Warm and cool defined

[Clive Fullagar]

Michele,

What a wonderful site. As you warn, you can lose yourself for hours on this one. And what wonderful scans!

[Steven Sweeney]

One of the more difficult bits of information that I had trouble absorbing and incorporating into my work during my initial training was the notion that the so-called cool areas of flesh were green, or umber, or violet. I couldn

[Michael Fournier]

Well, I will re-word part of my statement. One man's neutral tone is another man's cool tone.

If you open the images and sample these colors out using Photoshop so you can view them independent of any other color reference, they do even appear to be a green tone. But that does not mean that a green pigment was used. Ivory black mixed with Yellow ochre and white makes a greenish tone that is also considered a neutral by some. I do not think Marvin is wrong, I think we are really caught in semantics here. Just what is a cool tone? In comparison to the other skin tones the neutrals are cooler. That does not mean they are blue or green (although they can appear to be.)

I have a question if you had a warm skin tone made from YELLOW OCHRE, LIGHT RED and white, what color would you use to neutralize it? Even if you use a blue black you are using a cool color to make a neutral. That is the crux of this discussion was a cool pigment added to the skin tone to make the neutrals or cool tones in these paintings. If I remember right Rembrandt did not use a blue as we might think of such as ultramarine or cerulean, but he did use ivory black which is a blue black.

So did he mix this cool pigment in the neutral skin tones? I do not know but I sure would think he did, unless someone can tell me what colors would make this greenish neutral other then a Ochre mixed with some bluish color. Raw Umber is a yellow brown and I suppose it could be used in the place of the ochre but I still think that some bluish pigment was used. Of course I do not know for sure; also it could just be the greenish under painting showing though.

[Michele Rushworth]

What would you call these colors?

[Peggy Baumgaertner]

have a question if you had a warm skin tone made from YELLOW OCHRE, LIGHT RED and white, what color would you use to neutralize it?

I won't get into this color thread except to note that as Michael says, much of what is being discussed is semantics. One man's cool is another man's warm. On your question about the warm skin tone, Michael, I would say that what you have described is a very COOL flesh tone.

My flesh tone is made with cadmium yellow and cadmium scarlet and white. I cool with cadmium red or yellow ochre. But in the transitional edges and shadow I do see a lot of greens, and purples and blues, as well as orange and yellow.


Michele, on your swatches, I see 4 greens and 1 purple

Peggy

[Steven Sweeney]

One man's neutral tone is another man's cool tone

[or woman's, of course]

I guess that's what I wanted to get sorted out, Michael, before we went in too many directions on the basis of our possibly seeing the same thing but giving different names to it. (Lao Tze said it long ago, that once you give something a name and say that it is "this" and not "that", you're down the road to trouble. Of course, he said it in Chinese, and I'm paraphrasing, to boot.) I had the sense that there wasn't really a difference with a distinction, other than in the way we chose to label it.

By the way, point taken that black and yellow make some incredible greens (just as black and white make some wonderful blues). But they're still optically green, when it's over, so whatever the constituents, I would still call them green.

Michele --

I can (and will) try to put a name to those color swatches, but I've been tossed around in Photoshop enough to know that the eyedropper doesn't deal with optical mixes, it just grabs a pixel's worth of color, whereas what we see on the screen is a blend of many pixels. I often have to make a number of selections from the same small area to get the color I'm looking for, and I'm as often very surprised to make a selection from, say, a blue area and see violet, or red, in the swatch window.

In those colorist (and tonalist) schools in which you're first required to say whether an observed color is a red, a yellow, or a blue - this wouldn't be easy. Forced, I would say yellow, then red. But the next question is whether those tend toward one of the other primaries [or put another way, whether they're warm or cool], and they both do - toward blue - so I too see the effect in the painting as green, and then violet.
____

Which brings us full circle. Is there anything intrinsically "wrong" with painting greens (or blues or violets) into skin tones if we see them there, and leaving them out if we don't? For better or worse, that's where I'm at in my progress. It's not a perfect system, but if I don't paint what I see, I'm just makin' it all up anyway.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[Josef Sy]

Hello everyone,

Thought I could share this as one of the examples. It is a portrait by Pietro Annigoni. I really love the graying or greening effect. Enjoy!

[Michael Georges]

I too am loathe to get into this discussion because of my current time constraints, but I will say this.

I don't believe it matters what colors you use in flesh as long as your values are correct. Warm and cool variations add a complexity to flesh that makes it look more real, but how you accomplish those warm/cool relationships is up to individual taste.

I personally see a lot of green in flesh because that cool gray green is actually there in people. Look at your hand and study it a bit. You will see the color of flesh, the color of blood that pools in the fingers and knuckles, and, you will see the veins that sit right under the skin - they are a cool gray-green. So I see all of these colors in flesh, but again, I think that whether you add them in with ultramarine blue mixed with your flesh tone, or adding a cool gray-green to your flesh tone, or with just a complete neutral gray, is, as others have said - semantics and a bit of personal taste.

[Khaimraj Seepersad]

I am always cautious about using Old Masters as examples.It's the time alteration factor. This is one of those times where I believe only reality works.

[Michael Fournier]

but I've been tossed around in Photoshop enough to know that the eyedropper doesn't deal with optical mixes, it just grabs a pixel's worth of color

Steve the eye dropper has different settings, (Depending on the version of Photoshop you use) They are single pixel which is not that useful most of the time, 3x3 pixel average and 5x5 pixel average. I used the 5x5 pixel sample setting when I did my tests but of course it is still just sampling colors from the scan and if it is not color matched to the original then all color data is false anyway.

It is hard to pick out the exact pigments used when looking at a original painting never mind trying to make a observation from a scan on a computer screen. Conservators go as far as looking at pigment particles through a microscope to determine what the old masters used so I am sure we could find out exactly what colors were used in a area of a painting using such scientific methods if we had access to these paintings and the equipment but since none of us do we are all just speculating based on educated guesses.