True Summer and the overdone undertone
In part 1, we solved our first question about colour harmony: temperature. We discovered how each hue comes in each temperature. That resulted in a complete spectrum of colours, a full rainbow, in each temperature.
Having a full rainbow in each temperature has surprising consequences: the undertones disappear.
In the seasonal system, undertones are heralded as the hallmark of colour harmony. When a palette has a unifying cast of a certain colour across the entire spread, such as the bronze in True Autumn or the terra cotta feeling of Soft Autumn, that is taken as the quality that ties these colours together ‘naturally’.
Nowhere is this more visible than in True Summer. The True Summer has a strong cast of hydrangea blue all over the entire palette: bluish pinks, bluish greens, actual blues, blueish purples and bluish greys. The only thing not blueish is a very watery yellow, and depending on what make of palette you have, you might get a blueish red. But it absolutely never contains any orange or lime. Because that would contradict the undertone.
What even is an undertone? The answer depends whether you are referring to 1) a singular solid colour; 2) groups of colours or colour palettes; or 3) human skin and/or foundation. We will not be considering the skin and makeup undertones in this article (that is going to be a discussion for another day).
An undertone in a flat colour is when a hue has a strong lean towards one of its neighbours on the colour wheel. You can have a red with a blue undertone, which means it’s a red that sits closer to magenta, or a red with an orange undertone, which means it’s closer to, well, orange. So far so good.
This kind of undertone is unobtrusive when a colour is by itself, but becomes a great deal more visible when you put two colours together. The two reds from the previous example both look like ‘just red’ when by themselves. However, place them side by side and you will clearly see their blue and orange undertones.
Which brings us to undertones of groups of colours, or colour palettes. These are built up of two things: the apparent undertones of the individual colours from the previous example, and the sections of the colour wheel that are mostly represented. When both coincide, they reinforce each other and thus create the undertone of a palette. As we’ve seen in our True Summer example, a lot of the colours have a blue undertone (= leaning towards blue within their hue), and they are mostly grouped on or near the blue region of the colour wheel. The overarching effect is blue.
While that sounds great in theory, something here goes wrong. Let’s go back to the undertone of singular colours for a moment.
When we placed our two reds together, one orange-leaning and the other blue-leaning, we were able to see how they were different straight away. But there was another thing we might notice: these reds absolutely don’t look good together.
In other words: they don’t harmonise. The reason is quite obvious: our reds have different temperatures. When you force reds of different temperatures together, they clash.
This clash doesn’t just happen between reds, but between any pair of hues with different temperatures.
To summarise: whenever you put colours of (too) different temperatures together, their undertones act up and the colours clash. When you place colours of the same (enough) temperatures together, their undertones settle down and disappear, and the colours harmonise.
We have actually already been draping like that. Imagine a very cool, acid yellow drape fabric, typically from True Winter. When we put that drape on somebody who needs a warmer temperature, the yellow starts misbehaving. We see a strong blue cast to it, it almost looks like a lime green. It cannot, would not, will not settle down as yellow. It’s cool blue undertone is wreaking havoc.
However, when we put that drape on someone who does need a pure cool temperature, the blue cast disappears. The colour settles. It’s just yellow now, fresh and happy. Harmony is achieved, because the undertone is gone.
This part is important. Hues of the same temperature just leave each other be. They don’t cause an undertone to appear in each other. That is what colour harmony is: colours coexisting peacefully and not getting in each other’s way, as perceived by human vision.
The moment you do see an undertone appear in one colour or both, is when the temperatures are too different. The colours clash. Nothing wants to settle and we don’t experience colour harmony.
Ultimately, undertones in singular colours are a sign of disharmony.
A beautiful example are the lavender purples in True Summer. As it happens, lavender purple is a very warm colour. Cooler purples are more red-based. (Tangent observation: not everything that ‘leans blue’ has a cooler temperature. It works for red and green, both of which get cooler with more blue, but not for purple or violet, and other hues besides.)
Against the cool greens and blues that are also in True Summer, our lavender purple clashes in temperature and develops a strong blue undertone. Since that reinforced the blueness of the palette, we took it as a sign of harmony, when it was in fact the opposite.
And admittedly, because the purple is so blue-leaning, it does not stand out nearly as much as a wrong yellow or red would. If we were to try and place a too-warm red in True Summer, the resulting orange undertone would be much more jarring. Yet those purples remain warm, and will have every True Summer turn a bit sallow.
So what does that mean for palettes? When you have all hues calibrated to the same temperature, all colours appear just as they are, without undertone in any of them. And when you include all possible hues from around the colour wheel, there are no dominant regions of the colour wheel. For both these reasons, harmonious and complete palettes are free from undertones.
However, undertones created by leaving out regions of the colour wheel, are still important for curating and storytelling, and we’ll dive deeper into that at a later point in this article series.
Reason 2: Undertone is incorrectly assumed to be a sign of harmony.
So instead: Sphere palettes are free from undertones
Now we have hue and temperature figured out, we will shift our focus on the other components of colour harmony: brightness and value (light/dark).