In the Depths of Dark Autumn
In the previous part, we learned what pastels were and how they occurred in every tonality. In this part, we’re going to look at dark colours (with a small ‘d’). We will investigate how dark colours interact with temperatures, so they can be added into the Sphere palettes I was designing.
Unexpectedly, that turned into an emotional rollercoaster.
Dark colours are mirror images of pastels. As pastels are colours that contain more white than they do colour, or hue, so darks are colours that contain more black than they do hue. And yes, they also occur in every tonality. Including the Lights. These will be much lighter darks than, say, a Dark palette’s dark, but they function in the same way.
When I got to the stage of adding darks (and pastels) to the Sphere palettes, I encountered a question. Does the added black of a dark colour affect its temperature?
The reason for this question was my experience as a 12Season analyst. I was fully anticipating to place the burgundies, rust browns, camel browns and olives into the warmer palettes, and leaving the navy blues, pine greens and royal purples to the cool ones. This was what I was used to, after all, from working with the Seasons. Most of those rust browns, camels and olives went to Autumn, True and Dark Autumn in particular, while a small amount of them went to Spring.
When I was testing dark colours, a few went into the warmer palettes without problems. But another group didn’t. I had particular issues with the camel browns, which when they got too greenish didn’t want to stay in the Warm-Neutrals. They also didn’t want to be in the Warms. At some point, I even tried them in the Neutral temperature (perhaps those ‘warm’ hues came down all the way to neutral temperatures?), but that looked super weird. Neutral probably was too cool.
I shuffled the dark colours around for many weeks, and kept running into the same crunchy placements that I didn’t have any confidence in. I knew that particularly the camel colours would require more work before I was willing to commit to them.
I left the camels for later and shifted to working on the plums/amaranths and burgundies. The plums went all the way to cool temperatures, I knew from True Winter. For the burgundies, I wasn’t sure if they came down in temperature so far. They typically get associated with Dark Winter, which is a neutral season.
A whole day of trying combinations later, the plums finally clicked for me. I found the set of hues that worked for both the cool and warm temperatures. With that, the burgundies unlocked and fell into place easily, again both in cool and warm versions. So there was a cool burgundy, after all.
Next to the burgundies were the rust browns.
And then it felt like the whole world of colour analysis came crashing down on top of my head. I vividly remember feeling frozen in my chair as the realisation rushed into my mind.
The rust browns also went from warm to cool. The dark hues went everywhere, into every temperature. They were just like the clear hues. Every temperature had a version. The added black didn’t change the temperature at all. It was the distinction between absolute and relative temperature all over again.
From reading this article series, you may have seen this coming, but I certainly didn’t!
Sure enough, the rust browns went into the very temperatures that their orange counterparts were already placed in. The camels, based on yellow, followed suit, and covered the entire temperature gamut too. Those difficult camels I couldn’t place before, those turned out to have cool temperatures. Never in my wildest dreams would I have expected them to go there. I had only tried them as far as Neutral. I really should have kept going. And yet, perhaps I could have known: the ‘greenest leaning’ camel was just as acidic as the very acid yellow I had already placed in my cool palettes many months prior.
In my defence, I was so used to putting camel browns into only Autumn or Spring from the years before, it never occurred to me that they could be cool. Even considering a rust or camel brown in Winter or Summer would be absolute heresy, from a seasonal perspective.
And yet they appeared. The entire spectrum, now rendered in tonal darks, neatly adjusted for tonality and temperature, fell into each palette. Every single one had an amaranth, burgundy, rust brown, camel, olive, pea green, emerald, teal, petrol, navy, amethyst and byzantium violet. These were the darkened counterparts of the exact pink, red, orange, yellow, chartreuse, sap green, true green, turquoise, cyan, blue, purple and violet hues I already had placed in them.
At that point, I have to admit I had a bit of a meltdown. I had set out to figure out how colour harmony works, and to improve upon the Seasons if I could. When I started, I didn’t know if there was much to improve, nor if I would be capable of doing it. And though I was prepared to question everything, I wasn’t really expecting to arrive at drastically different answers from the Seasons.
Yet here I was. I had already suspected and subsequently discovered that the Seasons were not perfect: I knew they were incomplete within and without, that undertones weren’t the sign of harmony that we took them for, and that a lot of the palettes were inconsistent in temperature and tonality. I had already placed a True Spring-like rainbow in every palette, after all.
Now I found myself placing browns that every other colour analyst would call Dark or True Autumn, into every single palette, even the cool ones, even the Bright ones, even the Light ones – and they worked. Somehow, that felt different. It felt like a step away from the Seasons that was more definitive than any step before.
What’s more, the full spectrum phenomenon carried over into the pastels. These also came in a full rainbow for each and every palette. I found many a coral, originally from warm Seasons, that turned out to be a cool temperature’s pastel red.
The new pastels and darks took some getting used to, but they were promising. After I had calibrated versions ls for each palette, the harmony was obvious. How gorgeous it looked! And how delightful to have so much variety!
I have always liked dark colours, and embraced my forest greens and navy blues immediately. I found my dream lipstick colour in my burgundy (even if it took mixing three of my old BW lipsticks to arrive there). I discovered my trusty old highlighter was exactly my pastel pink, and experimented with ‘Autumn-looking’ eyeshadow on myself – results were mediocre, because the brown eyeshadow I happened to have in an old eyeshadow palette, wasn’t actually the right tonality. But I had fun!
Even better, so many questions were solved thanks to this insight about temperature in the darks and pastels. Any awkward drapes or makeup products that didn’t work as they should, promptly made sense.
Reason 6: Most warm-feeling darks get placed in Dark and True Autumn, but these hues can have every temperature.
So instead: Sphere palettes received darks (and pastels) in every hue.
As I continue designing the Sphere palettes, we will encounter another tonal class and the final component of the palettes: the neutrals.