Temperature and True Spring
How do you even begin researching colour harmony?
By breaking down the question into smaller, more manageable questions. From my training and experience, I knew that colour temperature was a big factor in how colours interact. So that’s where we are going to start. Our first simpler question is: how does colour temperature work?
To answer that, we need to simplify even further. Rather than focusing on temperature interactions between colour and human skin, which has a lot of colours together, we’re going to focus on solid, flat colours first.
What do we know about temperature? Temperatures are often assigned to certain hues based on how they make us feel: red, orange and yellow are called warm colours; and green, blue and purple are called cool colours.
However, if that’s how temperature worked, all we would do is chop the colour wheel in half. We’d end up with a ‘warm’ palette that has every version of red, orange and yellow but which lacks any green, blue and purple; and a ‘cool’ palette that contains every green, blue and purple but lacks any form of red, orange and yellow.
That does not make for very satisfying palettes. What’s more, it doesn’t agree with real-world observations. Acid yellow is a cool colour. Cool red is a thing. Warm blue is real. How do we settle these apparent contradictions?
The answer lies in distinguishing between absolute and relative temperature. Saying red, orange and yellow somehow feel warm, while green, blue and purple feel cool, is about assigning them absolute temperatures. Those are emotional qualities, important for art and colour psychology.
But for studying colour harmony, we’re interested in relative temperatures. Relative temperatures are about distinguishing between cool and warm versions within each hue.
Take for example yellow. Yellow comes in a warm version: golden, rich and buttery, leaning very much towards orange; and also in a cool version: acidic, clean and clear, leaning towards lime green. That cool yellow harmonises with other cool colours, such as a cool green or blue. Meanwhile, the warm yellow clashes with these cool colours, and harmonises with other warm colours, such as warm green and warm blue.
From Seasonal colour analysis, we are used to having more levels for temperature than just warm and cool. Traditionally, there are four levels: cool, cool-neutral, warm-neutral and warm. For designing my own Sphere palettes, I chose to go more precise with five levels: cool, cool-neutral, neutral, warm-neutral and warm. Therefore, all I had to do was sort all the hues on the colour wheel into five levels of temperature.
If that sounds easy, it was not. I didn’t know how many hues there were, where the boundaries between them were, or even what they looked like. It was like laying a puzzle that didn’t come with a picture on the box, didn’t have any edges, where you had to make the puzzle pieces first, and while not knowing how many pieces you need.
It took me many many months of moving around paint chips and printing swatches. In true storybook fashion, it was on Christmas Eve, that I finally solved the temperature question. The first leg of creating the Sphere palettes was complete.
When sorting hues into a version for each temperature, what do you end up with? You get a full rainbow in each temperature: a version of pink, red, orange, yellow, lime, sap green, true green, turquoise, cyan, blue, purple and violet.
But, I hear you ask, a cool orange? That’s always warm, isn’t it?
It’s not, actually. Orange has warm and cool versions like any hue out there. Yet for the sake of the argument, let’s think this through. If we were to determine that cool orange can’t exist because orange always feels warm to you, then by that logic, warm blue also cannot exist. Because blue always feels cool, right? Yet it is an accepted part of True Spring, which is characteristically warm.
Once again, this is why we distinguish between absolute and relative temperatures. Otherwise we’re back to chopping the colour wheel into two chunks and calling it a day.
If you want an example of a cool orange, ironically the best example are oranges – the fruit that shares its name with the colour. Warm orange is closer to red, like an almost-ripe tomato.
The Seasons lean partly on absolute temperature instead of relative temperature, and so have hues missing in a lot of places. Cool oranges, yellows, limes and sap greens are largely absent in True Winter and especially True Summer. Meanwhile, True Spring, known for its rainbow of clear colours, is the Season that has most of its hues complete (it lacks only purple).
This was the first reason against the 12 Seasons I encountered when creating the Sphere palettes. It turns out that there are no hues that are specific to warm or cool temperatures, and no need for True Spring to have a complete rainbow. Every hue occurs in every temperature.
Reason 1: Seasons are incomplete in their hues.
So instead: Sphere palettes contain all 12 hues in each temperature
If you are familiar with the Seasons, you may have trouble imagining what palettes look like with a full rainbow of hues included. Wouldn’t that contradict the undertone? That’s what the next article is about.