 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnock and today I'm going to do a little color theory. This is part one of a two-part series on warm and cool greens and we'll talk about watercolor but also Copic marker. Color theory applies to every medium, so don't dismiss something just because you don't paint, okay? Let's start off this discussion about what is a warm and a cool green? What makes something warm and makes it cooler? A lot of it is subjective just so you know, but a true green is that one in the middle. A cool green is going to be one that has more blue in it and a warm has more yellow. And there's a lot of different things you can change in this and they'll still be warm and cool. If I were to take the saturation and drop it, you're going to have warm and cool temperatures even though the colors are very grayed out and desaturated. And if you go the opposite direction and you go really into the super brights and make them screaming brights, they're still going to be warm and cool because one still has bluishness and the other still has yellowishness. It's the same thing if you go for really pastels or you go for shadow colors, you're still going to have warm tones and cool tones in the full range of greens. Now let's look at a couple of photographs and see how they compare. I've picked three Clover photographs by random people at Paint My Photo. This one has a lot of warm greens in it. They've got a lot of yellowish feel to them and in a few of the cool areas might be the shadows, but this one has cools for the highlights, believe it or not, because those are reflecting off the sky in some fashion because there's water on them. You can have cools and warms together. Oh my goodness, just because your head tells you Clover is one shade of green doesn't mean it always is, depending on the photograph you're taking of it. And then there's this Clover that's just a hot mess and it's very, very warm. All the colors in those bars were pulled out of these photographs in Photoshop, so I know those colors are the main ones in it. So when we talk about greens, just know that there's a lot of variety that you can use in your artwork and still be okay with it. So don't panic. If you don't understand, well, I don't know, is this a warm color and can I use it? Don't stress. And I'm going to tell you why. I'm going to do a little experiment here with some watercolor in my teaching palette that has the Daniel Smith Six Essentials in it. I've got the three warms on top and the three cools on bottom. And I'm going to use the warm with the warm first, the warm blue and the warm yellow and I get a warm green. If I switch out and make a cool yellow and mix that with a cool blue. And in this case, it's phthalo blue and phthalo blue is really strong. So don't use much of it when you're doing mixes with it. I get a cool green. So warm and warm makes warm, cool and cool makes cool. You think that's a rule, right? Okay, I'm going to show you a little craziness. Here I'm just mixing a tint of it, just more water in it. It doesn't change the temperature. It's the same thing. But let's try mixing matching. So we're going to start with a warm yellow and a cool blue. And look what it makes, a cool green. Because I used more of that blue, it forced it into being a more blueish color. If I add more yellow to it, I can push it more into a warm color. Let's try the cool yellow with the warm blue. And we can make a cool green. If we add more yellow to it, we can get a warm green. So it depends on how much of each of the colors that pushes them from warm to cool. Does it have more yellow or does it have more blue? And you can mix up an infinite variety, depending on which yellow and which blue you use. If I don't have these specific colors in a palette, I'll get different greens. And you need to just test that out for yourself with your own palette. Don't stress out about getting my colors or anybody else's colors. You need to learn what your colors do. So I'm going to paint a quick clover here using the green color that we mixed in that first bottom row, which was cool with cool. I'm going to start off with that. And then I added extra blue into it so I could make it a little darker, bluer color and drop that into the center to just try to get a little variety in the color. I added some yellow to it to warm it up because I wanted to put another layer after it was dry and add that little white line. There's a white stripe that goes around some clover. There's all different kinds of clover. I have found out doing some research. So I wanted to indicate that there is that little line. So I painted around the line because the line is not technically white. I have noticed in a lot of photographs. And then I just painted water on the outside of it so I could retain some of that brighter color. And then I mixed the color that uses the warm blue in it so that I could get a different kind of blue-green and paint some veins into the clover. You could use both together. It's OK. There's no law that says you have to stick to warm or you have to stick to cool. I just see so many questions from people that panic when they don't understand or they don't know how to mix. Warm versus cool, it's all about what works for what you're painting. And that's the goal, not whether you have the right colors in your palette or not. Now let's talk about something like alcohol markers. And these principles, of course, apply to every medium because it's color theory. It's not about the medium itself. So with an alcohol marker, what I like to do is sketch in the shape of whatever it is that I'm coloring first. So I'm doing a tree. A friend of mine posted a picture of this tree she camped under in Texas. And it was the biggest oak I think I've ever seen. It was gorgeous. So I decided I was going to use it for this lesson because it was in my head. So I'm going to sketch in with a warm, light type of green, the canopy of the whole tree, because all the other colors are going to cover it. And her camper is going to be underneath of it there, too. So the next color I'm choosing is my darkest color. And that one is a bluish color. Now if you're looking for rules, and I don't tend to like rules because I like to break them. But in general, think of cool colors as the ones you'd find in a shadow because they're cool. If you're looking for warm colors, you're looking for something that's out in the sun. It's going to have more yellow to it. And the cools will have more blue to them. So the two colors are very different from each other. And if you've ever thought, well, gee whiz, I have to always use my cool colors together. Always have to use my warm colors together. No, you don't. Now there are plenty of times I have done some cool highlights and I've done warm shadows. So I've done the opposite of the quote unquote rules. But if you're just looking for a way to remember what cool and warm are, the in the sun versus in the shade thing kind of helped me when I was first trying to figure it all out. Now I've got a mid tone or more of a dark mid tone that I'm putting in in addition to the shadow color. And that one is also going to be cool. So that's going to give me the warm color underneath and two cool colors to start building up the tree. So next I'm going to take a color that's about the same same value as the previous mid tone ish color, the one I just used. But this time it's a warm color. Can you tell the difference? There's more sunshine in it. There's more yellowishness in that color. So that's going to start to bring the tree back to being more of a warm tree and allow those cool colors to recede underneath of some of that warmth that I'm putting on top. And that's where I like to, when I'm doing any kind of drawing, do a lot of push pull with the warm versus the cool, the dark versus the light and let the colors play with each other. Let them change each other. And that's what art really is. It's just having fun with the colors and letting them do their thing because that's why we pay them to be colors. So now I'm back to that original color that I used in the tree in the first place to add in the rest of the grass. Now, look how sunny the grass looks because it's in that warm color and that shadow under the tree is in a cool color. Now I'm back to using a cool color again, and this is a desaturated cool color. It's a BG78, I believe, and it's going to add more depth to it, but I'm adding it with a color that's cool. So it's going to work better to bring out more of the shadows. And I go back and forth, and I just keep adding color and color and color and color because that's the way I am. You don't have to overwork a tree the way that I do. But I hope that this was helpful in showing you how you can play the two off of each other and mix the colors together. When I got all of that done, I took the second to the lightest of the warm colors and I just went over a bunch of areas of the tree so I could join them together because they were looking very polka dotty and just did some scribbling over top so that they would start to meld together a little bit. I wanted a lot of that detail, but I also wanted it to feel like it was just one tree rather than a bunch of polka dots. So darkened up some other colors to start to add the wheels on the vehicle, darkened that shadow even further with more layers. And I was very happy with my little tree sketch. I think I'm going to drop it in the mail so that when my friend gets home from her trip, she will have a picture of her beautiful tree and her camper out there in this little sketch. I hope you've learned something from today's video that you might apply. Follow me on social because I'm going to have a lot more to say on Warman Cool Greens and I will be back on Friday with even more on Warman Cool Greens combining them into the context of a landscape, which might be helpful even if you're not a painter. So I will see you on Friday in the other video. Take care and have a great week.