
Green is the color of cool grass and shady trees. Yellow is a happy and joyful color, the color of sunshine.īlue makes us think of the sky and water. When we look at the color red, we immediately think of love and passion, but at the Let us look now at the meanings of the primary and secondary colors. Now that we have identified which colors are warm and cool, the question remains why? It is because of the feelings they evoke and the emotions with which we identify when looking at a particular color. In a nutshell, yellows, reds, and oranges belong to the family of warm colors, while cool colors include purples, greens, and blues. You will see that green is definitely a cool color, thus all colors that have a greenish hue will be cool as well. But what about green? Is green a warm or cool color? Look at the wheel. As you can see, purple is a bluish-red, thus a cool color, whereas red, which has a yellow bias, is warm. They are a primary and a secondary color, respectively. Let us look at red and purple which sit next to each other on the wheel. The easiest way to do this is to look at what is known as the “bias” of each color, in other words, the color it leans towards on the primary or secondary wheel. Red, orange, and yellow are warm colors, while blue, green, and purple are cool.Īlthough it is easy to identify the temperature of the colors that are opposite each other on the wheel, it is a bit more of a challenge when it comes to the colors that sit next to each other. An imaginary dividing line running through the color wheel separates the colors into warm and cool. They are also based on the six-point color wheel of primary and secondary colors, the primary colors being red, yellow, and blue, and the secondary colors green, orange, and purple. So, what does it mean if a color is warm or cool? Well, modern theories regarding color have hardly changed in 300 years. According to Dossie, red and yellow “incline towards warmth, while green and blue incline to coolness”. In other words, some colors gave off the feeling of heat and others of cold. He explained that the terms referred to the colors on the wheel and the distinction between them in terms of the feeling they evoked. But it was Sir Isaac Newton who, in 1704, discovered the color wheel and laid out the colors on the light spectrum – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet – in a circle.Ī few years later in 1758, chemist Robert Dossie published The Handmaid To the Arts in which he stated that the terms “warmth” and “coolness” were being used by painters. At first, all colors – including black and white – were linked to the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air. We can trace the meanings of warm and cool colors all the way back from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages to Classical Antiquity.

6.5 In Art, Is Green a Warm or Cool Color?.6.2 Can I Use Warm and Cool Colors in the Same Room?.

