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04/20/2011 01:56:20 PM · #1 |
During the challenge I got consistent comments on my "Warm" entry that "green is a cool color" ... I was getting the feeling that maybe these folks were looking at -- and basing their judgement on -- a color chart or table, and not the picture itself.
Personally, I find "green" to be a quite ambiguous color (and not just because of my red/green color-blindness condition) -- it is sometimes a warm color and sometimes a cool one. Greens with a lot of yellow in them will be warm (like the Sun or a light bulb), those with a lot of cyan/blue will be cool, like aquamarine/sea-green and teal.
Here are some color swatches, some taken from my entry and some from a swatches from a commercial printing ink company; the second image shows the approximate location from which the color samples were obtained.
 
Now I wonder, had I entered these "hot" peppers into the "Cool" challenge, how many comments about how I was in the wrong challenge I would have gotten -- if I'd only looked at a color chart before entering, I might have gotten special permission from Langdon to enter the same photo in both challenges ... :-( |
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04/20/2011 02:04:50 PM · #2 |
| Green would be far too sophisticated to enter in a DPC "warm" or "cool" challenge... ;) |
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04/20/2011 02:23:50 PM · #3 |
Originally posted by DrAchoo:
Green would be far too sophisticated to enter in a DPC "warm" or "cool" challenge... ;) |
You'd think I would have learned that by now ... :-( |
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04/20/2011 02:26:15 PM · #4 |
| Here is my simple view on it and maybe others had this view in mind when judging. If you look at a color wheel there are 6 main colors. Red, Yellow and Orange are obviously warm colors so in my mind the opposite colors should be the cool colors which are Green, Blue, and Purple. Now both green and purple could be reasoned to the warm side, but if you want to keep things simple they are more of a cool color than a warm color. |
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04/20/2011 02:32:29 PM · #5 |
| See, I don't care about where a color is on some arbitrarily-contrived wheel, I want to know what you *feel* when you look at a color ... can you honestly look at those peppers and say they impress you as being a "cool" color? Obviously, they don't feel that way to me. |
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04/20/2011 02:32:30 PM · #6 |
Pretty much the same approach I took in voting in this challenge. But Wow, I didn't hammer so hard as some of the other folks. This image is a perfect example why I would like a 5.5 button. I fell to the 5 instead of a 6 on it.....Hmmmmm.
edit: I didn't go to a color wheel, just what I felt was a good way to vote on this one.
Originally posted by sjhuls:
Here is my simple view on it and maybe others had this view in mind when judging. If you look at a color wheel there are 6 main colors. Red, Yellow and Orange are obviously warm colors so in my mind the opposite colors should be the cool colors which are Green, Blue, and Purple. Now both green and purple could be reasoned to the warm side, but if you want to keep things simple they are more of a cool color than a warm color. |
Message edited by author 2011-04-20 14:45:18. |
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04/20/2011 02:39:45 PM · #7 |
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04/20/2011 02:47:07 PM · #8 |
When most people think of green they probably think of grass, leaves, pine trees, etc and that may make the average voter think "cool" rather than "warm". But even in the "cool" challenge voters would probably have wanted to see blues or icy white. Voters are frequently narrow minded.....as I am finding out in the "Sad" challenge! :-D
edit for spelling
Message edited by author 2011-04-20 14:48:53. |
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04/20/2011 02:59:01 PM · #9 |
If you look at a color wheel and split it down the middle into cool and warm, then green and violet are indeed warm colors. However two of the primaries (red and yellow) are perceived as warm and only one primary (blue) is seen as cool. The secondary colors of purple and green which sit at the 1/3rd marks on the wheel are about as far as people will go in seeing cool colors, leaving other 2/3rds of the wheel as the warm. The disparity in those two ways of seeing the wheel will mean that violet and green are left in the no man's land where they are seen as being neither cool nor warm.
Last cool color challenge a top ten was given by a green entry, but only because it was such a good shot that it overwhelmed the quibblers. If you want to sail into the wind, you better have a really fast boat.
Message edited by author 2011-04-20 19:59:09. |
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04/20/2011 03:59:48 PM · #10 |
Originally posted by BrennanOB:
If you want to sail into the wind, you better have a really fast boat. |
And leave the competition green with envy? ;-)
I agree that green (and violet as well) are in a no-man's land. Green, for instance, can appear warm or cool, depending on whether it's toward yellow-green (warm) or blue-green (cool), and even depending on what colors it's juxtaposed with. |
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04/20/2011 04:24:34 PM · #11 |
Originally posted by kirbic:
Originally posted by BrennanOB:
If you want to sail into the wind, you better have a really fast boat. |
And leave the competition green with envy? ;-)
I agree that green (and violet as well) are in a no-man's land. Green, for instance, can appear warm or cool, depending on whether it's toward yellow-green (warm) or blue-green (cool), and even depending on what colors it's juxtaposed with. |
Yes. To say that "green" is not a warm color is nonsense IMHO. Colors are not so simple to define and as  kirbic just wrote, they sing in a chorus.
One of the first lessons in any art school is to take 2 complimentary colors in oil paints and make as many combinations between them (using different proportions in the mix), then add white to do the same exercise, then black and study the changes in terms of cold/warm. (BTW, 2 complimentary colors in a special proportion will always produce the total black - thus a lot of painters never used black on their palette)
If we take  generalE image in question, we cannot take each color and analyze it against a swatch because the area that it covers influences a lot the entire picture.
In its entirety the peppers image has a cooler palette.
The tiny yellowish tips of some peppers or even the presence of a red one does not make the image warm. (Red can be a very cool color also.) |
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04/20/2011 04:38:17 PM · #12 |
A year short of a decade on this site and still figuring out voters have to be spoon fed a very fine Purée?
Not that I don't agree you on the warmness of yellowish greens... but hey, voters will be voters.
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04/20/2011 04:47:56 PM · #13 |
I can tell you in THAT arrangement, those colors don't say warm to me in any way. Why? They remind me of a supermarket, where vegetables have to be kept cool to stay fresher and more appealing for sale.
I didn't vote, but that photo makes me shiver, thinking of the air-conditioned produce aisle. Not warm in any way.
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04/20/2011 04:52:16 PM · #14 |
I'm confused now, two challenges Warm and Cool colours. Quite simple really.
Well it was until this thread. So cool colours are really warm?? Green isn't a cool colour.
One comment I got was blue is cool, but green isn't! Sorry, but green is at the cool end of the spectrum, that means it is cool.
But, I suppose you can make anything fit what you want. So the whole challenges were a complete waste of time and effort. |
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04/20/2011 04:57:39 PM · #15 |
Originally posted by SteveJ:
But, I suppose you can make anything fit what you want. So the whole challenges were a complete waste of time and effort. |
Not for the people who shot fully-saturated blue, red, and orange pictures. Everything's fine with them :-)
The take-home from this, and all other challenges of this sort, really, is "Stick to the blindingly obvious and you can't go wrong."
My colors were definitely warm, but neither warm enough nor colorful enough to fit the voters' preconceptions of the challenge. I knew that when I entered it, and my expectations were not confounded :-)
Message edited by author 2011-04-20 16:58:06. |
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04/20/2011 05:03:39 PM · #16 |
Originally posted by SteveJ:
I'm confused now, two challenges Warm and Cool colours. Quite simple really.
Well it was until this thread. So cool colours are really warm?? Green isn't a cool colour.
One comment I got was blue is cool, but green isn't! Sorry, but green is at the cool end of the spectrum, that means it is cool.
But, I suppose you can make anything fit what you want. So the whole challenges were a complete waste of time and effort. |
Green and Purple are ambiguous. They can be warm or cool, depending on circumstances. In fact, many of the reasons colors are what they are is because of associations in our experiences. There are exceptions, of course, but they're rare. Fire is usually yellow/orange/red, and thus those colors are commonly associated with hot, but what we don't normally see are the hotter blue flames.
When we surround ourselves in a certain color, we also claim to feel a certain way. Being in a red room, even when the temperature is ACTUALLY LOWER than the temperature in a completely blue room will feel warmer to MOST people than the blue room does. This is because psychosomatic response is very powerful.
Now, if you're a person that has lived a life of association with green (or purple) being more strongly connected to warm, you're going to think of those colors as warm (even if they have more blue/yellow or blue/red leanings). Thus, ambiguous.
What the PROBLEM is is ignoring the majority of people that are going to have a certain built-in response simply because you yourself have a certain response to a color. A person putting yellow in a cool challenge, for instance, because they lived their life in a yellow house in the Arctic with no heat is going to take a massive beating :D
So if you CHOOSE to use an ambiguous color (like purple or green) in a challenge that really pretty much calls for very specific and strong color association, you kind of have to accept whatever happens because of it. In this case, it's people that don't really associate green as anything, so use a chart to help them figure it out.
Green is simply one of those colors that relies FAR too much on secondary association in order to place it in some cool/warm response. A green field with a clear blue sky and shining sun with groups of wild-flowers and a woman in a sun-dress would be "warm". That SAME FAMILY of greens on a vehicle driving down a desolate highway covered in ice with a slate grey sky and snow falling would be "cool".
It's all in how we present things, and not REALLY in the specific color(s) themselves.
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04/20/2011 05:28:57 PM · #17 |
Originally posted by Bear_Music:
My colors were definitely warm, but neither warm enough nor colorful enough to fit the voters' preconceptions of the challenge. I knew that when I entered it, and my expectations were not confounded :-)
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Your image was really WARM and the feeling was more enhanced by placing the WARM/dead pamplemousse on a little (cool) burnt sienna plate |
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04/20/2011 05:30:47 PM · #18 |
Originally posted by SteveJ:
I'm confused now, two challenges Warm and Cool colours. So the whole challenges were a complete waste of time and effort. |
I promise here and now to make ASAP a little color exercise that I described below that I hope will find some use here also. |
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04/20/2011 06:16:33 PM · #19 |
Originally posted by K10DGuy:
I can tell you in THAT arrangement, those colors don't say warm to me in any way. Why? They remind me of a supermarket, where vegetables have to be kept cool to stay fresher and more appealing for sale. |
I didn't figure on the refrigeration association -- where these are is not kept all that cold -- and I guess I was figuring on the hot taste associated with members of the capsicum family would over-ride that anyway.
Regardless of their position on the color wheel, those *are* the colors of objects commonly associated with heat ... |
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04/20/2011 07:53:49 PM · #20 |
Originally posted by mariuca:
Yes. To say that "green" is not a warm color is nonsense IMHO. |
Silly voters giving such good marks to a warm color in a cool color challenge. How could they be so confused?
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04/20/2011 08:29:15 PM · #21 |
| On a monitor in 24-bit color, it is theoretically possible to display about 16.7 million colors. Is there anybody who thinks, given a spectrum displaying all those shades, that everyone would draw the line(s) distinguishing the "warm" from the "cool" colors in exactly the same place(s)? |
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04/25/2011 04:36:56 AM · #22 |
Everyone seems to have found the colors here cool. Really? I,m surprised it did so well and got such a high score for such a terrible image.
Message edited by author 2011-04-25 04:48:01.
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04/25/2011 07:26:02 AM · #23 |
Color Theory is SO interesting to me and was one of my favorite classes I had to take to get my degree in Digital Media Design. I agree with much of what has been said here. Even RED can be cool or warm, though you are taking your life in your hands by entering an image consisting mainly of a cooler red in the cool challenge. : ) Color combinations are also interesting as the colors can appear different depending on what color is right next to it.
Message edited by author 2011-04-25 07:26:41. |
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04/25/2011 07:37:20 AM · #24 |
Originally posted by K10DGuy:
Originally posted by SteveJ:
I'm confused now, two challenges Warm and Cool colours. Quite simple really.
Well it was until this thread. So cool colours are really warm?? Green isn't a cool colour.
One comment I got was blue is cool, but green isn't! Sorry, but green is at the cool end of the spectrum, that means it is cool.
But, I suppose you can make anything fit what you want. So the whole challenges were a complete waste of time and effort. |
Green and Purple are ambiguous. They can be warm or cool, depending on circumstances. In fact, many of the reasons colors are what they are is because of associations in our experiences. There are exceptions, of course, but they're rare. Fire is usually yellow/orange/red, and thus those colors are commonly associated with hot, but what we don't normally see are the hotter blue flames.
When we surround ourselves in a certain color, we also claim to feel a certain way. Being in a red room, even when the temperature is ACTUALLY LOWER than the temperature in a completely blue room will feel warmer to MOST people than the blue room does. This is because psychosomatic response is very powerful.
Now, if you're a person that has lived a life of association with green (or purple) being more strongly connected to warm, you're going to think of those colors as warm (even if they have more blue/yellow or blue/red leanings). Thus, ambiguous.
What the PROBLEM is is ignoring the majority of people that are going to have a certain built-in response simply because you yourself have a certain response to a color. A person putting yellow in a cool challenge, for instance, because they lived their life in a yellow house in the Arctic with no heat is going to take a massive beating :D
So if you CHOOSE to use an ambiguous color (like purple or green) in a challenge that really pretty much calls for very specific and strong color association, you kind of have to accept whatever happens because of it. In this case, it's people that don't really associate green as anything, so use a chart to help them figure it out.
Green is simply one of those colors that relies FAR too much on secondary association in order to place it in some cool/warm response. A green field with a clear blue sky and shining sun with groups of wild-flowers and a woman in a sun-dress would be "warm". That SAME FAMILY of greens on a vehicle driving down a desolate highway covered in ice with a slate grey sky and snow falling would be "cool".
It's all in how we present things, and not REALLY in the specific color(s) themselves. |
Agreed! My entry was green and purple. LOL! Though it felt warm to me, I put it in the cool challenge due to the color wheeel (and the people I knew would consult it to vote).
Message edited by author 2011-04-25 07:38:24. |
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