Warm and cool colours

Ages 9 to 12 Read alone or together · about 40 minutes

Read together

Colours can feel warm or cool. Red, orange and yellow feel warm, like fire and sun. Blue, green and purple feel cool, like water and shade.

Colours opposite each other on a colour wheel are called complementary: red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. Side by side, they make each other look bright.

Artists use warm and cool colours to show mood, light and distance.

Do it

1. Draw a colour wheel with paint or crayons: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Mark the warm half and the cool half.
2. Paint a sunset using only warm colours. Then paint a rainy day using only cool colours. How does each feel?
3. Paint a landscape with warm light on the sunny side of objects and cool colours in the shadows.
4. Place two complementary colours side by side. Look at them for a moment. Do they seem to glow?

Talk about it

• How do warm colours make you feel?
• Why do complementary colours look bright together?

For the grown-up

Colour theory, including the ideas of warm and cool colours and complementary pairs, is a basic tool of painters. The ideas are used in teaching by artists and teachers such as Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Use washable paint.

Mark as done

Next lesson →

Where this comes from

• Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (John Wiley and Sons, 1973)
• Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (Yale University Press, 1963)

Written with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed. Please read it before sharing it with a child.