/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>1979018
>>1979042
You also see it a lot in figure paintings, usually when cool lights are involved, or if there's a clear distinction between light and shadow color temperature as you often have outdoors on a sunny day.

This one has some true blue pigments, but a lot of the cooler shades you see here are still reds in hue - just subdued towards gray. Use the eyedropper to confirm.

One of the key ideas is when you want to cool a warm color (orange for example), graying it out will often suffice. If that new cool shade of desaturated orange needs to be further cooled, then you can now incorporate a sudden and strong hue shift. You might have something like a medium saturation orange cooled to a low saturation orange, then that low saturation orange cooled to a low saturation blue/purple.

Basically, using grays allows you finer control over color temperature while keeping your palette relatively consistent. Once you're in the grays you can now make a sharp hue jump, but it won't appear that way to the viewer because you're going from a grayed orange to a grayed blue.