Plum Color Temperature Study

 

4/22/25 Maple Leaf neighborhood

Now that I’m past the excitement of pink petal peeping and sketching, I want to get back to studying color temperature. Specifically, I want to apply what I learned in Sarah Bixler’s class to sketching in the real world, on location. With all those cherry trees I sketched, I found that I was too enamored with the subject matter to focus on study, which requires a different kind of concentration. It’s actually easier to study color temperature with a “nothing” scene.

These are the same ornamental plum trees I became obsessed with several years ago as I tried to find the right color mixes to capture the reddish-purple, nearly black hue of their foliage. During that first pandemic summer, this dead-end street between Maple Leaf and Green Lake became my favorite safe and easy place to study this confounding color.

In this photo, the grassy areas look blown out and overly warm;
in reality, the fence looked warmer.

With a limited palette (yellow, red, purple, blue) and nothing tricky to draw, I could see the whole scene abstractly in the same way my classmates and I practiced color temperature concepts on portrait skin tones. The warmest spot was the fence toward the left. Other than the sky, which I decided not to color, the coolest area was the broad freeway barrier wall in the background (in reality, a dark gray; I mixed all four colors). Everything else was somewhere in between. I considered mixing a very warm green for the grass, but instead I just added a bit of yellow to the purple shadows only where the trees’ cast shadows hit the grass. I left the street shadows straight purple.



Now that it’s finally warming up a bit, I intend to do more of these studies on my walks.