To analyze the color in the painting you can use some of the following questions, choosing the ones which seem most relevant to you. With this exercise we don't pretend to reach irrefutable conclusions or to classify the pictures in one way or another but to describe what we see. If you are not familiar with some of the concepts exposed here you can read my previous posts where I have a detailed explanation about them.

1. What kind of hues predominate in the painting, yellow, red, blue, green ...?
2. What colors are more important, warm or cool colors?
3. Is it a analogous or complementary color scheme? in general, the complementary color scheme is when at least two pairs of complementary colors of similar saturation occupy large areas of similar extension. When most of the colors are similar but there are small areas of complementary color, remains a similar color scheme. Sometimes it is difficult to determine because there are many variables (brightness, saturation, extension ...) But this is not about labeling the painting but talking about it and see if it suggests more of a color contrast or harmony.
4. Do dark colors predominate, or light colors?
5. Is there much contrast of light and shadow (chiaroscuro) or is it within an small range of  lightness?
6. Is the contrast of light and shade more important than the contrast of color?
7. Are the colors saturated or neutral? We may find modern paintings where most of the tones are saturated, such as the Fauves whereas classic paintings are usually dominated by dark and neutral colors but have clear areas of saturated colors.
8. What impressions do you get with the painting in general, and how do you relate that to the use of color?

EXAMPLE:



This is a painting by André Derain, one of the painters of the group Les Fauves (French for The Wild Beasts) a group of early 20th century artists who emphasized the use of strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. The painting is dated in 1906 and titled Pont de Charing Cross.

The first thing that strikes me in this picture is that basically uses the primary colors yellow, blue and red, as well as some secondary green and orange to a lesser extent, and employs a high degree of saturation almost as a child would do using colors as they leave the tube with little mixing.

There is a large presence of both warm and cold colors but personally I think the feeling is warm because yellow occupies a large part of the picture and because saturated colors suggest feelings closer to movement, warmth and action whereas more faded colors would speak of calm, tranquility and freshness. I also believe that to paint the sea and sky of yellow enhances the sense of warmth of these elements which are normally cold tones. I note that most of the cool hues (green and blue) are grouped in the area of the earth to create a clear composition shaped curve.

The color scheme is complementary and we can see that specially in the use of large areas of red vs. green and also blue vs. orange which create a very high contrast of color. The color is applied in large areas of flat color but also has some small touches of  almost complementary colors that interact in small areas such as the tree where you see blue and red-orange maybe representing light and shadow and creating an optical vibration.

As for lightness, my first impression is that this painting have lots of light but this is given by the saturation and not for the use of  light tones. In fact tones are rather medium as far as light is concerned, as seen in black and white version. Curiously some background blue buildings appear darker than the yellow sky but they are not. Therefore we can consider that this is a clear example of contrast of hue rather than contrast of light.



In general I think this is an attractive and vital painting. Other paintings of the Fauves suggest me more aggressiveness and chaos but this suggests me movement and vitality within an order, perhaps because the composition is quite simple and clear.