Best Daily Drawings: My boyfriend and I don't understand how undertones work. Like other places will say "if you want a yellow undertone use this" but its really only for skin colors and that doesn't really help us if we want to make a purple character with red undertones verses blue. Like when i make dark skinned characters, I cant tell if i picked a red undertone, a yellow undertone, warm or cool, etc. Or like when a piece has red undertones? We don't understand.

I feel like a concept such as undertones is something that can be overexplained really easily. I base this off the fact that when I read your ask, even though I know perfectly well what an undertone is due to my years being schooled in art - I still had to go double-check on various google sources if I was getting it right. It’s actually fairly simple. So im going to try an explain it as short and simple as I can.

Mass tones

This is the counterterm to undertones. Say you’re looking at a colour. And you immediately conclude “ this is blue “. Then blue is the mass tone of the colour you’re looking at.

https://www.mybluprint.com/article/these-3-tubes-of-paint-are-all-you-need-to-mix-millions-of-colors

undertonesUndertones are the underlying colours you detect secondly when looking at a colour. For example, you see the blue masstone and go “ oh that’s blue “ - but then you look closer, and you realize that there’s a hint of something else too. This “hint” is what we call undertones. “oh, that’s blue! - but there’s some green in it “

How to detect a tone

By just looking at it. V This here could be our colour example. It has a blue masstone, but it’s got a green undertone, which makes it look blue-greenish. You can use a colour wheel if you’re not sure what the undertone is. Grab a sample of your colour and place it on the colour wheel where it fits between two colours. Your undertone will be the colour that is not the mass tone on the colour wheel.

Now granted, we all perceive colours a little bit differently, but what undertones basically boil down to is that a mass tone ( a colour ) having a shade of another in them ( an undertone ).

Wether or not an undertone is “warm” or “cold” comes down to, once again, simply whether the colour used for the undertone is warm or cold. Our blue mass tone up there has a slightly warm undertone, since green is a warmer colour than blue. Meanwhile, a Red with a blue undertone would be considered to have a cool undertone.