artdaily

Sun & Sky

the sun warms the light, the sky cools the shade

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Why a shadow is not the same colour, darker

Four balls, each under its own sky. The rail beneath runs from deep blue through colourless to low amber, and where you leave it is your answer for the colour of that ball's shade — press “paint it” to commit. Each ball ends in a reveal: yours and the sky's painted side by side, both settings marked on the rail with the gap drawn, and the miss put in words — a hair, a little, a good way, a long way too warm.

Outdoors there are two lights rather than one. The sun makes the light side; the whole sky fills the shade, which is why a shadow carries the sky's colour filtered through the object's own. Blue sky on a grey ball gives a blue-grey shade; blue sky on an ochre ball gives a grey-green one, and that second step is the one nobody takes unprompted. Which way to go is readable on the sheet: the cast shadow on the ground is lit by that sky alone, no sun in it. Every rail setting carries the same luminance, so the answer can never be found by value.

How far off the temperature was

The target is the scene's own fill temperature: exact by construction, not curated by hand. No model looks at the ball: the score is one subtraction on that rail. Your error is the distance to it along a rail running −1, deep blue, through 0 to +1, low amber. Exactly right is 100, fading linearly to 0 at a judgement tolerance of 0.62; only the hand's share of that is eased for hardware, so a trackpad adds 0.08 of slack, a finger 0.04 and a pen none. A perfect round is exactly 100, and if all four shades leaned the same way the closing line says so and how far to come back.

More colour drills: Color Mixer · Palette Pick · Mix to Target · the whole catalogue