Color Theory and Painting Center Photos

The Blick challenge on the smARTteacher this month is to share photos of your classroom. I posted pictures of my painting center and they shared the color theory image on Facebook. Pretty soon after, there was a comment asking "Am I crazy? Why is yellow on the cool color example? And why is violet on the warm color example?"

Fair question. I just said that I was taught that purple and yellow could be warm and/or cool since they are split down the middle. Were any of you taught the same way I was? None of the other commenters act like they've ever heard of that.

I don't think any of my classes in university even talked about color theory. So I just go off of what I learned in high school. I think that a lot of color theory could come down to different perceptions. We learn in art that there is sometimes more than one right answer. Could this be another example? I said that my art teacher also taught that BROWN is a shade of ORANGE, therefore brown and blue would be complementary colors. A lot of art teachers can't agree on brown's complement, either.

If we learned anything from #thedress, it should be that people can have different perceptions of color. 

 Even primary colors can look different. Does blue ever look warm or red ever look cool, no. But I have seen some yellows that tend toward the warm side and some look cool. I love talking about colors- so interesting to me!

Here are the other painting center photos I shared on the smARTteacher:

How did you learn to classify purple and yellow? Am I the only one who was taught the either or thing?