I finally sat down at 9pm and realized the light in my kitchen is orange
So I've been working on this little still life for three weeks. Copper pot, two lemons, a dish towel. Nothing fancy, I just wanted to practice reflective surfaces.
Finished it Saturday and hung it in the hallway. Sunday morning in daylight the lemons are basically neon yellow-green. Like highlighter. In my kitchen at night they looked perfect and mellow and now I'm standing in the hallway going, huh.
Two of my bulbs are 2700k because that's what was in the house when we moved in, and I never thought about it once in nine years. Now I'm pricing daylight bulbs like it's a home renovation.
I know the answer is probably a lamp and not new overheads. But I'm genuinely annoyed at how long I've been mixing color under a light that's lying to me. Eleven year old asked why I was standing in the hallway holding the painting up to the window and I didn't have a good answer.
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Well, you have just discovered the single most useful lesson a painter can learn, and you learned it the hard way, which means it will stick. Warm household light flatters everything. It pushes yellow and orange and hides how cool your greens actually are. Under 2700K the lemons looked mellow because the light was doing half your color mixing for you.
I would not rush to buy daylight bulbs, though. I would buy one good 5000K lamp and keep it where you paint, and leave the kitchen as it is, because your kitchen light is a fact of the world and your painting has to survive it, not match it. Mix under the neutral lamp, then check the piece in the hallway, in daylight, and under the kitchen bulbs. If it holds up in all three you have done something honest. If it only works in one, you were painting the light, not the lemons.
The lemon problem specifically is usually too much cadmium yellow light and not enough of a cooler yellow with a touch of green in the shadow side. Zinc white or a hint of cerulean in the reflected light will pull the neon back down. It is a small correction, not a repaint.
The single lamp is the right instinct, but I would push back a little on 5000K as the answer. The trouble with a bright cold lamp is that it becomes a second version of the same problem, just leaning the other way. You mix to the lamp and then the hallway under a warm bulb lies to you again. What helped me was putting the work under the same light it will live in and checking it in daylight by a window, no lamp at all. Daylight is the one thing that does not flatter or punish, it just tells you. Keep the kitchen, keep the lamp, but trust the window.
You're right and I don't love hearing it. I basically already bought the 5000K bulb in my head before I read this.
But the part about daylight not flattering or punishing is the bit I'm going to remember. I've got a window in the dining room that gets decent morning light, so I'm going to hang the thing there for a day or two and just look at it before I do anything drastic. Half of why I freaked out is that I only ever saw it under the kitchen bulb, so of course the hallway felt like a betrayal.
One lamp, and a window. That's cheaper than the renovation I had planned, so thanks for that.
One 5000K lamp instead of redoing the kitchen, that's the advice I needed before I started browsing bulb listings at 11pm like a lunatic. And the part about the kitchen being a fact of the world, yeah, that landed. My hallway is the actual test and I've been failing it.
Follow up question since you clearly know this stuff: do you leave the lamp on while you're painting and compare as you go, or block the warm light out entirely? Because the two are fighting each other in my little corner and I can't tell which one I should be trusting.