I didn’t start with a colour wheel. I started at six years old with a box of Derwent pencils, sorting them by name rather than drawing what my mother had actually asked for. A sunset wasn’t “orange” to me — it was Electric Persimmon, and I remember real frustration that the box only had one shade of it when the sky clearly had four.
That habit of noticing never really left. It’s the same instinct, twenty-odd years on, that catches the difference between a brown that reads rich against someone’s skin and a brown that reads muddy on the same person in different light — not a mystical gift, just a lot of hours spent looking closely at something most people glance past.
I trained first in the traditional 12-season system, the way most colour analysts still do. It’s a genuinely useful starting framework, and I don’t think less of it for what came next. But it has a well-documented blind spot: it was built mostly around a narrower range of undertones and skin depths than the world actually contains, and neutral-leaning colouring especially tends to get forced into a box that doesn’t quite fit it. That gap is a real, acknowledged reason the 16-season systems — Sci/ART among them — developed at all: more categories, more room for colouring that genuinely sits between two seasons rather than getting talked into one because a chart only offered four boxes.
Autumn specifically earns its own study for a reason worth naming directly: the constant confusion between ‘Autumn’ the calendar season and ‘Autumn’ the colour family, which sends a real slice of search traffic looking for pumpkin-spice aesthetics instead of seasonal colour analysis, and the near-identical naming of True Autumn and Warm Autumn, which even practitioners use interchangeably.