The Munsell Student Color Set
 

Remember, how I was asking how to intensify chroma? Well this made me realize that although I use paints on a daily basis, mix some cool colors now and then, I still like to have more control over hitting that desired color right on, without lots of experimentation's.

After trying to figure out how to intensity chroma, it hit me that maybe it's time to take a step back,to make another leap forward. So back to school it is.

After some on-line reading I learned about the New Munsell Student Color set. (Apparently it has been around a while, it's just been revised.) This book teaches value and chroma recognition by having the student match up color chips in the right order. The text is very informative and sheds light into how color behaves by inviting you to do a series of exercises.

I have started to paint color chips and will be talking about this exercise in progress on my blog.

For anyone who sees any value in "value" this is a great exercise! ;)

Hi Enzie,
I am always curious to new theory's. They can be right or wrong, or something in between.

Why on earth would we want a new theory saying that the primary red is slightly towards blue, that is, containing both red and blue, and that the color wheel consist of 5 "primary" colors?

I have learned that the primary colors are the ones that can not be mixed from others, and that is yellow, red and blue.
The secondary colors are orange, purple and green and they are placed opposite their contrasts: blue / orange, red / green and yellow / violet in the color wheel.

I'd say that this is a false prophet and I advice to not waste your time on it. It simply does'nt make sense, only confusion.

Allan, you are welcome to stick to what work best for you. This post is meant for those who know about Munsell and like to learn more.

Fell free to learn more....

Just did a little check on SOG here is more:

The Munsell System for Artists

Enzie,
I was only trying to be helpful. I learned about color mixing 40 years ago, I believe it was the Johannes Itten system.
If you want to teach paint mixing you will have to deal with only three primary's, yellow, red and blue, this is the basic of the theory.

When it comes to actually mixing the paints, we must first analyze the content of these three primary colors in the paint we want to use.

I know that there are other theory's on color. Isac Newton, Wolfgang Goethe and Munsell.
Newton insisted on having the green included because it was much visible in spectral light.
Goethe's originated in his observations of how light changes when seen through mist. The white turns yellow, then orange and red with increasing density , think of the sunset.
I think that it is interesting to learn about different approaches, it can be great inspiration.

I've been looking for a downside to using Munsell since I started, because everything has one, right? I haven't found but one yet, and that is when I really hit a mix perfectly I am sometimes guilty of forgetting to clean the test bit off the chip because it blends in so well. Other than that, well, I haven't found any downside.

Allan seems to be bothered by the red/blue nature of Munsell's primary red, and goes on to talk about primaries being the colors that can't be mixed from others. That is just about any color at its highest chroma. That means there are perhaps 40 primaries.

Primaries make no difference to a painter, unless he/she is going to hamper themselves by attempting to mix all colors from three. It won't work. One could not mix a 10YR 8/14 from primary red and yellow. What about 5GY 7/12? That's a hard color to hit. Could I do it with primary blue and yellow? I don't think so, since the highest chroma mixes have to be perfectly clean and start as close as possible to the target mix. Since the primary blue is also at chroma 12, and 5GY 7/12 is a warm green-yellow it's likely that chroma would be lost using primaries to mix it. And then there are neutrals. The neutral mixes must also be very clean. How would Allan mix a value string of neutrals from just three primaries?

The idea of using primaries to mix all of ones' colors is wrongheaded. Why wouldn't one use a color that is close to the target color to mix with, instead of trying to create everything from three basic colors? Why not just put out an eye and tie a hand behind one's back? Munsell leads to clarity, not confusion.

The Munsell wheel is based on real pigments, so if you can find the target in the book it can be mixed.

Color wheelies
 

As I've mentioned many times here (more if you factor in the deletions) that I use the Munsell Color System as the basis of my color mixing in painting and teaching. My students are able to quickly grasp the concepts and transform their abilities to match what they see before them.

The traditional color wheel is limited because it is optically incorrect. The fact it is still widely used to teach students is amazing considering the Munsell Color Wheel is almost universally accepted in all industries dealing with color.

Hi Richard,
I always like to discuss theory's so your reply is much appreciated.

First I would like to state that I believe that I can agree in most of the Munsell system. The grey strings and how colors are valued in the system. It's obvious that a yellow is lighter than red and blue.

But I just don't understand how you can nominate a mixed color to be a primary one and much less 40 primary's.

I don't use primary's to mix colors because I don't have them ! My blue is a bit reddish and my red is bluish plus a little yellow and so on, because I use the
availeble pigments Ultramarine blue and Crimson red and I have never thought about them as primary's - but I know where they are placed on the theoretical color system.
It's like a compas with North, South, East and West - I don't need to go there, but I know where it is.

I am still waiting to learn.

Marvin, could you please explane to me, in a popular way, what it means that "The traditional color wheel is limited because it is optically incorrect".

Allan, using your definition of a primary color, one that cannot be mixed from another, there are more than 40 colors out at the extremes of chroma, and to mix them correctly one must start with colors as high or higher in chroma, and as close as possible to the target. Again, Munsell is based on pigment, not theory. We paint with pigments, not light.

There are many color theories, so I am not certain which theory you refer to when you say, "My blue is a bit reddish and my red is bluish plus a little yellow and so on, because I use the availeble pigments Ultramarine blue and Crimson red and I have never thought about them as primary's - but I know where they are placed on the theoretical color system."

There are reds -- such as in a strongly lit dark red rose -- that cannot be painted from any crimsom available, unless the painter is willing to accept lower chroma than is in the rose. Although ultramarine is very useful there are blues that cannot be painted from it.

Hi Allan, it is very nice of you to offer your advise, but to call Munsell a "false prophet" and advising me to not waste my time, meant to me that you did not take the time to find out who Munsell is, what is theory is about and that you seem to think I don't know what I am talking about. IF my reply seemed defensive, it might be that I am overall getting a bit tired of having my patience tested.

Not one to believe in putting one system down over another, I offer what I have learned or am learning to those who are interested. I do not advocate following anybody's advise blindly, but recommend we each try new things to find out if there is anything to be gained that can be applied to the style we work in.

I am not teaching, nor preaching but sharing my knowledge and work progress as one artist to another. I have several readers on my blog who like to follow this experiment and I have labeled the posts "Lessons 1,2,3,etc to make the process easier to follow.

Knowledge is power! The more we know as an artist the better we can make educated judgments on how to improve our own work.

Allan,

Red and green are not true optical compliments. Close but no cigar. Using the principles of simultaneous contrast, if you place, for example, a red card against a white field the eye tries to balance out the color red with it's optical compliment. If the red card is removed there will be a blue green after image.

The Munsell color wheel is based on optical compliments: yellow-green and purple, blue-green and red, yellow-red and blue, red purple and green, and blue-purple and yellow.

According to Philip Hale's book about Vermeer, published in 1913, the Boston artists (Paxton et al) were familiar with this concept.

That there is more than one way to skin the color wheel cat is demonstrated by my printer, which produces gorgeous photo-quality images across the spectrum, not with blue, yellow and red inks, but cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow and black. That so-called CMYK model is yet just one model, particularly suited to printing technologies. But like first hearing that the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh predates biblical accounts, it

[QUOTE=Steven Sweeney] . . . the

The problem I have always had with published color wheels is that they are theoretical and do not reflect true artist colors. I have found a true color wheel that finally is helpful to those of us who practice fine art. The real color wheel be found at:

http://realcolorwheel.com/colorwheel.htm.

Another helpful introduction to Munsell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system
The cylindrical model, with its chroma, value and hue coordinates, is especially useful in visualizing how the system is constructed.

And again, this reference is particularly well annotated, for further investigation.

All that being said, don't everybody go leaping off of precipices, over this system that is second nature to some and unknown to many.

When I'm indoors, it's a modified Paxton palette, but when the French easel goes out to the river bluff country next weekend, it will be stocked with a warm and cool version of blue, yellow, and red, with enough premixed grays to manipulate the chroma in any value range. A lot of white, a half-dozen brushes. Light, effective, harmonious -- and fun.

Notwithstanding the famous book title -- "Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green" -- they do. Don't throw away what's working for you, for the kind of painting that you do.

But remain open to any of the myriad tips and tricks available through other approaches. Steal the best of them, and make your mark.

Well said Steven! Thanks for the additional info and links guys!

[QUOTE=Marvin Mattelson]Allan,

Red and green are not true optical compliments. Close but no cigar. Using the principles of simultaneous contrast, if you place, for example, a red card against a white field the eye tries to balance out the color red with it's optical compliment. If the red card is removed there will be a blue green after image.

The Munsell color wheel is based on optical compliments: yellow-green and purple, blue-green and red, yellow-red and blue, red purple and green, and blue-purple and yell

Ah, Allan.... I see you are doing what I am doing. Mixing colors! Thanks for showing these samples. :)

Alan, if it works for you then that's all the validation you need.

It didn't work for me when I first struggled with painting theory and how to manifest it into practical technical terms. This was about 30 years ago. I was painting (or at least trying to paint) in acrylics when I discovered a new line of paint, Liquitex Modular Acrylics, based on the Munsell Color Notation System.

Somehow it all made logical sense to me because the tubes were identified by general hue names (red, blue, etc.) and values, as opposed to traditional packaging (Ulramarine) nomenclature. They also manufactured a set of neutral grays, to be used for reducing chroma.

The Munsell color wheel made sense. The logic of the relationships was so clear and gave me a big leg up. I could base my decisions on logic and not recipes. Within two years I was painting covers for Time Magazine and doing advertising campaigns for clients like IBM. I've tried to spread the word ever since.

Years later, I started to study the teachings of Frank Reilly with John Murray. Reilly based much of his methodology on his adaptation of Munsell, so it seemed a logical step in my evolution. This has, in turn, opened my eyes further and given me the foundation to develop my own ideas.

Here is an interesting experiment. I am in the midst of painting a little canary study to test how to keep the chroma of my Cad Yellow, while darkening the values.

Supplies: M. Graham cadmium Yellow
M. Graham Dioxazine Purple
and Micheal Harding Yellow Ochre

Mixing the Cad. Yellow with it's compliment produced a hue and major value shift and I ended up with a muddy looking yellow-green

Mixing the Cad Yellow with a earth color - Yellow Ochre retained the chroma and gave me nice value shifts

I also found out that Yellow already is a high chroma color and lightening it would only kill the intensity of this color. So I made this my highest value and am working the other direction, progressively getting darker. Since this a portrait artist forum, I don't think Canaries are welcome, but I will post the results as soon as the little guy is finished. Sorry about the enthusiasm, but I am just tickled pink to finally have the answer to my Chroma question!

Pardon me if what I'm about to say is stating the obvious, but I just want to present my thoughts on using Munsell, or any color system for that matter. His is a system based on representing color in a three dimensional tree, not just two as is shown in color wheels. It's possible to create a wheel from his system, but it would be a disection of a 3-D sphere of aligned hues. Most other systems don't acknowledge value (darker and lighter ranges)at all in their structure.

His system centers around the afterimage affect of light perception (stare at a red dot and you'll see a blue-green afterimage,) and his arrangement of five principal colors reflects this affect in terms of a linear balance of opposites.

Balance is a key word to understanding his sytem in that it shows linear gradations for each of the color properties along an axis, the center being a neutral gray. As such, he was able to construct an accurate notation system on a grid to catalog each color chip so it could be easily recreated.

All of the color systems have certain limits. If they're based on light, painters don't use light, but rather pigments which don't mix in the same way. Mixing red and green light makes yellow. Also any system based on colored light that represents itself using printed pigments, is working with a limited construct. Conversely, if the system is based on pigments, which pigments and in what mixture? New pigments are constantly being developed and introduced, and paint companys make their products differently without any standarization. It's like, we have a system, but now how do we use it?

The challenge for painters is to learn how their pigments mix together. Even Munsell doesn't tell you how certain pigments behave. That's up to you to learn how to handle, and to deal with their limitations, not to mention how to modulate the color optically on the canvas with underpainted colors, how neighboring colors affect it, etc.

There's a good book I would recommend by Edith Feisner called "Color Studies" that presents an overview of various systems and basic colro principles rather clearly in an applied manner.

Enough Sharon
 

First my apologies to the rest of my forum members, but this needs to be addressed.

Sharon, I believe you owe Marvin and the rest of the forum members an apology. We have all entered into this forum for the purpose of helping each other and have agreed to not attack or denigrate our fellow members. Your last sarcastic comment toward Marvin was totally uncalled for and did not advance the purpose of this thread in any positive direction.

I have stopped active participation in this forum, principally because of your unbecoming personal attacks and overbearing opinions that tend to give the impression that other forum members are of lesser ilk if we do not adopt your views.

Sharon, you are technically brilliant and have much to offer to this forum if you can do it in a positive, upbuilding way. I don

My last post may not make sense as I see that Sharon's post has been pulled from the thread. Thank you to who ever pulled the post. It did not belong here.

Sharon,

I am sure that your apology is appreciated by all. Also your good judgment in pulling your post. Above all I appreciate your humility in this matter. Thank you. We all learn all the time.

I have noted that the Munsell system is based on the visual contrasts that occur after looking at a color for a while and then removing it.
I have done some testings and to me it appears that all the after pictures tend to be relatively cool, no matter if it is the after picture from a cool or hot color. Maybe that is because the after picture is a genuine contrast, which means that it is also contrasting the value, and the after picture is always relatively lighter.

when painting we would not always want a lighter and cooler contrast, so how would this special bias on the Munsell wheel serve us?

I have no problems making neutrals from the RYB system. Al i have to think about is the contend of the three colors. I will attach a scale of red yellow mixtures to illustrate what I mean.
The top mixture is The bluish red ,Permanent Red + the bluish yellow, Cadmium Yellow Lemon. Because of the blue element in the mixture the orange hue has been lowered.

In the bottom example both mixing colors are without the blue element, closer to the goal so to speak.

It takes a "big" person to apologise, Sharon. You're tops!

I will disagree with you to the extent that while some adopt Munsell's ( and others') color theories with an ardor bordering religious, it's well worth to consider, how indeed did the master painters in other eras "get by" with out 'em ? (we stand on the shoulders of giants)

Allan, you got some nice mixes there. I am going to give them a try when I get my yellow string finished. I got another commission, with a less than desirable reference and haven't had a chance to continue the color studies. But I wanted to get back to you and thanks you for posting these samples.

Allan,

Your example points out why the Real Color Wheel can be of benefit to all of us. It is a wheel in which actual artists colors are noted. Thus we can instantly see if a tube color is fully saturated or grayed somewhat. It also helps us decide which tube colors we can us to help us create a true neutral or even a high quality black. In most cases we won't have a true complimentary tube color available to neutralize a color we have. The real color wheel can then help us choose some split complimetary tube colors to do the same job. Check out this interesting color wheel at:

http://realcolorwheel.com/colorwheel.htm.

Quiller Color Wheel
 

I have utilized Stephen Quiller's color wheel.

Stephen has done a tremendous amount of research into finding precise tube complements, (meaning that their mixtures produce clean, beautiful greys) and publishes a chart by color name/brand/equivalent, also by oil, watercolor and acrylic.He updates the chart periodically as manufacturers add or delete or change colors.

The advantage of Munsell
 

The difference between the Munsell Color Notation System and normal color wheels (annotated or not) is that Munsell describes a 3-D color space so you can relate your colors to each other contextually. It makes color recipes obsolete allowing you to modulate your color appropriately without needing to remember what colors you had previously mixed.

I believe it's always advantageous to simplify my thought process if my goal is to become more intuitive. Using the Munsell System has enabled me to do just that. In most instances my brush seems to be mixing the color on its own. Additionally, using neutrals to desaturate colors as opposed to using compliments, reduces color shifts and keeps the number of colors on your palette more manageable.

Marvin,
what you describe here is exactly the teaching that I received in the early sixty's when I became a house painter. I had to do a lot of scales, value, chroma and all sorts of harmony's, the whole color tree, and I loved it :)
Also the location of most known pigments in the color-tree.

The color wheel had only tree primary's, yellow, red, and blue, because they are the ones that can not be mixed from others.

I thought that this was common knowledge and is also why I questioned the Munsell system. I could not see any other difference than that Munsell had narrowed the orange to only half the steps compared with the green and purples.

Because of the research, lately, I have learned that Munsell has marketed the scales and is widely renown for the color cards used to compare the colors on dirt and diamonds.

I also agree with you that mixing between close colors are less hazardous than between contrasts. So maybe you don't use the contrast in the Munsell system after all ? ;)

Yes Allan, that's correct. I eschew the use of complements for the purpose of neutralizing color. As Daniel Greene pointed out last year at his PSA demo, "When I want to gray down a color I just add gray!" Eliminating the need to include a perfect compliment for each palette color means that I don't need to have a periodic chart full of colors on my palette and I can focus on the task at hand, painting. Also I use a hand held palette and I fear straining my arm.

Munsell used five pigments as opposed to three because with five you have a greater range of chromatic possibilities. Although I use his nomenclature and color wheel I'm not particularly interested in painting DayGloesque compositions.

I'd like to thank Steven for pointing out I've been misspelling the word complement by exchanging the first e for an i. I'm a horrible (creative?) speller and if spell check doesn't pick it up neither do I. If anyone reads an old post where I've mentioned that word, please pretend it's spelled correctly. Thanks!

Now if we could only note on the Munsell color wheel, where actual tube colors lie, we would have the best of all worlds.

I have learned something new from the discussion in this thread. For more than 50 years I have been using complements or split complements to gray my primaries. Having a neutral gray makes a lot of sense. It is such a simple idea, one wonders why we haven't thought of it before.

Question for Marvin: do you use an actual neutral gray or just a touch of black? If a neutral gray, what value do you recommend?

Richard,

Once you understand the Munsell notations it's very easy to identify the hue value and chroma of any color. I don't use the exact value designation of Munsell which is based on a theoretical black and white as the extreme points on the scale. My scale is also made up of eleven steps. My extremes are black and white paint with nine intermediate values. White is designated as value 10 and black is value 0. According to the Munsell notations Black paint is value 1.5 and white paint is 9.5 because Munsell is used to identify colors that go beyond the range of artist colors.

I mix my grays from white, ivory black and raw umber, varying the admixtures to adjust the value, as well as the coolness (too much black) or warmness (too much umber).

If I wanted to neutralize a yellow ochre I'd add neutral gray value 6. When I gray down a color I don't want to alter the value of that color. Using just black and white to make the grays will shift the hue of the color you are neutralizing towards blue.

Hope this helps.

Marvin,

If I understand what you are saying, you have 11 values ranging from white to black. To then gray a particular color of a particular value you choose a neutral of the same value to mix with the color. The more neutral gray of that value that you mix with the color the more gray the color. If what I have stated is correct, the system makes great sense to me. Thanks for the input.

I'm not trying to draw away from this, but to augment it, in that I found experimenting with John Howard Sanden's paint system equally as interesting and useful, in that he also grays his colors with grays. Of course, a lot of folks protest that they're premixed grays, and those folks remain free to spend the time mixing their own (arriving, eventually, at the premixed mix, while time marches on), but the lesson is the same. You're ahead of the game by not altering chroma in a way that alters value. Once you introduce two variables, you begin to lose control.

You got it Richard.

When a string of grays are coupled with value strings of various hues the amount of control in color mixing is geometrically magnified. I find using nine steps to be more efficient by virtue of the elimination of some extra steps. Using such an approach is what allows my workshop students to make such amazing progress in just two weeks, or even less. Color mixing becomes much less of a struggle and more attention can be focused on value control.

I know there are certain people who read my posts and don't like that I mention my teaching, but I believe that the fact my approach works so well for so many gives my ideas greater credibility.

Steven, Sanden's Pro Mix Colors utilize two or three grays, I believe. The concept of using neutrals to reduce intensities has been around since DaVinci. Bouguereau also used a similar approach as did many many others.

Artists of the past may not necessarily have used the exact nomenclature of the Munsell System but using value strings of various hues and neutralizing them to control intensity go back much further than Munsell. Without such an approach Bouguereau wouldn't have been able to achieve the subtlety that made his work so noteworthy.

Yes, I was merely citing but one example of a similar, though not the same, approach. Daniel Greene

I have been reading about the Munsell theory on various forums for a long time. I never really understood what they used it for until now. I knew what it was, but not what it was for. Thank you for clear explanation.

I sat in Marvin's color theory class, and then tried an experiment.

I mixed a certain shade of gray-green using
1. green and a complementary color and
2. green plus a neutral gray.
I couldn't believe my eyes! I could see no difference in my end results.

Using the gray made it faster and easier to produce the desired color.