Quote:
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One man's neutral tone is another man's cool tone
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[or woman's, of course]
I guess that's what I wanted to get sorted out, Michael, before we went in too many directions on the basis of our possibly seeing the same thing but giving different names to it. (Lao Tze said it long ago, that once you give something a name and say that it is "this" and not "that", you're down the road to trouble. Of course, he said it in Chinese, and I'm paraphrasing, to boot.) I had the sense that there wasn't really a difference with a distinction, other than in the way we chose to label it.
By the way, point taken that black and yellow make some incredible greens (just as black and white make some wonderful blues). But they're still optically green, when it's over, so whatever the constituents, I would still call them green.
Michele --
I can (and will) try to put a name to those color swatches, but I've been tossed around in Photoshop enough to know that the eyedropper doesn't deal with optical mixes, it just grabs a pixel's worth of color, whereas what we see on the screen is a blend of many pixels. I often have to make a number of selections from the same small area to get the color I'm looking for, and I'm as often very surprised to make a selection from, say, a blue area and see violet, or red, in the swatch window.
In those colorist (and tonalist) schools in which you're first required to say whether an observed color is a red, a yellow, or a blue - this wouldn't be easy. Forced, I would say yellow, then red. But the next question is whether those tend toward one of the other primaries [or put another way, whether they're warm or cool], and they both do - toward blue - so I too see the effect in the painting as green, and then violet.
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Which brings us full circle. Is there anything intrinsically "wrong" with painting greens (or blues or violets) into skin tones if we see them there, and leaving them out if we don't? For better or worse, that's where I'm at in my progress. It's not a perfect system, but if I don't paint what I see, I'm just makin' it all up anyway.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.