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Chris Saper: Could you desribe your chroma scale, please?
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Chroma is the relative purity or grayness of a color - tan for instance is a fairly low chroma where as cad orange is a very high chroma. As chroma of a color increases, the color comes closer to its pure hue.
Munsell ascribes a 14 step chroma scale which I use, but I have found it even more useful to group chroma into three categories of High, Medium, and Low. I even created some color charts with each hue expressed in nine values and each value expressed in high, medium, and low chroma. I mixed each value of the hue with 25% gray, 50% gray, and 75% gray - the grays each corresponding in value with the value of the hue - i.e., I mixed a value 6 gray into the value 6 hue to express the muted chroma of the hue at that value.
Does that help?
Michele: Burnt Sienna is about a value 3 to 4. Value 6 will be lighter. I made this color by starting with pure cad orange (value 6-7) and decreasing its chroma with a value 6 gray and tinting it with just a bit of yellow ochre (value 7) to hit the right color. Perhaps I should have described the hue as closer to Yellow-Yellow-Red.
It may be a bit hard for folks to get the exact color, but everyone who understands hue, value, and chroma will come quite close. The important thing is that we now have a grammar or language we can use to talk about color that we can all understand. Further, I can look at a color and say - "hey, that is a purple-blue hue, about a value 8, and pretty pure in chroma" when I look at a blue sky out my window, or the sky from an old master painting, or a photo I took. It takes a lot of the guessing about color out of the equation and gives the artist a solid spot to begin.