The Munsell Student Color Set

[Marvin Mattelson]

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.

[Enzie Shahmiri]

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!