The Munsell Color System for Artists

[Marvin Mattelson]

Michael,

I just wanted to point out that Reilly and Covino, although some overlaps exist, were two different animals for those who weren't familiar with their names. I'm glad that Covino's teaching was a source of knowledge for you. I feel the same about my Reilly training. The most important aspect of choosing a teacher is that they know more than you about the direction you wish to pursue.

[Timothy C. Tyler]

I think there is a point early on in the learning stage of painting where this info may be useful..very early on. I find it very boring. Maybe it's my personality. It's the nuances in art - the capturing the delicate individual characteristics that are important. Charts are at best a point of departure.

[Steven Sweeney]

One of my biggest advances in mixing color came when I finally, and reluctantly, sat down and did what I'd been resisting, but what so many masterful painters had been telling me to do, something very basic:

Take a hue from your palette. Tint it with white, again, again, again. Watch what happens. Do it with all the hues on your palette. It's astonishing how they behave, some changing quickly, some slowly. (Case in point: compare classic alizarin crimson with the

[Michael Georges]

Steven:

Exactly my point! I have charts of each hue made into 27 different colors made from nine values of each hue and then neutralized with equal value grays to three intensities! It really helps to mix colors!

[Khaimraj Seepersad]

Steven, Michael, agreed.

For me it was the white out of all known Mars colours, a bright lemon yellow, a bright orange type red and a bright blue. Then turning all of these opaque pigments into transparent on canvas.

Essentially a modified six colour palette. I use more the philosophy of, harmony of the painting and memory colour/tone.

[Richard Budig]

How interesting to read all these approaches to color. Color has, and continues to "bug" me. Like doing push-up, or sit-up, however, it gets a little easier the more you do it.

I learned what seem like a simple, but workeable solution in studying with Daniel Greene. His approach is this, whether painting portraits, still life, or whatever:

He looks at his subject to decide value, then whether it's warm or cool, and then whether it's on the yellow side or the blue side.

Painting and color are, to some degree, subjective, and my eye doesn't see color like your eye. So, it seems to me that if we were all standing side by side, painting a still life, we might not see the same identical color/value/degree of warmth, BUT, we would see a warm place as warm, and a cool place as cool, leaving us to then formulate/mix a color that would make that place in our painting correspond to that place on our model. In the end, if we kept our color/value/temp in the right areas, we should end up with a satisfying painting -- theoretically. :-)

I once had an instructor who had this large banner hanging in front of the room that read: DON'T THINK . . . PAINT!

[Sharon Knettell]

Mike,

There are people who have an eye for color, like Mozart. My best friend Bill is an example. He works mainly with an understanding of complements and that is all. No pedestrian Munsell systems to clog the intuitive flow of color on his canvas. Early Asian art has the most sophisticated and subtle color, yet I can find no complicated Chinese color charts to explain it.

Working with a system like Munsell shortcircuits the unconcious part of the brain which probably is the artists' greatest painting tool. It is like translating a direct experience with color into a foreign langauge and retranslating it onto the canvas. In other words, the intellectual faculties get in the way and you lose your direct visceral feel for the color The results are usually rather ordinary and do not allow for the unexpected and delicious color harmonies that come from being totally one with color.

Sincerely,

[Marvin Mattelson]

The Munsell "system" is just a way to identify the three properties of color, value, hue and intensity. Some people may have incorporated this method of identification and derived intellectual color harmony theories from it. If they did, it had nothing at all to do with the Munsell system.

There is no difference between picking up a tube of paint and calling it "Ultramarine Blue" or "Purple Blue Value1 Chroma 8" What you call it has nothing to do with how you use it. In either case, you need to be aware of the fact it's a dark purplish blue of medium to strong intensity. I don't see how this shortcuts anything.

[Juan Martinez]

Marvin

If I may interject here; I agree with you. I was taught to see and to understand colour as a combination of its three components and doing so allows everyone to be speaking the same language ... so-to-speak.

Because not all paint brands necessarily yield the same colours for any given paint name, it is really helpful, as you say, to identify a colour by its generic descriptors. The natural earth tones are particularly prone to variations as are newly made recreations of historic colours such as "Indian Yellow". These can be all over the place, can't they, and require descriptive terminology. The manufacturers are emulating colours that no longer exist and sometimes I wish they'd pick different names.

I don't know whether the system I learned was ever based on Munsell's but there are similarities. In it, all colours can be described by a combination of their hue, value, and chroma. But there are a couple of differences from the Munsell system, too. I was taught the 9-point, European (so I'm told) value scale instead of a 10-point one. It is, however, the same as Denman Ross's value scale (Ross was an American. Are you familiar with his work? It's fascinating stuff. I think he was at least partly a contemporary of Munsell's.)

There is a further complication in the system I use because, in it, the values are numbered opposite to that of the Munsell scale. That is, the darker values are higher numbers and lighter values, lower, with black being a 9 and white being a 1. It gets very confusing when talking values with the many people familiar with the Munsell scale. This is doubly so because I would still say that a light colour is a "high value" tone even though the "number" I would use to identify its value would be a lower numeral. Sheesh; it gets complicated.

Denman Ross didn't use numbers in his 9 value system, preferring to use names, instead: White, High Light, Light, Low Light, Middle, High Dark, Dark, Low Dark, Black. (Wt, HLt, Lt, Llt, M, HD, D, LD, Blk.). The only advantage -- if that is the right word -- I can see in a nine-value system over others is that with an odd number you will always have an exact middle value. So, a #5 is the middle value, as are 3 and 7, and so on. A small thing, I know.

The other difference between what I learned and Munsell's system is that you CAN compare chroma of unlike hues. I understand that Munsell says chroma is only relevant within a given hue. That is, you cannot -- according to Munsell -- compare the chroma of a blue with that of a red. Is this correct? Was Reilly also taking that approach? I can understand why that is done, but for practical usage, it works just as well to consider chromas right across the hue spectrum in any given painting.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw all of that into the mix.

Best.

Juan

[Sharon Knettell]

Everybody's perception of color is different, no two people will ever experience a color in the same way.

The Munsell system is useful for industry when a manufacturer of wallpaper has to have some curtain fabric dyed to match.

Color is visceral, emotional, based on observations of nature and experiments. There are laws, like complementary colors to be sure, but extensive theoretical knowledge of color will never supplant the great intuitive artist.