The Munsell Student Color Set

[Chris Saper]

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.

[Marvin Mattelson]

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.

[Allan Rahbek]

Originally Posted by Marvin Mattelson

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. .

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 ?

[Marvin Mattelson]

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!

[Richard Monro]

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?

[Marvin Mattelson]

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.

[Richard Monro]

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.