The Munsell Student Color Set

[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.

[Steven Sweeney]

I'm not trying to draw away from this, but to augment it, in that I found experimenting with John Howard Sanden's paint system equally as interesting and useful, in that he also grays his colors with grays. Of course, a lot of folks protest that they're premixed grays, and those folks remain free to spend the time mixing their own (arriving, eventually, at the premixed mix, while time marches on), but the lesson is the same. You're ahead of the game by not altering chroma in a way that alters value. Once you introduce two variables, you begin to lose control.

[Marvin Mattelson]

You got it Richard.

When a string of grays are coupled with value strings of various hues the amount of control in color mixing is geometrically magnified. I find using nine steps to be more efficient by virtue of the elimination of some extra steps. Using such an approach is what allows my workshop students to make such amazing progress in just two weeks, or even less. Color mixing becomes much less of a struggle and more attention can be focused on value control.

I know there are certain people who read my posts and don't like that I mention my teaching, but I believe that the fact my approach works so well for so many gives my ideas greater credibility.

Steven, Sanden's Pro Mix Colors utilize two or three grays, I believe. The concept of using neutrals to reduce intensities has been around since DaVinci. Bouguereau also used a similar approach as did many many others.

Artists of the past may not necessarily have used the exact nomenclature of the Munsell System but using value strings of various hues and neutralizing them to control intensity go back much further than Munsell. Without such an approach Bouguereau wouldn't have been able to achieve the subtlety that made his work so noteworthy.

[Steven Sweeney]

Originally Posted by Marvin Mattelson

Steven, Sanden's Pro Mix Colors utilize two or three grays, I believe

Yes, I was merely citing but one example of a similar, though not the same, approach. Daniel Greene

[Linda Ciallelo]

I have been reading about the Munsell theory on various forums for a long time. I never really understood what they used it for until now. I knew what it was, but not what it was for. Thank you for clear explanation.

[Julie Deane]

I sat in Marvin's color theory class, and then tried an experiment.

I mixed a certain shade of gray-green using
1. green and a complementary color and
2. green plus a neutral gray.
I couldn't believe my eyes! I could see no difference in my end results.

Using the gray made it faster and easier to produce the desired color.