If you add the complement of the hue straight out of the tube, the value of your mix can change drastically.

In the light values, you’ll be using more white than black anyway to mix the greys. A lot of teachers tell their students not to use black because to a beginner every dark color looks black. There aren’t any hard and fast rules about using black. I have some tubes of pure color (red madder, green earth, ochre red, venetian red, cadmium light, and so on), is there a way to know their position in munsell color system? Add simply the complement of a specific color (sse Artists -> hints & tips section of ).Ĭan you clarify what I have to do to get a correct color chart. I read also on some articles: do not use black to get dark version of a specific color. In fact impressionist used this technique to paint shadow version of a specific local color. I read on some articles that the use of complimentary color help to get a less saturated version of a specific hue. Probably this is the solution that was not so clear in the document.

You said that the gray scale value can help me to do this. Since I know that color is a three dimentional thing (hue, saturation and value) I didn’t understand how to get less satured version of a specific hue. To get value 6-9 it add white to cadmium green.

To get GREN values 2-4 she mixes viridian+raw umber with cadmium green. I use the portrait palette but not this one. (various mixtures of black and white to produce 9 values of grey) Once you determine, for example, that you want an orange of value 7, then you control saturation by adding a value 7 grey to the cadmium orange which is the value 7 orange. Saturation seems to be controlled by the grayscale mixtures cited above in the portrait palette. For example, YR (orange) value 1 is burnt umber value 2 seems to be a combination of burnt umber and burnt sienna, value 3 is burnt sienna, values 4-6 are combinations of burnt sienna and cad orange, values 8 and 9 are cad. The same seems true for the rest of the colors. My guess from the first palette listed for portraits is that different combinations of the Viridian/raw umber mixture and the cadmium green are mixed to produce values 2-4 (more cadmium green for value 4 and more Viridian/raw umber for value 2) and then white is incrementally added to the cadmium green to produce values 6 through 9. What’s missing are the values between 1 and 5 and values higher than 5. The 5/6 Viridian + 1/6 Raw Umber = GREEN only at the 1st value, at the fifth value Cadmium Green = GREEN. The colors listed look like they’re meant to be at the maximum saturation since they come straight from the tube. I wasn’t able to find a Munsell palette with paint pigments other than the one you posted so I can’t say for certain that it is correct but it looks useful and should be easy enough to decipher.

Convert rgb value to munsell