The Color Wheel, Part 7

Below is a digitally-created color wheel that includes yellow, magenta, and cyan in the 12:00, 4:00, and 8:00 positions. Halfway between those three colors are red, blue, and green.

These latter three colors, (RGB), are significant, because they are the essential colors of light, as opposed to pigment. Mixing red, green, and blue lights together on a theatrical stage or on a computer screen results in white light. Green and red mix to yellow. Blue and green mix to cyan. Red and blue make magenta.

The wheel was originally created by the photographer Tobey Sanford. I’ve spun it around to put yellow at the top and flipped it to put red on the right. Like those who work with theatrical lighting or computer monitors, Tobey regards red, green, and blue as his primaries. Yellow, magenta, and cyan are his secondaries.


You Ride My Bus, Cousin Gus
I tried to reproduce the wheel with oil colors, graying them toward the center. The colors shifted a bit when I photographed them, so the steps don’t look perfectly even here.

Placing RGB on the wheel evenly between CMY creates a color wheel that matches up with the color space in Photoshop. Now all those color balance sliders make sense.

You could name all twelve sectors, but for convenience, we’re just identifying six: yellow, red, magenta, blue, cyan, and green. The way I look at it, they should all be regarded as equal primaries.

Counting clockwise from the top of the wheel, they are YRMBCG. You can remember them by saying “You Ride My Bus, Cousin Gus.” For short you can call it the “Yurmby” wheel.

The “Yurmby” Wheel
Should painters adopt this six-primary color wheel? I believe it’s very helpful, as long as we keep in mind from the start that this color wheel—or any color wheel—is just a mental conception, a way of placing colors in your head.

We have to get used to red and yellow as closer neighbors than they were on the traditional artist’s color wheel. We have to get in the habit of recognizing and naming magenta and cyan separately from red and blue whenever we see them in art or nature. Unless you’re already accustomed to the Yurmby wheel, that means rewiring your brain. It has taken me a long time to rewire mine.

There’s a lot you can do with the Yurmby wheel. It makes a cool dartboard in an artist’s café. Also, you can chart where your pigments really appear on it. You can use it for gamut masking. I’ll show more of these applications in future posts. What I love most about it is that connects the worlds of computers, pigments, photography, printing, and lighting.
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Reviewing the posts in this series:
Part 1: Wrapping the Spectrum
Part 2: Primaries and Secondaries
Part 3: Complements, Afterimages, and Chroma
Part 4: Problems with the Traditional Wheel
Part 5: The Munsell System
Part 6: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow

If you’re checking out this series for the first time, don’t miss all the comments, too, which shed light and bring interesting discussion and further links to many of the points.

I thank Tobey Sanford, with whom I've discussed this stuff at length. I’m grateful to Bruce MacEvoy of handprint.com and David Briggs of huevaluechroma.com, who have explored much of this material in greater nuance and depth than is possible here.

The Color Wheel, Part 6

Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow
In the world of printing and photography, the three colors that mix the widest range, or gamut, of colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow.

These “printer’s primaries,” together with black (K), are known by the shorthand CMYK. CMYK inks are used throughout the industries of offset lithography, computer printing, and film photography.

If other industries use CMYK primaries instead of yellow, red, and blue, why don’t painters use them too? One reason is simple force of habit. Cyan and magenta don’t match our mental image of blue and red. These color concepts are deep rooted from childhood.

Can we find these colors as artist’s pigments? Until recently it was hard to find lightfast chemical pigments that would match up with CMY. The pigments Cadmium Yellow Light (known by the Color Index Number PY 35), Quinacridone Magenta (PR 122), and Phthalo Cyan (PB 17) come close. (The Lukas colors above are PY 3, PB 15:3, and PR 122).

Intriguing as this may be, it’s not really the answer. Most of these colors are very transparent, which can be a problem for oil and gouache painters. For painting we need a range of properties, opacity being just one of them. And most of the time we’re not trying to get the widest range of intense colors in a single painting from just three starting colors.

We can add as many starting colors as we want, especially if we want to get a wide range of mixtures. That’s what the top-end computer printers do, as do lithographers printing high quality art reproductions.

We can keep all our favorite pigments, even if they don’t match the printer’s primaries. We aren’t bound to using just three pigments when we’re painting.

But returning to the color wheel, we still need an accurate map to chart our pigments and mixtures. What we’re looking for is a universal way to understand color relationships regardless of the medium or technique we’re using.

CMY circles from Alias 3D Media

Reviewing the posts in this series:
Part 1: Wrapping the Spectrum
Part 2: Primaries and Secondaries
Part 3: Complements, Afterimages, and Chroma
Part 4: Problems with the Traditional Wheel
Part 5: The Munsell System
Part 6: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow
Part 7: The Yurmby Wheel

The Color Wheel, Part 5

Many contemporary realist painters use the system that Albert Munsell developed about a century ago. Munsell’s color system was adopted by Frank Reilly at the Art Student’s League in New York. From him and his students it passed on through several generations of teaching to contemporary academic realists, such as Jacob Collins and Graydon Parrish.

Munsell’s system divides the spectral hues into ten even steps. In deference to Munsell, I’ve painted the wheel with the reds on the left.

Instead of dividing the pie into threes and twelves, the structure is based on multiples of five, so I’ve represented it as two overlapping star shapes. Division by ten makes sense. We’re used to base ten in money and the metric system.

Students of the Munsell system become accustomed to the ten basic hues: yellow (Y), green-yellow (G-Y), green (G), blue-green (B-G), blue (B), purple-blue (P-B), purple (P), red-purple (R-P), red (R), and yellow-red (Y-R).

This is a much more useful wheel than the traditional artist’s color wheel because the spacing is better, and it allows for exact numerical descriptions of color notes.

The Munsell system is a big topic, which I hope to explore in a future post. A great benefit to the system (as some of you mentioned in the comments after Part 3) is that it permits exact 3-D mapping of hue, value, and chroma, allowing you to navigate precisely through the color space.

But for now, let’s just recognize the Munsell wheel as a different and effective way to lay out the 2-D hue and chroma relationships.

Thanks to Charley Parker of Lines and Colors for the post about this series, and check out Charley's post about the history of the color wheel.

Reviewing the posts in this series:
Part 1: Wrapping the Spectrum
Part 2: Primaries and Secondaries
Part 3: Complements, Afterimages, and Chroma
Part 4: Problems with the Traditional Wheel
Part 5: The Munsell System
Part 6: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow
Part 7: The Yurmby Wheel

The Color Wheel, Part 4

There are a few problems with the traditional artist’s color wheel, and its concept of primary, secondary and tertiary colors.

First of all, no color from the original spectrum has any higher claim to be a primary color than any other. Each hue occupies an equally legitimate place on the outer rim of the hue circle and can claim full status as a primary color. Nor are any particular hues by their nature secondary colors. Green is not a composite color any more than blue is.

You could set up a palette with high-chroma orange, violet, and green as primaries and paint a satisfactory image from them. It’s a good painting exercise to do so, and it can result in a perfectly acceptable painting.*

Secondly, it turns out that the traditional YRB wheel is out of proportion, like a clock face with some of the numbers bunched up in one corner (see center of wheel). It expands the yellow-orange-red section of the spectrum too much, so that red is at 4 o’clock instead of 2, and blue is at 8 o’clock instead of 6.

This uneven distribution came about partly because our eyes are more sensitive to small differences among the yellow, orange, and red hues, and partly because pigments are more numerous for warm colors, compared to cool ones. The precious pigments Vermilion and Ultramarine became our mental image for red and blue. There have always been many available pigments for the oranges and reds, but few for the violets and greens.

So, are primaries all relative? Can we set up the color circle in a different way? The answer is an emphatic yes. Tomorrow we’ll look at the Munsell system, which has served as the color map for many great realist painters.
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*In the case of mixing colors from OVG secondaries, you’ll have a hard time mixing a pure yellow, because yellow is a special case: it’s purest form is much lighter than the pure form of other colors, so it isn’t easy to mix yellow as a secondary in pigments. But the OVG colors have been used as primaries for the autochrome photo process.

Reviewing the posts in this series:
Part 1: Wrapping the Spectrum
Part 2: Primaries and Secondaries
Part 3: Complements, Afterimages, and Chroma
Part 4: Problems with the Traditional Wheel
Part 5: The Munsell System
Part 6: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow
Part 7: The Yurmby Wheel

Snow Plowing with Draft Horses

A heavy, wet snowstorm last night pulled down our birdfeeder, collapsed our kayak stand, and snapped an ash tree, which fell across the town road.

The electricity quit, so we made coffee on the camp stove, bundled up, and chainsawed the downed tree.

Then we took a walk down the road and into the nineteenth century. At the farm, Lenny was hitching up Sophie and Abby to try out the new plow that he bought recently from the Amish farmers in Pennsylvania.

We’ll get back to color wheels in the next post.

The Artist’s Magazine

The March issue of The Artist’s Magazine has Koo Schadler’s tips for workshop teachers: “So You’d Like to Teach a Workshop,” and the top 10 winners of the “Artists Over 60 Contest.” The common themes of the age 60+ artists were “supportive spouses and families, strong senses of style, and the resolute desire to never stop learning.”

And thanks to Holly Davis for the write-up about the Dinotopia exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum.

The Color Wheel, Part 3

THE COLOR WHEEL, PART 3
Complements
A color that holds a position directly across the wheel from another is known as a complement. In the world of pigments and color mixing, the color pairs are: yellow-violet, red-green, and blue-orange. When pigment complements are mixed together, they result in a neutral gray, that is, a gray with no hue identity. This is all pretty familiar to anyone who has fooled around with paints.

But in the realm of afterimages, light mixing, and visual perception, the complement pairings are slightly different. Blue is opposite yellow, not orange.

You can see this for yourself with the diagram above. Stare at the middle of the colorful circle for 20 seconds. Then shift your gaze to the middle of the white circle and relax your eyes. The complementary colors should emerge. Note that the afterimage of blue is yellow and vice versa.

But if you were to mix that yellow and that blue as paints, you wouldn’t get a gray, you’d get a green. In fact, pigments can behave unpredictably when mixed. Intermediate mixtures don’t always land on the straight line drawn between the two starting colors.

How does this affect the way we design a color wheel? First of all, you have to decide whether you want to try to represent the practicalities of pigments or the behavior of color in an optical or a mathematical realm. In other words, your color wheel must either represent the ideal world of optical color or the physical world of paints, but no single wheel can accurately represent both color universes.

Chroma
Many color wheels include the dimension of grayness versus intensity, known as chroma, also commonly called saturation. Here’s the traditional artist’s color wheel I made years ago, which goes to zero chroma at the center.

(By the way, which term do you use? Please vote in the poll at left). "Chroma," a term invented by Albert Munsell, is the degree a color ranges between neutrality and vibrancy or purity.

Tomorrow I'll try to take a look at that question posed yesterday: Are some colors really more primary than others?

Reviewing the posts in this series:
Part 1: Wrapping the Spectrum
Part 2: Primaries and Secondaries
Part 3: Complements, Afterimages, and Chroma
Part 4: Problems with the Traditional Wheel
Part 5: The Munsell System
Part 6: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow
Part 7: The Yurmby Wheel

The Color Wheel, Part 2

Artists generally regard red, yellow, and blue as the most basic, or primary, colors. If you ask most artists to select three tubes of paint to match their mental image of the primary colors, they will most likely pick something like cadmium red, cadmium yellow, and ultramarine blue.


Why those three colors? From Greek and Roman times to the Renaissance, most people thought green should be included as a primary, too. As we’ve noted on a previous post, green actually has more psychological salience than yellow. It’s mentioned much more often in the English language.

What is a primary color? The idea is that you should be possible to mix every other color out of the three primaries. You may have noticed that with the traditional artist’s primaries you can mix clear oranges, but the greens and violets are on the dull side.

The traditional artist’s color wheel,” above, presents yellow, red, and blue spaced at even thirds around the circle, in the position of 12 o’ clock, 4 o’ clock, and 8 o’clock.

Mixtures of the red, blue, and yellow primaries create secondaries. The secondary colors are violet, green and orange. They appear at 2, 6, and 10 o’clock on the traditional color wheel. But in truth when I painted this wheel, I didn't paint those secondaries from the primaries. If I had tried, they would have come out much duller.

As we’ll see in future posts, there’s nothing written in stone about any of those colors being primary or secondary, and we can take a fresh look at the whole arrangement.

Reviewing the posts in this series:
Part 1: Wrapping the Spectrum
Part 2: Primaries and Secondaries
Part 3: Complements, Afterimages, and Chroma
Part 4: Problems with the Traditional Wheel
Part 5: The Munsell System
Part 6: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow
Part 7: The Yurmby Wheel

The Color Wheel, Part 1

How we name and separate the colors on the color wheel is a subject with roots in physical science, visual perception, and artistic tradition. That’s what I’d like to explore over the next seven posts. The color wheel is our mental map of the color universe.

This may seem like boring review, but if you read all the posts this week, you may end up completely rethinking the color wheel—at least that’s what happened to me.

When white light is bent or refracted by a prism or a rainbow, it separates into a continuous gradation of colors. Within that smooth spectrum, there’s no clear division between the colors. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) proposed wrapping the spectral colors around a circle by merging the two ends, red and violet. The result was a hue circle, better known as a color wheel.

Newton observed that the hues gradate smoothly into each other. But in his diagram he identified seven colors we’ve come to know as ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). The tradition among artists has been to drop the indigo and to concentrate on six basic colors.

Tomorrow we’ll look at the colors that Newton and his contemporaries called “primitive” and which we call “primary.”
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Reviewing the posts in this series:
Part 1: Wrapping the Spectrum
Part 2: Primaries and Secondaries
Part 3: Complements, Afterimages, and Chroma
Part 4: Problems with the Traditional Wheel
Part 5: The Munsell System
Part 6: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow
Part 7: The Yurmby Wheel

Shoemakers

Back in 1987, while on assignment for National Geographic, I got lost in old Jerusalem.

I wandered down the narrow, twisting alleys. The sound of tapping hammers and the smell of contact cement hit me. Three guys sat in a little arched alcove making shoes. A boom box played Elton John.

They set up a plastic bucket for me to sit on and poured me a cup of tea. I pulled out my sketchbook and drew their portraits in pencil and ink wash.