THE SCIENCE OF COLOR- HUE VALUE CHROMA

heres an insanely in depth site used by many professional artists, referred to me by the good people over at conceptrt.org. it breaks down and answers any questions one might have on how to use, bend, and break the rules of color efficiently.

http://www.huevaluechroma.com/

This is pretty amazing. I feel like I could read this a bunch of times and get something different out of it every time, there's just so much in there. Page 3 of mixing paint mentions that thing I was talking about a couple weeks ago that I had heard from a painting major, you can get a brighter color if you do a glaze over white rather than adding white to a pigment. They say "Adding white progressively to a dark transparent pigment tends to increase the chroma of the mixture up to a certain point, beyond which the chroma diminishes. Thinning a layer of a dark transparent pigment over white follows a similar path, but the maximum chroma attained is greater than that attained by adding white." So if you want a high value, high chroma color, say, like a bright red, but NOT pink, instead of adding white to your paint lay down white and then add a thin glaze of the desired hue until you take it down to the value you want. Which is helpful, I guess. It's also a little maddening.

Another thing I had heard was that if you add white to a warm red, it gets cooler, and if you add white to a cool red it warms up. The page says something close to that. "Adding white, thinning over white, and adding black all usually cause a hue shift, the magnitude and direction of which depend on the pigments involved." In other words, when you do stuff, stuff happens. Weird stuff. Good luck.

This should be required reading. It also bears a resemblance to the mouth of madness.

Ian, I totally agree. I think iits pretty obvious that no matter who you are this site has infinite stuff to take away. It definitely should be something required, cause theres a huge difference between seeing color and understanding color.


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just fav'd the site dan....useffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuullllllllllllllll

Ian, loved what you had to say. It is amazing how much titanium white effects color. I am starting to understand the differences between kinds. (Literally, I just read this stuff yesterday). Titanium White is an incredibly strong pigment, cool and the most opaque. It isn't good for thin layers. It is ideal for alla prima. The Impressionists loved it. Zinc White is semi-transparent, warm and fantastic for mixing with other colors. Great for thin, scumbling techniques. It doesn't leave your painting chalky. However, it doesn't hold up during long stints of painting. That is why the Titanium and Zinc combos were made. Very good in mixing and does Ok in thin layers. I use oils and I paint classically. Classical (Master) palettes were very transparent. A lot of glazing and layering with thin layers. Their colors were very transparent. Even the white. The white was Flake (Lead) White which was banned for a long time and still might be in some European areas because of it's toxicity. However, it is the most transparent and warmest of whites and is ideal for glazing and scumbling. All whites will change a color when mixing. Titanium cools, Zinc may preserve a color's temp when tinting. Flake usually doesn't change temp to warm it up.

The beauty of living in modern times is that there are all these colors and color mixtures under the sun. You can buy radiant mixtures instead of mixing them yourself.

Good Stuff!!!