Why Use Munsell Color to Mix Your Paint?

She had purchased the first Lemon painting I ever did, and she had tears in her eyes when she told me that the painting hung on her stairwell and she would pause every day to contemplate it — and that sometimes it would make her cry.

I think the colors I mixed for that painting had something to do with her response to it. After all, the composition was simple enough and the subject was bought at my grocery store. So how does something so quotidian have such an effect on a person?

Accurate color alone is not enough to make it happen. In my opinion, there must be a competent attempt to convey the beauty of a common subject and the extent to which this is done successfully the painting will have impact.

Inaccurate, unbeautiful color will work as a blockade to the transcendence I seek to convey.

Let's define the problem all painters face:

• The average person can see just over one million colors.

• The average smartphone sees around five million colors.

• Many cameras record more colors than a smart phone.

• It is possible to mix only 3,200 colors with current oil paints.

• With a three-color palette that number drops to about 1,000 possible colors.

People who want to paint well struggle with color mixing. They hear various theories and start throwing around vague terms like warm and cool color (which are so vague as to render them valueless). Or worse, they come to believe that every color we humans can see can be mixed from a limited palette, and limited palettes are just that — limited.

Limited palettes seem like a good route — using only three or four colors is more manageable, right? Wrong. It's a very common misconception that all other colors can be mixed from red, yellow and blue.

There aren't any small set of paints that can be combined to create all other colors in oil paint. You can't even mix most colors from a few. The best estimate, confirmed by an esteemed color expert, is that between 35%-40% of the possible oil paint colors can be mixed from the "primary" three.

Primary is a deceptive concept when applied to oil paints. Light itself is primary. If the definition of a primary color is any of a group of colors from which all others can be obtained by mixing there are no primaries.

Without an objective color target, mixing color accurately is unpredictable at best. Once you begin thinking in terms of hue, value and chroma and have the ability to shift any one in the desired direction your painting will blossom.

Color is a Leprechaun — look away and it disappears

How do you gain the ability to mix every color possible? The surprising truth is that humans are excellent at matching colors IF they can see a color target and place it close to their working paint mix. This is a survival skill that must have been important enough to our ancestors for it to be passed down.

However, the moment we look away from our paint mix our brain recalibrates. And humans are terrible at remembering the color we were just staring at a second ago.

The best solution for most people is to use The Munsell Color system. Munsell is a constrained set, meaning it works as a GPS within the color space created by modern oil paints. It identifies objective landmarks in much the same way that one could define a forest and count every tree in it.

These identified color landmarks number just over 3,236 colors if every chroma step is included. In terms of individual landmarks that are practical and identifiable, that's it. Of course, you could mix fractions of any two identified colors. This is quite useful. My favorite way to do this is by mixing both and placing them close together. Then I free-mix between them. It's very satisfying to work this way and there are never any uncomfortable surprises in store — only good ones!

The expensive solution:

It consists of over 1,600 colors printed on card stock. However, it is very expensive to print those chips accurately. Because of this the Munsell Book of Color is currently priced at $1,871! And, to be honest, even the producers have acknowledged that as many as 30% of the chips are incorrect. That's a lot of money for something that's close but not quite right.

I love The Munsell Color System. I use it every painting session. It's a wonderful tool for oil painters. It helps me mix color accurately and intelligently, get the paint mix I want every time, paint faster and waste zero paint.

But it's very expensive, and that has been the biggest hurdle for most people who want to mix better color, especially new(er) painters. Struggling to mix color makes painting progress very difficult. Good color is critical to learning to paint well.

The second issue with the Munsell set is that the chips provided are every other chroma step. This is fairly easy to get around when painting a still life or landscape — a slight bump in chroma usually looks good.

But when color must be accurate in chroma — for instance, when painting human skin — not having every chroma at your fingertips slows you down and doubles your color mixing time.

If you're ready to take charge of your color mixing The Digital Munsell Book of Color is the best decision you could make.

The inexpensive solution: The Expanded Digital Munsell Book of Color.

If you want to mix oil colors accurately, quickly and beautifully, but don't want to spend over one thousand on The Munsell Book of Color, The Expanded Digital Munsell Book of Color is an elegant solution. It's 100% accurate, and sits on your smart phone so you can mix your paints with it as a guide.

You can take it everywhere from galleries and museums to see what colors those painters you admire actually used. Or take it out landscape painting and use it to determine the color differential between oak trees and maples in spring summer and fall.

The regular price is $99 for the full set but it's available at a steep discount right now. It contains almost twice as many colors as the printed Munsell set, including half-step values and every chroma for the a skin tone hues. I've also made some mixing videos to make it easier for those who are brand new to Munsell. They will be available in a short course. A link will be sent to you.