Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Color Theory: Completed Munsell Color Charts

I finally finished Exercise 1.4 in The New Munsell(R) Student Color Set. The exercise basically asks you to complete the book by filling in the blanks on the color charts with colored chips. I've blogged about Munsell's color theory before. I've also blogged about my specific experience assembling the color charts, back when I'd finished only the first three out of ten. Here I thought I'd share my pictures of the completed charts with a few observations.

5R with 30 chips. The chip that matches the 5R chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5R 5/14. I started with the 5R chart because a previous chart illustrating the concepts of hue, value, and chroma used one row from the 5R chart to illustrate chroma. Also 5R contains the most chips, 30, so I could check all the rest of the charts against that chart if there wasn't the same value and chroma on the adjacent hue charts.

5YR with 24 chips. The chip that matches the 5YR chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5YR 7/12. Then by chance I worked clockwise around the hue circle. This turned out to be a good plan because in that order the charts with the most chips come at the end. Charts with fewer chips are easier to arrange.

5Y with 21 chips. The chip that matches the 5Y chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5Y 8/12. Do my charts look right to you? Any chips seem out of place? This is the moment when I wish I could work on this with a class so I could have a group of well-trained eyes to double check my charts.

5GY with 20 chips. The chip that matches the 5GY chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5GY 8/10.

5G with 22 chips. The chip that matches the 5G chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5G 6/10.

5BG with 20 chips. The chip that matches the 5BG chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5BG 5/8.

5B with 20 chips. The chip that matches the 5B chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5B 5/8. It certainly got easier the more charts I completed. By the last few I had no trouble pulling out that first column /2 with the lowest chroma.

5PB with 27 chips. The chip that matches the 5PB chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5PB 5/10. Once I figured out that if I set up the chart as I thought it should be on medium gray paper then switched the position of chips I wasn't sure about those switches really pointed out mistakes better than comparing to other charts.

5P with 26 chips. The chip that matches the 5P chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5P 5/10. The only bummer is I'm almost 100% sure I got two of the same chip for my 5P chart. So I have two 5P 8/4 chips and no 5P 7/4 chip. I'm going to write to the publisher, Fairchild Publications, and see if they'll send me a single 5P 7/4 chip.

Finally 5RP with 28 chips. The chip that matches the 5RP chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5RP 5/12.

Sort of unrelated, but also about color, check out Kris's Color Stripes, a very cool blog where an artist named Kris posts pictures and color swatches of the colors in the pictures. I found Kris' blog via Dear Ada, a wonderful blog of visual art.

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2 comments:

Rebecca said...

I was going to say I thought a couple of the swatches were out of place, but then I looked at the post again on my laptop and not on my work computer and things look better here. Are there always two swatches across the top? Maybe you said I didn't read carefully enough...Also, I may be cross eyed from grading.

Sarah said...

Monitor differences are REALLY highlighted by looking at these color charts. On my monitor I can see virtually no difference among any of the chips on the bottom two rows, which makes sense when you think about how monitors create the color you see. I imagine my monitor could probably rock the top two rows to a lot more visually distinct gradations than the opaque paint gamut of the chips. Also, I took these pictures in morning light via a northwestern exposure, so that might change the appearance of some of the charts.

There aren't always two swatches in the top row, but that seems to be the case a lot, particularly in the arc of the hue circle from 5BG to 5R. If you think about the low value of these colors at their full chroma as compared to the high value at full chroma of the rest of the arc from 5YR to 5G, it makes sense that they have a small range at a high value. When I first pulled out the chips for the 5P chart the top row looked stark white compared to the rest of the crazy dark purple chips.