COLOR AND VALUE

Color and value: the working charts

There are many palettes, and most of them work. What they share is not a list of tubes. It is a balance of primaries and a synergy between them, and that balance is what lets a small set of colors open a wide range of harmonies. Get the balance and the range follows. Miss it, and no number of tubes buys it back.

You can watch that principle hold across very different kits. Every chart is below, in full, so the differences and the overlaps are here to read side by side, from the palette Daniel paints from to the Munsell scale under all of them.

01Start with the palette Daniel actually paints from. See the muted triad first, burnt sienna, ultramarine, and yellow ochre, then permanent rose and phthalo green added to push the cools, with the mixes each group reaches shown beside them.

The Bilmes palette: three muted primaries, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, and yellow ochre, with permanent rose and phthalo green added to push the cools and the more vibrant notes, shown beside the muted mixes the triad reaches, the brighter mixes the push pair opens up, and the colors made through white, a warm blue from rose and phthalo and white, and a range of subtle cool skin notes from yellow ochre with those and white.
The Bilmes palette: three muted primaries, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, and yellow ochre, with permanent rose and phthalo green added to push the cools and the more vibrant notes, shown beside the muted mixes the triad reaches, the brighter mixes the push pair opens up, and the colors made through white, a warm blue from rose and phthalo and white, and a range of subtle cool skin notes from yellow ochre with those and white.

The Bilmes palette, charted. It lives here.

02Those five keep working once white comes in, and the shadows come from only two of them. See burnt sienna and ultramarine run the whole shadow range, warmer with more sienna, cooler with more blue.

The Bilmes shadows: burnt sienna and ultramarine blue mixed as the whole shadow range, a gradient axis that runs warmer with more sienna and cooler with more ultramarine, with the mid mixes as discrete swatches, then a cross-section of those combinations glazed over each other, building to almost a deep warm black that is the shadow foundation.
The Bilmes shadows: burnt sienna and ultramarine blue mixed as the whole shadow range, a gradient axis that runs warmer with more sienna and cooler with more ultramarine, with the mid mixes as discrete swatches, then a cross-section of those combinations glazed over each other, building to almost a deep warm black that is the shadow foundation.

The Bilmes shadows, from two pigments. It lives here.

03Glazed over each other, those two reach almost a deep warm black. Not a black from a tube. A built one. Set Daniel’s five beside Zorn now, and watch the same logic run on four: white, ochre, vermilion, and a black that reads as blue beside the warm colors.

Zorn palette chart: the four pigments Zorn worked from, lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, ivory black, with the mixes they reach.
Zorn palette chart: the four pigments Zorn worked from, lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, ivory black, with the mixes they reach.

The Zorn palette, charted. It lives on the Anders Zorn page.

04Zorn reached his cools by placing black next to warmth. Reilly reached his by value first. See every color pre-mixed into a string of nine steps, matched to a neutral gray string of the same values, so the value is settled before the brush moves.

Reilly palette chart: the nine-value neutral gray string with matching red and yellow-red color strings, pre-mixed as paint piles on a glass palette over fifth-value gray paper.
Reilly palette chart: the nine-value neutral gray string with matching red and yellow-red color strings, pre-mixed as paint piles on a glass palette over fifth-value gray paper.

The Reilly palette, strung by value. It lives on the Frank Reilly page.

05Four, five, nine. See all three palettes stacked as one chart, and the shared move in every row: balance a short set of primaries, and a wide range of harmony follows. That balance is the thing to watch, not the tube count.

Three painters' palettes compared in three rows: Zorn's four colors (lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, ivory black), which take their cool notes from black set beside the warm colors with no blue tube; the Bilmes five, three muted primaries (burnt sienna, ultramarine, yellow ochre) plus permanent rose and phthalo green to push the cools; and Reilly's nine-value neutral gray string that fixes every color to a value first, all three balancing a short set of primaries to open a wide range of harmony.
Three painters' palettes compared in three rows: Zorn's four colors (lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, ivory black), which take their cool notes from black set beside the warm colors with no blue tube; the Bilmes five, three muted primaries (burnt sienna, ultramarine, yellow ochre) plus permanent rose and phthalo green to push the cools; and Reilly's nine-value neutral gray string that fixes every color to a value first, all three balancing a short set of primaries to open a wide range of harmony.

Three palettes, one principle. It lives here. Also on the Zorn page, and the Reilly page.

06What every one of those balanced sets is measured against is Munsell. See a color split into three things you can name on their own: hue, value, and chroma, so you can hold a value steady while you drop the chroma, or match a value across two different hues.

The Munsell color system for painters: the ten-family hue circle shown at one constant value, the value scale from black to white, and the chroma steps from neutral gray to full intensity, with the 5R 4/10 notation explained.
The Munsell color system for painters: the ten-family hue circle shown at one constant value, the value scale from black to white, and the chroma steps from neutral gray to full intensity, with the 5R 4/10 notation explained.

The Munsell system, the scale under the palette. It lives on the Munsell guide.

07Laid out in three dimensions, it is not a tidy sphere. See each hue reach its strongest chroma at a different value: yellow high near white, blue-purple only down in the dark, so the solid is lopsided, a tree with branches of different lengths.

The Munsell color tree: the neutral value axis from black to white, with each hue family branching out to its peak chroma at its own value, yellow high and pale, red in the middle, blue-purple low and dark, so the color solid is lopsided rather than a sphere.
The Munsell color tree: the neutral value axis from black to white, with each hue family branching out to its peak chroma at its own value, yellow high and pale, red in the middle, blue-purple low and dark, so the color solid is lopsided rather than a sphere.

The Munsell color tree. It lives on the Munsell guide.

08Flatten that tree to one value and the hues run in ten families. See the forty steps close into a ring, the five principal families spaced by the five intermediate ones.

The forty Munsell hues arranged in a ring, ten families of four steps each (2.5, 5, 7.5, 10), all shown at one constant value, with the five principal families R Y G B P labeled bold and the five intermediate families YR GY BG PB RP labeled between them.
The forty Munsell hues arranged in a ring, ten families of four steps each (2.5, 5, 7.5, 10), all shown at one constant value, with the five principal families R Y G B P labeled bold and the five intermediate families YR GY BG PB RP labeled between them.

The forty-hue circle. It lives on the Munsell guide.

09Stand one family up on its own and you get a page. See value climb one way and chroma the other, the right edge ragged because the strongest chips exist only in the middle values. A red can be intense at a middle value and simply cannot be at a very light or a very dark one.

The 5R page from a Munsell book as a chip grid: value rows 9 down to 2 on the vertical axis, chroma columns 2 to 14 across, the neutral gray N column at left, and a ragged right edge where high-chroma chips exist only in the middle values, with the 5R 4/10 chip annotated.
The 5R page from a Munsell book as a chip grid: value rows 9 down to 2 on the vertical axis, chroma columns 2 to 14 across, the neutral gray N column at left, and a ragged right edge where high-chroma chips exist only in the middle values, with the 5R 4/10 chip annotated.

A single hue page, the 5R chips. It lives on the Munsell guide.

10Which is why the useful way to dull a color is not black or white, since both move the value while they lower the strength. See each color stepped instead toward a neutral gray of its own value, so the color quiets while the value holds. Same move whether it came from Zorn’s four, Reilly’s strings, or Daniel’s five.

Three rows of chips, each stepping a saturated tube color to the neutral gray of its own value: a value-4 red to N4, a value-8 yellow to N8, and a value-3 blue to N3, showing that the value holds constant while the chroma drops, unlike adding black or white.
Three rows of chips, each stepping a saturated tube color to the neutral gray of its own value: a value-4 red to N4, a value-8 yellow to N8, and a value-3 blue to N3, showing that the value holds constant while the chroma drops, unlike adding black or white.

Mixing toward gray, not black or white. It lives on the Munsell guide.

Choosing a palette that is actually yours, and building the process around it, is the work the Methods program exists for. If you want to know which historical painter’s color habits are closest to yours, the free diagnostic reads how you work and points you to the nearest one.