THE BLUE FAMILY

Blue: the humble family, strongest in the dark

Blue is the humble family. Its strongest chip is weaker than red’s or yellow’s, and it never gets far from gray. The deepest, most saturated blues sit low on the value scale, down in the dark, which is the exact opposite of yellow. A light blue is always a quiet blue.

The 5B page below is the shortest of the four, its edge stopping around value 4. And it understates the family: on the Munsell tree the blue purples, ultramarine’s neighborhood at 5PB, reach their strongest chroma lower still, further down in the dark than any other family, which is why ultramarine is a deep blue and not a pale one.

The 5B page from a Munsell book as a chip grid: value rows 9 down to 2, chroma columns 2 to 8 across, the neutral gray N column at left, and a short gamut that never reaches far from gray so blue is the humble family, strongest near value 4, with the 5B 4/6 chip annotated.
The 5B page from a Munsell book as a chip grid: value rows 9 down to 2, chroma columns 2 to 8 across, the neutral gray N column at left, and a short gamut that never reaches far from gray so blue is the humble family, strongest near value 4, with the 5B 4/6 chip annotated.

The 5B page, blue value by value and chroma by chroma. It also sits beside the other families on the color charts.

How the painters spend it

Every use below is drawn from a methods.art record, not invented for the page.

Daniel runs the shadows on it

Ultramarine is Daniel Bilmes’s blue primary, balanced against burnt sienna and yellow ochre. Mixed with the burnt sienna it also becomes his whole shadow range, warmer with more sienna and cooler with more ultramarine. See both on the Bilmes palette and the Bilmes shadows.

Zorn carried no blue at all

There is no blue on the Zorn palette. Ivory black mixed with white stands in for it, because a cool gray reads as blue against the warm ochres and reds beside it, so simultaneous contrast does the work a blue tube would. See it on the Anders Zorn page.

MUTING THIS FAMILY
To mute a blue, step it toward the neutral gray of its own value, around N4 where 5B is strongest and lower still, toward N3, for the darker blue purples. The same move, family by family, is the whole of the Munsell guide.