This is the first step toward mixing beautiful color!

Will mixing every one of the 294 possible reds in oils help you to describe the true nature of your subject?

I paint to communicate with the essential nature of my subject. Many things elude me in the process, but color mixing does not.

Why would we paint something if we did not find it valuable? If you can push through any resistance about your own abilities, and interact with the essence of your subject, it’s like meeting the Buddha on the road. You meet the divine in the everyday world. You can capture that essence when you paint. It takes painting from an activity that’s external to you into communion with the Divine.

If you struggle with drawing and color mixing skills, it can be like trying to see through a thick veil. It takes effort and courage to be able to sit down and see, without worries, negative thoughts or doubts in the way. To access the deepest truths about a subject, we have to be willing to meet it as a separate and valued being. To confront the subject in its own truth. To recognize and communicate with the forms in front of you. Many painters get tripped up by their drawing and color mixing skills, preventing them from seeing the deeper forms of their subject well.

Having command of color mixing solves some of the biggest impediments to beautiful painting. When I learned to mix every color I needed — quickly, easily, accurately and repeatedly — it changed my painting and my life.

Does that sound grandiose? If so, please stick with me, because mastering color mixing opened many doors that had been shut. It can for you too.

Start with the Vocabulary: If you understand these you can, with a bit of practice, master color mixing.:

Gam·ut: (noun) the complete range or scope of something. In music it is a complete scale of musical notes; in painting gamut is the full range of colors that can be mixed with contemporary oil paints. When it comes to color mixing, painters are often victims of persistent myths that hamper excellent color mixing.

Hue: The color of an object irrespective of the object’s value or chroma.

Value: The lightness or darkness of an object. Value can be an objective or subjective measurement.

Chroma: The intensity of an object’s color. Ranges from neutral to extremely high.

Munsell: A 3D color model that is made up of every color that can be mixed with contemporary oil paints. It was invented by Albert Henry Munsell, a middling painter who did something which no other person had done before: Quantified the intensity of colors, which he called chroma.

Munsell divided his color model into 10 major groups of hues. Red, Yellow-Orange, Yellow, Green-Yellow, Green, Blue-Green, Blue, Purple-Blue, Purple, Red-Purple. Each major group was then divided into four minor groups or sets. The subgroups are 2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10.

Munsell divided each minor group into 11 values from the darkest at zero to the lightest at 10. This is another odd way of naming, since the darkest value, 0, can’t actually be mixed because true black does not exist in paint. And the lightest value, 10 is also theoretical, but you can get very close using Munsell and taking advantage of opacity of your paint. True Value 0 would be the absence of all light. True Value 10 would be pure white. Neither of these values can be achieved in painting but it’s possible to come close enough.

Is mixing Munsell colors complicated? In my experience, not at all. There’s a bit of a learning curve to understanding chroma as an independent color quality, but it’s minor. Once you begin to see it in real life, and most importantly can identify and name it, nothing else will stop you. I guarantee the first time you correctly identify the chroma of an object you’ll be dancing in celebration. And the digital Munsell charts that come with this course sit on your phone, so you can walk around practicing your color skills.

The Deciding Factor

Once you have a beginning understanding of hue, value and chroma and how they appear in the world then begin mixing color. Practice every day. Try to broaden your experience with colors that are low chroma, mid chroma, high and extremely high chroma. Each has it’s own challenges but each of those goes away very quickly. Most people I know can become excellent color mixers in two to three weeks.

Advantages of Digital Munsell Charts

There are three main issues with The Munsell Book of Color, printed version.
1. It’s very expensive and does not come with any instruction on how to use it.
2.Lose a chip and it will cost you over $150 to replace it because you need to buy the entire hue sheet.
3. The chips are printed very carefully, one of the reasons the set is so expensive, but it’s clear that there’s wide variance in the colors of each chip. I know this to be true because I own two sets and have compared them edition to edition.
4. The chips are small, so not only are they easily lost but they are hard to see.

By contrast, the Digital Munsell Charts I created for this course have none of those disadvantages.

One thing you can do with the chips that you can’t do with the digital chips is place the paint directly on the chip. You could use a thin piece of plastic over the phone but that’s actually unnecessary. I discovered, quite accidentally, that having a digital chip enlarged on my phone is 350% larger than the printed chip. Placing my phone as close as possible to my mixing pile is actually more accurate than placing paint on a printed chip.

Hue & Chroma Arcs

Another Munsell advantage has been the discovery of what I call a hue arc. Over the years, I’ve noticed that objects are very rarely one hue. There’s usually a local and a hue arc that extends over a larger hue range.

A good example is human skin. 90%+ of people I’ve measured have a local of 5YR (yellow-red) at the third chroma. Yet, almost everyone has reddish areas on their skin in certain areas. Are those reds all the same red? No. Which reds are they? Typically, the majority of the reds are two hues and four hues away from the yellow-red local. A 5YR local will typically have reds that are at 10R with some touches of 5R. Being able to mix those reds adds a great deal of impact to your painting. Knowing your color is correct for the form you’re studying allows you to focus on painting.

There are also hue arcs within monochromatic objects. The more light an object allows to pass through, the more likely there will be a hue arc. How the hue arcs depends on the surface texture, the strength of the light hitting it and the opacity of the object itself. There are so many ways this can present that it’s impossible to predict how it will present. The majority of hue arcs I’ve seen are 3-4 hues wide. The widest I’ve noted was 5 hues wide.

Let’s look at an object with a local of 5R in warm light. The values darker than the local might shift toward 2.5R, because the influence of the warm light drops off as the object turns into shadow. As the object turns into the light the hue will turn toward 7.5R (toward yellow-red) and then into 10R. Once I verified this was an actual phenomenon and understood why it happened, I got much better at seeing them in real life.

The same thing happens with chroma as the form turns and is dictated by the light which reveals the form to us. These effects are subtle and hard to describe until you have the language of Munsell at your command.

Ready to be an official Munsell Badass, capable of mixing every red that’s possible in oil paint? How to Mix Every Red, with The Digital Munsell Red Charts is the key. 

Everything this course provides:

• 16 individual Digital Munsell red charts, organized by hue and chroma to guide your mixing
• 16 videos, organized by hue and chroma, showing you how to mix low chroma, middle chroma, high chroma and extra-high chroma colors. With a bit of practice you'll be able to mix every red
• 5 downloadable sheets explaining hue, value, chroma and mixing
• Bonus painting demonstration
• Bronzino's painting, The Panciatichi Holy Family to practice your reds

Available at a 36% discount until the midnight, September 30, 2023 CST. Use Code: REDS-36