Ever since I found Rational Painting a couple years ago, I've been puzzled by Munsell. There's a colour wheel and that's about all I could recognize about it. As you know, most kids in art classes are given the colour theory of the Impressionists and that's the first thing that comes to mind when I think about my early colour theory education—Monet, Seurat...If you could use colour theory to create works like them then you fully grasped colour. That's what I learned and that was fine because there wasn't anything else, at least not what my teachers knew about.
Looking back to my early attempts at mixing “intensity scales” and monochromatic scales...all sorts of scales, I realize they didn't really help, not when it came to painting what was in front of me because the standard mixtures were not sufficient, they were too arbitrary. I quickly realized that not all pigments fit into these pigeon holes and the colour wheel stopped working and became this mysterious thing I felt I needed magical powers to make work for me.
Painting became something I could do one day and not the next. I could never mix the same colour on the fly one day and get again the next day and I accepted that as part of what painting is. That's why drawing was always better for me; value is value, there's no confusion there. I thought “Why can't paint do that?” When I found this site and saw these strange Munsell notations, it went straight over my head. I heard the term “chroma” before and it sounded familiar to me, then I saw people using it synonymously with “intensity” and I relaxed again because I know about Hue, Value and Intensity. Then I found that actually didn't help me understand chroma at all.
Intensity seemed to block my understanding of chroma. I read some people saying it's the same as chroma, some people saying they are completely different. I figured artists disagree frequently and that's all that is, but after attempting a self-portrait and trying to mix my skin tone day after day, I had to get to the bottom of this issue. I knew Munsell had to solve this problem but I couldn't grasp it if I couldn't grasp chroma. Intensity and Chroma could not exist together in my mind and reading this excerpt from A Colour Notation by A.H. Munsell, I finally understood why.
“Intensity is a misleading term, if chroma be intended, for it depends on the relative light of spectral hues. It is a degree rather than a quantity, as appears in the expressions, “intense heat, light, sound”--intensity of stimulus and reaction...The word becomes especially unfit when used to describe two very different phases of a colour—as its intense illumination, where the chroma is greatly weakened, and the strongest chroma which is found in a much lower value.”
That's like fresh air rushing to my lungs. How did I survive without this hundred-year-old information for so long? It really is unbelievable. Now I can actually start learning and using Munsell.
Ahh, that's better.
