Thank you for your report!
We have received your report and it is currently under investigation by a forum moderator.
Hex to Color Wheel Conversion
Welcome to the forum.
Here you can discuss all things art with like-minded artists, join regular painting challenges, ask questions, buy and sell art materials and much more.
Make sure you sign in or register to join the discussions.
Hang on Studio Wall
This is a Studio member-only feature!
Join our Studio membership and save your favourite Painters Online content, from gallery artwork to step-by-step guides, to your own online mood boards. Create your go-to place for inspiration and learning. Plus, members can also enjoy a range of exciting features including monthly art videos and a digital magazine library.
If you are already a Studio member, simply login to your account.
Not a Studio member? Why not try our free 30-day trial - no commitment, no credit card required
Message
Posted
That's absurd, because if you're looking for a cmyk value for "Name RED primary" - that's not possible because the name RED doesn't mean anything; you will find a thousand different shades of red under the name RED (just as an example). That's why the colors are defined with Hex/Rgb/Cmyk values - and NOT by the name.Correct. If I have a value (not a name), I THINK I should be able to find out in which exact segment of the color wheel that value should be.
Posted
Well, actual paint does have a hex value when seen under specified illumination conditions, so all of the above applies to non-digital art too. Paint a uniform patch on to any support and a spectrophotometer will deliver hex etc values.
I can think of several applications in non-digital art where knowing such values might be helpful (possible moreso in OpArt or other abstract genres), though I wouldn't use hex myself (which is used to specify colours on web pages) but instead use luminosity and A/B (basically defining red-green and blue-yellow oppositions).
One such case would be mixing paint samples so that they have very similar luminosity, since it is known that interesting optical effects occur when the eye-brain system cannot make out a contrast boundary between such colours. I refer you to Margaret Livingstone's excellent "Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing". It can be quite hard to mix equi-value samples by eye alone (at least I find it so), and the effect does require values to be very close indeed.
Posted
Something I suspect rather few of us will ever do - a spectometer is not standard artist's equipment.
OK, I admit, this stuff leaves me both cold and irritable - but all that matters in painting, at least in regard to the paint, is knowing how to mix it. Nine out of ten colour-wheels are completely useless in even helping with that, as people regularly demonstrate in their struggle with, particularly, greens.
It IS useful to know how much red a given green carries, for want of a better word, and vice-versa; since we don't really have "pure" colours, and if we had they wouldn't work as we might assume. However - in practical terms this is not really that difficult; you don't need exact proportions or spectrum analysis, unless you're a paint chemist.
But I don't really understand the science, and am quietly confident I've proved as much!
Posted
I agree that they're not standard kit for artists: handheld spectrophotometers (this is the model I have) appear to be aimed at interior designers hoping to match paint to existing decor. However, I do find them useful in the application I mentioned of value matching, something that I find tricky when operating at the tolerances required for the optical effect I referred to to emerge. A cheaper approach is to take a monochrome photo (or use the monochrome digital filter on a phone camera), but that requires endless experimentation to correct the mix, whereas the scientific approach enabled by spectral analysis allows one to predict and home in on the 'right' mixture more quickly.
There's some interesting material on the handprint site about analyses of watercolours aided in part by a spectrophotometer.
Edited
by Martin Cooke
Posted
I'm just trying to better learn and understand the color wheel.
I have purchased several books over the years, but the concepts did not stick in my head long
My thought was to learn by using the colors I have in front of me with several different purchased watercolor pallets.
The exact numeric values for each color are discoverable for most sets.
In my head, each of those numeric values belongs in one of the 12 sections of the color wheel.
I learn better by doing, not reading or watching.
Sorry to cause so much confusion.
Posted
Mathias, you haven't caused any confusion, you've just wandered into a short-tempered old man - qui c'est moi! - who gets knee-clutchingly bored and irritated with (in his opinion) over-complication of a subject.
Martin is much more tolerant!
There is a problem with the traditional colour wheel, and with all the many variations on the basic theme that have ever been devised, and that problem is that it doesn't give you any clue about colour mixing other than showing (and they don't all even do this) the complementary colours. The references to primary and secondary colours are basic, if not helpful; the use of the term "tertiary" colours takes us straight into meaninglessness. This has been known for a long time, and was covered in books by Hesketh Hubberd among others - the concept of tertiaries was described as obsolete well over 50 years ago - in that they're largely indefinable, and even if one knew what they all were, it wouldn't help anyone to mix colour.
A clear and simple guide - I like those! - to colour mixing, and a good take-down of the colour wheel, can be found in the works of the Michael Wilcox School of Colour; depending on what you're really looking for - i.e. why you're really looking for it - most of the useful information available is to be found there.
Posted
I haven't got that one - might look out for it.
Just found this on tertiaries from a W & N booklet of many years ago, taken in turn from H Hubberd's book:
".... and finally the so-called 'tertiary' colours are the result of mixing two of the secondaries; but since, when we perform this operation, no fresh hue can be produced, and we merely obtain a duller variety of one of the primary or secondary colours, the term is now obsolete".
Not especially relevant to the matter in hand, but tertiaries do get a mention in the (redundant) colour wheel shown above.