PENCIL SHARPENER

A friend of mine is a self-taught expert in photography and he knows all about computer screens and colour values and how to tune your PC screen to make the final photographs look exactly right. Good for him. No good to me. It is far too time consuming for my liking. So will a picture on his screen look any different to a picture on my screen? I would not know. I stick to my primaries for my paintings and tweak the photos on my screen until they look like the original. Do they look any good on your screen? ;-)

&quot;The&quot; colour wheel is a problem - because there are so many of them.  Michael Willcox tried to address this - pointing out (and I have to very heavily compress his argument here) that it's of no practical use at all in colour mixing - and the more complex it gets, the less helpful it is.  <div> </div><div>Many took issue with that, and the debate still rages.  The only use I have ever found for the traditional colour wheel - apart from the fact that it looks rather pretty - is that it shows a spectrum from warm to cool (and there's even argument about that; not surprisingly as &quot;warm&quot; and &quot;cool&quot; have no physical basis at all - so what do the terms mean?).  I didn't need the colour wheel, however, to show me that - and there's nothing special about my colour vision, I don't think anyone needs it for that.  </div><div> </div><div>Printing and painting are different things - the knowledge needed for one is only partially transferable to the other; painters deal (on the whole) in subtleties - your printer doesn't: it's a simple soul, whose objective in life is to produce faithful colour reproduction.  We manipulate colour all the time (and everything else, if it helps).  </div><div> </div><div>So what's really important in painting is understanding the complementary colours - all the colour wheel does is lay out the options before you: something that your paint box can do just as effectively if not more so.  A diagram showing those complementaries might be useful - and Willcox has produced one, which whatever its theoretical shortcomings is at least practically helpful, whereas the wheel really isn't.  </div><div> </div><div>He also points out that there's no such thing as &quot;pure&quot; colour anyway - so even the term &quot;primary&quot; is misleading (e.g., we say yellow is a primary - but which yellow?  And red is possibly even worse - there is a wealth of difference between scarlet and crimson: which is the primary?  Either of them?  Both?).  </div><div> </div><div>It helps to think of red, yellow, and blue being the primary colours, with green as a secondary.  Helps that is in terms of mixing.  A bit.  If you wander on to printers and digital colour, you also have to contend with black - which some painters use, some don't - but it isn't the same process, and I don't think it's useful even to think of them in the same way.  </div><div> </div><div>The colours available to artists contain other colours within them - &quot;carry&quot; them.  So Ultramarine contains, carries, red; pthalo blue - let us leave the complication of PB red shade out of this, for simplicity's (!) sake - doesn't.  Crimson carries blue; scarlet doesn't - it contains yellow.  In practice therefore, if you want to mix a clear, clean purple, the choice should lie with the red-leaning blue (Ultramarine) and the blue-leaning red (crimson in one of its several forms).</div><div> </div><div>If you were to take the red + blue = purple approach, however, you'd begin the approach to black.  Why?  Because were you take scarlet (containing yellow) and Pthalo (leaning towards/carrying green) you'd be mixing red, yellow, blue, green together - which will give you a colour, but only the most generously inclined would describe it as purple.  </div><div> </div><div>This level of theory and analysis drives some people nuts, and interests others inordinately.  I find it interesting only insofar as it helps me to mix desaturated colour, particularly, but colours generally.  I do use black sometimes, but using this much knowledge, I don't HAVE to use it, or Payne's Grey.  So, I have more choices than my printer - and more knowledge than the colour wheel could ever have given me.  </div><div> </div><div>Finally (gasp!) - I've probably lost most of you long ago, and even I'm beginning to flag - there are artists like our very own Phil Kendall/Meltemi: not for him the limited palette, or overmuch colour-mixing - he has a full range of colours, paints in bold, bright, clear hues using the best brands of acrylic, and has much less need to mix than I have with my more limited palette.  It's a different approach (and I'm sure Phil has the knowledge needed to work with a smaller palette if he had to).  But I bet he finds the colour wheel no more useful than I do.  </div>

Very good spiel on colour theory, Robert. This shows that there is no substitute for good old fashioned experience of using the colours that are available to us. To a beginner red plus blue gives purple so he mixes cad. red with ult. blue and the result is a funny mud brown. If he had knowledge of colour theory he would know that cad. red contains yellow and red ,yellow and blue gives you browns and greys when mixed. So there is no mystery in colour theory .It is practical help in colour usage and. mixing thus avoiding wasting time and paint to produce a lot of mud.Regarding the simple colour chart the positioning of the complementary colours are helpful but you still have to knowwhich red is opposite to which green for example,and this is where experience comes in. If you like looking at colourwheels then Google colour wheels and you will get the lot ! eom. Syd :-)

As I have said before in this forum, I have never used a colour wheel and see no real need to do so and nor have I much idea as to what the constituent parts are of the commercially available paints. Theory is all very well but experience is key - there is no substitute for it. A good mechanic may never make a good driver but conversely a good driver doesn't have to be a good mechanic. I have been driving for over 50 years with only two accidents neither of which were my fault and for many years I was averaging over 30k miles per annum. Despite this I certainly don't understand much that goes on in that dirty noisy engine - yuck!.

Agree with both of you - the only thing I'd add, and my only excuse for coming back to it after a whopping post, is that the more information I can acquire to accompany my experience, the more interested I get in the properties of paint - however expert you are or think you are in that area, none of it is going to make you a better painter; but it might make you a happier one: one who doesn't have to worry about colour mixing, because just a bit of thought, based on your experience and knowledge, will solve so many problems that leave  beginners absolutely befuddled and not having the first clue where to turn.<div> </div><div>One of the problems I have with some tutors and painting 'systems' is that there's no, for want of a better word, science in them: hasten to say I'm no scientist - and I still have to check things; but knowing where to look, and what questions to ask, is a huge advantage and saves so much time.  </div><div> </div><div>Do you need to study theory?  Well, some people seem just to have it all .... they just know; how they know, how their eye leads them invariably to the right colour, is beyond me.  Most of us aren't so fortunate - I know theory, and the break-down of colours and all the rest of it, can be dry as dust to some; and I'm certainly not interested in the theory of light, refraction and so on.  But knowing your paint's characteristics, what comprises the colours, how they work - that's been immensely useful to me.</div><div> </div><div>I know of painters with years of experience behind them who still have recourse to black or Payne's Grey to darken colours, with never a thought about other ways of getting to the result they want.  They're probably very good at using these dead darks, but I suspect they'd be even better if they knew there were other ways of preserving colour in darks than just adding a given proportion of black to crimson in order to darken it: and when they use black to dull green, the full limitations of that method become all too obvious.  </div><div> </div><div>Experience plus a bit of homework - that's my recommendation.... </div>

Finally (gasp!) - I've probably lost most of you long ago, and even I'm beginning to flag - there are artists like our very own Phil Kendall/Meltemi: not for him the limited palette, or overmuch colour-mixing - he has a full range of colours, paints in bold, bright, clear hues using the best brands of acrylic, and has much less need to mix than I have with my more limited palette. It's a different approach (and I'm sure Phil has the knowledge needed to work with a smaller palette if he had to). But I bet he finds the colour wheel no more useful than I do. He knows me so well..I just use a test strip just to see if the vision will work...if not another colour! Yes I can do the boring mixing thing.... I recall checking out a three dimensional colour wheel many years ago...quite impressive...I prefer the intuitive approach! There mastered iPad cut & paste! It worked

It is quite simple, really. There are three systems in common use: RBY, RGB and CMYK . RBY (Red, Blue & Yellow) has always been and still is the system of primaries for opaque paint - artists, painters & decorators, etc.. RGB (Red, Green & Blue) came about in the mid 19th Century as a result of early experiments in colour photography and is mainly used in television, computers, stage lighting and photography. This is the system of primaries for light. CMYK (Cyan, Magenta & Yellow (+ Black)) evolved in the 1920s and is the system used by printers for transparent inks. RBY and CMYK are both subtractive systems in that the reflected white light of the support is gradually diminished as more colour is added. RGB is an additive system where light is added to a dark situation. The systems are not intermixable although it is worth noting RGB is the opposite of CMYK and vice versa. The 'K', incidentally, refers to the last letter of the word 'Black', 'B' having been used to define 'Blue' in the other two systems. As Artists, the only system we need be concerned with is RBY. Pure and transparent watercolours, however, in Cyan, Magenta and Yellow and corresponding exactly to the colours used by printers can produce similar effects to the CMYK system.

Robert , i am with you on your dislike of the dread and dead black and paynes grey ( colours ?)Some artists have these colours permanently on their palettes as noted inthe books they produce. these books I would never buy.however the colour manufacturers manage to get rid of blacks and w/c whites intheir bargain offers of tube colour sets and filled paintboxes pans. ...Syd

RGB is generally cited as the primaries of light in physics. It doesn't work in paint, but it is used for screens. It's a mathematical division of the spectrum. I once asked my 'O'-level physics teacher how brown occurs in the RGB system and she couldn't give me a satisfactory answer. (In light, all colours, ie R+G+B, is white, and no colours is black) She guessed that it was an imperfect mix of the three "colours". Of course, the spectrum of visible light is infinitely divisible and the boundaries between what we recognise as distinct colour are not defined. CMY can be seen as analogous to blue/red/yellow and works very well in paint, with or without K (in moderation). I use this palette frequently - in acrylics as the named colours, in oils as phthalo blue, rose madder (quinacridone) and lemon yellow. I do add white, but rarely use black.

I think Alan's explanation make a lot of sense and is possibly the simplest way to explain it. Thanks Alan