As an ex graphic designer and former digital printer operator trying to match any shade of orange to a pantone sample using CYMKcm was the biggest headache of my life....oh the horrible flashbacks of test prints and tight deadlines 😫
I filled my printer with very specific inks and I have a CcYyMmKkGW printer so some monstrosity that I stole from a defunct print shop. I have to use a specific red to get oranges that look like oranges and that drives me nuts.
This is where I really find myself getting "lost in the weeds" as I'm trying to switch to a palette of single pigments and learn to mix what I need as I go. The fact that there are so many options and none of them are correct is a recipe for analysis paralysis, especially when you factor in the cost of some pigments making it hard to justify experimenting too much. My kingdom for a real world color picker!
I am working on a few videos for this actually for both classical and modern color theories for all price points so people don't have to get lost by it all. Your cheap basic palette will be quin magenta, benz/hanza yellow light/lemon, phthalo blue green shade, white, burnt umber, and black if you want. If you want to expand that then you'd get naphthol red or cadmium red hue, ultramarine blue, and yellow ochre for a split primary on a budget. Unfortunately we cant replace quin magenta so that will be the only costly one on there. We do have color pickers its just hard to use them since the good ones are very advanced programs. However goldenartistcolors.com/mixer/acrylic this does exist and it can give you a good enough, not perfect, baseline for things. Its just specific to the golden brand which isnt a big deal to me but can be for others.
And yes pigment discontinuations make me sad. See also PO48 and PO49, beloved of watercolour artists everywhere, but people don't buy brown cars anymore, so goodbyeeee
@@nicholascaldwell6079 those are still produced in small batches by some people. It's how some watercolor Etsy shops have a never ending supply of it but it's very limited since it's expensive and hard to produce.
@@MrPigments makes sense, it's not like the chemical formula has been blasted out of peoples' minds. I might have to do a look to get hold of some myself.
@@nicholascaldwell6079 Guerra sells some dispersant for it which I think can be turned into watercolors if done right. There's an instruction online on how to convert PV19 over to quinacridone gold which really isn't that hard to follow the problem is getting enough of the materials. And it is in fact way cheaper to do it that way than getting the typical materials that you would want like quinacridonequinone
@@tiagodagostini Thankfully we still have the house paint industry who needs a wild amount of colors. This will also drive more art investors into wanting to fund small chemical companies who produce pigments for the art industry. It might be a small industry but it is growing and there is potentials there. We are seeing new emerging markets with large private investment companies buying up hobby companies because there is massive profits in it. If they cant have their huge color ranges then the profits sink.
I kinda like Mark Carder’s approach with his limited palette: 1. A red that it’s closer to Alizarin Crimson (Quinacridone Red PV19 is a great option), 2. A blue that’s very close to a primary blue (Ultramarine Blue) 3. A Yellow that’s very close to primary yellow (Bismuth Yellow or Cadmium Lemon) 4. Burnt Umber (II think Transparent Red Oxide is better option, but that’s me) 5. Titanium White. Then add more saturated colors when you need them like Cadmium Teal, Phthalo Green, and Pyrrole Orange. He has several videos on his channel Draw Mix Paint. Another option is to go with the color wheel that James Gurney proposes, Todd Casey also mentions it on his channel and books. The idea is to merge the digital primaries with the traditional primaries: RGB + CMY. James Gurney gave it the name the “Yurmby” Wheel and Todd Casey calls it “modern” wheel. For that wheel I would choose: R = Naphthol Red Light PR112 or Transparent Red Oxide PR101 G = Phthalo Green PG7 B = Ultramarine Blue PB29 C = Phthalo Blue Green Shade PB15:3 M = Quinacridone Magenta PR122 Y = Benzimidazolone Yellow Light PY175 For R, I think Transparent Red Oxide is more versatile than Naphthol Red Light. You can create beautiful reds when mixed with Quinacridone Magenta. You can also create a very nice “black” color when mixed with Ultramarine Blue. I would add Transparente Yellow Oxide, very convenient for darkening Yellows and Orange colors.
@@jc-aguilar I use a palette that was proposed by Dr. David Briggs. It's a split primary palette that uses a transparent and opaque primary pigment due to how light interacts with the opacity of a mixture because of particle size. An example would be 1. PR122/PR254 2. PG50/PB15:4 3. PY184/PY175 Obviously you'd add if you're whites and black but that's all opinion and based off the media you're using like with acrylics I make heavy use of zinc white while oils I use lead white a lot. The palette is more based off the physics of light and accommodating perceptual color while using physical mixing. I also avoid ultramarine in my palettes due to inconsistencies with the pigment as it's quality control is garbage from every company that makes it. You'll rarely get a batch that's similar to the last batch you got. But this is me being an industry weirdo and having eclectic knowledge like that.
@@MrPigments Thank you for sharing that information about Ultramarine, I didn’t know that. I would love to see a video about your palette. I have been also thinking about having a split palette with an opaque color. In the other hand , I’m also wondering, if maybe I’m thinking too much about colors, forgetting too often that colors don’t matter a lot. I have to remember that the priority is to get the values and saturation right. Saturation is very closely tied to values and atmospheric perspective, so it’s important to get good at values and saturation. Hues are less important, like seeing Josh Brolin all purple as Thanos, or Jim Carrey all green on The Mask. You still recognize them when they are totally different hue than a human on those movies. Maybe hues are the thing that really makes art to be art, because allow us to be expressive while keeping it grounded with reality. Values and saturation provide that grounding, I think… Sorry, I’m rambling now :)
@@jc-aguilar that's not rambling that's expressing your thoughts about color and how you perceive it. You see it all from the artist perceptive including the questions of intreige and wonder of what matters and what matters not which is important for the experience of color. I enjoy that type of comment too because I'm so close to the physics side of it they drag me back over to the art side with is way less analytical and more based off the opinion of the viewer than cold emotionless fact. Personally I don't think you're thinking too much about colors, I think you're thinking just the right amount. All colors matter it's just some matter more to you than another one
I'll be making some content less advanced in the future but also do some very niche advanced things like doing classic color theory with the original deadly toxic pigments like vermillion and orpiment. This video and the issues with classic color theory video were more rants that I wanted to get off my chest because despite my intense hatred for my career, I really do love it and want to provide information that isnt exactly public to people so we can have a greater understanding of color and appreciate the pigments we use everyday but never think about where they came from or how rare a pigment is on a mundane object like a classic car with its original paint job. These things excite me and I'd love to get others excited about this stuff too. I have a massive collection of pigments and it would be a shame if they all just sat on my shelf and decayed for my own enjoyment.
I have this problem too. I use a slightly modified primary and secondary palette that I based on this colour wheel. That's why I'm not sure about the cyan and blue tones and use two sets of blue and cyan in my 12 colour palette. The blue starting from magenta is ultramarine violet, which is also a good complementary colour to yellow. But using a violet as blue is strange to me and I use Phthalo blue greenish as cyan, which matches the ultramarine violet in terms of distance. The second is ultramarine, which to me looks like a blue that doesn't go in any direction, and cobalt turquoise, which is about the same distance from ultramarine as Phthalo blue is from ultramarine violet. I first put together my colour palette in watercolour and there was cobalt cerulean be it PB35 or PB36 not an option due to the cost. cobalt turquoise was available from Turner in price group 2 and it is quite versatile. The remaining colours are Azo Yellow medium PY74, Pyrrole Scarlet PR254 transparent, I know that orange is actually the corresponding secondary colour according to this colour wheel, but I need the tertiary colour red more often than orange. Quinacridon Magenta PR122 and Phthalogreen yellowish PG36 it is too bluish for a secondary Chartreuse, but it just looks like a green, which is a tertiary colour without going in any direction, and I didn't want to have a green that is made up of several pigments.
@@askialuna7717 The green you're looking for is really hard to find and you're probably going to have to look at some more fugitive things like the original sap green but that's also going to cost a fair bit of money. Phthalo blue green shade mades a good replacement for cyan and is one of the more budget friendly ones too. I'm experimenting with different blue pigments since I have around 108 of them currently to see what would be good for people who are willing to make their own paint. I'm kind of lucky I'm in a position where I have all these rare and extinct pigments and enough of a supply of them all to last several life times. But thankfully this means I can experiment for people who can't afford to get a bunch of supplies they might not like, not that I can but this is something I enjoy too much not to.
I’ll never forgive the auto industry for taking away quinacridone gold. 😭 And now we lose even the quinacridone burnt orange (RIP PO49, & PO48 respectively), which means goodbye to most of the recent quin gold replacement formulas, along with a lot of other awesome replacements & convenience mixtures that dependent on PO48. 😭 It’s almost like capitalist markets don’t serve human needs, but rather the profit motive of corporations/capitalist elites. It’s almost like economic demand is not actually any kind of “democracy of the market,” because it’s actually a plutocracy where each dollar = 1 vote instead of a person getting 1 vote… Which means, if you’re a giant capitalist or corporation with tens of billions or even trillions of dollars at your disposal, which you can afford to spend on some commodity, then you produce unfathomable amounts of demand all by yourself (such a big auto manufacturer corporations who used to buy a given pigment by the ton/kiloton, & if they stop then that decrease in demand is equivalent to hundreds of millions of ordinary middle class people stopping purchasing individual, personal use quantities of paints containing those pigments)… Whereas, if you’re one of the poor, working class majority of the population who has to spend basically every penny they earn on basic necessities, if you’re lucky make enough to save a few dollars towards potential emergency expenses, or maybe even hypothetically eventually retiring before you literally just drop dead on the factory floor/your Walmart greeter post at 80-100 years old… Then you have basically no money to spend on anything non-essential… Which means, when it comes to paint pigments, or any other luxury goods/services/means of production, you simply don’t get a vote- your wants & preferences are completely irrelevant to demand, because you don’t have the money to actually spend, to send the signal that you want more of that thing. Or maybe you get $1, or $10, or if you’re really fortunate, $100 (for a “middle class” worker, maybe even $1,000 on something you REALLY desperately want & think it’s worth putting the little money you can afford to spend towards)… Which becomes completely meaningless & drowned out as soon as a SINGLE ultrawealthy capitalist/corporation decides to spend $100 million, or $1 billion, or $10 billion on something, next to which you spending $1 or $100 or even $1,000 counts for basically nothing on the scale of demand across the economy… In an economy of such extreme inequality, where literally just the 3 wealthiest individuals have more than the bottom 60% or more (more than 130 million people), where there are just ~10 individuals who each have accumulated over $100 billion each, not counting the wealth that’s embodied in the corporations they owned, while about half of Americans (even in one of the wealthiest countries in the history of the planet) cannot afford a $300-400 emergency expense, this isn’t a “democracy of the marketplace…” It’s a dictatorship of capital, just like our actual political system, where, in exactly the same way, unlimited campaign donations (read: legalized corruption) essentially just mean that those same ultrawealthy capitalists & corporations are able to buy near total control of both of our only two ruling political parties, get their own puppets onto the Supreme Court & other appointed institutions, & as a result, studies have demonstrated that the policy outcomes we actually get are basically 1 to 1 identical with the preferences of those few ultrawealthy elites, whereas policy outcomes have virtually NO connections whatsoever to the preferences/will of the working class majority, of average, ordinary people. And now with Project 2025 they seek to make this even MORE extreme & autocratic by having the most far-right, fascist extremist wing of the ruling class literally seize dictatorial power & de facto overthrow the Constitutional government altogether, granting the president the power to rule by decree & installing their own fascist loyalists in every leadership position in the entire administrative state. It’s terrifying & monstrous, & they seem disturbingly confident about their odds, despite the VAST majority of the people polling as terrified & profoundly opposed to the whole unhinged platform they’ve announced, which would be by far the most oppressive, authoritarian, brutal, misanthropic, & destructive in our history, more akin to fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or the Spanish Inquisition than an ordinary, Constitutionally limited, elected government. Not to go too far off subject, but it’s all interrelated, & the parallel between what they pass off as “democracy” in the marketplace & what they pass off as “democracy” in government (when both have been designed to basically operate on money & empower those who have all of the money at the expense of everyone else, first & foremost) is quite striking. Sad as I am a both their loss, PO48/49 & these other precious pigments are the LEAST of what they’re trying to take away from us, as they dismantle the last of our most basic, fundamental rights; the electoral system; public education; all social safety nets; the separation of church & state; the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people that are being automated or outsourced away to further boost their already record profits (& then they blame the job loss on immigrants/refugees); any prospect of preventing catastrophic climate change from reaching apocalyptic heights… Any artist who makes a living by their own work, or works & does art on the side, is working class too, & we all need to see how these issues are broader than just AI art, & actually mobilize & stand in solidarity with all other workers across the board. It may be hard to unionize as artists, since many of us don’t work for a corporation, but we do fundamentally share the same class interests as all other workers, whether our art is our primary living or not, whether we do it for a paycheck at a corporate 9 to 5 or not. Anyway, thanks for your very good input about this pigment problem.
I'm happy I still have a 25kg bag of quin gold and have the ability to make it in my kitchen. I should do a video at some point on how to make it as its not terribly hard but it's a bit of a head scratcher if you're trying to make it without pv19. PB17 I need to find the trademark paper on and then hire a chemist to explain it to me. Working in the field I do I have grown incredibly jaded by corporations and annoyed by companies that are driven by investors. It's why I rep golden so much because they are employee owned which is a big thing for me. I hate capitalism as it is the bane of society.
This is also a problem for custom equipment manufacturers. If toy companies make something you need it's a goldmine. As soon as they stop, you can't fix your equipment.
Hello, I’m not familiar with acrylics but isn’t it possible to use brighteners and fillers with phalto blues to reach similar qualities to the color you’re looking for? Like holbein does with some of its blues in watercolor/gouache
Sort of. The problem is they will look similar out of the bottle but they will mix much differently than you would want. its the same thing with watercolors and oils too.
@@askialuna7717 that's the difference between hue axis and chroma axis. A 20~ decree swing on the hue axis is super noticable but a 20 on chroma and it's not as noticable to most people.
@@nicholascaldwell6079 yeah phthalos are a bit much but they still work for my style hence why I like phthalo cyan over manganese blue. I have some manganese blue coming in soon too hopefully so I can turn it into an acrylic paint.
@@MrPigments interesting! I know David Coles, the founder of Langridge Oil Paints, has expressed a strong interest in bringing manganese blue back, but he doesn't appear to have solved any problems around it on a commercial basis yet.
@@nicholascaldwell6079 And he probably wont in all honesty. One of the companies I contract with makes manganese blue for restoration purposes only and they only make a few kg of it a year because making bulk amounts is not only incredibly risky, but insanely problematic for the environment hence why they stopped producing it. The production of it is also incredibly toxic but not as bad as iirc ultramarine blue fumes for the most part so you have to have specialty systems that can handle high heat from kilns and deal with filtering toxic fumes. None of it is easy to do and I wish I could nap some from them but I cant since its all claimed. BTW 1kg isnt much as its a very heavy pigment. I will be getting a kg of it for some videos at some point but thats a financial burden for when i can afford that. It's not a scary amount just not an amount I can spend at this time for one thing.
It's funny with the evolution of language and culture to hear someone talk about such an anodyne, arguably boring, topic, with the roughly the same cadence as a "git gud" gamer. It's like Bob Ross with a mohawk
@@Hhanavan it's the mount it's on, it's a bit Shakey which throws off the focus sometimes. At some point I'll get a new one but that's expensive and I'm broke at the moment. Pigments are expensive
@@hardwareful My discord has a requirement that people must post pictures of possums if that says anything about me and possums. I also have a plushy one on my shelf.
@@joymiller9668 it's about the same as cobalt teal just darker depending on the variant. Some are going to lean way too much towards green to be functional though. Would you just reminded me I need to get the 10ish different types of PB28 Cobalt turquoise which i just added to my list. So it can be for a custom modern style palette.
@@joymiller9668 so I'm not trying to stay in the same brand persay what I'm trying to do is find colors that are brand agnostic for people who cannot necessarily get certain brands like Holbein primary cyan is near unobtainable in certain countries so finding a more universal solution is what's required here. I can get just about any paint and pigment I want but most people can't nor do they have access to the same type of resources I do to acquire these materials for testing. I don't think very many people have manganese blue acrylic paints like I do as an example here. PG50, PB15:3, PB36 are relatively common for every brand to have.
I find funny how much "colow theory" exist when it is perfectly math explained. It is a linear composition of 4 curves. The results are completely and perfectly predictable. There should not even be discussion about that except how much effort is wroth tryign to support the extremes of the curves.
@@tiagodagostini color theory is a stupidly complicated subject and people love simplifying it but it never works when you simplify it. One thing I've learned from people in demolition is that math rarely leaves the paper perfectly because there is always a missing variable. I think that applies here too.
@@MrPigments The only variable not handled in the linear composition is the different sensibility each human has in each of the 4 receptor curves. But that cannot be handled by any theory. Photoshop and other serious sofware simply apply linear composition and allow you to make your adjustment on the curves (to give you an illusion that you are improving the result.. but you arejust tuning to your own neural specificities)
@@tiagodagostini Thats stuff I don't know too much about but I am learning about tit as I go. Art school taught me that art education was mostly a scam however I did learn how to accept how to hate myself without it affecting me which was helpful which made school completely worth it.
@@tiagodagostiniSo, I imagine the 4 curves you are talking about are the response curves of the rods and 3 kinds of cones to different wavelengths? If you have light incident on a surface, with some distribution of frequencies, then depending on the surface and the distribution of frequencies in the incident light, you get some distribution of frequencies in the outgoing light, which is then filtered by the eyes into those 4 parts? I suppose that typically we don’t have materials converting one frequency to another, because that requires some fairly special stuff, So, the substance has associated with it a “how much it reflects each frequency” curve… But, just combining this with the eye’s frequency response curves doesn’t give a 4D value as sufficient to predict how it would appear in each possible lighting condition? Like, you could pick some standard lighting conditions and evaluate how much response each type of receptor would have, and get a 4D thing that way, but it wouldn’t be as valid for other lighting conditions? It seems to me that to fully characterize the “color” of a substance, it would take an entire curve of how much each frequency (in the visible spectrum) is reflected? (Maybe if you pick a handful of lighting conditions and evaluate the 4 responses for each of those, that would be pretty good, as probably most ordinary lighting conditions are pretty similar? Like, a few different color temperatures?)
It depends on what, exactly, you mean by "color theory". I'd say there's two primary (heh, get it?) kinds: Psychological and "Plain Language". Psychological color theory is more the approach of how to actually use colors according to how they affect human neurology, not strictly the math of the light frequencies. Maybe think of it this way; mixing gunpowder is a matter of chemistry, almost entirely predictable and explainable. Firing a projectile is a matter of ballistics; almost entirely explainable, but a bit less predictable because there are always things that can throw you off like unexpected gusts or slight weight imbalance of the projectile. But hitting a target is a matter of _marksmanship_ and that's a trained skill, not merely a set of math formulas. Sure, it *relies* on formulas, but there's something else in there; an element of Game Theory in understanding how an opposed agent, acting to avoid getting hit, might move to avoid getting hit and also how they might predict how you'll adjust your aim to compensate for such movements. Psychological color theory *uses* the predictable formulas that describe the physical properties of the EM spectrum, but in addition to that it needs human psychology which is like searching a completely dark room with black carpet, black walls and ceiling, and black furniture, trying to find a black ball that may or may not actually be in the room. It's less predictable than one might wish or pretend it were. Then there's "Plain Language" color theory; the math of proper color theory explained for people who have no capacity whatsoever to understand or comprehend _anything_ involving math. So it has to be explained in "Plain Language" to them *without* referencing the math behind it... usually by way of mnemonics, metaphors, analogies, and "rules of thumb". The drawback is that these often have a way of being subject to Anchoring Bias; the first version someone hears becomes their "anchor" and the basis against which they compare all future alternatives. So if the way they learn something later becomes obsolete (or worse, they learn an obsolete or flat-out incorrect version right out the gate), they need to be strongly convinced to go through the effort of abandoning those long-ingrained habits and learning new ones. They take up a "Correct until proven Incorrect" stance, but set the bar for what qualifies as sufficient "proof" that their notions are incorrect unreachably high so that it's nearly impossible to ever prove them wrong. This is usually so they don't have to face the self-evaluation of thinking about how much effort they "wasted" doing something the "wrong" way; as long as they can hold onto their belief it was the _right_ way, their efforts weren't wasted. So they're defending the value of, in many cases, almost their entire life's work. At that point, psychologically speaking, the brain stops evaluating it as "change my mind" and hands it off to the part of the brain that handles situations of, "you can't kill me if I kill you first". fMRI scans have actually confirmed this; the parts of the brain that light up when confronted with changing core values are the same ones that light up for the "fight-or-flight" response. Your brain *literally* can't tell the difference between a fight to the death and a debate on a sufficiently deep-held, foundational belief, because losing either can be just as life-changing; the "you" that you were before dies.
@@MrPigments I love stuff like this. Fascinating nuances of everyday things (like paint pigments) is fun to check out. I'm not a painter, but I also follow the woman who makes poisonous pigments. Forget her name, right off.
@@DrNothing23 I know who you're talking about... She over exaggerates the danger of the pigments a lot. I'll be doing videos with arsenic pigments in the future so toxic stuff isnt far off from this channel. I'm also going to be doing different artists palettes at some point which tend to contain deadly pigments then checking modern pigments for a good replacement.
