A NEW MOVEMENT IN COLOR mixing for painters is challenging some old orthodoxies. Naturally, it also is facing stiff headwinds. Is there really something new under the sun when it comes to mixing paint? Painters have established their pallet selections for generations. And it's not easy to turn such orthodoxies on their heads.
But that's what a new approach is claiming to do. Though this new approach has no particular title--we shall call it the Rebel Palette--its nemesis is well known: The Six-Color Color Wheel (red, blue yellow as primaries, and orange, green, and purple as secondaries).
So what is the new proposal?
In short, it argues that, by their nature, the six standard pigments are not pure, being compounds of various sorts. Thus, whenever they are mixed, the result will invariably have a less pure hue (color) than theory might suggest. The new idea is to abandon that standard color wheel and substitute a new one--a sixfold set of colors, based on the primaries, but with two different hues for each primary (3x2=6).
Accordingly, this Rebel Palette would have RED in orange-red and violet-red, BLUE in violet-blue and green-blue, and YELLOW in green-yellow and orange-yellow. With these six (double-primaries, of sorts), you can then mix purer secondary colors: oranges, violates (i.e. purple), and greens. At its core, the new palette has nine colors and, arguably, the basis for the purist mixing of all hues.
Normally, an oil painter using the standard color wheel would mix red and blue to get purple. However, it usually is a dead purple, given that there are traces of other colors in the pigment (which increase the muddying effect in paint). In the new Rebel Palette, to get purple, you mix a purer violet-red with a purer violet-blue, avoiding contaminant colors (and the mud).
At first blush, this might sound like the classic Flemish Palette, so-called, which has a warm and cool version of all six color-wheel colors. The difference, however, is in the scientific argument behind the Rebel Palette, an argument that requires some cogitation, and ends up sounding like one of those geeky TED Talks on YouTube.
Still, here goes: All colors come from the light spectrum, which reveals itself when it hits the various electron assortments that make up the molecules, and substances, of the world. The electrons that make up green foliage, for example, absorb all colors except variations on green. A red sports car is similar: the electrons in the chemical paint reflect fire-engine red, but absorb all other colors. Human flesh works the same, but is an infinitely complex colored substance.
Paint pigments, therefore, can be seen a concatenation of electrons. Yet when oil paints are made, they are judged by the eye (and sometimes a color-spectrum device), not by electron microscopes. If it looks red to the paint maker, that suffices. However, at the electron level, a pigment may not absorb all the non-red colors in light, "contaminating" the pure red with the potential to turn muddy—a less vivid hue—when mixed with another color.
The new Rebel Pallet is arranged to subtract as much electron-level color contaminant as possible from the primaries. In the Rebel Pallet, if you mix a violet-blue with a violet red, in other words, you get a purer purple—since electron traces of green, or yellow, are reduced.
This scientific aspect of producing purer mixed color fascinates, but the conceptual reality is never easy to comprehend. The rub is in the difference between "additive color" and "substractive color," the two basic kinds of color we see.
You might think additive is mixing blue and yellow to get green. Not so. Additive color refers to pure light, as in shining a blue, red, and yellow light on a white wall. When the three overlap, they are white light—the cumulative white of light itself. A way to approach this is to look at four-color printing. The printing press uses yellow, magenta, and cyan (a blue green) with black to get all possible colors. The white paper under the transparent print primaries is what allows the bright-color effect in print (light is bouncing off the white paper, illuminating the primaries in their various overlays).
In contrast, "substractive" color takes place when a pigment—that is, the electrons making up the chemical substance we call paint--absorbs some colors and reflects back others. The reflect-back is never pure, however, since chemical pigments are not as pure as light itself. Thus, we see the tendency of paints to become muddy even when mixing supposedly "pure" primaries straight from the tube.
The Rebel Pallet has its share of advocates online, with talks like the above discussion on the subject of electrons and color mixing. The British artist, Michael Wilcox, who writes books on paint pigments, is a particularly out-front advocate of trying the Rebel Pallet (for which he produces plastic trays, to keep the concepts straight).
Throwing out the old pallet habits and adopting a new one is a tough decision for a painter. Years of experience, and experiment, may have produce every color that artists has ever needed. Moreover, a number of great painters of our time market their own particular pallet arrangements, and indeed, they are great painters, so their color choices must work, right? Some propose 15-20-color pallets, others just three (plus dark brown and white).
Yet who hasn't stumbled over the mud when you're trying to get a bright hue, especially in the secondaries (green, purple, and orange)? The Rebel Pallet comes over as common sense, but with the added feature of a little bit of TED-talk-science mixed in. Like a scientist, every painter experiments with trial and error. So what’s wrong with a little High Color Theory from time to time?