The Store Room · Museum Wing
🎨 The World of Colour
An atlas of the studio palette — every pigment charted by hue and chroma. Flip between the two ways painters map colour, and tap any pigment to open its case.
& blacks
Rim = full chroma · midway = muted · centre = neutral grey
Press Esc or tap Back to close
The World of Colour · continued
🌳 The Munsell Tree
One colour, described three ways at once — its hue, its value, and its chroma. Munsell gave painters a precise language for every colour they could mix. Turn the knobs, then walk through the tree.
Where you sit on the colour wheel. Munsell circles through ten families: R · YR · Y · GY · G · BG · B · PB · P · RP.
How light or dark the colour is, from 0 (black) up to 10 (white). This is the single most useful axis for painters.
How pure or how grey the colour is. Chroma 0 is a neutral grey; higher numbers are more saturated. There is no fixed ceiling — it changes with hue and value.
Munsell built a physical book of colour chips — one page per hue. Each page holds that hue at every value (up and down) and every chroma (in and out). Pick a hue to open its page.
↑ lighter (value) · grey on the left → more chroma to the right. The ragged edge is the colour running out — that's why the solid is lopsided.
Side view of the tree
How far this hue reaches out from the grey trunk, value by value. No two hues match — the reason it can't be a tidy sphere.
Devised by Albert H. Munsell, painter and teacher, and published in A Color Notation (1905). Colours here are a perceptual approximation rendered on screen — the real atlas is printed chips.
The World of Colour · in the studio
🎨 Mixing by the Numbers
Munsell isn't only a way to name colour — it's a way to mix it. Three habits turn the tree into a working method at the palette.
Value first
Squint at your subject and match the value before anything else. A shape reads correctly when its lightness is right, even if the hue is a little off. Value is the axis the eye judges first.
Aim for the trunk
To dull a colour, move it toward the grey axis — lower its chroma. Add a grey of the same value, or a touch of the complement. You're walking the chip inward, not down.
Hold the value
The classic mistake: greying a colour with black or raw complement, which crashes the value and turns it muddy. Add white back to keep the value where you want it.
Dull it without muddying it
Start with a pure colour, then lower its chroma. On the left you protect the value; on the right you don't. Watch what happens to the mix.
a pure, high-chroma colour
The World of Colour · in three dimensions
🌐 The Colour Solid
Flatten the wheel no more. Here is Munsell's whole tree at once — grab it and turn it to see why no colour space is a tidy ball.
Drag to turn · release to let it spin
The Practice Wall
Colour games to sharpen your eye
Now put the wheel to work. Little games for mixing, matching, and reading colour the way a painter must.