Munsell Exercise 1.3: Determining Values of Colors

In my ongoing exploration of color theory centered on The New Munsell(tm) Student Color Set, I've completed another exercise. This time the goal was to determine the Munsell value for a number of colors. Judging values of colors is always a challenge for me. First of all, I thought this was a grayed color. When compared to a chip of actual gray, it doesn't look grayed at all. The chip is Munsell(tm) value 3/, which was my best guess for the value of this color.


I did this exercise in one lighting situation and then when I went to photograph it in another lighting situation I realized my answers were WAY off for a few of them.

The green in this image - which is a tiny segment of a magazine reproduction of what I suspect is an acrylic painting - I suspect might be Munsell value 5/.


The yellowy-orange color from another tiny segment of the same painting in a magazine might be Munsell value 6/.


Under the six chips, this is a portion of Giorgio Morandi's "Natura Morta" (1954) as reproduced in the September 22, 2008, issue of The New Yorker magazine. If you click on the picture, you can see that I've labeled each chip with its value to indicate what I think the adjacent colors' values are.

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