Peter Donahue

I had a lot of requests for this one! The Munsell Color System is a color order and notation system. Used as a standard in the US Government, used by artists to organize and control their palettes, and even used as the basis for color harmony guidebooks in Japan. But hey -- this is Color Wheel Wednesday, so we'll mainly obsess here over the distinguishing feature of the Munsell color wheel - the fact that it has not 3, 4, or 6 primary colors - but 5 principal hues. Why? The Munsell system isn't based on additive or subtractive mixing, or a theory of psychological primaries. Instead, it's built around perceptually even steps between hues. Turns out Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple are equally distant from each other, while other colors like lime and orange, are more like half-steps on the same scale. in the full episode (found on my YouTube) I show a few different appearances of Munsell-based hue circles from very different sources. plus a cool Irish color wheel of 5 hues and their complements that actually predates Munsell's first book by two years! this is episode 10 of Color Wheel Wednesday. Thanks for watching! #colorwheel #colortheory #arthistory

Ohhh.... ouch. This hurts my head. A vintage Munsell student color book found on eBay. All the pages are like this, with value flipped and rows of ... decreasing blackness? I guess? instead of chroma. I'd buy it just to remove the chips and put them back correctly... but they want $300 for this tragedy! 😭 #colortheory #artteacher #munsell

What color wheel do I reach for in my own studio work? If I go by "most frequently consulted," my top pick isn't really a "wheel" at all. It's Bruce MacEvoy's map of 80 watercolor pigments, plotted using CIECAM02, a perceptual color model that spaces colors the way your eye actually judges them in context. And yeah, I'm mostly an oil painter, but the plot is close enough to give me an idea of how different pigments visually relate in oil, too, and I've learned the differences. (There are good but not perfect oil pigment plots out there, like on Artistpigments.org, for those who are interested.) MacEvoy's chart is partly responsible for the obsession that became this instagram/tiktok/YouTube account. Years ago, it showed me what color wheels were failing at, and inspired me to try to fix those problems. Six years later and I'm no closer to a solution...but much further down the rabbit hole, and I love it here. The full breakdown (including why the Color Wheel Company wheel fails on all three jobs a color wheel is supposed to do) is on my YouTube. This is Color Wheel Wednesday, episode 9. Thanks for watching! #colortheory #artteacher #colorwheel

In previous years, @art.pete.repeat visits us during the Fellowship for his two-day Color Theory Workshop, but this year we are starting earlier so it has time to bake into our minds before our first Fellowship classes even start. Thanks to Pete for joining us last weekend! This one always makes our heads hurt in the best way. 🎨 #colortheory #memphisart #teenartists #petedonahue

RGB color wheels space their hues evenly around an additive triangle. That's how the HSL (hue, saturation lightness) wheel works... but that's not how human perception works. In 2014, Warren Mars decided to fix it by brute force. Warren Mars built the Martian Color Wheel to correct two known problems in the HSL colorspace: uneven perceptual spacing between hues, and the Abney Effect — a hue shift that happens when colors are lightened on screen. He did it by eye, swatch by swatch. It's a remarkable project, and a window into how hard perceptual color problems actually are to solve. Mars also creatively named every color in his system to be human-friendly. The Martian Color Wheel can be found at warrenmars[dot]com. This is episode 8 of Color Wheel Wednesday. Suggest the next color wheel in the comments! #colortheory #colorwheel

Before you ask - No, you can't have one. These perceptual color wheels are hand-built for this year's fellows at @contemporaryartsmemphis ! I made them from Valspar paint chips. I measured a couple dozen vivid hues with my spectrophotometer and plotted them to OKLCH. Then I narrowed it down to these - 12 cheap-as-free spot colors that are as close as I can get to 30-degree intervals in a perceptual space. (If you want to make your own, I published the 12 paint colors in a previous post) This tool will help me train the fellows to navigate color in our marathon 6-hour workshop this Saturday. Super stoked! #colortheory #colorwheel #artteacher

This is episode 7 of "Color Wheel Wednesday," and this week we're examining the DIN 6164 color system. In particular, we'll take a close look at the color wheel and hue pages in Biesalski's Pflanzenfarben-atlas! There's a longer version of this video in my YouTube channel. You can explore the DIN 6164 system online here: virtualatlasblazor [dot] azurewebsites [dot] net #colorwheel #colortheory #arthistory

Sterling B. McDonald (1892 – 1966) was an American industrial designer, color theorist, and design consultant whose career spanned transportation, retail, publishing, and government service. His "Color Calibrator" was in some ways, just a traditional color wheel with fancy mechanical calipers attached. But his approach to color harmony was more advanced than the wheel lets on. This is episode 6 in the series "Color Wheel Wednesdays." Thanks for watching and let me know what color wheels you'd like to see discussed here! #colortheory #colorwheel #arthistory

Trying to figure out the optimal grayscale built from paint chips. I've actually got a mix of Valspar, Sherwin Williams, and a few color-aid papers mixed in. You can see some are too warm, or cool, or greenish. But for the most part the steps between values are pretty even, and that's the real goal (the value scales you can get at the art store are trash in that regard). I just have to decide where to compromise, but I think I at least have a good cool-leaning option for each level, so I'll just, you know... keep it cool. Once I'm happy with the results, I can build inexpensive, accurate 9-step grayscales for my students. I've already worked out a similar hue circle of 12 equal perceptual steps of hue (swipe to see the Valspar paint chips I'm using). I'm building both tools for a workshop for @contemporaryartsmemphis . Looking forward to flying down in just a couple weeks! #artteacher #grayscale #colorwheel #colortheory

Thanks everyone for the views and comments on my “Color Wheel Wednesday” series so far. While going over my color wheel collection and deciding which ones to make videos about, I was reminded of Lovibond. He had a collection of color circles, too! Well, kind of. Joseph Williams Lovibond invented a tintometer to measure and grade the color of beer. In his 1915 book, Light and Colour Theories and Their Relation to Light and Colour Standardization, he has this great color plate. It’s hand-drawn and hand-colored. It shows six different hue circles, to compare various historical theories of “primary rays.” Scroll through to check them out. With this set of wheels, he's trying to clear up what he saw as the messiness of color science at the time. In 1915, there was no consensus on even the most basic question in color science: how many primary colors are there, and which ones? Ultimately, Lovibond settled on red, yellow, blue, deeming these adequate subtractive primaries for his beer-analysis work. But he does say his red glass transmits violet wavelengths. So… maybe it was more of a magenta! Lovibond includes an appendix framing his opinions on how color should be taught in schools. While I don’t agree with all his opinions, I very much like is central principle: nothing should be taught that will afterwards have to be unlearned. Lovibond was frustrated in 1915 by the same problem I see in 2026: color instruction built on “theory” that doesn't hold up under practical use. Anyway, thanks again, and see you around! #colorwheel #colortheory #artandscience

The Modern Color Chart from 1931 is one of my all-time favorite color wheels. Why? Because hiding behind it is a bittersweet story. A story of ambitious, intellectual collaboration between two women -- a scientist and an artist -- to produce a cutting-edge color chart... that was immediately superseded. #colortheory #artandscience #colorwheel

Found some time for a little plein air painting. Maybe in 20 years I'll actually be good at it, but for now... getting outside and focusing on light and color for a couple hours feels like... good for my soul. I've got to work on my in-the-field mixing, especially when it comes to darker tones. But I'm pretty happy with my palette. #pleinair #oiloncanvas