The Reilly Palette: The Reilly Neutrals

At the core of Reilly's Universal Palette is a scale of equidistant value steps called the "Neutral Control" values. The main purpose for using a scale of values is to help control the values in your picture, enabling you to create form, the illusion of three-dimensions on a two-dimensional surface. Getting your values correct can be the largest factor in accomplishing this. Reilly attributes 80% of our success in getting the form to correct values, 20% to chroma, and 0% to hue.


A scale of nine value steps made by mixing Titanium White with Ivory Black produces cool grays with a slight blue bias. A scale of nine value steps made by mixing Titanium White with Raw Umber produces warm grays with a yellow bias. "Neutral Gray" can be arrived at by  mixing the cool gray with the warm gray at each of their nine value steps. The full range of neutral values includes both extremes white and black. White is designated value #10,  black is value #0 and between them are values #9 through #1, comprising the eleven-step scale of Neutrals.  Your judgement of true "Neutral" (with minimal spectrum bias) might best be determined under a north-light source.


The Neutrals can also be used to control the chroma of any color without altering its hue. (Mr. Reilly preferred the specific term Neutral to mean a pigment that has no hue bias, while the casual term "gray" can imply very weak chroma of any hue). Oil paint comes out of the tube often at it's most chromatic. These neutrals can be used to reduce the chroma without changing the hue. For example, if your goal is to make a middle value muted purple (P5/6), you might take Dioxazine purple (P1/12), add white to bring it to value 5, then add Neutral 5 until it's chroma is weakened sufficiently. 


In the late '40s, Reilly contracted Grumbacher to mix and tube boxed-sets of all nine Reilly Neutral values. Sadly they are no longer available. Tubing your own Neutrals saves time and promotes palette consistency. Empty tubes are available at art material suppliers like Pearl Paint and Utrecht. 

Photo courtesy of Jerry Allison

Mixing the neutrals. 
Using Ivory Black and Titanium White, mix nine intermediate piles of paint from dark to light. Black representing the value #0 and white representing value #10, the neutral colors will be values 1 through 9. Including black and white you will have eleven equidistant values.  Next create a separate string of nine corresponding values mixing Raw Umber with Titanium White. Now, relying on your own judgement, blend these two strings together visually until they appear to be completely neutral in hue.


Jack Faragasso's 1979 book is a good reference for paint mixing.


For your bookshelp:  The Student's Guide to PAINTING by Jack Faragasso 
ISBN 0-891-34025-4 


Next Topic: The Reilly Palette: A Palette of Convenience


© John Ennis 2010 

The Munsell color notation.

It would be difficult to advance with this project without offering a short primer on Munsell. Reilly adopted the Munsell Color System for his program, and an understanding of its basics and nomenclature is fundamental to the Reilly vocabulary.

Munsell divides color into three components: hue, value and chroma. 

Hue is the quality that distinguishes one color from another, i.e. red, yellow, green etc. Munsell's color wheel is a little different from what most of us refer to. Instead of three primaries of red, yellow and blue, and three secondaries of orange, green and purple, Munsell expands the wheel to 10 colors. Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Purple are considered "Simple Hues". Between them are found the "Intermediate Hues" of yellow-red, green-yellow, blue-green, purple-blue, and red- purple. So when Reilly describes complexion as yellow-red, this is where the nomenclature comes from.

Value is the quality which distinguishes light colors from dark colors. In this system, the gradation of light to dark is separated into eleven values. Pure black is labeled 0 and pure white is labelled 10. Nine values equally distant from each other lie in between. A color with a value of 8 is very light, two steps down from white.

Chroma describes how strong or weak a color is. The color red with a chroma of 2 is a warm neutral, a chroma of 14 describes a brilliant red.

So a Munsell color notation for caucasion skin tone in the light might be described like this: YR8/4. This means the hue is yellow-red (orange) the value is 8 (very light) and the chroma is 4 (relatively weak). Reilly uses these notations through-out so it is important to be familiar with them. A premise of the Munsell system is to get us away from terms like Banana Yellow or Lime Green, and offer a more specific method of describing color, and a common language through which to describe it.

Further study of the Munsell system is suggested. There are lots of informative websites you can explore. A simple but informative guide can be found at  The Munsell Color System - Color Models - Technical Guides


For your bookshelf: MUNSELL, A Grammer of Color by Albert H. Munsell and Faber Birren, ISBN 0442255764


© John Ennis 2010




Next topic: The Reilly Palette: The Reilly Neutrals

Edges

Edge modeling is an essential ingredient to successful representational painting. The first thing I look for is what Reilly called the "Big Blur". Where does the subject blend into the atmosphere? Look for areas where the value on the subject is nearly the same value as the adjacent background and obliterate the edge. This is your softest edge.

Go to the light side and look for the main (light) effect, the focal point in the light. Establish your hardest edge here. 

All other edges can vary between these two extremes. Hard edges help project the form toward the viewer, and soft edges help make the form recede. I use edge-modeling as a design tool to control the viewer's visual path around the painting.

"Purple Scarf"  oil  30"x24"  by John Ennis

From Reilly's notes:

Edge Modeling is basically a skill, without it no painter excels. 
It helps to create atmosphere, putting the model in the room, existing in space. 

It relates the form to the background.

It heightens the effect of light on the subject.

It aids selective looking.

It is done at every stage, Wash-in, Lay-in, Painting.

The diagram below illustrates the variety of edges and the process for softening edges of varying hardness. The two strokes of paint adjacent to each other represent a hard edge. A slightly softer edge can be made by dragging a clean brush over the border of where the strokes meet. To create an even softer edge, take a clean brush and zig-zag the brush, pulling paint into the adjacent areas all along the length of the stoke. Then with a clean brush softly brush down over the zig-zag creating the soft transition. When the size of the area to be softened exceeds the width of your biggest brush, lay in a half-tone value, and brush the light into the halftone and the halftone into the shadow using the technique described.

© John Ennis 2010

Next Topic: The Munsell Color Notation

The Wash-In

The initial step in the Reilly painting program was dubbed the Wash-In. It is an imprimatura, a thin translucent monochromatic layer of paint designed to develop the drawing, values, and edges while putting off the challenge of color and brushwork to another session. I created the one displayed here in twenty minutes using raw umber.

Material list:

Canvas

Linseed Oil

Raw Umber

Medium Cup

Varnishing bristle brush (or house painter's cutter brush)

Cheese Cloth (or cotton rag)

Solvent (turps or OMS)

Oil out the canvas with linseed oil thinly, applying the minimal amount to just barely cover the surface. "Breathe it on" is how we used to describe the application. This may seem antithetical to fat over lean concerns, but it has proven to be safe.

In a medium cup, mix one half solvent and one half linseed oil. 

Brush on Raw Umber thinly to approximate the shadow value of the subject, dipping the brush into the medium to add fluidity to the application. Let this set for a few minutes. 

Using cheese cloth, or a cotton rag, separate the light from the shadow by rubbing out the lights beginning with the average, or middle value in the light. After separating the light from the shadow in this way, further define the values in the light by rubbing out the lightest light, perhaps the upper chest or forehead,  then using the cutter brush, dust in the darkest light, like the underbelly of the torso. I hope to describe this better in a later blog on the Lay-In. By this approach, the figure is simplified to three values in the light and one in the shadow. 

In this illustration, Reilly breaks the process down as follows: 
A- tone the canvas to the shadow value. 
B-draw in an outline of the figure. 
C-Wipe out the average light. 
D- wipe out the lightest light and brush (dust) back in the darkest light. 
E-draw in the darks. 
F- emphasize the "Effect", the lightest light in the picture. 

© John Ennis 2010

Next Topic: Edges