Re: Gum Tri-Color Yellow

Another thought, and this is just musing on my part, so take it with
salt: it occurs to me that if all formulations of PV19 are as wimpy as
the ones I have, and this seems likely since Daniel Smith and M. Graham
tend to be well-pigmented, then in order to get a neutral color balance
you'd have to back off on the blue and red, and then you'd get grey
instead of black. I've never understood why anyone would need to add
black to a tricolor, since three saturated primaries will give you black
every time, but this offers a hint.

And that's the real answer to Mark's question the other day about how
you can tell color balance without using color separations. I guess it
seemed so obvious to me that I didn't think to say it. If the color
balance is right, the three together will produce a neutral black in the
shadows and a neutral grey in the mid and highlights.

BTW, and this is something I just learned, since PV19 isn't a color I've
ever used in my work (don't ask me why I have three tubes of it) there
are two forms of PV19: gamma and beta. It's the gamma form that gives
the rose-red color; the beta is very definitely violet, not reddish. The
rose-red has a distinctly violet cast to it, as I learned when I brushed
the two versions I have of this gamma PV19 on paper just to look at them
in comparison with each other. When I washed the brushes out, the color
of the wash water was violet, not rose-red at all, even though the paint
on the brush and on the paper was rose- red.
Katharine
Received on Tue Jun 29 11:30:51 2004