Pigments, Screens, and a Case Study of Greens

Even the most vibrant paints are limited in their range of hues and saturation, especially when compared to the range of a digital screen. Being aware of the range and limits of natural pigments is something that could aid in achieving a traditional effect in digital painting.

Simply put, traditional pigments just don’t reach as high a saturation, and the colors are further toned down and harmonized as the artist mixes them. Anyone who has tried to match the color of a bouquet of flowers or a green lawn with traditional paints is aware of the gap, and this gap is larger with certain colors (purple and green coming to mind). However, with digital paintings it’s quite possible to match an incredibly vibrant color. 

While doing master studies I’ve also noticed there are certain gaps in the digital color wheel that remain untouched in traditional master paintings. This is due partially to the limits of saturation, aesthetics, and perhaps the lack of certain pigments. 

In general I’ve noticed that paintings hover primarily in the reds, oranges, and yellows. Blues can often be a desaturated red. True blues remain very desaturated, and some of the purples are almost untouched. 

By studying master painters you will begin to see a pattern of what colors are most used, and the areas that should be avoided. 

I have used green as our case study in saturation and hue, and picked paintings that seem to have the highest possible saturation of green to prove my point.

In the paintings by Friedrich Voltz and Harold Power, I color picked a range of greens, swatched them, and showed where they lay on the digital saturation and value gradient. Even I was surprised how these intense colors all sit in the middle of the saturation scale. 

This painting by Ivan Grechishkin is a perfect demonstration of greens dropping in saturation as they move towards a less used area of the color wheel. This is a pattern I’ve observed through many paintings. Greens that lean towards yellow and orange can safely be more saturated (sitting in the middle of the saturation scale). But as the hue shifts towards blue, the saturation drops (compare 1-3 to 4 and 5).

It should be noted that even if traditional pigments could go as saturated as digital, I doubt we’d see many paintings taking full advantage of that due to the sickly effect those colors can have, and how they obliterate color harmony.