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WARNING!
Artists' materials are very dangerous and can cause injury or death! Use in a well-ventilated area,
read all warning labels, and keep out of reach of children! Use at your own risk!
So, I want to explain to you how to use a color checker.
It's essentially very easy to use.
Take your paint from your palette,
paint it on to this part right here,
and then you look through it
and match your color like this.
And you find that point where the value is the same,
where the brightness and the darkness of your color
is the same as it is on your subject.
Once you've figured out where that is, then you can judge the colors.
Either too yellow, blue, red, orange, purple, or green.
Ok, so that's it. Now that's as simple as it is to use.
There's a couple of things you need to think about.
You don't want any glare to get on to the paint.
If I'm holding it out — for instance, on this still life —
and I lean forward far enough, now I'm getting glare all over my paint
from my still-life light. That's no good, because it'll throw your color off.
The other thing I need to do is make sure that my subject
is in the same amount of light as my paint on my color checker.
So, I need to balance my light. Let me show you how to do that.
And this isn't always necessary. If you're outdoors,
painting a meadow or whatever
and you stand out in the bright sun, and the meadow's in the bright sun,
you know you're in the same amount of light.
So, the only deal with is the glare.
And you can check the glare by tilting your color checker a little bit
and seeing how it's affected by the glare.
If the sky is putting a whole bunch of glare on your color checker,
block it with your hand, or a piece of cardboard, or whatever.
The glare is always coming — when you're holding out a color checker —
the glare is always coming from right above and beyond the color checker (up above).
So, if there is a big, bright cloud up there, it may be putting glare on your color checker.
In the case of a still life, in order to balance my whites,
in order to make sure that the still life is in the same amount of light
as my color checker is, what I've got is a piece of wood
with a 45-degree cut on it.
You could use anything, but this is just the most accurate.
So, 45 degrees... and I've just put a piece of masking tape on it,
and I take some white paint,
paint it on to the masking tape —
make sure it's white, white, white —
and then I'll just put this over right in the middle of my still life, where my main subject is.
And if you're still life is really tall, then you need to raise that up on a piece of wood or something
so that it's up high. But it needs to be, more or less near the top of your still life,
in the main light source. Since this still life is not very tall, it's just sitting there.
And make sure there's no glare on the paint that's on the piece of wood.
If there is, you need to tilt it a little bit to get rid of the glare.
So, I hold out my color checker,
and the paint on my color checker should be the same brightness —
the same value — as the paint on the piece of wood.
If the color is a little different, that's OK.
It may be that your still-life light is more yellow than your studio light, and that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with the color of light being different,
but, we want the brightness to be the same.
So if I hold it out, I want to ask myself:
"Which one is brighter? Which one is the value brighter?"
Simple as that.
Disregard the colors, if the color is a little different.
So, which one is brighter?
And if your still-life paint is brighter, then you need to either
make your studio light brighter, or make your still-life light dimmer.
If your white paint on the color checker is brighter,
then you need to dim your studio light, or brighten your still-life light.
It's pretty obvious. But you need to make that adjustment
and make sure that your still life, or your subject,
is in the same amount of light as your color checker.
Let me show you also how to use it indoors.
For instance, if you were going to paint a portrait of somebody, and you wanted to match the colors
and you don't have a shadow box,
or you're just painting a still life that's sitting by a window.
So, let's go and let me show you how to do it, and deal with that situation.
I have a still life sitting here on a table, and the still life is in a good spot.
I'm not worried about my color checker, or balancing whites, or anything.
I've just set up the still life,
and it's in a good place relative to the windows, I love the light on it.
It's ready to go.
Now, when I'm ready to mix colors, all I'm going to have to do is
position myself relative to the window
to get where my white matches that white.
So, if my white is too dark, I move closer to the window
until my white matches the white on the piece of wood.
If my white paint is too light, too bright, then I move further away from the window
until my white paint matches the white paint on the wood.
Simple as that. And the only other issue is the glare.
Just make sure there's no glare coming from right there.
You can put a piece of cardboard over just to see if there is any,
and usually you can just see it.
Try twisting the color checker a little bit.
But I don't have any glare, so I'm ready to go.
This same method would work for a portrait or whatever.
You could have somebody sitting in a chair, and do the same thing.
Just move yourself closer to the window, or further away from the window
until your white matches the white there. And then, you're ready to match
all your colors, from the blacks all the way up to the highlights.
And that's how you use the color checker.