The Williamsburg Neutral Gray Set, including N2, N4, N6 and N8 colors, allows artists to create full value grisaille paintings with its range from black to white. Color can then be conveniently applied to the grisaille, either full strength or as desaturated color after mixing with these grays, giving artists more control of color value throughout the painting. Williamsburg Artist Oil colors each have an assigned value that can either be maintained when that color is mixed with the corresponding value of neutral gray or shifted to a lighter or darker value.
Working with neutral gray on the palette can be incredibly helpful to overcome some of the perceptual corrections the brain and eyes might make when working with saturated color – causing one to assign lower values than might be appropriate to light colors, or lighter values to dark colors, resulting in a flat or confusing lighting effect in a painting.
