#gamut mask

[life-take]

CSP Gamut Mask Part II

(continued from Part I)

Part II: How to use it

There's a few different ways we can use the gamut mask to pick colors! Using these, I made a palette of primary and secondary colors, with some neutrals!

N.B.: Now here's where things get a bit different from real paint. Clip Studio Paint has perceptual color mixing, but because each real world pigment has unique properties that also change based on the medium, we can't perfectly recreate paint mixing. That doesn't even get into white pigments to lighten colors! Everything here is approximate to real life. Here's the rule of thumb: You can't mix a saturated color from unsaturated colors. Check your mixed colors against the gamut mask (adjust the lightness if you need to) before assuming they're within gamut. This includes Blending Modes!

Technique 1 -- Eyedropper

The easiest way to pick colors is... use the eyedropper directly on the mask! This is guaranteed to not exceed saturation limits.

Then use the Lightness slider in the Color Picker Sliders tab to make it lighter or darker.*

(*Yes, apparent chroma and saturation can change with lightness in most color spaces. this is one of those approximations.)

Technique 2 -- Blending

CSP has a built-in color mixing window! Pick some of the most saturated colors (in this case, blue-green, magenta, and yellow-green) and mix them with the color mixer tools to get a basic palette. It appears that the blender tool averages the colors, which means the results will not exceed the gamut, provided your gamut border isn't a concave shape like a star, or separate parts.

Technique 3 -- Intermediate Color Palette

CSP also includes a fun little tab in the color picker called the Intermediate Color palette. Put whatever colors you want to mix in the corners, and it creates a spectrum of colors between them. It works by averaging, like the color mixer.

Conclusion

I hope this tutorial was helpful for you! I'm not an expert in palette-making myself, but I wanted to make a tool that would be helpful to me as I practice. The mask I made as an example was placed with no real thought in mind other than "triangle", so please do look up real examples of good masks and palettes! Just as a proof of concept, I saved my palette as a png, then opened it in the "Sub-View" window so I could eyedropper from it easily to paint this bird!

[life-take]

Making a Gamut Mask in CSP

Strap in folks! I'm going to show you how to make a "gamut mask" and palette using nothing but a color wheel and Clip Studio Paint!

*I made this tutorial using CSP Pro 1, but the same principles should apply for any version.

Introduction

First, what's a gamut mask? The term comes from physical painting and printing, where artists only have so many pigments to work with. A 'gamut' is the set of all colors that can be mixed from a certain set of pigments. Painters and printers have been looking for 'wide' gamuts for a long time -- so they can make the widest variety of colors from the fewest number of base pigments or dyes. Some base-color sets you may have heard of are CMYK, RGB, or RYB.

One of the easiest ways of making a painting harmonious is to use color theory to limit the number of colors of your palette. The technique of covering up, or 'masking' your reference color wheel also lets the artist see what intermediate colors can be mixed and still remain part of the cohesive palette. And in the physical world, where more pigments means more tubes of paint you have to spend money on, it's important to know exactly how few pigments you can get away with.

In digital art, painters have access to every possible RGB color right out of the gate, which can sometimes feel overwhelming or make it harder to see relationships between colors. So let's try gamut masking! Using this tutorial, you'll make a general-purpose file you can change and adapt to your liking for future projects!

Part I: The Setup

In this tutorial, I'm using a color wheel image obtained from Björn Ottosson's blog, showcasing the OKHSL color space. I like it because the OKHSL space has perceptually constant lightness and saturation per hue. Try out his comparative color picker here. (I also like this image bc it has a transparent background)

You can use whatever color wheel you like! Just one thing is important-- it should gradually become more unsaturated toward the center of the wheel. This saves you some manual color mixing down the road.

Here's our basic layer template. To get started, follow this:

Open your color wheel in Clip Studio Paint. It will be the only layer.

Select the "Frame Border" tool (U), pick the shape or subtool you think is best. I've picked 'polyline' since I'm making a triangle. (HINT: if you want an elliptical/circle shape, click the wrench in the tool properties window, then the "Figure" submenu, then you should see the option to choose an ellipse shape.)

Create the frame shape on the canvas over any section of the wheel. If it's not quite right, choose the "Operation" tool (O) and adjust the rotation, corners, or size of the frame!

You'll now see your frame border shape over the color wheel. Drag the color wheel layer into the Frame folder and it'll be masked!

That's the very basics! Here's some extra steps I took to make it extra helpful:

*In the Frame folder, I added two correction layers: a Hue/Luminosity/Saturation and a Color Balance. The first is in case I want to work with darker/lighter tones. The second is if I want to apply a tint to my gamut while preserving the color relationships of the mask! eg: if I want to make a painting that's overall blue, but still want colors that 'feel' red, yellow, etc compared to the strongest blue.

*I've created a uniform neutral grey layer at the very bottom, so I can judge tones and colors without bias.

*("Folder 1" was unused, just some layers not relevant to this tutorial)

With that mask, you technically have everything you need! For each new painting you want to make a palette for, just edit the shape of the Frame Border layer and change the adjustment layers to your liking. Then you can save it as your favorite image type to use for reference!

But let's talk about how you can further use the mask...to be continued!

[yama-bato]

Gamut Mask Tool FREE Interactive color harmony tool for painters and visual artists

https://www.livepaintinglessons.com/gamut-mask/

[halflingpony]

ATG VI - Day 21 - Relaxing on the Beach

Prompt: "Draw a pony at the beach/Draw a pony catching some rays"

This was a fun little experiment. I decided to completely change things up from my normal selection of “watercolor” brushes and instead exclusively use the “oil” brushes in Clip Studio. They definitely have a different feel and results.

More important than the choice of brush, though, was the extremely limited color pallet. I’ve a bit to say about it, so I’ll go ahead and drop a break here so as not to strain anyone’s dashboard. ;)

I decided to try doing this with a limited color gamut in a digital adaptation of the technique James Gurney describes on his blog and in his excellent book Color and Light (which I have owned for a few years now and really should put to more frequent use).

Knowing I would be painting Fluttershy, with her distinctive pink mane and butter yellow coat, I decided to make this more interesting by selecting a gamut mask that trends toward the darker saturated yellows and just barely touches the red portion of the color wheel (making a true pastel pink impossible to achieve):

Clip Studio fortunately provides a handy tool for doing this sort of thing, called the “Intermediate Color” pallet. You set four color for the extremes (in this case, I used the three points of my triangle up there and a pure white for the fourth; essentially the color of the virtual “paper”) and it sets up an easy to use, limited color pallet for you:

Look at that thing! Not a single color on it looks suitable for her mane, does it? And yet, in context, it can be forced to do the job. Trying to figure out how best to utilize such a small cross section of the color wheel is a very enjoyable challenge and I’m rather pleased by the results.

Of course some people may wonder why an artist would bother limiting themselves like this in the first place. The soul of Art is, after all, freedom of self-expression and the communication of ideas that cannot be constrained by mere words.

Yet, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, art genuinely thrives in an environment of artificial limitation. Putting unnecessary limits on oneself forces an artist to struggle to overcome them and the end result is often much more interesting to both artist and audience.

Oh dear, I seem to be waxing philosophical all of a sudden. I suppose that’s as good a sign as any that it’s time to wrap this blog post up. ;)

[eireni]

Huevember #1: #e6ff00

I’ve made colour wheels to use huevember to practice James Gurney’s Gamut mask exercise. Feel free to use them. The first is the colours chosen in the original post on huevember, while the second is the more mathematically accurate colour wheel, where each of the hues in the first wheel can be found by the position of a small white spot.

[teacup-art]

Handy tool for artists and students of colour theory. To learn how this tool applies to colour mixing and theory, check out James Gurney’s video on the gamut masking method.

[tinylongwing]

Still enjoying the gamut mask thing way too much, it’s just such a neat way to do a color scheme. Enjoy! I’ve got a bunch of work to do this weekend so other than little doodles there won’t be a lot from me for a bit. :(

[tenayaanue]

A background for my upcoming second year animation film! Trying some new stuff by focusing on shape instead of line and using a gamut mask to create a color palette