#gamut masking

[foldingfittedsheets]

This is my latest painting with all its components. The top painting is a full spectrum rendering of my setup. The lower one is a gamut mask, meaning I only had the colors in the triangle to recreate the first setup. You can trick your brain quite a bit. This one was pretty fun.

[sparkywonderelf]

OH BOY you guys I gotta lot to talk about with this.  I’m probably not going to bother polishing up the above painting--it was an experiment and I didn’t really draw it out or plan it ahead of time.  But I learned so much from painting it that I wanted to share it.  I picked up James Gurney’s book Color and Light a little while ago. In it he describes a technique called gamut masking, where you mask off a portion of the color wheel and only use the colors within.  THIS BLEW MY MIND.  I used an online gamut masking tool to make the palette below.

Mixing a digital palette is different than mixing a traditional palette, but I think I did okay with a few adjustments.  Since most of my color decisions were already taken care of, all I had to do was paint.  I had more fun painting this than I have since I stopped oil painting.  I literally painted until my hand started cramping up, about 3 hours, and got more done in that time frame than I ever have before.  Definitely a fun technique and I’m looking forward to experimenting more with it! You can read more about gamut masking on James Gurney’s blog here and here.

[foldingfittedsheets]

This guy got tweaked to change the subjective neutral and it’s working a lot better.

[con-affetto-kiko]

Some new color trials for the next issue of Knocking on the Sky using Gurney’s gamut masking technique. I’m in love with it!

[fujiyosky]

this is fuji and i’m back i’ve been away for a while and i’m here to draw some rabbits and cry over job offers

[heysawbones]

tvvelfth replied to your post: words

those all sound like wonderful feelings! Do you have a new method for figuring out palettes, or?

Check it. And again. Third time's the charm.

I like making them manually off the YURMBY wheel, personally! I deviate a bit from just the palette provided by the mask by adding more darks/lights... or, you can just hit Auto Contrast in Photoshop if you feel like you need more contrast instead of manually picking extra darks and extra lights, ha ha.

[artist-advice]

Gamut Masking

More Color Tutorials by James Gurney:

Color Wheel Masking

Shapes of Color Schemes

From Mask to Palette

Gamut Masking 1 2 3