The mask reveals only the colors we want in the picture and leaves out the colors that are absent. That selection is called a "gamut." Consciously leaving out sectors of the color wheel is what produces interesting and subjective color environments.
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You can create these subjective gamuts digitally or with painted colors. Thinking about color in this way is especially helpful if you're creating an animated film, an illustrated storybook, or a graphic novel.
The mask can also be a small triangle in one part of the wheel. Here I’ve taken two paintings from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara and mapped out their color schemes by digitally defining a shape on the wheel and ghosting the rest.
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The swamp scene has dull yellow-greens and browns (browns are really dull oranges). The colors can be contained in the small triangle.
I explain and demo this idea in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter.
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5 comments:
Hi James,
The open-source paint program "Krita" features a "gamut mask" option in their color selector.
Details of the tool are provided in the documentation here:
https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/gamut_masks.html
The user can choose from a variety of built-in mask shapes, or make their own.
hi James, i bought your book twice, the first time, i had to sell it, and the second time i bought it, it doesn´t come with the usefull poster, there is anyway that we can get that poster, is very handy. greetings.
Hi James, I too bought your book a couple years ago, and I didn't get the useful poster either. Is there a poster available. I would really like to get one. Thank you.
Virginia Rinkel
When the book was released 12 years ago, there was a small edition of those posters released for the book convention. They didn't come with the books as a normal thing.
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