Saturday, February 17, 2024

Premixing Color Gamuts in Oil Paint


 Here’s what it looks like when I’m premixing oil colors on a palette made from a roll of freezer paper.

🎨 The goal is to premix a “string” of four or five values of each of the subjective primaries that appear at the corners of the gamut.

🎨 The “gamut” is a sector of the full range of possible colors. If you paint just from that string of premixed colors, you can paint any color from inside that gamut but you can’t paint any “extra-gamut notes.”

🎨 The reason to narrow your gamut is to create a subjective envelope of colors and explore the possibilities they offer.

🎨 In sequential art, each sequence can have its own gamut, which is especially helpful in color scripting for animation or concept art, or for illustrated books or graphic novels.

More in my book Color and Light

1 comment:

  1. I thought you might enjoy this video about the proper way, mathematically, to mix color the way it happens with pigments. I have been correcting people for ages, saying that the ideal primary colors for paints are cyan, magenta, and yellow, just like with printer ink. But this shows that I was wrong about that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qa5iWdfNKg

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