Part 2: Gamut Masking Method

A gamut is a geometric shape (usually a triangle) superimposed or "mapped" over the color wheel. What’s inside the gamut are the colors you’ve chosen for your painting. What’s outside the gamut are the colors you want to leave out.


The gamut will contain the full range of color notes that can be mixed from a given set of starting colors. Those starting colors could be the paint pigments you choose for a limited palette. Or they might be a set of custom starting colors, called color strings, which you premix with a palette knife.

Any triangular gamut has three primaries, one in each corner of the triangle. These are called subjective primaries, because they may not correspond at all with the full-intensity colors we may think of as primary colors. Yet they are the purest and most extreme colors within the gamut you’ve selected.

Note that in the cool gamut above, the purest "yellow" is a warm gray, a mixture of the weak red-magenta and the weak green-cyan. So what looks "yellow" on the Las Vegas sign is really just that warm gray.


Premixing is the key to staying within the gamut you want. You define the range of colors, then you mix those colors and use no others. That way, you’ll get exactly the range you want.

Gamut planning becomes especially important for sequential artists, such as book illustrators or comic artists, or for concept artists or game designers. It's a tremendous aid for painting color ranges like those above. Those skin tones on the top image of Gandalf are in ranges that most traditional painters aren’t used to mixing. (From The Lord of the Rings, directed by Peter Jackson, ©New Line Cinema, all rights reserved.)

This method is also a good tool for gallery painters. You can bring plein air paintings home and develop them into studio compositions with interesting moods. By placing a gamut mask over the color wheel, you can define a very specific range of color for your painting. Tomorrow I’ll show you the method in action with those two Las Vegas paintings.
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You can order the book "Color and Light" by mail from my online store and get it signed.


Read the full series
Gamut Masking, Part 1

Gamut Masking, Part 2

Gamut Masking, Part 3

 Colored Cube Illusion (aka "Color Constancy")
2008 post on color masking

Part 1: Gamut Masking Method

I’ve presented the paint mixing method called gamut masking before on this blog and in my book on color. But I’ve always wanted to do a demo for you so that you can see how it actually works with a specific image.


So for this three-post series, we’ll have some fun with the method. Let’s start with the final results, so you can see where we’re heading. Above is a plein air painting of the colorful Circus Circus sign in Las Vegas, painted in gouache.

It has intense local color to start with, and it’s lit by a midday sun from in front. And there’s not much hazy atmospherics. So most of the colors that I used in the painting are pretty close to the local colors I was looking at.

Suppose that later on in the studio you wanted to shift the color scheme in one direction or another, similar to the digital method called “color grading” in film. Of course in Photoshop, you could just move a few sliders around, but how would you do it in paint?

You could shift the color by using a very limited palette of tube colors. But that’s an inexact method because you’re limited to the available pigments. A better method is by premixing within a specific gamut that you select, and I'll explain more tomorrow.


Previously on GJ:
Gamut Masking, Part 1

Gamut Masking, Part 2

Gamut Masking, Part 3

 Colored Cube Illusion (aka "Color Constancy")
2008 post on color masking

From Mask to Palette (2008)
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
Color Grading

Cows Love Music

I was hanging out once with a dairy farmer in his milking parlor in Wales. He switched on a tape machine to play some reggae for his Friesians. He said it helped get the milk flowing.


Apparently, cows love music.


(Direct link to video) This video proves that cows in France have a fondness for New Orleans jazz.


...Oh, and belugas like Mariachi music. Thanks, Dan




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Previously: An audio visit to the Tyddyn Perthi farm in Gwynned near Caernarfon in Wales

Another take on Highland Avenue

Jeanette here...It’s amazing how Jim and I can sit sketching right next to each other, using the same tools, and come up with completely different results. It’s always been this way since 1980, when we met at art school.


I used a Windsor & Newton enamel 12-pan Lightweight Sketcher’s Box, a sable filbert travel brush in a Moleskine 5" x 8" watercolor book (just like Jim used).


I finished it with a black ballpoint pen. It’s my favorite tool. Lately, it’s been a Pilot easytouch fine point, which doesn’t get goopy and leave blobs on my sketch. The detail is blown up from about the size of a postage stamp.

First steps in a watercolor

After yesterday's post, Tom Hart asked:

"When you're doing a quick painting of architecture, how likely are you to carefully draw with respect to perspective (checking horizon line, etc.) as opposed to free-wheeling it? I get the impression that for your longer plein aire sessions that include buildings you do a quite detailed drawing of the architecture. Is that right, and if so, how much by contrast do you wing it on these quicker sketches?"

So Tom, here's your answer. I do try to get the eye level, perspective, and big lines right before winging it later. If I rush ahead with color and washes before working that out, I regret it later.

The top image shows the picture partway finished, at the point of blocking in the main tones in watercolor with a brush. You can see the underdrawing just establishes the main lines, not the clapboards and smaller window details.

I added those smaller details with water-soluble colored pencils after the big tones were laid down.

Highland Avenue

Yesterday, in honor of the Ninth Annual Worldwide Paint Out, I stopped to paint a snapshot of Kingston, New York.


I was struck by two old houses, both of the same design. One was covered over with white asphalt shingles and the other still kept its wood details, though the paint was peeling.

The houses stood side by side on Highland Avenue, one of the steepest streets in Kingston. A guy walking his Boston terrier stopped to tell us what it is like to live here.

“In the winter, when this street is covered with ice,” he said, “it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to go up or down. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a big four wheel drive SUV. Either way you end up at the bottom. There’s nothing you can do.”

He pointed to a spot in the weeds at my feet, where his dog was snuffling, tugging at her leash. “My truck ended up right there one time,” he said. “It slid all the way down out of control.”

Korpus Lectures, October 6.

Thanks to Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing for the nice post about my little mud puddle sketch.

For those of you in the Los Angeles area, I’ll be doing two back-to-back lectures in one evening at the Korpus School of Art next month. The date is Thursday, October 6, from 7 to 10 in the evening.


The lectures are “Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist” and “Color and Light.”(Faked photo above)

Since we’ve got three hours, you can ask any question you like, and I’ll try to answer it, and I’ll do a short demo following the lectures. There will be a book sale and signing to wrap up the evening. Please sign up now, as space is very limited.


Korpus event
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist