Colour Schemes and Gamut Masks

In this post I will be talking about gamut masks and colour schemes. Gamut mapping and creating gamut masks is something that can help me a great deal with my colour compositions and is a simple way to generate coherent colour schemes for my paintings. A gamut is the range of colours contained within a painting and can be represented by a polygon over a colour wheel. Illustrator and painter James Gurney explains gamut masking in this video.

Restricting the palette helps bring the painting together and create mood, despite this you can still create the impression of a range of colours due to colour constancy where a colour can appear different depending on the surrounding colours. This is demonstrated in Gurney's box diagram.

   

The blue square in the bottom corner of the left box and the pink square in the top corner of the right box are in fact the colour, but appear to be different because of the surrounding hues. The colour used is blue or pink relative to its neighbouring colours. 

A useful tool for generating gamuts can be found at http://www.livepaintinglessons.com/gamutmask.php . 

With this online tool you can make your own gamut mask and print it off. 

In this gamut I have annotated the colours within it that appear as the primary, secondary and neutral colours. In a triangular gamut, forming a triad colour scheme, the colours in the corners are of highest chroma the secondaries in any triadic gamut will be of lower chroma as they are closer to the grey centre. This phenomenon is known as saturation cost. 

Within Photoshop there is another useful tool for creating colour schemes called Kuler. With this palette you can create a custom colour scheme which you can save or add to your swatches. 

The final tool I have found for generating colour schemes can be found at http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/ . With this tool you can extract colour schemes from images of your choice, which you can then use in your own work.