Mixing Color Strings
A Color String is a group of paints blobs mixed by a palette knife to help you be prepared for what you are about to paint.
There are different ways to prepare you paints: free mixing and premixing. I prefer to do premixing because you are ready and according to Gurney it provides a cleaner and more organized palette. Gurney mentions other benefits to premixing versus free mixing. Below is an example:
A method known as the Reilly Method helps you prepare your paints by making 10 tonal steps. Gurney says you are fine having four to five like the picture above.
Gamut Mapping & Creating Gamut Masks
Gamut Mapping is a way of mapping out the group of colors you will use for a painting. Taking a color wheel you select only a section of it to use, for example:
Gurney claims a painting is not about what you can include, but about what you leave out. That is exactly what Gamut palettes help you do. They confine you to a limited palette; however they most often create the most interesting pieces of art.
Shapes of Gamuts
The most common shape is a triangle because it will have one dominating color. There are different triangles however that create different types of schemes of color. For example you can have an even triangle that lies on only one side of the color wheel which gives you three dominant/main/primary colors. This is called an atmospheric triad. There are narrow triangles that allow for another type of limited palette. Complementary gamuts are like a long diamond stretched across the length of the color wheel.
Analogous Colors are those adjacent to one another on the color wheel. They are automatically related and harmonious.
How to take a gamut and put the paints on your palette:
1. Place Gamut Triangle on wheel where you want your desired color scheme.
2. Place your colors/paints on palette from tubes (any of your preferred choice).
3. Create the three corner colors of your gamut triangle, these are your primaries. You can have anywhere from 3-6.
4. Now create the strings. From each primary extend to four different values (adding white).
*5. Remove extra tube colors off palette and only leave white, this will help you stay within the range you have chosen.
Color Scripting
When creating scripts for a story or film gamut triangles are perfect. The trick here is transitioning from one part of your gamut to the next, focusing first on one or two primaries and shifting slightly until you have hit all three. It is pleasing to the eye and also helps the story move along nicely.
