Hello dears! I hope you are all doing well. Do you remember my recent series on limited palettes? I used a different one each week in October last year (you can see the results and reflections about them here, here and here). One of the reasons I like limited palettes is that the overall colour harmony seems to be higher. There is a tool out there that you can use to help you choose your colours; it’s a great tool but for some reason I had completely forgotten about it until two days ago. Starting a new painting, I paused and thought about reducing my colour choice and how (and why) I would do that, and all of a sudden I remembered the gammut mask. I first learned about this concept from James Gurney’s great book Light and Colour; Richard Robinson, a kiwi painter, took the idea further and developed an online tool that anybody can use. This is what it looks like:
You choose your colours by selecting one of the little geometrical shapes on the right and then, turning the wheel, you place that shape on the colour wheel in the position you need. The palette is made up of the segment of the colour wheel that lies within the shape. In this way and after some playing around with the many options, I chose four main colours and one accent colour for the painting:
This is the resulting piece of work:
I must admit I didn’t stick to my palette very strictly – there shouldn’t be any green in it, for example, but there is – but it did help me figure out how I want to go about this painting and so I thought it might help you too.