Understanding Light in the Landscape - Part III

Evening Road Oil John Hulsey

Gamut Mapping: Mastering the Art of a Selective Palette

In part two, we introduced you to the concepts of color gamuts and gamut mapping. Gamut mapping is a tool for preselecting a limited palette of colors from which to create an entire painting, and was invented by James Gurney. James is an artist, illustrator and creator of the world-famous Dinotopia series of books, as well as Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter. He invented the gamut mask tool as a convenient and reliable way to create believable color-specific moods in his illustrations, without having real world references to call upon in his fantasy paintings. We immediately saw how useful this tool could be for both the landscape painter who must deal with unpredictable lighting in nature, and the studio artist who is wanting to have complete control over mood in their painting.

This is a powerful tool that gives us two distinct advantages: (1) I…