Integrating/using a "gamut" mask in Paintstorm Studio

Florian G. · Post by **Florian G.** » Sat Dec 29, 2018 2:20 pm

Hi!
Those of you who have read the book "Color and Light" by James Gurney, (or know the works and workshops of Richard Robinson) might be familiar with the idea and use of a gamut mask to achieve color harmony within your paintings.
(If not, I highly recommend researching it yourself, because if I try to explain it here, the post will become too long.)

Anyway, I just had the idea of how to integrate the gamut mask into your day-to-day Paintstorm life/workflow.

As you can see in the screenshot below, I use the "Reference" window to display the "gamut mask" that I opened in another document (tab). – Where this comes handy: you can directly pick colors from that "Reference" window.
What I then like to do, is to add the colors I pick into the "Quad gradient" mixer to instantly have lighter and darker shades and tints of that color premixed.

[If you like, you can download the "gamut mask.psd" file below. (See at the end of the second entry.)]

I hope this will be a help to you.
Happy painting! :)

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TIP: I recommend scaling the size of your "Reference" window to a size (square!) that you are happy with; then figure out the size of the display area of the "Reference" window*; and then rescale and save the size of the "gamut mask" document to that same pixel format.
If you do this, you don't have to zoom and pan inside the reference window after opening the "gamut mask"; instead it will automatically fit into that format perfectly every time you open it.
(For example, the size of the display area of my "Reference" window is 128x128 pixels, therefore, I also resized the "gamut mask" down to 128x128 pixels and saved it as a copy.)

*to do so you can 1) make a screenshot 2) crop the image (the screenshot) to the display size of your "Reference" window 3) now look up the exact measurements of your cropped document by opening "Image/Image resize".
Alternatively, you can first resize the "gamut mask" document to the size of your desire and then resize the width and height of your "Reference" window to fit that scaling.