It is cold so I painted a crab in mittens and a scarf.
4×6″ gouache and ink
Quinacridone violet, gamboge, delft blue, dioxazine purple, and white.
Wintercrab
Category Archives: Gamut Mapping
Cuttlefriends!
Portrait of my friend’s dear cuttlefish, raised from eggs, who passed away of happy old age this year.
This one was a very limited palette – Talens Light Blue (a phthalo), Schmincke Burnt Sienna (a weird mix), and white.
8×10″ gouache on board
Furiosa
Furiosa by Meg Lyman
9×12″ gouache on cold press
I never gave this one an official post – here is my homage to my favorite movie, Fury Road.
I used gamut mapping and a limited palette to help this obtain the color-filtered look of the movie. My colors were, from top to bottom: gamboge (didn’t use much of this at all), titanium gold ochre, Hooker’s green, burnt umber, neutral tint, cerulean blue, and indigo. I also added a bit of quinacridone red for the faces, gold for the sparkles in the engine grease, and of course white. I could have limited the palette more and had even better color harmony.
Note how all the octopus are hanging on the same horizon line, through the upper middle of the torso for an average-height imaginary octopus. I initially sketched them all wrong, and had to review my perspective rules.
Bonus thumbnails:
This is going to take a while
Fancy Goldfish Power by Meg Lyman
24×12″ oil on board
I started this painting a long time ago. It survived a cross-country move in between 18 months of me working on it when I could. With commission work, calendar art to finish, and shiny objects everywhere, I get distracted from personal projects easily. I should really not do that. I am not going to get any better at painting my visions (that sounds really pretentious sorry) if I don’t practice regularly. And yet I keep taking commissions. There is clearly something wrong with my brain.
Anyway, this isn’t the first time I’ve posted about this piece. I underpainted it with magenta because of reasons. As you can see, the grey of the pole isn’t so eyeball-breaking now, but the underpainting adds a nice vibrancy. I also planned this composition carefully, keeping rhythm and visual pathways in mind. And I didn’t adhere strictly to my gamut map, but used it more as a guide. Learning things is fun! And also really overwhelming because I never feel like I have a handle on everything I should.
Nonetheless, I kinda like this painting. Probably mostly because it’s the first wobbly, tentative step of my grand journey. I may twist some ankles along the way, but as long as I don’t fall face first into the mud I’ll consider it progress.
Disapproving Goldfish is judging me
Shades of Grey
I’m finally starting to lay paint on this background (see the bottom of the post). The magenta underpainting is slicker than snot on a doorknob, and the first layer of paint didn’t stick to it very well in some places. It’s reminiscent of the trials and tribulations I had painting with oils on smooth Gessobord. So, perhaps my problem with that whole thing was a lack of tooth. I’ll sand the gesso less next time and let you know.
Anyway, this is my first painting using gamut mapping. I had my color wheel all ready and cut a triangle into a sheet of palette paper. I picked my gamut and taped the sucker down.
My three primary tubes are Primary Green Light, Quin. Red, and Cerulean Blue. I wanted to start with the neutral grey in the middle, and so mixed the three together. Looks pretty neutral to me, maybe a bit brown. Excellent. I added white to give myself two shades:
I proceeded to paint it onto the magenta underpainting. The more I painted, the greener it looked. It’s a pretty cool effect to see just how relative color is in our brain! The color on the palette looks nothing like the color on the board. And once I paint over the magenta, it’ll look different yet again.
p.s. you can see how it was tough to get the grey to stick to the underpainting. I love learning.