Gurney Journey

Kelsey Rodriguez's YouTube channel has made her a hero for self-taught artists, so I was pleased that she included my book Color and Light among her recommendations in her video on YouTube

Kelsey Rodriguez: ART BOOKS to read instead of going to art school!

A color circle created using CMYK Sliders (Source)

Answer: You could use white or black instead of gray at the center of a color wheel, and many people do, especially when they're in the digital realm. Whichever you choose, the center of the wheel should have zero hue saturation. Black, white, and gray all fit that description.
It helps to keep in mind that the color wheel doesn't represent the full color space, which is a three-dimensional volume, where the vertical axis is a gray scale. The Munsell color system charts color three dimensionally, like a tree with a trunk that goes from black at the bottom to white at the top, as the vertical arrays of hues branch out from the central trunk. Note that the colors have peak saturation at different values. Yellow peaks in lighter values and blue peaks at darker values.

So the color wheel is a horizontal cross section of that 3D color volume, sliced through the peak saturations of each hue, with a gray at the center.

Thanks to Sandrine for her review (Link to YouTube) of Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Artist.
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The book is available signed from my webstore or from Amazon.

Anand has some questions about how people talk about color temperature.

He says he understands how a yellow can be cooler if it leans more toward blue, and warmer if it has a red bias. But which blue is warmer/ cooler? One could argue that a blue with a red or violet bias is warmer because red is a warm color. But a blue with a yellow or green bias can also be regarded as warmer because yellow is also a warm color.

He also asks which is warmer, green or magenta? And is there a pure primary color on the dividing line between warm and cool? Finally, Which is the warmest color on color wheel of tube colors yellow or orange?"

Casein paint

Here's my contribution to international diplomacy: the new Russian and Korean editions of Color and Light: A Guide for Realist Painters.

1. Paintings from limited palettes are automatically harmonious, but they’re very often eye-catching and memorable too. 

2. Old masters used limited palettes by default because they just couldn’t get the range of pigments we have now. Using older, quieter colors can give a much wanted mellowness. 

3. A limited palette forces you out of color-mixing habits. If you don’t have that standard “grass green” color, you’ll have to mix it from scratch, and you’re more likely to get the right green that way. 

4. Limited palettes are compact, portable, and sufficient for almost any subject. In fact you can paint almost anything in nature with just four or five colors.

Khasra by Moonlight by James Gurney, 12 x 18 inches, oil on board

Here's the quick (45 minute) maquette that I built for lighting reference. It didn't need to be beautiful at all, just any old blobs of modeling clay were all I needed.



I quickly discovered that I had to move the actual lighting position quite far to the left, much farther to the left than the position of the moon in the painting.

I just finished writing an article called "Extreme Limited Palettes" for International Artist magazine and I want to preview one small part of it for you.

The article will include these four color charts. Each diamond-shaped diagram represents the possibilities of three colors, plus white.

Each diamond shape is composed of two isosceles triangles. The left triangle represents the gouache colors straight out of the tube, and the right one represents the mirror image of those colors, but mixed with white. Secondary mixtures appear as rectangles along the side of each triangle. The darkest "black" you can get from those colors is the small dark patch in the center of the left triangle.


Each chart gives a sense of the full available gamut for that limited palette, so you can see at a glance what's possible with a given set of colors. For example, you can see how this painting belongs with the chart in the upper right, the one with yellow ochre (Holbein), perylene maroon (Winsor Newton), and viridian lake (Winsor Newton)—plus white (M. Graham).

Below is another way to set up the charts using hexagons to represent the color wheel, with tints in the center. These are done with oil.



The colors you choose for your limited palette don’t have to be blue, red, and yellow, or even cyan, magenta, and yellow. As long as they’re differentiated, the painting will seem to have a full universe of colors.

Before you start a given painting, you can refer to a set of charts like these to decide which limited palette would suit the subject you want to paint. These charts would be a big help if you're thinking of joining in with the Graveyard Painting Challenge for October.
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Jason Morgan just produced this video review of Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter. (Link to YouTube) The book is available on Amazon.

Thanks, Jason. Check out Jason's website on his excellent wildlife art, photos, and videos.

We just received copies of the new Chinese hardback edition of "Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter" (upper left) from the Eurasian Publishing Group / Solutions Publishing (link to publisher's web page).

There's also a Chinese softcover edition and a Japanese and Korean edition.
The little dinosaur on the cover is Mei long, from China's Liaoning province.