This week’s Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to use a restricted color palette to paint a masterpiece. I chose to repaint “Farmhouses near Bellevue” by Paul Cézanne. I painted this masterpiece two weeks ago, but Artrage failed to save my work. Or maybe I failed to save it. I really don’t know.
This restricted palette challenge was inspired by the “Creating Gamut Masks” chapter in James Gurney’s Color and Light. I created a gamut mask in Artrage with the aid of Aaron Rutten’s Gamut Masking Tool, which he explains in his Youtube video Color Gamut Masking Tool for Artists. Aaron is a cool guy —- I love artists who freely share their knowledge.
Here’s the gamut mask I created using Aaron’s tool. I examined Cézanne’s painting and picked the predominant colors. However, for the sake of experimentation, I intentionally chose to limit blues. Neutral gray serves as blue in this color scheme.
Getting this palette into Artrage was a pain — Artrage for iOS can’t import PSD files. To work around this, I created the gamut mask in Procreate, which does handle PSD files perfectly, then exported a PNG to the iOS Photos app, then imported the “photo” into Artrage. File handling is a tragic affair on the iPad. The idea of using an iPad as a general purpose computer is a joke.
