Painting using alternating limited palettes 

OR

A guide to making a subject stand out and fit in

A few years ago, I came across a book by a well known fantasy artist and personal art hero of mine, James Gurney. In the book, Mr. Gurney talks about limiting your palette of colors to help create an environment within your composition that allows everything to fit together as best as possible. It's almost the greatest trick to cohesiveness in painting as there has ever been. The trick falls under a broader group of color control tricks Mr. Gurney outlines and calls "Gamut Mapping". I decided to give his limited palette strategy some tries, and have been completely hooked by the idea. My work has leaped forward in skill and successful execution, and I'm really having much quicker solutions to painting problems through its use. 

Below is an image of a painting almost finished. Having used a limited palette of one red, one yellow and one blue for the background, wherein I have 1 dominant chroma color and 2 weaker ones (I chose Deep Magenta, Cobalt Blue and Yellow Azo) and a little bit of white, I was able to sell the background as a fully cohesive system. I decided that I wanted to create something different for my foreground, and added 3 completely new colors for my foreground (Deep Turquoise, Cobalt Teal and Burnt Sienna), and used them primarily as my palette for the foreground. As I go through the working process, I will try and explain:

Here, I began to lay in my basic shape of the citadel. I used a basic mixture of my colors, and worked with basic warm and cool undertones, trying to vary everything a bit.

I didn't want to jump into details too fast, but I basically worked a bit with ground tones on the buildings to try and define shapes. Because of the light playing onto the citadel, I had to use some highlights and warm undertones, which is where my Gurney "Starved Palette Science" had to come into play:

I had to break my color palette in the foreground and influence those colors with my yellow azo from the background, as well as my warm and cool tones (yellow azo with deep magenta, and yellow azo with cobalt blue) to try and glue the foreground to the background. This way, my foreground castle, (which jumps out because of the new colors) fits nicely into my background (of which it shares no main colors) because of the mixed lighting colors that are hitting it. This palette theory stuff is awesome!

A quick up close look at trying to get the colors right. Now that I have added the magic fireflies to the mix, I have to worry about lighting from the foreground color palette AND the background color palette! 

I most definitely changed some color options a few times... the biggest joy of acrylic as a medium is that you can always paint another layer.

 Here we have a couple dry run finished photos of the piece under different lighting conditions: Haven't quite been able to photo the actual colors- photography is definitely a science that escapes me!

And the finished (NON PROFESSIONAL) shot. Professional Photos and prints coming soon!