This is the third post in a series on Sunday a method called masking color wheel. The first message showed how colored masks can help analyze the colors, and the second station explored different forms of masks. In this post I will show you how to effectively mix the colors you have chosen for a given painting.
To start, here the color wheel on the left. Right above the paper pallet are primary colors of oil paint. You can use as tube colors you want at this stage. I just small demo keys Winsor Red, Cadmium Yellow, titanium dioxide, and ultramarine blue. 
Say you want a monochromatic atmospheric triad with the dominant (and most saturated) color in the red-orange range. Using your knife, mix a batch of each of the three colors you see in the corners of the triangular range.
I placed a small white box on the colors in this picture. In this case, it is a saturated red-orange, red-violet desaturated, and a yellow-green desaturated.
Now that you have created the "heads of households" or subjective primary. Then extend these color values or four different tones. Try to keep the hue and saturation constant as you do.
Look again at the color wheel mask. Halfway along the edge of the triangle are small marks indicating your secondaries. These are your in-between colors, which you may want to mix as well. You may end up mixing and working with three to six strings of colors.
Before starting to paint, remove the pallet from all tube colors you wrung except for white. This is important, because these colors are out of your range. You do not want to have access to those most during the painting process.
To the left is a color wheel with monochrome atmospheric triad red underlining. This time he landed on the digital color wheel Tobey Sanford (link to download). Right so far are mixed I color ranges. In the middle is the paint resulting from Dinotopia :. Journey to Chandara
This group portrait occurs in the phosphorescent caves in the Dinotopia book The World Beneath (1995). I wanted the colors to suggest a cool, magical atmosphere. With colors that range, it is impossible to mix all the intense heating up, even if you wanted to. But your eyes adapt to the color mood, it feels complete. Hot related colors appear quite warm in the context of the image. I notice that when I use the color wheel masking system, I am more careful to keep them clean brushes and push against the outside of the beach. Harmony and unity are a given, so that the effort goes into reaching for accents. It is the opposite of the mindset mix color when mixing color from a full palette of color tubes, where I always neutralizing mixtures.
To conclude, here is a table of Dinotopia: A Land Apart Time (1992), at the time when I developed this method. I have digitally rebuilt the range I used to close the complementary color scheme.
Blog Briggsy player provided the diagram at right. He treated the image through a filter created by P. Colantoni, and available for Windows users to couleur.org. What you are looking at the right of the table above is a computer visualization of the target actual color scheme.
As you can see, it corresponds roughly to the generation of mask, proof that the system gives us exactly the color scheme planned. The blue colors are very intense, almost touching the edge of the wheel. The rest of the colors are in a narrow band across the gray center to the lowest supplements.
I look forward to hearing how this method works for you, whether with traditional or digital techniques.
Tomorrow: Pinkwater Interpreted
