simonist:

[This is off one of Neonnoodle’s posts from SomethingAwful, but it’s such a useful technique I wanna repost it here.]

Here’s one approach I’ve found, which is based on the gamut mask idea, but a little simpler and tuned to working in PS:

1. Start with three color swatches: a red/magenta of some kind, a yellow of some kind, and a blue/cyan of some kind. They don’t have to be crayon-box “red” “yellow” “blue” — the nice thing here is that you can decide how warm or cool you want the overall cast of the color to be. So, for instance, you could pick a cool yellow, a purplish red, and an electric blue. Or a very orange red, a warm yellow, and a greenish blue. Or even substitute green for blue. Experiment here. Even colors which are completely hideous will mellow out, so don’t be afraid.

 

2. Draw your 3 swatches in a tight triangle so that they are bumping up against each other in the center. Then use a smudge tool with scattering on for a blender, and blend the edges of each color into each other:

 
(I also had pressure set so I wouldn’t blend too hard, but that’s optional. Scattering is the important one.)

3. Now you have a neutralized color wheel. The closer toward the center you go, the more neutral the palette becomes:

 
 
 

(here they all are against 50% gray)
 

4. Now you can start establishing the values for the colors you might want to use. Use the L (Lightness) with Lab sliders on the color panel (even if you’re using RGB or CMYK color for your document) because “Brightness” (HSB) is a load of horseshit.

 

5. By the way, here’s what the color wheels from those other colors from the beginning would look like:

 

And one other with more swatches:

This is so neat, you can take the ugliest red/blue/yellow combination possible and get a really nice, cohesive palette from it with this technique.

reblogging cause i know a lot of artists follow me and they might get a kick out of playing around with this

p.s. USE A TEXTURED BRUSH TO SMUDGE, it works far, far better than a solid circle. I don’t know what Neondoodle used but I tired with the watercolour brushes I abuse constantly nowadays and it works pretty good.