World Famous Comics: Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green
Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green
By: Michael Wilcox Publisher: School of Color Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: School of Color Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 200 Publication Date: March 10, 2002
Product Description: Artists, designers, printers, and crafters alike would agree that the selection and use of color is of great importance to their work. And yet, a great deal of misunderstanding surrounds color mixing. Michael Wilcox offers a total reassessment for the principles underlying color and color usage. This revised edition of the original Blue & Yellow Don't Make Green--the first major breakaway from the traditional concepts of the three primary colors: red, blue and yellow--contains more than 80 pages of new information on the transparency and makeup of colors and includes many new color mixing swatches.
On the path to color enlightenment..... I'm a sorter. I organize. I put things in boxes. Color doesn't want to go in boxes. Or categories, or areas, or mix well with others. It drove me nuts. Sometimes it was too bright and sometimes it was so dull it hurt like a toothache. This book began my understanding of why color does what it does. Michael Wilcox put together a dictionary which unravels for me the complexities of color and the how's and why's of hue, tint, and shade. He has broken down the chemical compounds of color in an understandable way and broken the secret codes of the paint manufacturers so that you and I can read the labels. Now we can purchase exactly what colors we want and either mix our own exact shades and tints or get the individual paint supplier's.
Ever wonder why you sweat in your sister's bathroom and not in your's? Her's is painted peach and your's is blue. Why that works, now, is someone else's story. And then there's black. Who knew there were so many different kinds of black? There's a black to fit each room in your house, made out of every color in the room in which it is to reside. And it matches perfectly. Amazing.
Now when I see two shades of lemon yellow I don't see yellow at all. I see either greenish yellow or brownish yellow and refer to them as green or brown. It's very tricky to see the primary hue over the secondary color anymore. Huh. I guess that's what an educated color sense sees nowadays. Never thought about it before. Three cheers for Michael Wilcox and PO3, PV15, PY3 and others! I get true colors every time.
18th century color theory this book gets more interest for its paradoxical (and inaccurate) title than for its contents, which are straight out of 18th century color theory and painting practice. for a review of this book and links to background materials, google "wilcox handprint" and click the first few links. i should add that some of the positive reviews posted here appear verbatim at the wilcox "school of colour" website and are therefore just viral marketing.
the quiller book "color choices" and the hilary page book "color right from the start" are excellent resources. this book is heavy on simplification, routine, and computer generated color samples.
Finally - colors make sense. This ia a fabulous book for any artist or aspiring artist. From a pallet of only 12 colors he show you the hows and especially the whys of mixing just about any color you want. Especially good for water colorists. You'll never be mixing "mud" again.
Ben Albert
Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green I am very pleased with this book. It is filled with valuable information for the painter which is presented in terms that are easy to comprehend. I am currently working my way through the exercises and by doing so can already see where the book has been worth every penny. As someone well acquainted with "mud" I think the book will save me a fortune in paint down the road. I wouldn't hesitate for a minute to recommend this book to anyone interested in painting whether new to painting or an experienced artist. We can all learn something new from it. In fact, I think it would make a great text book.
Presents a system that works Before reading this book, I already had a good basis in the basic color theory: the primaries, secondaries, tertiaries, and the ideas of complementary and analogous colors. I even knew that mixing complementaries would result in browns to blacks.
However, I hadn't learned how to apply that knowledge in the way this book presents it. As a result, sometimes I would mix colors that were muddy or shaded, and I didn't know why. This book explains it all so clearly and so simply that you are sure to retain and use the information with ease.
In summary, this book tells you how to mix any color you want, reliably and with confidence, just using six colors, two of each primary color. Everyone who understands color knows that yellows fall on a range from almost-orange to almost green, blues fall on a range from almost-green to almost-purple, and reds fall on a range from almost-purple to almost orange. The fact that these colors are in a range means that, when you mix them, you will get different results depending on where the colors fall in that range.
This book tells how to determine where a color falls in those ranges, and also gives you a clear and understandable way of knowing what to expect when mixing different primaries. The system works.
One nice thing is that, with the price of paints today, if you need to, you can only purchase six colors and you will pretty much be set. Accordingly, this book recommends that you purchase those six colors, two from each primary, with one color each that tends toward each end of each primary (a green-yellow and an orange-yellow, for example).
Of course, you can always buy a larger range of colors, but armed with the information in this book, when you do so, you can confidently purchase and mix those colors and have a good idea of what the results will be each time.
If you are impatient with theory, you can skip all the stuff about reflected light, additive versus subtractive color mixing, color perception in the brain, and so on; it may or may not all be true, and is anyway only Mr. Wilcox's theory about *why* his system works. Instead, if you are impatient, just read the juicy stuff about the colors themselves. It will definitely improve your ability to mix colors well. If I were making a list of "must have" books in an artist's reference library, this would be one of them.
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