Book Review: Color Mixing Recipes For Watercolor

This book is a spiral bound hardcover. It's pretty thin at 48 pages but enough.

The colour recipes are presented in varying proportions of pigment and water. That's great in showing the subtle colour variations of various mixes. Most other books I've see just mix the colours 50 percent each. This book has a few examples with three colour mixes as well. The starting colours used are from the colour wheel.

In addition to the colour recipes, there are also value and intensity recipes. Unfortunately, only a few selected colours are used. The value recipes feature yellow, red and blue. The intensity recipes mixes complementary colours to give different earth tones.

The downside of the book is the author used too many starting colours. Just for yellow, you have Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Pale, Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Medium, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Naples Yellow, Lemon Yellow and Gamboge. That's eight yellow colours if you're counting. There's also no mention of the brand used.

There are some text on colour theory, all very elementary, but good as a starter guide. At the back are four pages on mixing portrait colours. It presents the general idea of creating skin tones but too few examples are given as application.

And finally, there's a detachable plastic sheet with mixing grids provided. It's cool but not necessary. Well, you can use your own palette for mixing so why mix on the piece of plastic?

In reality, the resulting mixes are just a reference point of what is possible. Having so many starting colours can get confusing. It's not such a big deal because the multiple colours listed already gives a general idea of what to pick. It's still helpful for that reason.

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