Book Review: Artists’ Master Series: Color and Light

Artists’ Master Series from publisher 3dtotal Publishing are advanced books that cover the fundamentals of making art. These are books for artists who want the extra knowledge to bring their art to the next level. Color and Light was published in 2022 and is the first book. Composition & Narrative is the second book. The third book Perspective and Depth will be released in June 2024.

This book is a large format 388-page hardcover.

As the title suggests, this book focuses on colour and light. This book is an incredible resource that covers almost everything that you can think of when using light and shadow.

Click on the image for a larger view to look at the contents.

Actually, the book's description is quite accurate so let me just repeat that here:

Expert Charlie Pickard goes beyond the basics to explore color theory. Advanced topics include color hierachy, value keying, color constancy, and exposure. Discover how hue, value, and chroma enable you to create, mix, and control color. Next, he moves on to the vast subject of light. Using highly illustrated examples, complex concepts of shading, form, depth, and textures are decoded. Three essential material types – matte, specular, and transparent – are analysed, instilling confidence to paint and object you encounter.

Respected artists Djamila Knopf, Guweiz, and Nathan Fowkes then guide you through extensive tutorials, specially commissioned to explore their use of color and light. Each artist breaks down their process, discussing the decisions made at every date to achieve striking colors, believeable lighting, immersive atmospheres, and realistic surface. All three artists work in contrasting ways, resulting in a wide range of approaches to putting theory into practice. Further insight is provided by the gallery artists, also experts in their fields, representing a range of styles, skills and mediums.

This unique opportunity to study color and light so extensively offers a deeper mastery of the subject, and a single, comprehensive reference at your fingertips.

Here's an interview with Charlie Pickard

The proportion of the book that covers theory, hands-on tutorial and gallery pages with insight is 50-40-10 percent. The gallery pages has more tips from Beatrice Blue, Dibujante Nocturno, Simone Grünewald, Iraville, Devin Elle Kurtz, Asia Ladowska and Pernille Ørum.

3dtotal Publishing has actually published a book called Art Fundamentals (2nd edition): Light, shape, color, perspective, depth, composition & anatomy in 2013. There is definitely some overlapping content even though the artists and writers are different. The main difference is Color and Light is noticeably more in-depth since it covers the two subjects in 388 pages compared to Art Fundamentals that covers more subjects in 288-pages. So even if you have the earlier book, it's still worth the money to get this new book.

If you like this book, you may also want to check out Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.com.au | Amazon.co.jp

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.