– Customer review on 19/08/2009

This is a marvelous book to develop colour knowledge beyond the basics. The author is an excellent colourist and her approach to colour and it's combinations is very innovative. Throughout the book she presents her colour theories and encourages experimentation with your chosen media (paints or other art media or fabrics) and she explains how to develop a card system to store your colour experiments for future reference. She covers colour and its terminology and the elements and principles of design before moving on to the seven colour contrasts: hue, value, intensity, temperature, complements, quantity and perceptual. The next chapter covers creating colour harmony. She presents 8 different harmony triads with a colour wheel, tips and examples for each over a double page spread. Next she covers possible palettes with 2 split-primary examples and 4 full spectrum possibilities. The chapter on selecting colour schemes covers monochromatic, analogous, complementary, triads, tetrads and some unusual variations on these. There is a chapter devoted to showing how 7 colourists working in different media approach various artworks. In the final chapter the author concludes with some further encouragement to experiment with how light affects colour in your art, try different schemes, choosing palettes, developing your own colour style, achieving unity and developing colour awareness and intuition.

The book is hard cover and spiral bound so lays flat nicely while you are using it when painting. The pages are full of beautiful artworks by many artists in a wide range of media: paints, mixed media, collage and quilts, as examples of the concepts the author is conveying. The information in this book takes anyone interested in colour well beyond the basics, gives a comprehensive understanding of how to use colour, shows examples of what is possible and encourages exploration.