Oil Painter's Color Handbook: A Contemporary Guide to Color Mixing, Pigments, Palettes, and Harmony

Very useful guide to a successful painting.

Love the book content but delivery comes without any form of protective bubble wrap, 2-3 edges are dented and the book doesn't comes with any wrapper and seems like a rejected or return copy. In short no effort is taken to protect the item, hopeless!!!

Very good color book, explains when and how to mix oilcolor for a specific result, well explained and some nice pictures

This book is perfect for both beginners and the experienced painter. Even if you do not work with oil paints, you will definitely find this book insightful. I certainly wish this book existed decades ago when I had just started my painting journey! The print quality is fantastic. A book that focuses on color that certainly has paid extra attention to detail on how colors should be presented most accurately and with high-fidelity in print. Every page contains valuable information that is supplemented by relevant visual aid which makes it a super effective learning tool for art students (who are mostly visual learners). I especially love that the author does not subscribe to any one school of thought in particular when it comes to color theory/color palettes, but presents his readers with multiple perspectives instead; from various eras, with various historical contexts so that the reader is encouraged to decide for themselves how they wish to approach their own paintings with all that given information. An additional bonus is that the science of optics, and of color perception are both topics that are also mentioned which are often neglected in other oil painting manuals. Sometimes the beginner painter does not realise that their ability to perceive color and value is just as important as the ability to understand how color and value should be utilised — and this book acknowledges that importance. There were so many things I had to relearn, so many questions that were raised during my painting journey and this book has finally provided the answers I was looking for that wasn’t available anywhere else previously. Color/pigment is such a complex subject and this book also goes into detail about the historicity of what we have gotten correctly and incorrectly in the past regarding its unique characteristics, chemical makeup, and properties. It is like having the most up-to-date version of what we now know about pigment properties so far — which is exactly what I was looking for: the contemporary color (oil painting) compendium.

This was a great book to learn more about mixing color for painting. Nice hard cover book with quality pages. I read through the book in less than a week cause I didn't want to put it down. The first few chapters were a bit more about color history and some things that I already knew, but once you get to chapter 5, it gets really good and had information I haven't seen presented anywhere else about color mixing. I'm not sure if this author has any other books out there, but would buy more if he did. There are a lot of nice photos throughout the book and great color wheels, especially helpful if you use Gamblin Oil paints since some of the detailed color wheels plot the gamblin pigments on the wheel and shows where they are in relation to all other colors in the paint line. I am probably going to go back through the book now that I finished it and write down all the highlights of great information into a notebook to keep near my easel.!