Color Mixing Recipes for Watercolor: Mixing Recipes for More Than 450 Color Combinations [リング製本]

I've been an artist all my life and yet never really tackled watercolors.
So, since colors are the hardest part of watercolor painting, especially greens, I wanted a book that I could just glance at and have a recipe for the color I need. Sometimes you can end up with mud, or a color that clashes with your intention of the color you have in your head.
This book really helps me to just turn a page...pick a color I want and use the right combos to get the tone and hue I need.
It's a great tool. I highly recommend it for a beginner or anyone just wanting a color reference at their fingertips. It's a lot more time saving than making your own.

Bought this book because the author's concept of mixing colors seemed interesting. After all, there's this neat grid to use so you mix the right percentage of colors. Here's my problem. As the book states, "each recipe indicates a specific Water Level." Yep, the author says "specific." Really? From the book: Level one requires the "greatest amount of water," level 2 "slightly less water," level 3 requires "less water than level 2" ....wow, real "specific." So is the author's idea of level 1 a drop of water from an eye dropper or a teaspoon of water? And through the Color Recipes, the author specifies water levels of 2.5, which I guess is slightly less water than level 2 but slightly more water than level 3 - whatever that may be. Pretty book if you want to look at colors. Fairly worthless if you want to learn to mix colors.

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.

(There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)