Walter Foster Publishing 1,500 Color Mixing Recipes for Oil, Acrylic & Watercolor: Achieve precise when painting landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and more (Volume 1)

if you are an artist , u NEED this book , it has every color mix possible , no need to google color mixes anymore

Perfect for finding the right shades for oil painting.

It’s a nice book for color recipes. Am happy with book and delivery service

Will definitely come in very handy.

The one book that was missing from my art library that no-one - either amateur or professional should be without. From a list of roughly 20 colours it shows you how to mix any colour you can think of, and I do mean any colour, for either landscapes, portraits or just about any type of painting. The section on colour mixing for portraits is fantastic; think of a skin colour, eye colour, hair colour etc. and you are given the highlight, shade, tone, or anything else you may need either side of that colour to create lifelike portraits, how to paint hair to give it depth and realism, how to paint eyes to get that watery just cried look with a glint in it.The section on landscapes shows you any colour you can think of that you might see from a daybreak to a storm cloud laden, windswept seascape storm, to a rose and lilac evening glow in a peaceful lake side mountainous cabin. Colours for plants, trees, fur, scales, in fact any texture you want to create is also listed.I can only describe this book as absolutely fantastic - buy it. Its what every artist needs, even if they don't realise they do.

This book would be perfect if it wasn’t for the fact that it was originally published in 1994! I’ve tried my best to find alternative colours to the discontinued ones in this book or recipes to mix them but some just aren’t doable, even if they were it’d mean adding more colours to the recipe which would take away the simplicity that this book is trying to achieve because you’d have to experiment more with ratio.Some colours are available from Gumbacher (which could be what the author refers to) which is way too expensive and can be difficult to source in the UK.

Pros - good quality paper, large paint samplesCons - really hard to work out colours used by author. Spent ages on the internet working out his list of acrylic colours. He uses ‘permanent blue’ which does not seem to exist. Would have expected to have a cross refers to the standard p colours or at least for him to say which manufacturers range he was using. He also doesn’t point out that different manufacturers use different mixes to get their colours so you won’t necessarily get the same results. The same goes for his mixing proportions that you are supposed to use to get the exact colours in the book. Colour grouping makes it hard to find colours and lacks a range of greys.Not recommended, disappointed.

There is a reason watercolours are mentioned last in the title; although they are covered in the skin tone section, the landscape section ignores them completely. I'd have given 3 stars, even so, except the recipes for assorted animal and plant colours are also almost exclusively North American. As an english watercolourist I can only muster a disappointed 2 stars and a warning for those coming from a similar grounding. I'm looking for an alternative.

I was pleased with this, it is value for money, and as a spiral book, very easy to use, would add that I am a novice artist so other artists may differ, but I just wanted an idea of what colours to mix with what, and found it very useful.