Colour Demystified

Praise

Booklist -  Starred Review – August 2021

Non-professional artistic color education starts and stops with the color wheel, primary andsecondary hues, and complementary and analogous colors. Award-winning UK watercolorist Collins (Painting Flowers with Impact in Watercolour, 2005) changes the conversation by delving into all the different ways hues, shades, and tones can play together. She explores topics like palettes, interactions, and glazing in detail with the intention of inspiring new thinking and experimentation, and furthers her cause with several different gallery-type examples, 16 worksheets that showcase techniques (painting a free hand tulip, for example), and seven step-by-step projects—still life with tulips, carte postale birds, even just one leaf. To amplify the book’s title, she includes “demystifying” sidebars, observations, and recommendations that strengthen the artistic process, such as “the look of yellow differs in the center of green and red versusorange and green.” A book with an aesthetic sensibility that more than lives up to the title. Includes a glossary. – Barbara Jacobs