Complete Colour Mixing Guide || John Barber

As far as I can see, this owes a huge debt to the author’s previous Colour Wheel series of books. However, where those were a new approach to the whole colour mixing thing, this one bears every resemblance to all the many other books of its type, the only real difference being the layout of the colour charts.

What you get is a series of radiating arms working out from the central base colour and mixed in decreasing proportions with eight other colours. As a colour guide, it’s confusing because you only get one set of mixes on each page, so you have to get though a whole lot of often similar charts in order to find the shade you want. Other books, which tend to work in blocks of colour, seem somehow easier to follow, or at least less intimidating.

The other thing is that this is an all-media collection: you get acrylics, oils and watercolour all in the same book and there are precious few example paintings, so no real points of reference. If you want a book of colour mixes, there are plenty of others out there (many also from Search Press), so it’s worth shopping around.

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The Pastel Colour Wheel Book || John Barber

The format of this series is becoming familiar and the idea is that you can use the 8 projects, which include full-colour step by step demonstrations, in conjunction with the colour wheel built into the front cover. Yes, it’s a gimmick, but sometimes gimmicks concentrate the mind and, with the emphasis here on relatively simple combinations of colours, you can explore the possibilities of the medium, freed from at least one layer of complication.

If there’s a gripe, it’s that the paper chosen makes the illustrations look dull which is, it has to be said, a neat trick when the medium is the pure colour of pastel.

	The Pastel Colour Wheel Book with John Barber

The Oil Paint Colour Wheel Book || John Barber

The basic principle of this ingenious series is by now established. The cover includes a simple colour wheel and then the body of the text provides a series of eight demonstrations based around specific colour combinations. Neither of these things is original on its own, but the idea of putting them together is really quite inspired and provides a way in to what is for many a tricky subject.

The original watercolour volume used a trick paper that was supposed to mimic watercolour paper, not altogether successfully, but neither of its successors has gone down that path. However, the illustrations in both do seem rather dark, here to the point almost of murkiness and I do wonder whether there is a reproduction issue.

That aside, the series is a bold and largely successful attempt to provide a way through the maze that is colour mixing and is to be welcomed for that.

	The Oil Paint Colour Wheel Book with John Barber

The Acrylic Paint Colour Wheel Book || John Barber

This is the sister volume to the previous one on watercolour and, if it follows the success of that, it’s a fair bet we’ll be raising quite a family.

Most of what I said previously applies here. It’s a gimmick, but sometimes gimmicks make you sit up and suddenly understand what has previously been a problem subject. I still think that the illustrations are a bit flat, even though the trick paper has gone. Nevertheless, there’s a good variety of subject matter and the medium is used in both impasto and as a wash, so you get to see most of the techniques you’ll want.

I don’t think this is a book you’d buy at any price, but equally, it’s certainly not a tenner wasted.

	The Acrylic Paint Colour Wheel Book with John Barber

The Watercolour Wheel Book || John Barber

OK, this is a gimmick. It’s a book with a colour wheel on the front cover and a series of projects inside that are based on the mixing combination you can get from playing trains.

Actually, before we go any further, I have a couple of reservations. First up, the paper the book’s printed on: I think it’s supposed to look like a NOT watercolour paper, but it has the effect of making the illustrations look dull, the colours flat. Second, the actual quality of the artwork. Put it this way, let’s just say I’ve seen better.

But… But none of that matters because, although this is a gimmick, it’s a completely fresh way of looking at the whole problem of colour mixing and it might be just the thing that makes the whole tricky subject understandable for you. A friend of mine says that, if you want to call yourself an artist, colour mixing should be instinctive. However, the fact of the matter is that plenty of people one certainly wouldn’t call incompetent do struggle with it and the are a lot of books out there that sell in the sort of quantities that suggest it’s an ongoing struggle.

Will this be the one that stops the sales of all the others? Well, maybe not, but it’s an honest and imaginative attempt and, at less than a tenner, no more that the price of a colour wheel on its own, so worth a punt, I’d say.

Search Press 2008
£9.99

	The Watercolour Wheel Book with John Barber

Windsor & Newton Colour Mixing Guide: Acyrlics || John Barber

This isn’t the first colour mixing guide and intuition says it probably won’t be the last. They come in all shapes and sizes from fat tomes with pages and pages of colour swatches to the Michael Wilcox ones you paint in yourself.

The first thing you’re going to notice about this one is that it’s the proverbial slim volume. So it’s not much use, right? Wrong: it’s compact and it doesn’t bother with variations of mix, tint and hue that are unlikely to disturb you unless you want to start painting the sort of exotic flower that became extinct about 5 million years ago. I’ve seen all these guides and, believe me, I’m not joking.

What you get is a series of colour wheels based on 25 colours from the Winsor and Newton range. Not generics, specifics. If you don’t use W&N, the book will be of more limited use, though you may still be able to make sense of it. If you do, there’s no “nearest, dammit” matching, what you see is what you get. (Or, more correctly, what you’ve got is what you see.)

The base colour is placed in the middle of the wheel and then eight arms radiate out from it, showing how the colour appears in 8 tints of mixes with other colours, themselves based on specific groups: yellows, reds, purples, blues, greens and neutrals. If you’re looking for a specific colour match, it’s a quick, reliable and fairly easy way of finding it. If, on the other hand, you just want to know how specific colours behave in mixes, then a browse through will teach you quite a lot. It’s not an instructional book as such (Tony Paul’s How to Mix and Use Colour is probably the best of these), but there’s a lot you can pick up by just leafing through.

A whisker under £10 seems like a lot of money for 64 quite small pages, but it’s a hardback, so it’ll stand up to a lot of the carrying-round it’s going to get and it’s also spiral bound so that it lays flat without having to be sat on, which is a highly desirable quality in a book you’ll be wanting to use with both hands free to paint. And anyway, when the discount merchants have got at it, it’s barely more than the cost of 2 cups of designer skinny decaf latte, so what are you complaining about?

First published 2007
£9.99

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