Books on Color

I’ve had a lot of problems with color harmony over the years and these two books are the ones I keep going back to.

“Mastering Color” by Vicki McMurry – some good exercises for working with color and insight into handling color temperatures.

“Color and Light” by James Gurney – don’t let the dinosaur on the cover throw you. This guy is one of the top illustrators in the country and he is also an excellent plein air painter. The book is broken into 2-3 page articles on various lighting effects in the studio and in nature, and how light effects color.

Gurney has an interesting approach to color harmonies. He uses gamut masks. Basically a cut-out of a polygon, like a triangle, that is placed over a color wheel to identify a harmonic color arrangement.  The masks limit the amount of saturated color and show which neutrals will go well with them. You can find a series of articles on gamuts in his blog online http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2011/09/part-1-gamut-masking-method.html .  (You can also try out gamut masking at http://www.livepaintinglessons.com/gamutmask.php .) The online gamut masks are useful when working out a color scheme for a studio painting.

The traditional color wheel is great for color mixing. But I think the complements of the Munsell wheel have more visual spark. Gurney uses an extension of the traditional color wheel that includes cyan, blue, magenta, red, yellow, and green because most of his work must display well on the screen.

Most books recommend a limited palette because you are almost guaranteed to create harmonious colors that way. I find that too restricting for me. So I’ve come up with a compromise that works for me. I choose 3-4 colors to work with exclusively during the first stages of painting. This gives me a harmonious base to work with. It also gives me something to compare against during the later stages when I start using my entire palette, which consists of about 12 colors.