Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green [Paperback]

Michael Wilcox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2002

Michael Wilcox is the specialist publishers of books, courses, workbooks, videos and CDs covering all aspects of colour mixing and use, artist's paints, pigments and painting techniques.With sales of more than 400,000 copies, this has become the standard reference book in its field.The only book ever published which explains what happens when colours are combined and how to mix them quickly, accurately and without waste.For more than 200 years the world has accepted that red, yellow and blue - the artists' primaries - give new colours when mixed. And for more than 200 years artists have been struggling to mix colours on this basis..This book has changed the way that artists and all who use colour think about colour mixing. By unravelling the many ambiguities and myths inherent in the established way of working, Michael Wilcox has transformed colour mixing from a haphazard affair into a thinking process.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Michael Wilcox has a varied background, including periods as a professional artist, a conservator of art works and an engineer, which in turn led to a study of light physics in relation to the needs of the artist. His studies led to the book Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green. Published in English, Dutch, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, this book has changed the way that countless artists now mix and use their colours. This publication was followed by The Wilcox Guide to the Finest Watercolour Paints which has led to many of the changes in the pigments used in artists' paints today. Specialist mixing palettes, workbooks and courses were then developed and the School of Colour was formed on an international basis.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: School of Color (March 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0967962870
• ISBN-13: 978-0967962870
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #162,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Presents a system that works, May 25, 2006

By 

Marina Michaels (Santa Rosa, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green (Paperback)

Before reading this book, I already had a good basis in the basic color theory: the primaries, secondaries, tertiaries, and the ideas of complementary and analogous colors. I even knew that mixing complementaries would result in browns to blacks.

However, I hadn't learned how to apply that knowledge in the way this book presents it. As a result, sometimes I would mix colors that were muddy or shaded, and I didn't know why. This book explains it all so clearly and so simply that you are sure to retain and use the information with ease.

In summary, this book tells you how to mix any color you want, reliably and with confidence, just using six colors, two of each primary color. Everyone who understands color knows that yellows fall on a range from almost-orange to almost green, blues fall on a range from almost-green to almost-purple, and reds fall on a range from almost-purple to almost orange. The fact that these colors are in a range means that, when you mix them, you will get different results depending on where the colors fall in that range.

This book tells how to determine where a color falls in those ranges, and also gives you a clear and understandable way of knowing what to expect when mixing different primaries. The system works.

One nice thing is that, with the price of paints today, if you need to, you can only purchase six colors and you will pretty much be set. Accordingly, this book recommends that you purchase those six colors, two from each primary, with one color each that tends toward each end of each primary (a green-yellow and an orange-yellow, for example).

Of course, you can always buy a larger range of colors, but armed with the information in this book, when you do so, you can confidently purchase and mix those colors and have a good idea of what the results will be each time.

If you are impatient with theory, you can skip all the stuff about reflected light, additive versus subtractive color mixing, color perception in the brain, and so on; it may or may not all be true, and is anyway only Mr. Wilcox's theory about *why* his system works. Instead, if you are impatient, just read the juicy stuff about the colors themselves. It will definitely improve your ability to mix colors well. If I were making a list of "must have" books in an artist's reference library, this would be one of them.

52 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Let's get something straight about this color theory book., August 19, 2001

By 

The Artist "The Artist" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green (Hardcover)

This is a book that is good for several kinds of readers, in my opinion:

1) For readers who want to use it as color references, the book provides a considerable number of color charts. Readers can use them as a guide in the mixing of colors (oil, water colors, or others).

2) For readers who like "color formulas", color mixtures presented in the book are of big help and a good start.

3) For readers who like to get to the bottom of things, the author presents rather in-depth discussions on color theories. Briefly speaking, there is a major difference between the mixing of light of different colors (i.e. mixing of visible light of different wavelengths. Remember, visible light is simply a spectrum of electromagnetic signals, characteristic by their frequencies, hence, their wavelengths), and the mixing of color pigments. While the resultant color obtained as a result of the former obeys the "additive mixing rule", the resultant color obtained by mixing of the latter (color pigments) follows the "subtractive mixing rule". My rough analogy of these two rules is that "additive mixing rule" (the mixing of light) may be considered "What you see is what you get - a.k.a. WYSIWYG"; meanwhile, the "subtractive mixing rule" (the mixing of color pigments) may be considered "What you see is what you DON'T get" - a.k.a WYSIWYDG".

Commonly, scientists such as physicists and chemists are more familiar with the additive mixing rule, since this is of common use in measurement techniques such as colorimetry or photometry. On the other hand, artists and painters who understand pigments and color mixing are usually more familiar with the "subtractive mixing rule".

It is also worth mentioning that the "subtractive mixing rule" is sometimes referred to as the "subtractive system" of color mixing. This system is NOT at all new, nor is it presented solely in this book. Instead, readers may find it discussed in other color theory books as well.

To sum it up, this is a good reference book for artists at any level; and speaking with a scientist within, I believe there are nothing wrong, nor are there any lies presented in this book, regarding the theory presented in it. In my opinion, it is a decent book in the mixing of color pigments. Therefore, it deserves an accurate review from both viewpoints, those of a scientist and an artist.

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

59 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yellow and Blue SOMETIMES make green..., February 17, 2005

By 

Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green (Paperback)

Don't let the title fool you, sometimes Yellow and Blue DO make Green (just like on Sesame Street and in that commercial for zip-locking plastic bags.) But depending on what paint pigment you use, yellow and blue can give you gray or some other shade. It's all to do with how the pigments are balanced (greenish, reddish, bluish) and how they reflect light in a mixture.

The book has you do a number of swatch painting exercises (for watercolor) and these are fun to do. The first involves using cerulean blue (a greenish blue) and cadmium red, a yellowish-red. You get shades of gray. Nice ones, mind you, but if you thought you'd get PURPLE from this mix, well, no way, Jose.

I did about 20 of the exercises and found it quite useful when I subsequently did a painting involving a lot of masonry in the picture. I used a limited paletted of cerulean, cadmium red and a brownish yellow and found I got a nice gray for the masonry, but the yellow (Nickel Azo Yellow) did NOT work well.

In summary, if you paint watercolor, this is an essential text to keep you learning about color mixing and what works, what doesn't. I highly recommend this to amateurs and experts alike.