Customer Reviews

Color Mixing the Van Wyk Way: A Manual for Oil Painters

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You will appreciate and use this book as a color reference, and as a philosophy explaining why we do paint and view things the way we do. The author Helen Van Wyk, in the introduction shares her invaluable experiences that she learned while studying with the Master M. A. Rasko in the 1940's. The articles he wrote are no longer in print and can't be found so she shares some of his fundamental approaches to painting here. A most important and valuable learning experience for me, was how the six colors of the spectrum and their admixtures, vary in three ways, in tone intensity and hue. In other words; brown, tan and orange are variants of yellow in regards to the tone, intensity and hue that you mix the colors. She uses the example of a Yellow Lemon on a table on a darker toned background, and you might describe the colors as brown,rust,tan or woody but it is actually a yellow lemon on a yellow table on a yellow background. Buy this Book if you want to enjoy the colorful world around you!

I wouldn't call this a bad book, but as a self-taught painter, I didn't find that it added any value to my studies. It discusses basic colors, one color at a time. So one chapter will be on Burnt Sienna, which is great if you're painting an entire painting in Burnt Sienna. If the book were more unified, i.e. it went through all the colors individually, then showed you how they work in tandem to create a painting, it would be much more useful.