Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green (Hardcover)

by Michael Wilcox (Author) "In the late 1700's it seemed to many that the search for an answer to accurate color mixing had at last been found - the..." (more)
Key Phrases: Cerulean Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Sienna (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Based on his study of paint pigments, Wilcox found that grade school formulas for mixing colors don't work. Tossing out tradition, Wilcox effectively transforms color mixing from a process of chance to one of choice. Previous edition sold 30,000 copies. 480 color illustrations.

About the Author
Michael Wilcox has a widely varied background, including periods as a professional artist, a conservator of art works and an engineer. His research in art and design led to the book Blue & Yellow Don't Make Green followed by The Wilcox Guide to the Best Watercolor Paints, both of which led to many changes in the pigments used in artist grade paints. Wilcox also published The Artist's Guide to Selecting Colors, which shows how to select a suitable palette in all mediums--watercolors, oil paints, acrylics and more. He lives and continues his research and writing in Bristol, England. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: North Light Books; Rev Sub edition (September 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0891346228
• ISBN-13: 978-0891346227
• Product Dimensions: 11.5 x 8.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,007,726 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 45 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 (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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.

34 of 35 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.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Begining oil painter. What color paints should you buy...read this book first., January 27, 2006

By	Karen Malmgren (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

First off, read the book, buy the paint colors suggested, then start mixing and make your own color chart. Then decide if the book is worth it or not. If mixing colors has been a chore instead of a joy buy this book.

Like other reviewers, I saved lots of money and headaches using the principles in this book. No, it does not have pictures of pretty artwork. You provide the artwork. I thought I knew how to mix colors. I used acrylic paints and guessed at what I wanted. Now I know how to get what I want out of any paint media. It is the only book about mixing color you will need. Read on for more about the book.

Let me tell you as a beginner oil painter it was maddening to try and figure out what color paints to buy. I have checked out, borrowed and brought several books on oil painting and color over the last few months. It was very confusing on what type and color of oil paints to buy. Each painter in each book had their own colors and brands they used. When I finally got the money together to order my paints I spent all day trying to wade through the color chips on the Internet and the books that I had. Of course unless you have the paint color in front of you on a canvass, you can in no way or how figure out the true color of the paint your buying.

I was lucky to have come across the Colour Bias System (called the six color system which is confusing because I thought that was the old color wheel system) on another artist's website who was nice enough to provide a short explanation and tell what colors she used. Unfortunately the colors she suggested did not match up with the names of the water-soluble oil brands I was interested in using. I was very excited to learn how to get a pink instead of a coral, and how to get a true green and not a sap green or get a sap green if I wanted it. Still I had the problem of which colors to order.

After much digging around on the Internet I found Talen's website. They make H2o water soluble oils. It has listed the names of their primary and secondary paint colors for the Colour Bias System. The primary colors are equal to the colors in ink for a printer - cyan, magenta, and yellow. The term secondary is not used in the traditional sense of green, orange and purple but, the other yellow, red and blue to use with the Colour Bias System. I jumped on that information and ordered my paints from them just because now I knew what to order.

It was a leap of faith because the colors were not what other artist where saying to use. I did not order any greens, trusting to what I had read about the Colour Bias System. I ordered the two yellows, the two reds, and the two blues, plus white, and burnt umber.

I just finished my first oil painting and I am please to tell you the Colour Bias System works. I made my own greens and was more than please with how they turned out.

Now comes in the book Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green. For some reason Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green was always checked out of my local library and I just came a crossed it.

If I had read it from the first I would not have been so scared when I got my paints and saw the colors. I just about fainted. I thought I had made a big mistake until I started mixing paint for my own color chart. Now I could see how it all worked. Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green would have made it easier to figure out how all the colors interact. It is not a matter of warm or cool it is a matter of orange-red verses a violet-red and so forth.

The pages describing paint colors to use, their pigments, and how and why to keep you pigments as pure as you can keep them is priceless. The Colour Bias System color wheel in the book makes it easy at a glance to remember which colors have what underlying tint and what colors work with and against each other. I like the addition of the other color charts. It does not bother me that the color charts lean to watercolors. You should have seen the color book I checked out for oil paints. Ugly! I am mixing my oils described the way in the book with beautiful results. I love clear clean colors and am getting them with the lest expensive oils. No book that I have gotten has or can produce true color charts that match perfectly with original paints. The printing process just does not allow it.

I was just at the art department of one of the biggest universities in the nation. One class was on color and the students were making a color chart with oils. I did not see one example of a student's work that was not all muddied. Thousands of dollars for an education and I have learned more about color from this book than those students will in that class.

The reason I gave the book four instead of five stars is that it gets too technical with color absorption and reflection. It could have been explained in a simpler manner and the principle was over worked.