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Book Review, © Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
This book makes a person think. It was written for artists, and is about mixing colors. The book explains why artists sometimes don't get the colors that they intended. When you mix blue and yellow, you sometimes get an interesting greenish brown.
Blue paint actually contains all of the colors, but mostly blue, with plenty of green and violet, and not much of the other colors. Well, some blues contain more violet than they do green. And some yellows contain more orange than they do green. When you mix such blues and yellows, you will get a kind of brown. So, the authors categorize primary colors into blues that lean toward violet, blues that favor green, yellows that favor green, yellows that favor orange, etc. With this adjustment, mixing of colors becomes much easier.
The book encourages you to familiarize yourself with the various paints, by experimenting with various intensities and mixings, to determine just what colors each of them favors.
I was building a plastic model airplane once, when I was a child. And I needed to mix olive drab. I looked in the instructions, and it told me to mix Testor's black and red. This made no sense, but it worked. Apparently the black contained plenty of green or blue, while the red was an orangish red.
This book is in hardcover. To order this book, click Amazon.com (goes directly to this book).