Living Colors: The Definitive Guide to Color Palettes

by Augustine Hope, Margaret Walch

Living Colors has proven to be a perennially popular guide to color for designers, artists, and color enthusiasts. Now reissued with a striking new cover, this indispensable double spiral-bound volume displays 80 classic color schemes from art and design history. From architecture and apparel to paintings and pottery, Living Colors draws on exemplary work in a variety of media and across a range of historical periods. Each scheme is individually presented, profiled, and illustrated in a handy gatefold format with representative four-color images and accurate color-bar reference for matching against the project at hand. From the dominant reds of ancient Egyptian ochers to the psychedelic palettes of the sixties, Living Colors will inspire professionals and laypeople alike in choosing colors for a multitude of uses.

Genres: Art

162 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2002

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are interested in color theory, and how colors have been created by artists over the centuries, this book is a good primer. Although the cover design of this book suggests an easy read, this book was actually quite technical and geared more towards artists than the layman. Who knew ultramarine was created from stones from a single mine in Afghanistan? Who knew Pucci colors and patterns were derived from his underwater dives? Interesting stuff--but at times it was difficult to imagine the differences between colors when they weren't pictured. They attempted to display the palette with a separate painter's strip on the right of each entry, but, ironically, the color in these was often "off". I actually wish this book was a bit more exhaustive. Giving snapshots of color palettes in different cultures and different eras as represented by a single item or a single painting is tough to pull off. I learned a lot though, and would recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in the field.