Artist Toolbox: Color: A practical guide to color and its uses in art

by Walter Foster Creative Team

Artist  Color explains how color captures mood and helps communicate meaning, as well as how to use color to create personal, expressive works of art.

In Artist  Color, painters will learn how to create impactful work with an understanding of basic color theory. Topics include the color wheel , hue , saturation , value , temperature , relativity , color relationships , and color mixing . You will learn how color captures mood and to communicate meaning with nothing more than color as you create personal, expressive works of art. Step-by-step projects and accessible technique demonstrations show color theory in action, making this book a useful reference for any beginning artist's library.

The Artist Toolbox series provides easy-to-use reference guides for beginning and aspiring artists. While many instructional art books gloss over important concepts, focusing instead on how to replicate a piece of art, the Artist Toolbox series breaks down the whats, whens, whys, and hows of each relevant tool or technique, clearly demonstrating its purpose and how to employ it to achieve the desired effects.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

112 pages, Paperback

Published December 5, 2017

Reviews

[Lili · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, along with its sibling (Artist’s Toolbox: Painting Tools & Materials) are great textbook style books for those just starting traditional art. If you are new to painting and wanting to learn the basics for a bunch of media and not just one particular style of painting so you can experiment and find what kind of paint works best for you, then giving this book a read is a good idea. It includes useful information about color blending, color theory, and how various paints behave as well as also includes painting demonstration.

This book is very basic, if you have any experience at all with painting it will seem like a rehash and not present anything new, but if you have never picked up a paintbrush then the information is a good beginner, however you will eventually need to hunt down more advanced and specialized books/tutorials, so I would honestly advise going after a book that is a little more inclusive if you are serious about learning to paint. Though if you are just curious if painting is something you are actually interested in then this book is a good choice.

[ToriCoStudio · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the sort of handy reference book that is ideal for total beginners stepping into the realm of art for the first time. More advanced artists may pick up a titbit here and there, but it will be of limited use to them.
You can find an in depth look at this book at my website, Tori & Co. Studio
*I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

[Critterbee❇ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting book to look at, but I am certain that the electronic version that I am looking at cannot have the final formatting for the book. Text was extremely small and there was not a lot of it. The photographs of the color hues and mixes were interesting. Overall, the publication seemed like a basic text book for beginning painters.

*eARC Netgalley*

[Nami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginner friendly guide. I like how no nonsense it is. Learned some cool techniques that I am excited to try.

[Books In Brogan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really good book with very detailed explanations of color uses in multiple types of mediums.  I also like the step by step instructions on different paintings some of which I have already used to practice. This review was originally posted on Books In Brogan

[Tiffany W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is like a handy reference for beginners who want to learn the basics step by step, I have to admit that it is useful for beginners like me ------ but the page design and formatting really, really need some changes and improvements. It's a book about art, so I was expecting a book comfortable to read and perhaps fun and easy to understand. However, the current formatting makes it look like a textbook with way-too-small font sizes. I do like the cover, though. It's the reason why I requested for this book. I'm not disappointed overall, but I just think there are much to be improved.
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Overall: 3/5
Cover: 5/5
Formatting: 1/5
Writing: 4/5
Page design: 2/5
Appealing: 3/5

[Janus the Erudite Artist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like this book was made because of people like me. Those who struggle with color combinations. Working as a graphic designer we have palettes the work in certainty in terms of color combinations appealing for the web and digital work that I kind of slacked off in terms of color experimentation. Whenever I feel like one color doesn’t work with the rest, it was so easy to change it. Hence the slacking.

You can’t exactly do that with painting especially when you work with watercolors. Glazing can only do so much to help make your pieces look like you meant them to appear as such when in truth you used the wrong color.
This book has been very helpful. I often play it safe and use the colors I already know work well with each other, so having another insight towards colors allowed me to take on color mixing more valiantly.

Much like the other Artist’s Toolbox book that I reviewed, this book also includes an activity section where you can adapt all that you read and learned from the previous chapters. The painting I created here is the first project (contributed by Maury Aaseng) you can follow through and create your own version.