https://iscc.org/%5B/URL%5D Inter-Society Color Council Sorry, I don’t know why the link isn’t working. Pull up Inter-Society Color Council on your browser. These guys do nothing but study color: scientists, artists, philosophers (Goethe, for example)

“The history of the Council dates to its founding in 1931, with the goal of advancing the knowledge of color as it relates to art, science, and industry. Each of these fields enriches the others, furthering the general objective of color education.”

Have fun!

Good, good. It’s a great website with tons and tons and tons of information. You can also join the webinars, for a fee, of course. Hope you find the info you hope for.

I’m an amateurish color addict, myself. It’s a fascinating, never-ending field.

Steven Quiller’s wheel is great, he developed it over many years of teaching as a way to help artists get into using their paint tubes. It’s a brilliant piece of contextualization, and quite pioneering. Bruce MacEvoy heaps positive things on Quiller, begining with “[F]ar and away the best book to explain and use a mixing color wheel”, praise in both in the book review and elsewhere on the Handprint site. MacEvoy simply critiques the framework regarding complement mixing. That’s all, just one aspect about which MacEvoy has a different approach. And, I’d also like to share that there are critiques of MacEvoy’s Handprint approach to complements as well. To each his/her own, for sure. Grain of salt… baby and the bath water….

I’d like to share that in science and technology models are a generalization of reality, a reality we rarely fully understand in detail. All models, including colour models, have technical limitation statements. Unfortunately, these limitations are rarely understood especially so when the models are used outside their area of development and application. This is especially true with colour models. Seeking great detail from colour theory derived from such models can bog down the painting experience as we can’t transfer from the former to direct application all the time in every detail to the latter. But it is a fun journey of exploration, just have a large bag of intellectual salt at the ready for sprinkling about along the way. Context is everything. One example is that colour theory can’t account for the individual character of each paint, especially for the broad dichotomy of modern versus mineral pigments. That’s a big one in of itself, a huge shock if the learning artist isn’t ready for it.

My recommendations, just a sample, are:

Charting Color From the Eye, a reprint from American Scientist
The Color Curiosity Shop, Mark Fairchild

Freely available online by the authors as pdf’s.

The second title is a set of Q&A about colour, same set of questions presented at three levels of detail in the answers. Both slightly off topic for the OP, but very interesting for folks who enjoy exploring colour.

Lastly, David’s last paragraph in his post is especially spot on – excellent advice.

I just remembered, one of my favourites:

Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, Revised and Expanded Edition, 2014
by Dr. Margaret Livingstone

There were some problems with incorrect colour reproduction in the first edition, which were fixed in the 2014 edition.

Read it through the library system, and so enjoyed it I bought the new edition. It’s a richly rewarding read, and I often re-read it.

Perception and choice of color is subjective. The study of color as we see it spans a wide range of topics like the chemical nature of the pigment, wavelength of visible spectrum, rods and cones in our retina etc.
As for books on watercolor mixing Betty Edwards is a basic one. “Making color sing’ by Jeanne Dobie is quite practical. As to theoretical possibilities in the treatment of color you can check out ‘ Watercolor Mixing. 12 Hue method’ by Christopher Willard. This author analyzes various paintings by different artists and their color combinations.

Any comments on the following books?

I’ve started rereading a book inherited from my late father: [U]Color Manual for Artists[/U] by Arthur L. Guptill, 1962, paperback published 1980. This book seems to be a sequel to Arthur L. Guptill’s [U]Color in Sketching and Rendering[/U]. He seems to be a prolific writer.

At the very beginning, the former book references two earlier books on color: [U]An Introduction to Color [/U]by Ralph M. Evans and [U]The Science of Color[/U] by Thomas Y. Crowell. This last book was produced by the Optical Society of America.

Has anyone looked at any of these books? Are they worthwhile, considering when they were written?

I have this book in my library, Arthur L. Guptill’s Color in Sketching and Rendering and it is the best book on watercolors you can find (if someone else has a better book, let me know). If I had only one book for art, it would be that one. It is not just about sketching and rendering. It is shows you how to paint in watercolors from start to finish, as well as give you practical uses, predominately in architectural drawings and landscapes. Basically teaches you how to get your idea across to other people, the use of color theory, and how to overcome the problems in watercolors.

It is very thorough, and not a like a typical art book you find with three hokey paragraphs per chapter. It is actually an old school university book. I highly recommend it if you can find it!