Monday 19 January 2015

The professional touch

I scanned the colour charts for my new book myself on my Canon scanner. I didn't clean them up or adjust them and they look ok though not a perfect match...


But I also took them to my wonderful printer Fine Art Imaging and had them professionally scanned using a large format camera, then colour matched and cleaned up. What a difference the professional touch makes :-)

The new book, titled 'Ultimate mixing palette: a world of colours', has 49 charts and two colour wheels to show every possible two colour combination and the most useful three colour mixing combinations of my 15 colour 'Ultimate Mixing Palette'. Each chart has additional notation and cross referencing.

You can see many more colour charts done using a huge range of colours here. These are also available as a book, which has been updated with renewed images. The idea of my new book is that it is very easy to use the same paints or similar pigments to reproduce the same hues. This is a wonderful colour mixing reference :-)

5 comments:

  1. I've now purchased my first set of 12 DS colours from your suggestions, and I am enjoying watercolour and mixing more than ever before. Thanks so much Jane, for all your wonderful information and advice.

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  2. That is wonderful Jules. If you have the mixing space in your palette, working with just 12 and mixing as you go is fabulous as it is so portable!

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  3. Hi Jane...Love your site! I have been absorbing the info like crazy for the past weeks since I found it. What a wealth of information you have provided. Thank you! I am quite new to watercolor and would like to buy your book on the ultimate mixing palette. However, I'm afraid I won't understand it well enough because I can't figure out how the type of charts in this post are made. I see that there is a color on each end but I can't figure out why the color shifts dramatically here and there across the row rather than shifting in a spectrum from the color at one end to the color at the other end as I would expect if you were gradually mixing the two. Does the book cover what is happening in these charts? Do you have a blog post that details what is being done to make them? Thanks so much!

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  4. I'm so excited to have found you!
    On my computer your original colors look bright and clean. The Fine Art Imaging one appears more muted and almost the same blues all the way down the column. Is that common for viewing on a computer? I have so many questions. :)

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    Replies
    1. The difference between the two blues is more subtle in the second version than it looks on my scanned version. While the first looks bright, it isn't correct. The second, more subtle version, is much better and far closer to reality. The cooler (greener) cerulean chromium and the warmer ultramarine alternate down the right side of the image, changing the colours created when mixed with each yellow.

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