The Ultimate Mixing Palette: a World of Colours - updated

My next book, 'The Ultimate Mixing Palette: as World of colours', is now available on Blurb.com

This is a very different book to my first one 'Watercolour Mixing Charts'. That contains 98 charts and shows a vast range of colours but also uses a huge number of different paints. It's a fascinating study of colour mixing!

This book uses a more limited palette so it is possible to purchase the same colours and re-create the mixes. I really think it will be a most valuable reference for anyone working with watercolour. It has taken almost a year to create and is based on almost 35 years of watercolour exploration. It has over 7500 individual colour swatches - that's a lot of hues with just these fourteen pigments :-). The charts were carefully painted, then professionally photographed with a large format camera and carefully colour-matched. They look fabulous on a computer screen and the printed physical book is also very true-to-life.

You can see my previous book, Watercolour Mixing Charts, as well as the various versions of the Ultimate Palette book here. Click on any to see a preview.

It is available as an eBook or as a physical book in hardback or softcover formats in Premium Lustre paper, which is slightly thicker so my recommended paper. The softcover version is also available in standard paper.

The link to the eBook is here. This shows the first 30 pages. The eBook will work in iBooks on iPhones, iPads and Mac computers.

The Ultimate Mixing Set.

My website has more information and a tab with a list of alternate paints to the Daniel Smith ones I have used.

Books - to publish? to self publish? iBooks?

I have written a couple of posts about my black book collection, which is largely a private thing. I am working on another book for publication, so thought I'd write about that process.

I have a published children's book, 'Kayla & the Magical Tree', which I created with the author Steve Stine in 2003. Lots of fun. It was a small print run but they can still be found on Amazon in the new and used section. You can see it here. It was unusual in that we worked on it together and then took it to a publisher - a wonderful way to work but rare I understand.

I have another book that I self-published on Blurb.com on colour mixing. It is 100 pages of watercolour mixes, visual images only. The preview is here. I like the fact that I can up-date it if I do another chart so the print-to-order is not a a bad idea on this one. I also like the space for notes to be added by the buyer to make it their own.

I also have a gorgeous book of my artwork covering over 30 years of drawing, painting, etching, calligraphy and so on that my husband made on Apple  - a lovely coffee table book that many of my students, friends and family have bought, though it is not publicly available. It would be nice to publish it...

My published and self-published books.

Now I am working on another book which will be on watercolour. A mixture of colour mixing, painting exercises, examples, tips and tricks set out as a series of lessons to take a beginner from setting up a palette to planning and painting their own work. 

But how to publish this one? It would be fun to make it an iBook with links to videos of techniques. It would be useful for my students and on-line tutoring. But there are so many books out there!

The other book in the wings is on sketching and sketchbooks. I have had all my plein air paintings and drawings professionally photographed but that also needs some thinking......More on this soon...