As a mixed media artist, I use color every day. Color is my language and my Secret Decoder Ring. It allows me to create moods, tell stories, illuminate a message (or a mystery), and express/expound/explore. What’s my favorite color?–All of them! My approach is “more is more,” and I use color in abundance. Nothing is as lavish as a canvas or journal page slathered in bold colors, and nothing makes me happier than a color-soaked room full of vibrant textiles and collections. And books! Color rules.
When a book has compelling content plus is a beautiful object, I call that “having it all.” This handsome volume takes us inside the nature-centric world of color and is an admirable, elegant treatise on the subject.
I enjoy sitting with this book, flipping through the pages, rewarded on every spread with engravings, etchings, color swatches, marbled end papers, and tasteful typography. I can either dig deep and explore an unrivaled tutorial on the subject, or I can focus on the endless visuals—either way, the enduring beauty of Nature is richly represented in this stately volume.
A gorgeous expanded edition of Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, a landmark reference book on color and its origins in nature
First published in 1814, Werner's Nomenclature of Colours is a taxonomically organized guide to color in the natural world. Compiled by German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner, the book was expanded and enhanced in 1821 by Patrick Syme, who added color swatches and further color descriptions, bringing the total number of classified hues to 110. The resulting resource has been invaluable not only to artists and designers but also to zoologists, botanists, mineralogists, anatomists, and explorers, including Charles Darwin on the…
This book is a visual banquet revealing a lavish historical collection of color charts and swatch boards. Thanks to the astute full-color reproductions I felt I was holding these rare sample books in my hands; and the fulsome text satisfied my urge to know every back story.
I discovered charts for textiles, feathers, fibers, automotive paints, ribbons, yarns, felt, paint colors, cosmetics, and more. Although I frequently search for images of color charts online, this impressive volume consists of a wealth of new-to-me examples—literally, the mother lode.
A beautifully illustrated history of the many inventive, poetic, and alluring ways in which color swatches have been selected and staged
The need to categorize and communicate color has mobilized practitioners and scholars for centuries. Color Charts describes the many different methods and ingenious devices developed since the fifteenth century by doctors, naturalists, dyers, and painters to catalog fragments of colors. With the advent of industrial society, manufacturers and merchants developed some of the most beautiful and varied tools ever designed to present all the available colors. Thanks to them, society has discovered the abundance of color embodied in a…
This impressive volume brings together two of my favorite topics: art journals and color. A unique idea sparked a round-robin collaboration between fifteen noted mixed-media artists: Each artist was invited to select a color and create a beginning for an art journal.
The volumes traveled throughout the United States for over a year and were worked on by all the participants. Eventually, each journal returned home, absolutely bursting with creativity. The inclusions ran the gamut of custom musical CDs, found objects, poetry, fold-outs, quilted textiles and embroidery, and more.
The lavish photography on each page makes this book a feast for the eyes, and the emotional stories from the artists provide insights into the healing nature of art journaling. From pure white to mysterious black (and every color in between), the true colors in this book lifted my spirits.
Somerset Studio Presents True Colors: A Palette of Collaborative Art Journals Reflective. Explosive. Playful. Heart Felt. Monochromatic. Riotous. No rules. No boundaries. No wonder the 16 extraordinary color journals black, white and all the colors in between burst out of their covers and into our imaginations.
Fifteen amazing artists wanted to see what they could do with a single color scheme. Each artist contributed a journal cover in her chosen palette and a page in each journal. The finished works are filled with page after page of techniques and mediums, including stamping, painting, sketching, fabric art, metalwork, transfers and layered…
Just call him “The Color King”! Vivid, vibrant color is Kaffe Fassett’s vocabulary, and he has brought his command of the entire spectrum to textiles, knitwear, ribbons and trims, quilts, and mosaics. And more!
I have every Kaffe Fassett book in my personal art library but his lavishly-illustrated autobiography is a favorite. This bountiful volume is full of remembrances, insights, revelations, and stories. It turns out that this incomparable designer is also a masterful storyteller, and I loved learning more about his lifelong creative journey.
Kaffe Fassett has led an extraordinary life and is a captivating storyteller with a vivid memory. Born in 1937 in San Francisco, he spent much of his youth in Big Sur, where his parents bought a log cabin from Orson Welles and transformed it into the world-famous Nepenthe restaurant, a gathering place of artists of all sorts (Kaffe has many stories to tell about mingling with the likes of Olivia de Havilland, Elizabeth Taylor, and Henry Miller). After attending a boarding school run by the disciples of Krishunamurti, an Indian guru, he studied painting on scholarship at the School of…
Sometimes, restraint can be a good thing. As much as I normally advocate using the whole paint palette, I was enthralled by the story of a lone color: indigo.
Deceptively modest, this color is celebrated worldwide and has influenced designers, crafts people, artists, and more. From secret dye recipes to historic batik prints to skirts of one hundred pleats to distressed Japanese “boro,”–Indigo endures. Visuals abound in this encyclopedic and fascinating volume.
Gloriously pieced together, much like the fine garments it portrays, this colourful volume takes the reader on an international tour of indigo-coloured textiles, presenting a huge swathe of remarkable clothing, people and fabric. Catherine Legrand, who has spent over twenty years travelling and researching the subject, has a deep knowledge of the ancient techniques, patterns and clothing traditions that characterize ethnic textile design, knowledge that she deploys to great effect in seven chapters exploring the production of Indigo textiles throughout America, China, India, Africa, Central Asia, Japan and Laos/Vietnam, and the men and women behind them. This profusely illustrated photographic…
Creative souls want and need a special place for recording and decoding their interior world–a place to download all their creative ideas, a place to remember the events of the day, or a place to doodle, draw, and dream.
This book is for all these people–it’s an engaging and intimate glimpse into the personal pages of a wide variety of artists and journal keepers whose works not only provide visual delight and inspiration but also evidence of the intensity and devotion that such personal journals invite.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
