In Reply to: problems with mixing colours posted by Meteku, Solomon on 11/02/01 at 8:14 AM:

: are there guidline books on achieving the right or nearly right colour mixture in oil? I spend my weekendsin fornt of my easel, struggling to mix the colours i see in my in my mind and put them on the canvas. Sometimes i almost want to cry out sheer frustration. I try not to mix more than 3 colours at a time, but where it often or at times goes wrong, i think, is with the amounts of, say, colour types that i mix. Human flesh colour, in all its vareities and hues is also another headache. To put a long story short, are or is there a book with illustrations of colour types and what clours to mix to achieve them and more improtant, a piece of advies on what amounts of each type to mix to get near the colour types as in the illustration. I know this is a silly wish, but all the same i would be eternally grateful to whoever proffers me an advies on this.
: God bless!

deep breath: color mixing is problematic in many ways a book or chart can only assist heres why. each manufacture has a diferent mixture to create the basic tube colors raw umbre pigment from one place is not the same as from another ie red tones, black tones,ect. besides printed book colors are not the same as oils . ok, get to the point, you need to make color charts of your own using your paints. there are plenty of books that show the charts and how they work. use them as guides but you must make the combinations your self, its a pain but it works and the more charts you make the better you get at figuring out combinations. also understand that some of the colors you see can't be mixed no matter how good you are,they are colors that are formed by glazes and overpainting. you can make charts of these too. many skintones are plainwhite over warm underpaints. limit your charts and pallet until you get the hang of it. yell back if you don't understand. i'll try to be more specific. deep breath, good luck.