This book is about full-color seeing.
There is a book by Hensche on painting that's horribly expensive and hard to get. Susan Sarback has taken this subject and made it easily comprehensible to expert, intermediate and even total beginners in oils and pastels. If you just got a nice oils set for your birthday or the holidays and aren't sure what to do with it yet, this book would give you enough of a start that if you read it, studied and did the early exercises your first paintings would be colorful and pretty enough for reciprocal gifts.
I discovered the Colourist Method in a class on WetCanvas.com by Charlotte Herczfeld, aka Colorix. Charlotte is a student of Susan Sarback and produces incredible Impressionist paintings -- click on her name to see her website and her gorgeous work. She's Swedish and she paints still lifes and landscapes that brim with color as much as Susan Sarback's.
Ms. Herczfeld's class, Exploring Soft Pastels: Colourful Still Life, is still available to read on WetCanvas in its entirety. It's a very long thread packed with information and examples of various students' work including mine. It's free to read and Charlotte's explanations, including her shorthand description of the four stages of the Colourist Method, are a useful addition to the book. Work backward from the end to the last Index post to find the specific posts that have her short form instructions, color wheel and exercises, some, like the block studies, are directly from Susan Sarback's book and workshops.
This class literally opened my eyes. I learned to see color differently, as big a shift in how I perceive the world as learning to draw human portraits was.
Before I could draw portraits, I recognized people by hairstyle, eye color, whether they had glasses, general complexion. I could not recall faces easily and I judged appearance to a large extent on whether they were in fashion and part of my subcultures. After drawing portraits, I wound up living in a world that had no ugly human beings. Only interesting faces that show people's lives and attitudes and personalities as easily as if you read their biography.
Full-Color Seeing was a perception shift like that. Now a pile of garbage shimmers with color, a crumpled bit of paper towel is a wonderful thing of complex shadows and hues, my cat sleeping on the windowsill is absolute beauty. A half-used pencil is gorgeous. So one of the things this book may do for you is by opening up new ways of seeing color, make your life happier. The more you paint in these brilliant colors, the easier it is to see them in all the drab dull brown things like dried leaves and unglazed pottery too.
I always wondered how painters got that impression of having the full spectrum in a painting of a brown and green landscape with haystacks in it. Impressionists completely fascinated me. What were they doing? How did they get pink into it? How did it turn out to be olive green and brown and also the entire spectrum?
Charlotte's class and this book by Susan Sarback have a wonderful answer: the Colourist method. A painting is created in four stages from pure bright spectrum colors. To do any of the exercises, you'll need to make sure you have a full spectrum of bright colors. You may need a few extra colors in oils or pastels depending on what you already have, but student pastels sets always have the spectrum brights and so do many brands of the more firm square-stick pastels like NuPastel or color Conte.
