Color Choices a Book Review

The “Quiller Wheel” is a special color wheel featuring 68 precisely placed colors designed by internationally known artist and best-selling author Stephen Quiller. The “Quiller Wheel” is primarily an artist’s tool used to interpret color relationships and mix colors more clearly. In the 144 page book Color Choices: Making Color Sense Out of Color Theory,Quiller employs his wheel and other techniques to help artists in perfecting their own unique color styles.

The “Quiller Wheel” is a special color wheel featuring 68 precisely placed colors designed by internationally known artist and best-selling author Stephen Quiller. The “Quiller Wheel” is primarily an artist’s tool used to interpret color relationships and mix colors more clearly. In the 144 page book Color Choices: Making Color Sense Out of Color Theory,Quiller employs his wheel and other techniques to help artists in perfecting their own unique color styles.

nging and in-depth, demonstrating the color schemes from nearly every angle and combination.

Quiller’s color chart is an excellent resource for working artists in nearly all media, colors are listed by standard commercial names with the commonly known brands. This is a big help when ordering paint online or buying at your local art supply store.

Quiller’s examples, illustrations and gift for explaining make quick work of the confusion regarding complementary, secondary and tertiary colors. Color Choices comes with a wall poster reference to the Quiller color wheel. I have personally torn the poster out of my copy of the book and currently use it as a color mixing reference. I can give no higher endorsement than that.

Color Choices is perhaps the most systematic color text available and is deserving of a featured spot in your personal library of books about color. I’m not saying this is the only color book you’ll ever need but it comes darn close. The author combines a deep, personal knowledge of traditional color theory with some very thorough research into how paints actually mix as colors. Not a one trick pony, Quiller’s text repeatedly emphasizes the importance of a strong value composition, and careful variations in color saturation in building a painting.

Stephen Quiller is a true master of color harmony. He teaches not only the theory of color, but also demonstrates how it works in the real world. Color Choices teaches us to think of complementary colors as two ends of whole. This approach gives us the ability to use a much wider range of color in our paintings. I challenge any painter to read this book and not come out on the other end making stronger use of neutrals, and semi-neutrals. Once finished you will find yourself mixing and using colors you never even considered before.

Color Choices will teach you not to use the "real" surface color of the objects, but to search for feelings and the atmosphere of the ambient. The leaves may be, say, violet and the sky green, if that's how you see them. One of the final sections of the book is titled “Inner Vision” in which Quiller encourages us to look way beyond the structured color schemes presented earlier to find our own unique approach to painting. He encourages us to create paintings nurtured by own inner vision, approaching each image in a way driven by our inspiration for that painting and that painting alone.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book for anyone looking to deepen their knowledge and experience of color. It’s amazing that so much knowledge can be condensed into such a short, easy to read text. To me Stephen Quiller’s Color Choices: Making Sense Out of Color Theory is a true color masterpiece.

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