Colorworks 2: The Blue Book (Colorworks)

Rating:
Summary: Colorworks, Volumes 1-5
Review: The book above is only one volume of a five volume series. However, if you get this one you will probably want them all. If you are a designer or artist working with colored images on paper produced with printers ink, this out-of-print series of five Colorworks books, Red, Blue, Yellow, Pastel, and Black & White are excellent sources to quickly see how printed colors will interact without either guessing or a whole lot of time-consuming experimentation. The illustrations are systematically layed out to show how tints and shades of the primary colors in various mixtures of the standard colors used in four-color printing, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black & White)actually appear in different quantities---in lines, stripes, circles, blocks, and dots and how they actually interact. Interaction with colored type is also shown. Additional illustrations show how the colors work in photographs and illustrations. Excellent instruction for using black masks to isolate and clearly see the book's color interactions is also included in each volume.
Three of the five volumes are each devoted to one of the primary colors: Red (Vol. 1), Blue (Vol. 2), and Yellow (Vol. 3), each of which is dominant in its own volume. The remaining two volumes, Pastels (Vol. 4), and Black & White (Vol. 5) use the pastel colors, and black as the dominant color showing how various mixtures of the dominant color interact against a spectrum of many other colors, like in the other volumes. The real value is that the colors shown are shown in percentages of each of the four color printing inks, which makes them reproducible. Unfortunately, all of the books are out of print, no doubt due to their limited audience and the original price of [money] per volume when originally published in 1990. Their production was truly an international effort. The books were designed in London, published by a Cincinnati firm, and printed in Hong Kong. They should be published in a new edition for the many new designers and artists who would benefit.