Museum Shop

Gift Books on Color

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  The Secret Lives of Color

  Kassia St. Clair · 2017

  Seventy-five short, deeply illustrated histories of individual shades — lead white, mummy brown, Vantablack — in a slim hardcover that has become the standard color gift book.

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  Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color

  Philip Ball · 2003

  A National Book Critics Circle finalist on the chemistry and history of pigments — the single best gift for the friend who wants to know where the colors in paintings actually come from.

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  Color: A Natural History of the Palette

  Victoria Finlay · 2004

  A globe-trotting account of where pigments come from, from Afghan lapis mines to the cochineal farms of the Canary Islands. Reads like travel writing.

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  Blue: The History of a Color

  Michel Pastoureau · 2018

  A beautifully made hardcover from Princeton: the medievalist’s social history of blue, with companion volumes for Black, Red, Green, Yellow and White also in print.

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  Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition

  Josef Albers · Yale, 2013

  Albers’s 1963 classic, reset at full plate size for the anniversary edition. The studio gift for art students; the iPad app is a fine companion.

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  Theory of Colours

  J. W. von Goethe (MIT paperback) · 1810/1970

  An evergreen MIT Press paperback — Goethe’s poet’s reply to Newton, with the famous color circle and a long psychological section that influenced Turner and Kandinsky.

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Studio Tools & Color References

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  Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolour Dot Card

  Winsor & Newton · 109 colors

  A hand-painted swatch card with a small dot of dried paint for each of Winsor & Newton’s 109 professional watercolors — the cheapest way to test pigments before buying tubes.

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  Pantone Formula Guide GP1601B (Coated & Uncoated)

  Pantone · 2,390 spot colors

  The two-fan PMS reference used by every print designer: 2,390 solid spot colors with their ink formulas, on coated and uncoated stock. The standard for specifying color in print.

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  The Color Wheel Company — Watercolor Wheel

  Color Wheel Co. · 9.25 inch

  A rotating cardboard wheel that shows how twelve common watercolor pigments mix — classroom-grade, but the easiest physical way to demonstrate complementaries, splits and mixes.

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  Color Mixing Guides: Color Wheel + Creative Color Wheel

  Color Wheel Co. · 9.25 inch pair

  A two-wheel set: the basic mixing wheel plus a “creative” wheel that visualizes harmonies, splits and tints. Useful for teaching and for picking palettes.

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  Sennelier Dry Pigment — Yellow Ochre (80 g)

  Sennelier (Paris)

  A jar of the same dry pigment Sennelier mills into its oils, watercolors and pastels — useful for binding your own paint, tinting gesso, or simply seeing what an earth pigment looks like at full strength.

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  Sennelier Dry Pigment — Ultramarine Deep (85 g)

  Sennelier (Paris)

  Synthetic ultramarine, the modern replacement for ground lapis lazuli — the blue of Renaissance robes, of Yves Klein and of every twentieth-century color theorist’s primary palette.

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  Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary and Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments

  Eastaugh, Walsh, Chaplin & Siddall · 2008

  The serious gift for a conservator, restorer or pigment-curious painter: a one-volume dictionary of every Western pigment name, paired with optical-microscope identification keys.

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