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I receieved James Gurney's 'Color and Light' book yesterday. It's the follow up to his very successful 'Imaginative Realism' (which up until now had been firmly at the top of my art book collection – and I have a LOT of art books.
It now looks like 'Color and Light' is going to overtake his previous book and sit proudly at the top of the pile. (It's not really a pile – just a large section of my IKEA bookshelves).
James Gurney keeps a very regularly updated and informative blog at: [link] and if after my rambling review you fancy a copy, there are details there on how to get it.
Like his previous book this is just a goldmine of useful and very well presented information. He's not a digital artist – he works mainly in oils, but on every single page there's something to be learned. It's almost like an art cookbook in a way – Every section introduces something which leaves me thinking "I must try that soon."
He talks about: Types of light (overcast, sunlight, candlelight to name but a few), light and form, types of shadows, a very informative chapter on colour, colour relationships, visual perception* (how all colour and value is relative as our brains take the raw info from our optics nerves and take shortcuts processing it).
That's just a fraction of the info in the book. Even sections that deal directly with real world media, stuff like colour mixing and pigments are interesting and probably useful for a digital as well as traditional artist. I'd recommend this book at it's predecesor to anyone interested in either making art or appreciating how others go about it – and at around 220 pages long it's well worth every penny.
* See the following link for a great example of how visual perception or processed visual information differs dramatically from what our eyes are actually seeing: [link]
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Joy 
You ever try taking up oil painting?
James Gurney's two books supply a whole load of information that I was never given in art classes throught my school years, not at college where drawing and painting was a part of my curriculum. I think in all that time I only heard the word chiaroscuro mentioned once, and even then the definition was a bit vague. Likewise colour theory was a subject hardly touched on.
So, I'd either need basic classes or another James Gurney book, one that deals specifically with the mechanics and nuts and bolts of oil painting... although to be fair I got a couple of video tutorials from Massive Black/ConceptArt which do show you people doing an oil painting from start to finish.
You might have seen these already. Links about color theory and color mixing.
[link]
[link]
[link]
ArtRage3 seems to have an even better handle on colour mixing than Painter. If 'Real Color Blending' is turned on then it is possible to mix up and number of green from any number of blues and yellows. Try doing that on Painter's Mixer Palette and you get a muddy neutral mess. I hope Painter 12 sorts that out.
Those are some great links
[link]
You are lucky to have the newspaper experience. I just know what I've read and looked at using color proofing. I won't understand fully until I actually get something printed.
Many comic colorists work natively CMYK in photoshop. Its a very saturated/bright style of art. Its taking me a while to learn the color range.
We use Photoshop at work mainly for basic colour correction, adjusting levels, or cutting out of images supplied for adverts. Once of the first things I do when working that way is hit CTRL+Y to turn on the soft proofing. It's a very useful tool, expecially when trying to explain to someone from advertising why they can't have fluorescent bright green or even bright green in a client's advert. Conversion to CMYK happens at the end of our workflow.
ArtRage just seems to handle virtual paint mixing a bit better than Painter... could be something to do with the fact that Painter often insists on adding the background into the mix also (white for example) ----> [link]
I mostly gave up on the version of artrage I have. The comic coloring style I'm using involves making selections. Artrage 2 only had a weird interface for stencils. I need all the standard selection tools to work.
You'd probably be really good at comic coloring. You know the color range and you know how to airbrush. Digital comic coloring is in that style.
You get to the Pre-mixing chapter of "Light and Color" yet? Its pretty amazing what is possible with a limited palette. I'm going to have to see how much of it is possible in painter.
I'm hoping that Painter 12 brings more to the table than simply more tools for photo-painting.
I love using all 3 programs to be honest - they all have their strong and weak points, but they are nice to use in combination - I'd like to see their programmers learn from the other applications without them all becoming too samey.
Photoshop's fairly recent feature of on-the-fly canvas rotation for example is a good example of Adobe picking up something from another app. Painter had it first, but now it's implementation - having to hold down 2 keys seems clumsy when Photoshop allows you to do it with one (and that one being spring-loaded - paint, hold down R, rotate, leave go of R and straight back to the brush tool)