If you paint and can allow yourself to have only one book about mastering your craft - this is the book you were looking for! It's comprehensive, easy to digest, and full of amazing inspirations. It will be useful at any level, from beginners to pros.

I enjoyed this book a lot. It doesn't give you point-by-point instructions on painting, but rather shows different problems that every artist will encounter. It helped me to notice these problems, understand their nature, and gave a perspective on how to think about solving them. I think I'm better equipped to take up a challenge and confidently play with light and color.

It starts with generic, fundamental knowledge about different kinds of lighting and color theory that any beginner will appreciate. Gradually selected subjects, each of them beautifully illustrated, become more advanced and more specific. Maybe not all o them are applicable to every picture but if you happen to work on something peculiar, you'll have no problems finding the right reference in this book as it is structured very well.

All of the insights, tips, and techniques are very pragmatic, based either on physics, psychology, or years of practice. They are described in a simple and accessible manner, without lyrical "artsy" language that likes to get loose with sense and meaning.

While Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist was rather universal in terms of medium, this book is heavily skewed toward painting. There are parts dedicated solely to pigments, paints, and mixing colors that won't be applicable to any other medium. Nevertheless, I believe that any visual artist will benefit from reading this book. ( )

I’m usually not a fan of instructional art books. All to often, they devolve into breaking things down into a series of steps, or simply showing a the different stages of one image. While this breakdown might be helpful in creating that one painting or drawing, it rarely helps you develop the skills needed to apply to original work.

Thankfully, Color and Light is not that sort of book. Instead it is a wonderfully useful guide to how color and light works and how to incorporate them into your artwork.

That’s another benefit of the book – since it focuses on color and light and not on a specific medium, it is applicable for all sorts of media and field. While it’s geared towards artists, either traditional or digital, who create their artwork from the ground up, the information on color schemes could also be useful to a photographer.

This book is full to the brim of all sorts of useful information, from different types of lighting, to ways to think of the color wheel, to how you create different surface effects. Each topic is covered in a two page spread, which, while simple, effectively conveys what you need to now.

Which brings me to another topic. I can’t believe that I’m already five paragraphs into this review and haven’t mentioned how wonderful James Gurney’s art is. If you know anything about James Gurney, you’ll know that he’s the creator of Dinotopia, and luckily for us, he uses his own highly imaginative and beautiful paintings to help illustrate the principals in his book.

If you are at all interested in art, this is a book that you should at least flip through. Even if you don’t create your own artwork, you may very well want to marvel at the beauty inside this book. ( )