What the heck is a “pure pigment?”: Close-reading Jeanne Dobie’s Palette Advice

When I first began to read Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing as a beginner (I say “began to” because I never finished it), I loved it. I didn’t understand it fully, but it contained ideas that blew my mind and made me think. Revisiting it as an intermediate with a greater understanding of color, I’m less impressed. I still think Jeanne Dobie’s ideas about how to use color in a painting are inspirational, but I find her technical explanations more confusing than I did before, because now I know enough to know which parts are gibberish. 

Dobie prides herself on using “plain English” which I suppose means that she avoids technical-sounding terminology like hue, value, and chroma. Instead, she makes up her own technical-sounding terminology which has inconsistent and unexplained meaning. This is not better.

Chapter 1, “The Pure Pigment Palette,” is full of Dobie’s personal terminology. Let’s do a close reading of the chapter and see if we can figure it out. 

Color involves much more than the name on the tube. Learn to distinguish the behavioral differences of pigments. Not all pigments are transparent, not all are equal in intensity, not all have ‘carrying power’, not all are permanent, and not all can be corrected. Most important, not all pigments mix well.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing

Okay, let’s see if we can make sense of those qualities.

• Transparent = transparent, we’re off to a good start
• Intensity = tinting strength, or possibly chroma
• ‘Carrying power’ = I do not know what this means. Tinting strength? Dispersion?
• Permanent = lightfast, reasonable
• Can be corrected = lifting, I actually like this as a “plain English” replacement
• Mix well = Transparent and non-granulating, maybe?? I think that all pigments “mix well” in the sense that they may be just what you need for different scenarios, but transparent and non-granulating ones tend to mix more completely, without color separation.

She goes on to say,

Liquid, fresh color that does not become opaque or ‘muddy’ is what we seek.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing

Add “liquid” and “fresh” to the list of words that don’t signify anything in particular.

Often people say a mix is “muddy” when it is low-chroma, but clearly, Dobie doesn’t think it’s always bad to mix low-chroma colors; the next chapter, “Mouse Power,” is all about the joy of mixing gray and the important of using muted colors to set off vivid colors, “like the setting of a jewel,” which I think is a lovely phrase that I often think of when deciding how to best showcase my favorite high-chroma colors. 

People also use “muddy” to describe mixes that are opaque. And Dobie specifically uses the word “opaque” to describe paint we don’t want. I think the word “liquid” may also imply transparency, in a roundabout sort of way; I have a subjective experience of finding transparent, nongranulating colors like Nickel Azo Yellow, Phthalo Blue, and Quinacridone Rose to be more “liquid feeling” than opaque or granulating ones, even if they are technically all liquids. So that is three clues that say to me that Dobie is describing transparent paints.

But wait! In the next sentence, Dobie says, 

Contrary to common belief, the result does not depend wholly on the use of transparent pigments.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing

So that’s that theory out the window. 

My secret is the use of pure color pigments. By this I mean pigments without any color additives and as close to the raw state as possible.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing

Now these two sentences are rich texts. Dobie will use the term “pure pigments” for the rest of the chapter. But this is a fuzzy term which could mean any number of things; the clarification “as close to the raw state as possible” doesn’t help, and only makes me more confused.

My first thought, based on the word “additives,” is that she means paints with a high pigment load, so professional grade rather than student grade. Even professional grade paints aren’t “without additives” in that all paints contain binder and other ingredients that make them into paints instead of a pile or raw pigment powder, but we can be charitable and assume that “without additives” she means “without unnecessary filler.”

But the fact that the phrase is “color additives” rather than just “additives” give me pause. Does she mean “additional pigments”? In that case, is she talking about using single-pigment paints rather than commercial mixes?

The latter definition begins to feel more likely a little later, when she describes the benefits of using “pure pigments”:

Gone is the frustration of struggling with a pre-mixed commercial color that you can’t seem to make vibrant enough.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing

Okay! Now we’re getting somewhere!

I was feeling confident about this definition until a page later, when she claims that earth colors – which are traditionally made from single pigments like PBr7 – are not pure pigments!

[Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna] are both transparent, but each is best used alone. Because tertiaries (the umbers and siennas) are not pure pigments, they do not mix well. They are composed of the three primaries, so that any color you add will be a complement of one of the primaries.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing

Leaving aside my strong disagreement (Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna absolutely “mix well” for many use cases; I almost always use them in mixes), let’s see what this is trying to actually say.

In this context, “pure pigments” seems to mean “primary colors,” in opposition to “tertiary colors.” Neither “primary” nor “tertiary” are explained, but it seems she is implying a hierarchy of: 

• Primary colors. Red, yellow, and blue, presumably, though she never outright states it; you might assume as much from her palette, though this also includes green.
• Secondary colors. Hues that can be mixed from two primaries, typically listed as orange, green, and violet.
• Tertiary colors. In context, this seems to mean hues that are mixed from all three primaries; so, in effect, black, brown, gray, earth tones, etc.

This is a nonstandard use of the word “tertiary”, as it is normally used to describe position on the color wheel rather than mixing components; for example, “scarlet” would be considered a tertiary color because it is in between primary red and secondary orange. However, in Dobie’s system which is related to the number of colors used to mix, “scarlet” would still be considered a secondary because you would mix it from red and yellow, same as orange; just in a different proportion.

A crucial observation of Dobie’s primary/secondary/tertiary hierarchy that it is related to chroma (brightness vs mutedness). The more colors you add to a mix, the lower the chroma, particularly if you add complementary colors (or all three primaries, which amounts to the same thing). So by telling you to avoid tertiary colors, she is in effect telling you to go for high-chroma rather than low-chroma colors.

Because all of this is implied instead of explained, you need to already have a significant understanding of color theory to understand what she is trying to say.

The use of the word “pigment” here is also misleading, because she has actually shifted from talking about pigments to talking about hues. The pigment is the physical stuff you put in a paint; the hue is what color it appears to be to our eyes (e.g. red, green, brown, etc.) Sure, you could think of brown hue as being “composed of” red, yellow, and blue, in the sense that you could mix a brown hue from those primary color paints, but the pigment of raw and burnt sienna is not “composed of” red, yellow, and blue. The pigment is naturally brown. You can’t get much closer to “raw state” than pigments that are made from dirt.

You might think it is nitpicky to distinguish between these things: colloquially, people often use the words color, hue, and pigment interchangeably. But I think it’s important to be precise when teaching, because slippery language can conceal confusing and unhelpful ideas.

Like, does any of this actually help a beginner choose paints?

The best she does is list her own personal palette – but unless you copy that exactly, there is no clear way to fulfill the promise of the chapter title, building your own “personal palette,” while having any confidence at all that you’ve chosen “pure pigments.” 

The points I think she’s making

I think what I’m supposed to be getting out of this is the advice to pick colors that are:

• Transparent (except that sometimes it’s okay to use opaque)
• High pigment load (though at no point does she use the terms “professional grade” or “student grade” or explain how to tell the difference)
• Single-pigment (though at no point does she explain that or use any pigment numbers or show you how to read a paint label)
• Primary colors (also not defined) 
• High chroma (though this is only implied due to misuse of the word “tertiary”)

My personal conclusion? You shouldn’t need a close reading to determine what an author is actually saying. And sometimes the attempt to use “plain English” and avoid technical terminology is only more confusing. 

Then & now

Interestingly, I can see in my original posts on Dobie from 2022 that I was already ignoring what Dobie actually said in order to charitably make sense of it. The original version of my Artists’ Palette Profile of Dobie, I renamed her category of “tertiary colors” to “granulating colors”, because all of the examples are; but Dobie never actually mentions granulation. I also put French Ultramarine in that category, though Dobie miscategorizes it an opaque color. (I have since corrected the palette profile to more closely adhere to Dobie’s categories rather than my interpretation.)

Overall thoughts

I don’t mean to imply that this book is all gibberish. As I mentioned, there are many ideas and ways of thinking about the use of color that are extremely wise and useful. The next chapter, “Mouse Power,” was the first color lesson that ever made me excited about using grays because it showed how grays can be chromatic and how they can be used to intensity bright colors by contrast. Other chapters talk about using color to create depth, making chromatic darks, contrasting complements to create “vibration,” and multiple chapters about glazing. All of these are useful and complex topics about which Dobie has much of interest to say. 

As a color enthusiast, I also truly appreciate how much she values color and considers complex information about color to be within the grasp and right of a beginner to learn. In the introduction she writes, 

Unfortunately, all too often, composition is the first component to be taught and only much later are students told to ‘add’ color. Instead, because artists respond naturally with emotion, I prefer to begin with exciting color approaches that unleash creative responses.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, introduction

Color is what draws me to paint, so I appreciate the rare effort to attempt a “color-first” approach to teaching. Unfortunately, I think this chapter gets the book off on the wrong foot because its nonstandard terminology and vague explanations require advanced knowledge to untangle.

Edit: I continued exploring this book! Go forward to chapter 2.