Mouse Power: Revisiting Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing, chapter 2

I was mean about chapter 1 of Making Color Sing, but I love chapter 2. While I still don’t get the concept of doing a chapter about low chroma colors without saying the word “chroma”, I think the euphemism of “mouse colors” is cute, and effectively conveys the idea of varied hues of gray and brown, while also casting these colors as soft, meek underdogs. And I love the combination of the words “mouse” and “power”: this reminds you that these colors, though easily overlooked, have a great role to play. 

The chapter opens with another metaphor I find very evocative:

Colors are like jewels: each should be placed as carefully as a precious gem in a setting. The proper setting makes the jewel glow and enhances its quality.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Colors Sing (chapter 2, p. 14)

The idea is to get the most out of your vibrant colors by placing them in the unobtrusive, but important, setting of low-chroma colors to set them off.

Dobie stresses two main points in this chapter:

• Muted/vibrant contrast. By contrasting muted “mouse colors” with bright and vibrant colors, you can make the bright colors look brighter. At the same time, you can make use of hue contrast by juxtaposing complementary colors, e.g. bright yellow with muted violet-gray.
• Varying your grays. Of the various ways to paint gray – using a black/gray paint, mixing complementaries, or mixing all three primaries – Dobie most recommends using all three primaries so you can easily mix up varied grays. Don’t think of gray as just a straightforward, boring, neutral gray, but as a range of varied, subtle hues.  

I find it interesting (derogatory) that the first chapter keeps going on about how you don’t want to mix mud, and then immediately follows up with this chapter, detailing circumstances where you do want to mix low-chroma colors. This isn’t a quibble with this chapter, which is still beautiful and perfect, but retrospectively makes the previous chapter even more baffling. 

Assignments

Another great thing about this chapter is that it gives you assignments! Practice really helps me to understand and explore and remember the ideas. Dobie provides both an exercise and a project.

Exercise

The exercise gets back to the “jewel in a setting” idea. First, you are to paint little frames in various muted but not neutral grays (e.g. violet gray, greenish gray), mixed from primary color triads. Then, you fill in the middle of the frame with a bright color in a complementary hue; for example, in the center of your greenish gray, paint red. By contrasting in both chroma and hue, the frame is supposed to make the center color, the “jewel,” look brighter.

To be very scientific, I probably should have contrasted each “correct” setting with another one, varying the chroma or hue, but I didn’t bother. I take Jeanne’s word for it.

One thing I did do was intentionally not always use the highest chroma colors for the “jewel”; for example, I used Pyrrol Rubine (PR264), rather than a brighter red. It’s notable that this is one of the least successful ones. The most successful I think are Hansa Yellow Medium (PY97) and New Gamboge, although it’s unclear to me if those are just the highest-chroma colors anyway, or if it’s because of the value contrast. Some of them may also be slightly betrayed by my inability to paint two adjacent color blocks without a little overlap.

Project

The instructions of the project are to paint something – anything – using a variety of grays from different categories:

• Mixed from primaries
• Mixed from complements
• Diluted (light value)
• High in pigment, not very diluted (dark value)

Dobie’s example is a painting of a beige barn and a dark gray and brown house against a gray sky. She explains how each “mouse color” was mixed. It is not a painting that particularly proves the sentiment at the beginning of using grays to make another color look vibrant, as the entire painting is low chroma; rather, it is celebration of different types of gray.

I didn’t want to copy the painting (nor are you told to), but I found a picture in my camera roll that I decided would be perfect.

I had been intending to take a picture of the vibrant rose bush, but the greige stucco house and wide sidewalk offer lots of opportunities for different shades of “mouse color”. Plus, this is scene that contains the “jewel in the setting” effect, as if done correctly the roses should jump out – not just against the low-chroma background but against the contrasting hue of the green leaves.

I had kind of given up on the scene as too hard to paint, but reading the chapter gave me the impetus and courage.

I even used masking fluid. I’m not afraid of it anymore!

I can’t say for sure if I really followed the directions – I don’t know what I used to mix my grays, I just kind of added a little of this, a little of that – but I don’t mind as I feel this is a more advanced methodology than measuring out precise recipes of blue and orange, or what have you. Most of the grays were mixed with Monte Amiata Natural Sienna, Venetian Red, and Cerulean Blue. The greens included Green Gold and Indanthrone Blue, with some of the gray mix colors at times in the shadows. And I used a truly alarming number of pinks for those tiny little roses: Red Rose Deep (PV19), Quin Red (PR209), Quin Fuchsia (PR202), Transparent Orange (PO71).

I can tell from this (and other urban scenes) that I badly need to learn perspective, but in my defense, the weird corner lot is pretty wonky IRL.

Then and now

This is the second time I’ve covered this chapter of this book! I blogged about it in the post Lessons from “Making Color Sing”: Mouse Power, way back in 2022, the first time I read it. It’s interesting to read my thoughts from back then, because I barely seem to have read the same chapter. I zeroed in on the idea of low-chroma colors as a means of making high-chroma colors look brighter, because this was the only argument I had ever seen that made me actually want to consider ever using less than the maximum chroma.

Bizarrely, even though there are exercises, I didn’t do any of them, even the easy “jewel in the setting” one. Instead, I made up my own: I painted the same scene twice, once using all my ordinary high-chroma color choices and ones intentionally muting the colors in the background, to see if my foreground tree would look brighter in the second case. To my chagrin, it did!

Conclusion & Rating

If I’m going to keep reading chapters in this book, I think I will also rate them. Chapter 1 got an F for Folderol. “Mouse Power” gets an A!

This chapter blew my mind when I first read it, and I still love it now. Instead of awkwardly talking around technical language, Dobie creates useful and memorable metaphors. She builds a case for using low-chroma colors that even a high-chroma diehard like myself can buy into. And she provides both a simple exercise and a project to cement the ideas. I got a lot out of rereading this chapter and doing the work!

Key Useful Ideas

• Use grayed “mouse colors” to emphasize bright colors by contrast.
• Mix varied, not-quite-neutral grays with varied mixes of complementary pairs or primary trios.

Back to chapter 1 – Foreward to chapter 3