Octanic Color: Revisiting Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing, chapter 3

Previously in Making Color Sing: chapter 1, chapter 2.

When I first read Making Color Sing as a beginner, I assumed “octanic” was a well-known color term that I simply had never encountered before, but now I realize it is a Jeanne Dobie-specific term.

“Octanic” is my expression for color with the greatest impact. Just as you use high-octane gasoline for extra performance power in your car, you often need a mixture that produces a powerful color.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, p. 20

So, high-chroma, then.

This chapter is mainly about making high-chroma mixes using colors with matching undertones, e.g. mixing a vibrant violet by mixing “[a] blue primary [that] contains red and [a] red primary [that] contains blue.” I think it’s easier to see and easier to explain that a vibrant violet comes from a blue and a red that both have violet undertones, but okay. At least she mainly avoids color temperature terminology – until it is used in a large, confusing diagram.

I’m amused to discover that when I originally reviewed this chapter after reading it initially in 2022, I already had strong opinions about hating color temperature.

As before, I feel like I noted something different in each reread. This time, I was struck by this section:

In Portugal I watched a painter leave spaces where he wanted to add vibrant red roses later. His watercolor was flawless until at long last he dropped in the luscious red pigment. He was disappointed as the roses quietly blended. The surrounding colors, which did not relate, negated the effect he had struggled all afternoon to attain.

I’m a little confused about what’s happening here (and I don’t know why it matters that it was in Portugal), but I think the issue is that the painter had instinctively adjusted the values of the foliage and shadows to the white gaps left for later flowers, and when he added the color of the flowers, the value was too similar to the surroundings. I suspect this because I feel like I experienced something similar in painting the project for the Mouse Power chapter, in which I used masking fluid to leave gaps for the flowers and then colored them in later.

The flowers still stand out, but they sure stood out more when they were white.

Exercise

The exercise I made up last time was simply to practice mix-and-matching undertones to mix up high-chroma and low-chroma two-color secondary mixes. This certainly seems like a reasonable and obvious exercise for this chapter. It’s such a good exercise that I opted to redo it using the Daniel Smith Essentials split primary palette (Hansa Yellow Light, New Gamboge, Pyrrol Scarlet, Quin Rose, PBGS, French Ultramarine).

For the most part it seems that I did get the expected effect that colors matching in undertone produce more vibrant colors. That is:

• Pyrrol Scarlet + New Gamboge (upper right of oranges) most vibrant as expected; both orange undertoned = more vibrant orange
• Hansa Yellow Light + Phthalo Blue GS (upper left of greens) most vibrant as expected; both green undertoned = more vibrant green
• Quin Rose + French Ultramarine (lower right of violets) most vibrant as expected; both violet undertoned = more vibrant violet

I will say that I found this effect most pronounced among the greens. All the oranges are pretty vibrant. The ‘cool’ orange isn’t even low chroma/brownish, it’s just more of a coral. And although the purples here are quite dramatically different, it doesn’t fall along undertone lines so much as which red is used. Quin Rose makes vibrant violets with both blues, but Pyrrol Red doesn’t with either one. PBGS + Pyrrol Scarlet are actually complementary and make black!

Project

At first I thought there were no prescribed exercises or projects within the text of this chapter, but then I found one tucked into an image caption:

Find an old painting, executed in in your former palette. Repaint it, using the pure pigments in octanic combinations, and then compare.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Colors Sing, p. 23

This exercise presumes some pretty specific circumstances. As a beginner, it didn’t apply because I had no stack of old paintings to pull out and repaint; as an intermediate, it doesn’t apply because this color-mixing information is not new to me.

However! Since I did learn something new from this reread, namely the tip about putting the bright colors down first, I can retry something right away! While I don’t want to paint the exact same painting twice, I decided to paint something similar to the rosebush I painted last time, only this time I put the rose color down first.

Because I painted around the roses instead of masking them, I ended up with more little white gaps, but I don’t think it’s bad. I also left more room for the roses, because I knew how much room they’d actually take up, which allowed them to look more abundant and to be big enough to paint shadows on. And I ended up making the background bushes darker and less detailed, which draws less attention from the blooms.

The overall color story is also adjusted to the flowers and uses the same pigments in different mixes. Because this is a chapter about bright color, I skipped the neutral grays and opted for a Joyce Hicks-style violet-as-gray palette. I can’t prove it, but I do also think that, even had I tried to make grays as I did in the first exercise, I would have been more likely to use pigments from the flowers because putting them down early made me decide what they were going to be.

Chapter Rating

Cons: made-up terminology, color temperature, confusing mixing chart, describing simple concepts in the most confusing way possible, project hidden in an image caption that is written in a way to alienate artists at every level.

Pros: A truly helpful tip that I learned from!

I guess that adds up to about a C. It was worth reading!

Key Useful Ideas

• Match color bias to make vibrant mixes.
• Paint the vibrant colors first.

Go back to chapter 2 / Forward to chapter 4