Finally, we learn what “singing color means!” In this chapter, Dobie brings together concepts from previous chapters into a unified theory of color contrast.
Insight #1: Singing color
Again, to make a color sing, you need to create a reaction with the color surrounding it.
Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, ch. 8, p. 48
By “reaction,” she means a visual pop effect by means of contrast. She most frequently talks about this in terms of hue contrast (putting complementary colors next to each other in the painting), but it can also apply in conjunction with other forms of contrast, such as chroma and value.
We have seen this in various contexts throughout these chapters:
- Mouse power: Mixing your own grays to make low-contrast colors that are not quite neutral gray, but err on one side or the other. You can then lay these next to brighter colors in complementary hues for chroma + hue contrast.
- Dark glows: By the same token, mixing your own darks allows you to make low-value colors that are not quite neutral black, which you can lay next to lighter colors in complementary hues for value + hue contrast.
Insight #2: Glow requires a light touch
Too often [color, especially yellow] is applied strongly for brightness, but adding more pigment does not necessarily increase the glow. When the yellow is too heavy, light cannot penetrate through to the paper and help the color shine. Also, when yellow is thickly applied, it appears as a middle value rather than a light.
Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, ch. 8, p. 48
This is one of those insights that’s added as a sort of side issue, but I think it could get a chapter all its own. I feel that I have been quite often guilty of slathering on more paint in order to make colors brighter. For me, this applies not just to yellow, but also pink and red, particularly in floral and autumn foliage situations. I have enough experience now to know that “just add more paint” is often counterproductive, but I can’t help myself!
Instead of adding more paint to the bright area – which often requires a light touch and transparency to “glow” – Dobie suggests that you leave your subject alone and instead work on the surrounding context, increasing various types of contrast as outlined above.
Exercises
Exercise #1: Creating complementary reactions with settings
The chapter centers around an exercise much like the “jewel in a setting” exercise in the Mouse Power chapter. Dobie has you paint a line of various bright colors, then create “frames” that use different methods of creating dark or gray colors:
- Black paint
- A mixed neutral dark
- A mixed complementary dark
- A mixed complementary gray
The point of this exercise is to notice the increased “glow” when using self-mixes over black paint, and even more so when using more complementary colors compared to neutrals.
In my example, I skipped step 1, black paint, because I am already sold on this not being The Way.
Here is a series I made with yellows.
I do feel that my dark complements “sing” here more than my neutrals, though the transparency of the grays over the yellow stripe make it harder for me to judge. I copied the way Dobie does it in the book, but perhaps I should have limited the yellow to a square instead of a line.
All three of my yellows seem to have a glowing reaction when compared to the dark blue-violet background (middle column), though perhaps PY97 (middle) is most successful. I think that I was most successful at keeping a light touch here. But PBr24 (bottom row) isn’t bad, even though it’s opaque. Opacity doesn’t seem to matter as much in the bottom layer, especially if you don’t apply it too thickly.
Here is the same exercise repeated with some reds.
Here I feel that my “complementary” darks (middle column) are not as successful at creating a glow reaction as my neutral darks (left column). Perhaps I did not make them dark enough, or they are too warm-green and should be more of a blue-green?
I feel that all the reds performed equally, and that I was more successful at keeping a light tough with them in this exercise than I usually am in real paintings. I’ve achieved “glow” with very transparent PR209 before, but I usually apply more opaquish PR255 and PR255 more thickly. This is a good reminder that they are capable of glowing if handled delicately.
Exercise #2: Too Much Paint
This exercise is not in the book; I came up with it myself after reading the tip I outlined as insight #2 above, about not using too much paint. Using a reference photo of a very bright rose, I attempted to paint it twice, side by side: once using a ton of very bright paint, and once using more restraint and contrast.
These are painted on Canson XL, so I did struggle with water control. Still, I really enjoyed slathering on tons of paint in the left rose. And, I don’t actually hate it! I used Opera in my mixes, so it is quite bright. I also made the background bright, for minimal contrast. On the right, I attempted to follow Dobie’s contrast advice. I kept a lighter hand with the paint, which gave me more value range to play with. I also attempted to make the background contrast in value (darker), chroma (grayer), and hue (green opposed to coral pink).
I fully expected the “restraint” approach to work 100% better, but I’m actually not so sure. Because of the better value range and water control, it has more dimension and is more legible as a rose, but I feel it does kind of look like a generic rose and not like the electric-bright one from the photo. Perhaps the best approach is somewhere between the two; or perhaps I should have used this approach but with brighter colors, including Opera. More hue contrast within the rose (e.g. more orange center and pinker outsides) would also have made it look more like the reference I was going for.
Conclusion
This chapter is kind of review, but I don’t mind that! I wish more books had a dedicated midpoint review chapter where they explicitly reinforce and put together some of the recurring concepts. I like the sense that different building blocks are coming together into a coherent theory or system.
Both the major insights here are important, and I hope to explore them both even more as the book continues. I don’t hold against the book the fact that I didn’t 100% “get” the desired effect in my experiments; I feel like this is mostly user error and that I have more to learn and practice.
Chapter rating: A.