White Glows: Reading Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing, Chapter 9

We’ve had chapters on grays and blacks; now it’s time for white. White is a challenging color to paint because, in transparent-over-white-paper watercolor, it’s really the absence of paint. Let’s see what Jeanne Dobie has to say about it.

General Points

Think of white as a color

As with grays and blacks, Dobie urges you to give your whites chromatic – to give them hints of different colors.

Simply leaving the white of the paper and placing a dark nearby creates a contrast, but this does not necessarily give you the glowing light you seek. Instead, think of whites as warm or cool, muted or intense.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing ch. 9, p. 52

Keep paint diluted so as not to lower the value out of the white zone and into a halftone, but think about what color of white each white object is.

Consider outer glow

Light from the sun, Dobie points out, tends to expand into neighboring objects.

To capture this elusive quality of expansion, avoid boxing in your whites. A boxed-in white is one that is hard-edged and looks cut out or pasted on. To eliminate the enclosed effect, give the white a subtle halftone neighbor.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, ch. 9, p. 42

I agree here that a hard-edged white shape can look pasted-on and is generally not to my taste. This is why I tend not to like whites preserved by masking fluid, which have sharp edges.

We are often told to increase contrast, so I’m interested in seeing how it will work to reduce contrast and lay a softer white next to the edge of the white object in order to create a “glow” effect, as if it is producing or reflecting light.

Make use of complementary color contrast

The recurring theme of complements is here, too, linking us with our lessons about grays and darks. Dobie reminds us that we can use the surrounding colors to give context to a color even when leaving the white of the paper. We can make the white of the paper look warm by contrasting it with cool shadows, for example.

As with the first tip, it’s important to ask yourself “What color of white is this?” and use either pale paint, contrast, or both to make it look that way.

Yikes-o-meter: High

Moments in this chapter when I tensed up included her referencing an “Oriental master I knew” and frequently referring to white with over-the-top purity language; not only “pure” and “clean” but also “unmolested” and having a “virgin glow.” Creepy.

Exercise

Dobie offers a color chart of near-white “blush” colors from her palette, implicitly suggesting that the reader do the same. So I did!

I mixed and matched some colors out of my current palette: Azo Yellow, Pyrrol Crimson, Phthalo Green BS, Quin Magenta, Phthalo Blue GS, Pyrrol Scarlet, and Cobalt Blue.

I think because of my strong colors, many of them ended up more in the realm of pastels than blushes. This provides perhaps an argument for using weaker colors since the amount of water needed to dilute strong colors can make the washes unruly.

Project

We get an assignment! I will summarize in simple steps since the description is long.

1. Paint very pale, almost imperceptible flower shapes with four different diluted colors: a yellow, a blue, a warm pink, and a cool pink.
2. For each pale color, mix a complementary gray halftone (for example, violet-gray halftone to complement the pale yellowish white).
3. Using various tones of the halftone color, negative-paint the form of the flower.

In the example you can see that she also uses other colors as needed (e.g. a yellow center for the daisy) and that she uses the complement both as the background color and for the shadows.

Here is my run at this project. I divided my paper with tape and laid a very pale wash in each window. They’re so pale they didn’t photograph well.

1. Top left: Pale yellow (diluted hansa yellow medium PY97)
2. Top right: Pale blue (diluted phthalo blue red shade)
3. Bottom left: Pale magenta (diluted quin red PV19)
4. Bottom right: Pale scarlet (diluted pyrrol scarlet PR255)

For fun, I chose different white flowers for each example. I introduced a second color as a complement to the first, but mixed the same color from the background wash to mute them. (I also included yellow generally for the flower centers.)

1. Top left: Pale yellow -> daisy on violet (carbazole violet PV23 + original PY97)
2. Top right: Pale blue -> lily on brown (DV terra cotta PR102 + original PBRS)
3. Bottom left: Pale magenta -> daffodil on brown-green (Phthalo Green + original PV19)
4. Bottom right: Pale scarlet -> tulip on blue-green (Phthalo Green + original PR255)

Somehow, the foreground and background looks more distinct on Dobie’s examples than on mine; it was more difficult than I thought to use the same hue for both shadows and background.

I may have made my original background washes too pale because I felt that I could not distinguish them once the shadows were on; I wound up adding a little more of the background color for some of the shadows, for interest.

I struggled to figure out what it meant to “lay down a halftone” next to the white to get a glowing effect. In the upper daisy and lily, I made some of the edges so soft that they become blurry, which I think is too much. In the bottom left daffodil, the edges are sharp, and although I didn’t make the background as dark as I could, I still find it leans more toward “pasted on” and less toward “glow effect.” I think I was most successful in getting the desired effect on the bottom right tulip. The edges are still sharp, but the background is pale – especially closer to the flower – giving the whole thing an ethereal glow.

While I think my skill at creating volume with shadows needs some work, I do think this method was effective in that all of my white flowers still look white even though they have some color on them.

Rating

I enjoyed this project and I felt that this lesson struck a good balance of building on previous ideas and making points that are unique to a new and specific painting situation. Chucking down one letter value for the truly creepy language, I give this chapter a B.

Key Useful Ideas

• Notice what “color of white” you see.
• Use pale “blush” washes instead of leaving the paper actually white.
• Use neighboring complementary hues to create the illusion of a color (e.g. a purple shadow next to white may make the white look more yellow).
• Lay white/blush colors next to midtones, rather than darks, to enhance a glow effect and reduce the “cut out of paper” look.