Color Disguise: Making Color Sing, Chapter 16

In chapter 16 of Making Color Sing, Jeanne Dobie explains how to design a low-contrast color context that will help you de-emphasize a subject without repainting or glazing it. This is the opposite of “singing color,” it’s quieting color! 

Dobie identifies scenarios where you might want to paint a section of a scene in such a way that it is ignored or passed over by viewers; for example, if you’ve left a certain section of the painting undeveloped or you want emphasis elsewhere. To choose “color that they eye ignores,” use a color similar to the surrounding colors – similar in hue, value, and/or chroma.

The principles are the same ones we’ve learned so far:

• Emphasis is created with contrast. Colors laid next to each other that contrast strongly in value, hue, chroma, or color temperature create a “vibration” that draws the eye. (It’s just, in this chapter we’re trying to avoid that.) 
• Color perception depends on context. The same color may look bright or dull depending on its neighbors.

A color placed next to another color influences it for better or worse.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, p. 89

Dobie gives an example of painting a bright red barn. She loved the rich color, but hadn’t intended it to be so vibrant. Rather than “making color sing” by contrasting neighboring colors, she instead reversed those principles and used neighboring colors with red in them: a warm gray sky and brown landscape elements to help the barn “sink in” to the painting. 

Another example shows a yellow shed with a lavender snowy roof. When the background trees are blue, the yellow shed “pops”, and appears to be the subject of the painting. However, Dobie didn’t want that; she wanted to emphasize the lavender roof. When the background trees are instead yellow-brown, the lavender roof “pops” while the yellow shed “sinks in.”

This is my favorite example because she shows it both ways, and it’s clear that this is simply the inverse of “singing color” – but thinking about it in both ways can help you make more intentional decisions about which part of the painting you want to emphasize.

Project

Dobie shows the finished product of her red barn example, but not how it might have looked with opposite choices – that is, with the barn’s red color emphasized by contrast. I thought a natural experiment would be to do something similar but show how the scene looks both ways to be able to make an informed choice about which strategy I want to employ in a given situation. 

I used this barn reference photo by Guido Klinge on Unsplash.

I started by painting the painted part of the barn using the same red mix in both the top and bottom panels.

Then I painted the rest of the barn and the surrounding scene. For the top panel, I used warm colors to go along with the red and help it “sink in”, as Dobie did in the chapter. I used warm brownish-grays and yellow-ochre-ish vegetation. For the bottom panel, I did the opposite: I created contrast. I made the sky green-blue, the roof blue-gray, and the surrounding vegetation very bright green.

I’m trying to ignore the fact that I did a better job in general on the top panel than the bottom panel (for example, in the bottom panel I made a mistake and painted over the bottom of the red barn with green, resulting in a weird brown stripe).

True to the lessons we’ve learned so far, the red “pops” more when it is contrasted with the green. But true to Dobie’s example in the book, I think the top panel looks better! Somehow, the red of the barn pops too much in the bottom panel, giving the overall scene a flat, graphic look. The slightly increased realism of the top panel makes the red color look more realistic and therefore more intense contextually even though it doesn’t contrast as much.

Rating

The chapter is reasonably clear by the standards of this book (meaning it still has some meandering). There are visual examples, but no exercises for you to do.

The idea is a little repetitive with previous chapters, but I don’t mind this. I think that learning variations on the same lesson is really helpful in cementing the ideas.

The one thing I wondered about was how she made the artistic decision for when to use “sinking” vs “singing” color. How did she know she didn’t want the red barn, the subject of the painting, to pop out that much? I understand the color theory principle of what you actually do to reduce emphasis, but how do you make the artistic decision that you want to? It’s beyond the scope of the chapter.

Overall rating: B.