Paint Passages: Making Color Sing, Chapter 17

In chapter 17 of Making Color Sing, Jeanne Dobie is defining yet a new term: “paint passages.”

Simply put, a paint passage is a color that weaves throughout your scene, leading and delighting the eye in its different variations – warmer of cooler, muted or intense, lighter or darker.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, p. 90

The example shown is the oil painting “The Butterfly Catchers” by Theodore Wendel (1906), in which lavender is the featured color, appearing in the figure’s dress, the flower fields, and the distant hills, all in slightly different variations.

I think of this chapter as an expansion on my interpretation of “Color Bridges.” It’s about returning again and again to a featured color, but it’s specifically not about reusing the same exact color; it’s about choosing different variations of the featured color. The variations are key, as Dobie stresses:

This lesson is designed to push you beyond the habit of using color straight from the paint tube. Too often, once an artist dips into a color–let’s say, yellow–the temptation is to paint every yellow area in the scene with the same brushful.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, p. 90

Later:

When a paint passage isn’t used and the color is painted without variation, the resulting sameness traps everything on a flat plane. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to weave color spatially back and forth in your painting.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, p. 93

The “spatially” there makes me think this is meant to be on some level a chapter about atmospheric perspective and creating depth, though the idea is only touched on tangentially.

Projects

For a landscape painting, select a color that intrigues you. It need not be the dominant color or in the center of interest or even important. Just select a color that you respond to and wish to develop in to further variation as it travels through the landscape…

Once you’ve decided on a color, observe how it moves through your scene. The object is to use this color to lead the viewer’s eye through your painting, along a path of color. By observing subtle color variations, you can enhance the feeling of space or accent your interest.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, pp. 91-93

Project #1: Purple Landscape

In keeping with my desire to paint more purple I chose purple as my featured color and picked a reference by searching Unsplash for “purple landscape.”

Ha ha! Without intended to, I managed to paint it a lot less purple than the reference.

Somehow this isn’t reading as a “paint passage” to me. I used a number of variations of purple – the sky, mountainsides, mist, and trees all have various red-to-purple-to-blue variations in them. But there is no “path,” no leading of the eye with the color. Purple can’t lead your eye through the scene if everything is purple. If anything the path comes inadvertently from the pops of non-purple (orangey reds).

Dobie says your featured color “need not be the dominant color”, but I think what I’m learning is that it can’t.

Project #2: Hydrangea sunset sketch

This time, I chose my own photo, and worked in a sketch style (though I actually worked on it inside from a photo because it’s too damn hot out).

I have some major problems with the way I did this: the composition weirdly focuses the sidewalk instead of the flowers, which really need to take up far more space than they do. I also used too large of a brush and couldn’t stay in the lines.

What I was trying to do in terms of passages, though, I think is slightly more successful. Again I was trying to feature purple, but this time I had an idea of the path I wanted: moving between the hints of purple in the clouds in the upper left, down the light pole and the literal path of the sidewalk, to the flowers.

There are also secondary passages here with variations of green and orange.

Project #3: Sundappled house sketch

Here’s another sketch based on one of my own snaps. I was fascinated by the orange glow of sun on the house.

The intended passage is the trail of orange sun on the edge of the tree, the trunk, and the house.

Again I had some issues with poor planning in composition and I realize now I should have glazed instead of doing the orange and brown patches on the house separately and just hoping they met at the edges properly!

Conclusion

In the second half of the book, the challenge has become distinguishing each chapter from an earlier, similar chapter – or at least, the way I interpreted an earlier chapter. I found chapter 16, Color Disguise, subtly different from the ideas of Singing Color and Mouse Power in difficult-to-articulate ways. This chapter, meanwhile, seems quite similar to chapter 15, Color Bridges. The lesson I took from “Color Bridges” was to drop elements of color already in the painting somewhere else in the painting, asking myself, for example, “How can I use this yellow somewhere else?” Now that I look back at “Color Bridges,” I can see that Dobie was referring to something a bit more specific: using an in-between color to “soften the transition” between two areas where the contrast is too great. Actually, this chapter, chapter 17, is probably more akin to what I thought “Color Bridges” was about. Bridges, passages – it’s all similar terminology!

I guess it’s not Dobie’s fault that I misinterpreted chapter 15 – well, it sort of it, but it’s not chapter 17’s fault. I do think Chapter 17 is, all by itself, overloaded with too many semi-related ideas:

1. Featuring a specific color that appears several times in the painting
2. While also subtly varying the featured color
3. Atmospheric perspective/creating a sense of depth
4. Leading lines/creating a path of attention

Dobie spends most of her time talking about the second point, variation, but as I found, the third and fourth points are also really important! They’re just sort of tacked on or assumed. I think they could use their own chapters before this to bring it all together.

A major problem with this book is that each chapter is about too many things at once. Dobie will conflate 2-3 ideas, and then write about them with vague, metaphorical language. You can read a chapter once and think it’s about one thing, and then read the same words later and realize it’s about something else. In a poem or an intentionally ambiguous work of fiction, that quality may be a strength, but in an instructional book, it’s not okay.

Grade: C-. The idea of featuring a color with subtle variations is cool… but this chapter fails to explain all the elements you need to successfully carry it off.