Color Vibrations: Making Color Sing, Chapter 18

“Vibration occurs when two colors interact to add visual tension,” Jeanne Dobie explains in chapter 18 of Making Color Sing. She seems to have a very specific idea in her mind of what “vibration” is, showing examples and declaring “these vibrate” and “these don’t.” I don’t always see it, personally, but the main gist seems to be creating an eye-catching, tense, slightly discordant feeling by the juxtaposition of two very intense colors, such that “the eye is forced to pulsate between the two colors… it cannot come to rest on one over the other.”

To be honest, I thought this is what chapter 8, Singing Color, was about. Looking back, I can see that the previous chapter was more about elevating one color – letting it “sing out” over other colors – by use of multiple forms of contrast. For example, you might help a light pink sing by surrounding it with dark, low-chroma, grayish greens. The “vibration” ideas is more about creating a bold visual contrast when both colors are bright and almost competing with each other. (This makes two chapters in a row where I retroactively realized I’d misunderstood another chapter.)

The Vibration Rules

Dobie gives these are the rules for creating a vibration:

1. “Both colors must be seen simultaneously.”
2. “Both colors must be totally equal in carrying power.” (tinting strength? overall dominance, as defined by the next two points?)
3. “Both colors should be exactly the same value.”
4. “Both colors should be matched to the same intensity.” (chroma)
5. “One should be cool and one should be warm.”

She doesn’t say the colors need to be complementary, but understanding complements is helpful for this challenge. Most of the example vibrations she gives are complements or near-complements. A nice thing is that if you are using complementary colors, one will be cool and one will be warm automatically.

Exercises

Dobie walks you through a specific exercise using red and green. Here, I’ve expanded on it to use additional complementary pairs, and changed the order of steps to an other that was more revelatory to me.

Exercise #1: Varying Chroma/Value

I painted each complementary pair in three variations:

• Equally bright
• Left/warm color darker & lower in chroma
• Right/cool color darker & lower in chroma

Between these three, the vibration is greatest in the version where both colors are equally bold and intense. This proves the vibration rules that both colors should be equal in value and chroma.

Exercise #2: Varying Size

In the red & green example, Dobie notes that the red color will tend to naturally dominate over the green. Warm colors will naturally “pop” over receding cool colors. To counteract that, we can adjust the size of the blocks.

I experimented with this idea a little more by painting variations in complements. In each pair, I painted blocks of equal size, then blocks where one or the other color was larger.

Where do you see the most vibration? Vibration is subjective to some extent but personally, just as Dobie predicted, I find the most tension and interest in those scenes where the warm color is large and the cool color is small (mostly red/a little green, mostly yellow/a little purple, mostly orange/a little blue).

The vibration increases when the less-dominant color is smaller. This is counterintuitive to me – I would have thought you’d make green a more dominant color by making it larger!

Vibrations with non-complements

So far, our examples of vibration have all been with complementary colors. Complements provide the maximum vibration. But you can increase vibration of any two colors by pushing them a bit further from each other on the color wheel.

In the example above, I painted blue and green, then experimented with making the green more yellow and the blue more violet. Per the theory, you should see the most vibration with the final one – the violet blue next to the yellow green.

Conclusion

I kind of get this, but the idea of “vibration” feels a little vague and subjective. I’m not sure I fully see it. Kind of, though. I do want to dig more into the “less is more” idea!

Grade: B-