Less is More

I wanted to make a post about an idea that I’ve been noticing hidden between the lines in the last few chapters of Making Color Sing, although there’s not a specific chapter on it. That’s the idea that you can make a particular color pop by having less of it in your painting. That is, make it take up less space.

I first noticed this in chapter 17, Paint Passages, where I attempted to feature the color violet but ended up inadvertently featuring earth red because my painting was mostly violet so that the earth red highlights popped out.

In chapter 18, “Color Vibration,” Dobie points out that you can increase the “vibration” of a contrasting color pair by making the less dominant color smaller.

She also gives an example of a student who painted an orange sky with a blue moon. Normally, orange would be a stronger, pushier, more “pop” color than blue; after all, blue recedes. But in this case, the opposite happened: the blue popped.

Although the orange color my student chose was beautiful, it covered a vast area so that it was no longer unique but mundane. By providing relief, the cool blue moon paradoxically superseded the overwhelmingly bright, warm orange.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, p.97

There’s no picture of this in the book, and I couldn’t quite picture it, so I tried to paint a recreation.

Experiment

I experimented with this idea by painting four abstract mini-panels. The black background is meant to set off the bright green triangles (made from masking tape).

In which panel does the green “pop” most for you? Arguably I did create a distacting factor by making the largest ones feature a gradient! But I think the large triangles definitely overrun the background, while the smaller ones create a much more specific “target” for your eyes to zip to.