Color Composition: Making Color Sing, Chapter 20

Last time, I talked about how Making Color Sing had taught me that less is more: making a color take up less space in your scene can give it more impact. I had gleaned it from secondary points made in chapters about other things, but I claimed there was no chapter on the topic. I was wrong: that’s exactly what Chapter 20 is about.

I should have read ahead! I now understand that “Color Composition” literally means “the amount/proportion of space a color takes up in your painting.”

“Methodically duplicating colors as they appear in a landscape is rarely satisfying,” Dobie writes. Speak for yourself! However, I have to concede her further point: “sometimes nature’s colors ‘disguise’ the center of interest.”

Dobie describes a student who was excited about the brilliant fall colors: “As she excitedly sketched, she captured the lovely rust tones in the berries and the lovely rust tones in the leaves! Later, when she analyzed the sketch, she realized nothing interesting was happening with the color. There was no reaction.”

Busted! This specific scenario has happened to me tons of times, because I am a huge fall color aficionado. When I’m out in the landscape, the brilliant yellows, oranges, or reds look so amazing, but often my photos and sketches fall flat because I insist on filling the frame with one color.

I know why I do it; I’m trying to capture the feeling of wonder that I have as I stare at the color, surrounding myself with it as I do when I stand under a tree and look up. Unfortunately, I do think the strategy often backfires. As pretty as the color is in real life, when it’s the only color in a scene, it becomes monotonous.

As in Mouse Power, Dobie uses the metaphor of jewels.

If you have a special color you wish to accent in a painting, repeating that color everywhere defeats your efforts. Workshop participants have heard me preach about how beautiful a diamond can look displayed on a cloth of black velvet. As it shimmers and catches light from all directions, the viewer can readily appreciate its uniqueness. But if two dozen diamonds were placed around it, would you be able to admire the original as much as before? Would you even be able to find the original?

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, p. 100

Projects

Inspired by the story of Dobie’s student who loved fall colors, I decided to try some fall colors paintings myself. (Besides, I’m just dying waiting for fall!)

My original idea for a project was to take some autumn scenes where I’d committed the “too much of a good thing” error and redo them, but I found often that the error was in the original reference photo: I cropped too tightly on the brilliant color, losing the context that allowed it to pop.

So, instead of redoing existing scenes, I flipped back through my fall reference photos and found some where I could put the “jewel in a setting” principle to work.

In the reference above, there’s barely any red: just one tree has turned red, and the rest are still green. I couldn’t resist painting the brilliant blue sky, but I muted my greens a bit to cause the scarlet to pop.

I may still have centered and enlarged the colored trees too much here, but, believe it or not, this still me toning it down compared to my instincts! As much as I wanted the “fiery maple” from 2023 to look flamelike, I have to concede the trees look even more flamelike when I include more of the context – the gray sky, the dark conifers, the brown grass.

Note that the original 2023 scenes also adhere to the “mouse power” concept that supporting colors should contrast (in value, hue, and chroma). The background colors don’t compete, there’s just not enough of them!

Rating

I really like this chapter. It’s pretty similar to Mouse Power, and some of the examples veer into that territory, but distinct in that it covers amount of space taken up by your favorite color, specifically that a color achieved more “dominance” when it is not so large. This (as I explained in Less Is More) is an idea I found counter-intuitive. There are relevant and memorable examples, and another great jewel metaphor.

Rating: A