Unpainted Shapes: Making Color Sing Chapter 23

I’m working my way through Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing. Chapter 23 is about negative painting and leaving areas of the painting white.

Dobie stresses the importance of seeing unpainted areas of the page as shapes in and of themselves, not just leftovers.

Exercises

There are two exercises suggested here.

Half and half exercise

Design a painting with half painted and half unpainted shapes. In other words, half the scene is the pure white of the paper.

It would help every watercolorist immensely if it were possible to ration paint to only half the amount needed to cover a sheet of paper. Then we would be forced to use it judiciously to describe the remaining unpainted shapes!

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, p. 116

I think this is an absolutely wild thing to say. First of all, it’s not true: watercolorists do ration themselves to half the paint they need, but it doesn’t result in them leaving half the paper white, it results in them using tepid, pale color across the board.

Second, I disagree that it’s at all desirable to leave large amounts of paper unpainted! Most of the time, there’s hardly any white in a scene. Certainly, half of the paper is never devoted to any one color. Personally, I think even elements that are “white” should actually be painted. Actually, this is an opinion that was espoused elsewhere in this book.

I feel like sometimes Jeanne Dobie just says things.

I did not do this exercise.

Design the unpainted shapes

This is an exercise where you make a “negative thumbnail” of your painting.

1. Make a simple white and black value study
2. Reverse the white and black, using black to paint the shapes that will be white in the painting.
3. Determine whether the white shapes make sense and look good as positive, instead of negative, forms. Redesign, if needed.
4. Resketch and paint the scene.

Okay, this is an exercise I feel I can do.

Project

I used this winter reference photo of mine since it has a lot of white.

In the thumbnails below, I first did a thumbnail in the colors of the reference, then I did the “negative” with black in place of the white.

I developed this into a painting by sketching the outlines of “black” (really white) in pencil, then switching back to the reference photo as a color reference.

I didn’t actually leave anything pure page-white; I used Brienne Brown’s snow painting method of doing a first layer of darker-than-you-think-you-need diluted wash over everything that will eventually be white.

I ended up going a little overboard and painting shrubs into the righthand bank that I intended to leave white. Oops!

I think this is a reasonable exercise for thinking about white as shapes instead of “what’s left over.” For me, I don’t feel it made that much of a difference in the end, especially since I failed to preserve the whites I intended; but I suppose it would have made more of a difference if I had used the negative stage to reshape or rearrange the whites.

Key Useful Idea

White/unpainted area are part of the composition just as painted shapes are, not just “what’s left over.”

Rating

The negative-painting exercise was okay, but I felt like I had to bring a lot of my own knowledge and intuition to bear to ignore the bad advice and pick out the good. I can’t think of a single other watercolor teacher, including Jeanne Dobie elsewhere in this book, who would assert you should leave half your paper unpainted.

Rating: D

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