I’m working my way through Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing. Chapters 24-25 build on the idea of planning your shape structure, as introduced in Twelve Shapes: Making Color Sing Chapter 21 and developed in Shapes Plus Value Plus Color: Making Color Sing, Chapter 22. In the interest of moving along, I’ll combine these chapters.
Chapter 24: Beyond the Subject
A bad beginning:
What usually captures your eye as you search the countryside for painting inspiration? Is it always a subject? Or is it a relationship? Don’t stop short and merely depict a subject. Even though you may lavish all your expertise on it, a subject will remain just a subject.
Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, ch. 24, “Beyond the Subject”
Okay, that means nothing. Reading on, what Dobie refers to as the “subject” is probably what I would call the focal point: the main idea, or most detailed part of the painting. She is telling you basically to think about how you situate the subject within the background or context.
This is another chapter that is a little difficult to generalize because it’s taught in examples, but I think she is talking about negative space or the space in between different areas, and encouraging you to consider and plan the shapes that result when you place the subject/focal point against the background. Don’t be afraid to move the subject relative to the background so the shapes look nicer together.
Pitfalls Dobie warns against:
- just painting everything you see exactly as you see it without thinking about how to position or change it. This can result in a scene that is too complicated.
- focusing entirely on the subject with no background/context. This can result in a scene that is too simple.
She posits that focusing on the relationship between subject and background is a solution to both problems, but in different ways.
Example 1: Simplify a complex scene
Dobie gives the example of a complex scene with three elements: boats, a town, and mountains. She suggests drawing each of these elements on a separate piece of tracing paper and stacking them to try different arrangements. You could entirely remove one of the elements – make it a painting of just boats and mountains, or just boats and a town, for example. You could also move them relative to each other.
Example 2: Complete a relationship
Another example is an overly simple painting of rocks in the middle of the frame. Dobie shows how moving the rocks within the frame and adding a shoreline next to them creates an interesting interplay.
Chapter 25: Distinctive Divisions
This chapter builds directly on Twelve Shapes: Making Color Sing Chapter 21. Here she suggests designing your shapes in such a way that there are “unequal divisions”, or some shapes/areas much larger than others. Basically she is pushing you to play with extremes and resist the neat and tidy temptation to make everything equal and even. She gives the example of a painting with three equal-sized mountains and how it becomes more interesting when they are varied in a shape and size.
I’m not sure I believe this justification, or care:
When jurying an exhibition, judges often comment, “I like the simplified division of shapes,” as they accept a painting. There is little doubt that distinctive divisions can make a painting stand out. Indeed, an expertise in dividing areas of the paper is the reason a painting excels, more than relying on a dramatic subject.
Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, ch. 25, “Distinctive Divisions”
Dobie again advises working in cut paper, though personally I think cut paper is a terrible medium for this since you can’t enlarge it once cut. She seems to feel that students find cut paper easier to experiment with than permanent paint, but cutting is also permanent! I think it’s easier to make thumbnails with paint because it’s quicker to paint than cut out a shape.
Really, for those who want to incorporate digital into their work, it’s probably easiest to make up a thumbnail on Procreate, enlarge or reduce areas, put things on different layers and move them relative to each other, etc.
Project
There are no specific exercises in here, so I’ll just take one of my photos and try some thumbnails showing different composition options.
Here’s the photo I’ve chosen.
I like the mountain against the cloud, but it’s small and hidden away. Let’s try some thumbnails where I experiment with the size and placement of the mountain.
Personally, I think pencil thumbnails are far far easier than these other options using tracing paper, cut paper, or even digital. It takes a couple of seconds to dash off a messy thumbnail, and you can quickly make a ton of variations.
I liked the “small mountain” variation best (even though it happens to be basically the same as the photo, just without the foliage), so I painted that one.
Key Useful Ideas
Play with composition in the planning stage:
- Try different ways of placing the elements of your painting relative to each other. Pay attention to the way the shapes look together, such as shapes created from negative space and interplay between elements.
- Try deleting areas from your scene if it’s too busy.
- Play with size and scale. Compositions often work best when one area is much larger than another.
Rating
Neither of these chapters are about color or even value, so I found them off-topic (and because I am all about color: boring.) It’s not a bad idea to remind artists that they don’t have to copy references or reality – they can change shape, size, and placement of elements, and edit others away. It’s good to remember that you can experiment before you commit to a composition. The specific framing of “create a relationship” or “unequal divisions” don’t do much for me, though.
Rating: C-
Back to Chapter 23
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