Making Color Sing [Paperback]

Jeanne Dobie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2000

Through clear, illuminating excercises, this best-selling book stimulates new ways to think about color, generating responses that unlock personal creativity and allow artists to express themselves with paint as never before. Readers are shown how the interplay of complementary hues can trigger vibrations; how the push and pull of warm and cool colors can create a feeling of space; how to disguise one color in a scene to accent another; and many more tidbits of colorful advice.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jeanne Dobie, a teacher and painter whose work is shown widely and often wins coveted awards, lives in Pennsylvania.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Watson-Guptill (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0823029921
• ISBN-13: 978-0823029921
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 0.3 x 11 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #525,240 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must-Read for any watercolorist, May 13, 2004

By 

Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Making Color Sing (Paperback)

The talented Jeanne Dobie does a lot of her work in the sun-drenched Florida Keys. While there are many good books on color and pigment, Dobie explains how light in a painting scene shifts moment by moment and how you have to be ready to capture that brilliant moment with the right palette.

The book gives advice on which colors to put in a limited palette for brilliance. (As anyone who has done watercolor even for a short time knows, there are hundreds of colors available, but when you MIX them, sometimes you get a flat, dull result that looks like mud on the paper.) Choosing a limited and CORRECT palette for the painting you are going to do is one of the most critical steps after creating the composition. Dobie includes important facts about which paints stain the paper (and cannot be lifted up again), which are transparent and can be used as a wash or glaze, and which paints are opaque. And if you follow the "purist" rule of no white paint, you learn how to leave the whites (use the paper for brilliant whites) and no black paint (which causes a visual hole in the paper.) Instead, Dobie shows the student painter how dark colors like brown or a visual black can be mixed that still look luminous and interesting on the paper. This is a very difficult technique to master--shadow detail can make or break a painting.

I disagree with one of her points, however, on mixing greens. While it is true that green pigments direct from the tube are far more brilliant and transparent than any you can mix, I find certain mixed greens from yellows and blues to be subtle for shadowed foliage, and sometimes the pure paint greens are jarring and unnatural to me. I tried to follow this "use unmixed" greens rule, and I end up mixing mine anyway, though I own many shades of green paints.

Of course, the best part of the book are the paintings. These are inspiring to the reader, but this author can also write and explain herself well. This book should be a standard on any watercolorist's shelf.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bible of watercolor books, July 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Making Color Sing: Practical Lessons in Color and Design (Hardcover)

I have a library full of books on watercolor. Dobie's book is the one I read over and over and carry with me where ever I go. If I get stuck in a painting, a key to the answer is always in this book. This is a book to read several times. Each time I read it, I take my painting to a higher level. My copy is so dog-eared, I will soon need another one. If you know a watercolorist, this book would make a great gift. I call it "The Bible" of watercolor books.

49 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Recommends non-lightfast colors!, April 24, 2005

By 

Nigel "Nigel" (Austin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Making Color Sing (Paperback)

What are all these 5 star reviewers thinking??? Aureolin and rose madder--Dobie's recommended yellow and red primaries, are extremely fugitive--they fade in a short time.
Because of this alone, the book should be vigorously rejected as coming from dubious authority. Her plan for making colors "sing," by the way, involves placing an occassional bright color in a field of grays or browns, mixed not from earth pigments, but from (fugitive) primaries. It would be irresponsible of me to perpetrate such a book on an unsuspecting public by giving it any stars at all. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't have a "zero" stars option. If you want a superior book that will show you much better ways to make colors "sing," get "Perfect Color Choices for the Artist," by Michael Wilcox.