Making Color Sing, Jeanne Dobie – Book Review

160 pages, paperback.

So what’s in this book then?  Well, the first 100 pages are about colour.  What to have in your palette, some colour mixing ideas, using hot and cold colours, complimentary colours and glazing techniques.  The bit on colours in the palette is a bit out of date – there are more transparent blues these days than cobalt and nobody uses alizarin crimson.  So Hazel Soan’s Watercolour Rainbow still rules there.  But the rest is….   Let me come back to that later.

Because then the remaining 60 pages are on something else: values and shape-based composition.  It’s all still kind of colour related but feels less colour-focused than the first 100 pages.  Still good though.

Most art instruction books tend to have, what, six to ten chapters?  And you read through them and pick up the odd interesting tip here and there.  Maybe there’s one chapter you don’t learn from but another where you learn something new on every page.  Making Color Sing isn’t like those books.  It has 31 chapters and each chapter is effectively one huge tip.  And these are all tips that you want to put into action on your next painting.   It feels like a relentless barrage of learning – the sort of book where you realise half way through that you probably should have been taking notes.  And as well as those 31 huge tips, there are plenty of other useful nuggets within the chapters.  I’ve had to read it all a second time just to take it all in before I write this review.

This book is so good that it’s got me wondering whether I should downgrade some of the five palette ratings that I’ve given other books.  I found it to be amazing, well worth investing in.  One of the very best books out there.  Just buy it!