Making Color Sing Book

This book has a lot of useful information about colour, mixing, highlights, shadows etc, some of which I've not seen anywhere else yet. I took a lot of notes and I would certainly recommend it for the comprehensive explanations and colour charts. However, it is not exactly an encouraging book for a beginner - Dobie makes so many dogmatic statements about what one must and mustn't do (for example, one mustn't care much about the subject one is painting, only about the patterns and shapes), and she is so disparaging about anything that doesn't fit with her ideas ("conventional", "hu-hum", dismissing details as "calligraphy") that her claim to want to empower everybody to be as creative as they can seems not very credible. While some of the illustrations in the book show fascinating paintings, many of the pictures she holds up as shining examples look gloomy and dull to me, often containing large expanses of barely differentiated dark paint of nondescript colour. Some of her advice seems dubious, for example placing reflections on water not where they de facto belong, but to one side to make the painting more interesting - I found it just made it annoying, because it looked so clearly wrong. Other advice is impractical and wasteful, like cutting out all the shapes for a painting out of coloured paper or mixing up twice as much pigment as will be needed - I get the impression money is of no concern to her, but it is to me. Even though I learned a lot of useful things from the book, I felt depressed after I finished it and didn't even want to try another painting, since I wouldn't be able to meet all the demands she says need to be fulfilled all at once. Perhaps this book is better suited for advanced art students than to hobbyists.