Techniques of the Impressionists: What Colors are Shadows?
Once you start painting and closely looking at colors, you soon realize that simply reaching for a tube of black paint whenever you need to put in a shadow doesn t work. The result isn t subtle enough to capture a realistic shadow. The Impressionist Renoir is quoted as saying No shadow is black. It always has a color. Nature knows only colors white and black are not colors. So if black was to be banished from their palettes, what did the Impressionists use for shadows? The True Colors of Shadows Working from the then-relatively new theory of complementary colors, the logical color to use was violet, being the complementary of yellow, the color of sunlight. Monet said: Color owes its brightness to force of contrast rather than to its inherent qualities primary colors look brightest when they are brought into contrast with their comp
