blue shadows

Outdoors on a sunny day, shadows can appear to be tinted blue. The shadows appear blue because the bright yellow light from the sun is blocked from the shadow area, leaving only indirect light and blue light from other parts of the sky.  Once you start 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. 


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? Working from the then-relatively new theory of complementary colors, the logical color to use was violet, the complementary of yellow, the color of sunlight. The Impressionists created violet by glazing cobalt blue or ultramarine with red, or by using new cobalt and manganese violet pigments that had become available to artists.

twenty-three/blue