Tip: Shadow Colors

Since most of my painting has been done indoors using photographs as reference, I couldn’t understand all the talk about colors in shadows. Now that I have painted several studies outdoors and can compare them to photo references, I realize that my camera is not able to capture the subtle colors differences that give life to shadows.

If you look closely into shadows you will see that they are not merely black as they often appear in photographs. Look at Marla Baggetta's work titled "Shadow Color 1". The shadows are rich with color giving the painting depth and luster. Pierre-Auguste Renoir said, “No shadow is black. It always has a color. Nature knows only colors … white and black are not colors.” That being said, the honest observer must also admit that with the absence of direct light, color differences become very slight.

Although shadows can be many colors, I think it is easier to think of shadows as being more similar than different. Shadows seem to share the most devitalized color which is violet. After all, if yellow is the color of sunlight then violet, as its complement, is doubtless the best color to represent the absence of light. Color shifts in shadows are relatively easy to obtain if you start with a neutral violet as the base. All you have to do is add a little of the local color, reflected color, or complimentary color as needed to give a shadow the punch you desire.

Here is a simple exercise described Paul Strisik in his book “The Art of Landscape Painting”. “Try laying-in all the shadows in your picture with the same red-violet color (mixed form ultramarine blue and cadmium red medium). Put down the darks with a posterlike simplicity, thinking more about value than color. If you do a tree, for example, paint its shadowed side gray violet. You can add green later; the violet will mix with it and devitalize the green… As you understand shadows better, you can temper this simple idea with knowledge and taste. For the time being, however, learn to think of light and shadows in terms of energy – energy expressed in terms of values. Seen this way, lights are light; darks, dark. And the color shifts within them are relatively unimportant.”

Look at Marla Baggetta's "Color Shadow 2". Can you see how the shadows all hint of violet yet they are filled with a variety of other colors keeping the shadows alive and vibrant.

If you think of shadow color in this way, it even helps make sense of the idea that warm light casts cool shadows, and that cool light cast warm shadows. Warm sunlight or warm lamplight can produce a cool, bluish shadow when compared to a true violet. On the other hand, cool light creates a much warmer shadow (such as light through a window on an overcast day). Regardless, the warm and cool shadows never fall too far outside the violet hue.