Lemon, Light and Shadow
Complementary colours for shadows
Complementary colours are sitting opposite each other on the colour wheel: yellow and purple, red and green, blue and orange. Theyâre the engine behind almost every good shadow youâll ever paint, and they work in different ways depending on whether you mix them or layer them.
Mix them in the palette and a complementary pair cancels out into a natural grey or brown. This is how you make a darken or mute a colour without reaching for black, which tends to look dead.
Glaze one over the other on the paper (a transparent layer over a dry layer) and something different happens. The colour underneath still glows up through the top layer, so a shadow stays luminous and full of light instead of going flat and chalky. That effect is what makes watercolour so special, and itâs what weâre practising this week.
With a lemon twist đ
The lemon has a long history as a painterâs subject. In the great Dutch still lifes of the 1600s a lemon turns up again and again, often half peeled with its skin curling off the table, because rendering that bright skin and its luminous shadows was how a painter showed off. It was the fruit you used to prove you could handle colour and light.
So this week we paint lemons. Not to prove our abilities, but because yellow is the brightest colour and makes a beautiful pairing with purple.
If youâre not into lemons, this also works for bananas, papayas or mangoes â fruits the painters of the 1600s didnât have access to.
Exercise
Mixing the swatches
Painting a lemon
Why
Mixing complements gives you natural shadow colours
Glazing complements makes luminous shadows that palette mixing alone canât match
Yellow and violet is the most legible complementary pair, so you build the instinct here before tackling trickier ones.
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Video demo of the exercises
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My favourite complementary colour pairings
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