What colour is white?

Some say that white is not a true colour. But that depends on how you see it and how you use it in your painting. In reality, pure white rarely exists in nature, and so should only rarely be used in your paintings. Of course there are exceptions to this – snow is a good example of a pure white in nature. However, even when we paint the white of snow it is good to tint this with a tiny bit of yellow to contrast nicely with the bounce of blue light from the sky reflected in the shadows. See my post “What colour are shadows” to find out more about reflected bounced light.

There are a variety of “whites” in my plein air sketch of a mountain ridge near Mont Blanc in France. It’s easy to see the grey and blue shadow areas, but even the sunlit white snow has a little yellow in it, put there by the colour of the sun.

But let’s explore this a bit further.

I snapped this photo as I sailed up the River Douro in Porto in Portugal a few weeks ago.

I took this photo because I was immediately struck by the colours of the white building. Below I’ve intensified them a bit to make my point clearer. Just look at how many strong colours there are in the “white”. Only the sunlit areas are what we would call white. The shadow areas are all coloured for various reasons.

Why are some areas blue and others pink? That’s because the colour depends on what is being reflected into the white walls. The end of the church on the left is blue because it is catching reflected light from the river and from the blue sky. The purple/pink wall is this colour because it is reflecting the sienna colour from the pantiles on the roof below it, and mixing this with some of the blue from the sky.

The thing to note and to remember is to paint what we see, not what our brain tells us. We see a white walled church and our brain says, “this is a white walled church, so paint it white”. But if we look carefully, what we see is entirely different. The white walls are pink, purple, buff, grey and blue. We must paint them that way. That’s where the art begins. Most people would not notice these subtleties.

Our job as artists is to point them out, to reveal the amazing beauty of this planet, and to share this wonder with others.

This “white” walled house certainly isn’t! I just painted what I saw.

Once again I hope you find these posts interesting and helpful. Thanks for reading and being a part of the community here!

#learningtopaint #paintingtips #paintingwhite