The color yellow appears to advance. It has the highest reflectivity of any color.
Today hearing “yellow” many painters will think of Cadmium Yellow – brilliant and opaque. Cadmium Yellow replaced toxic chrome (lead) yellows. Although more expensive than Chrome Yellow, Cadmium Yellow was used by landscape painters, including Claude Monet, because of its higher chroma and its greater purity of color.
Painters today can choose from among the cadmium yellows of the impressionists as well as the modern and more transparent hansa yellows. Hansa yellows retain their intensity in tints and make beautiful glazes. Hansa Yellows can boost cadmiums in mixes; enabling brighter secondaries. India Yellow has been prized for hundreds of years and is ideally suited for glazing. In its transparency, it makes a glowing warm yellow—as if a painting were suddenly lit with summer sunshine.
