It Ain't Easy Paintin' Green

To paraphrase Kermit the frog, "It ain't easy paintin' green!

Just seeing the variations in green is  difficult for most people. Here on the east coast during in spring and summer, green is everywhere.  Not only are the the trees green, the bushes green and the grass green; even the reflections in the water are green.

To compound matters, greens straight out of the tube are way too garish to use in landscape. And they don't play nicely with others, making it hard to achieve color harmony in your paintings.What's a painter to do?

When it comes to  green, you have plenty of choices. It's so easy to get overwhelmed and confused.  Paint manufactures tempt us with colors like emerald green , permanent green light and cobalt green.

There are infinite varieties of green that you can make with different blues and yellows.But which greens and blues and yellows do you start with? And how do you avoid using the same color combinations over and over again?

The best way to get started on your green mixing adventure is to use a limited palette. Get to know the colors that you normally use and see what greens you can make with them. With fewer colors, it's more likely that your mixes will have common colors, and that's what creates color harmony. My normal palette consists of white, cad yellow, yellow ochre, cad red, transparent red oxide, alizarine crimson and ultramarine blue.

Just using cad yellow and ultramarine blue some white and a toning color like transparent red I can get quite a nice variety of greens

Now, I can up my range of greens by adding a second blue. These mixes use thalo blue and yellow ochre in addition to white and transparent red

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I would recommend experimenting with all the blues and yellows in your paint box until you find your favorites.  There are convenience colors that I love to have in my arsenal. Pennsylvania springs call out for cad yellow green and  I wouldn't dream of painting the Italian landscape without olive green. I've rediscovered the subtle beauty of terre vert and mixes with viridian can fast track me to luscious blue greens.

The truth is  that without variety your landscape paintings fall flat.  In order to create distance our greens needs to be duller and blue. To create the close ups the greens should be warmer and brighter. Having an idea what your colors you can mix will help you create just about any green you can find in the landscape and you will be on your way to capturing the scenes that you see.

Want to know more about mixing green? Here is an excellent technical article about the color green.