Getting to Grips with Greens

Getting to Grips with Greens

A personal approach to creating harmonising greens within a landscape

all the years I have been teaching, mixing greens and creating a harmony within greens when painting landscapes seems to be one area many artists struggle with. My personal approach is not to use a standard green from a tube, but instead to mix all the greens for the landscape and greys for the sky using mainly one dominant blue. If, for example your sky is mainly Ultramarine Blue, I would mix greys for the clouds by adding a little Venetian Red and White to create a colour similar to Paynes Grey (but with interesting variations within the greys). Using the same Ultramarine Blue and a little Naples Yellow for distant hills, the same Ultramarine Blue and cool Lemon for distant fields, moving to the same Ultramarine Blue and a warmer Yellow, perhaps Cadmium Yellow Deep, for stronger, warmer tones nearer to the foreground. In this way the underlying Blue pins together all these colour mixes to create harmonious greens under a sky which also harmonises with the landscape beneath it. Give this a try sometimes and see if you agree
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Comments

Look forward to hearing how you get on using Venetian Red as the warm terracotta to mix grey with Blues. I would say it should work well with Kings Blue but might be a little too orange to work as well with Cerulean Blue. Try using Burnt Sienna if you find yourself mixing too much of a greeny grey shade.

Interesting discussion and I will try the Venetian Red mix as I haven't used that in the sky previously. Usually stick to one blue (or maybe two) in a landscape and have been experimenting with Kings Blue recently with some interesting results.

Thanks, Robert for this insight. I agree with your feelings, especially about Phthalo Green. For anyone wishing to learn more about the greens in their paintbox, simply take each blue in your own paintbox and mix it in turn with every yellow you have. This is a great way both to mix lots of greens but also start to appreciate just how influential the underlying blues are and also just how much yellow and how little blue you need in each mix For my brightest spring green shades, I use Sevres Blue (similar to Cerulean Blue) and Lemon Yellow, with plenty of yellow. This makes a hideously strong acid green but wonderful if you then tone it down with a tiny bit of either Cadmium Red or Magenta.

spot on as usual Robert

It's the one enduring question - how do I mix greens? Or people actually being afraid of painting greens because they don't look right - and then you discover they've used an olive green, which is nearly always hideous. Adrian Hill used to rail against those who used too many blues in their oil paintings - even a different blue for the reflection of the sky in water, which you'd have thought quite obviously wouldn't make sense. The only green I've ever found which could be used un-mixed without appearing very unnatural is Cobalt Green - which is also very expensive. The one to avoid in its unmixed state ... apart from Olive Green, which is always a mix anyway ... is Pthalo Green: mixed, it's fine; on its own, it'll gobble up your whole painting. Imagine your painting above with Pthalo instead of the colours you used..... it's enough to make you feel quite queasy.