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Message
Posted
Recently I was passing through a small village and spied a sign advertising a local art exhibition I was in no hurry and decided to drop in and while away some time viewing the various works .
There were still life's , portraits , seascapes but the majority of paintings were landscapes and most had one thing in common although well composed nearly every landscape had the most dreadful acidic or garish greens and indeed in some this green was used for everything grasses , leaves , trees with no variety whatsoever .
I remember when I started out in art a fabulous landscape painter told me a fair proportion of artists are terrified by greens and rarely give it much thought and think they will get away with just using any old tube green , and seeing these recent works I'm baffled as to the why ?
If any of the otherwise good artists who's works I viewed last week spent an afternoon studying how to mix convincing greens it would pay them back a thousand fold , the great James Fletcher Watson used the most delightful greens in landscapes and used to say artists used too many very light greens where darker greens abound even in summers light .
Unfortunately I think this trend is here to stay .
Posted
So right you are Dermot. The opposite to this is the number of paintings I see which are all painted in one tone. The best advice I ever received and which I still remember to this day (although it was about 25 years ago) was give to me by Peter Welton - an artist local to me with an international reputation. He looked at some of my work and he said: 'Your work would benefit from more tone and more tone Michael'. I took up the advice and my work was transformed overnight.
Posted
Last week I did spend an afternoon examining green mixes in acrylic, but I have to admit most of the green that came out of tubes was pretty vile. Viridian and Phthalo green are virtually unusable direct from the tube. I do however own a book on mixing acrylics by Ian Sidaway, which has every colour under the sun in it and how to achieve it. It's a good book if you have the base colours that he uses.
Posted
I don't do many straight landscapes, but when I do I interpret the greens so that they work together or can be differentiated. They don't always have to be "realistic" so long as they convey what you want them to. And I seem to have a preference for blue greens and grey greens, I'm always happier when I'm using those. The truth is that some people are too literal - green is green - but it has to be said, it is a tricky colour.
Posted
It's the colour with which most people have most trouble, and the reason, especially in acrylic, is that they do what Splosh correctly advises you shouldn't do - they use greens straight from the tube.
No tube green will ever be capable of representing foliage and grasses on its own - the only one that comes near to doing so, in oil, is Cobalt Green; it has the degree of dullness that you'll see in large trees at certain times of year. Fred Johnston (might have been Johnson), a former editor of Leisure Painter, said that Veridian (however I try to spell that, I get a red line under it...) on its own was useful only for achieving the colour of municipal park benches, or possibly green baize doors. You have to mix it - with a red, with a yellow; and this is true of just about all the greens you can buy.
Many artists would do well to let the tube greens lie in their box for a while, and see how they get on with blues and yellows, with a touch of red to quieten the resultant greens - try Cerulean and Cobalt with one of the fresher yellows - Lemon Yellow, for instance, or a mid-range Cadmium. Go very easy on the Pthalo Blue and Green, and Prussian - keep those for the deep darks, with a bit of Burnt Sienna, Indian Red, or Burnt Umber. Don't always use Ultramarine as your mixing blue. And absolutely - watch the tones. There's a lot to be said for painting a few pictures in monochrome (you can always glaze colour over it afterwards if you like, if using acrylic or oil) - it teaches you a lot, because you have to make the picture read without the aid of different colours.
And while I'm at it - do remember that the green of trees is almost always darker than the green of grass - back to Fred Johnston/Johnson again, who said that he'd seen trees which looked as though someone had thrown a sack of lawn-mower clippings into the branches. Some are actually afraid of green - but as a general rule, most things in nature require a mix of colours if you're to represent them believably: and we'll all have seen paintings where the tree-trunks are always brown, or even black, the grass is always a tube green, ditto the trees, the sky is ALWAYS Ultramarine (and the horizon line is always on the slant, but that's another story...), and shadows are always represented by violet, or worse, Paynes Grey or Black.
Here endeth the First Lesson...
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk.
Posted
Robert I do agree with you BUT, just for the hell of it, you've also convinced me to do a painting where tree-trunks are brown, or even black, the grass is tube green, ditto the trees, the sky is ultramarine and the shadows are violet. The hills might be even be in orange. No I won't go as far as a wonky horizon line - but there again....!
Posted
If you ban tube greens from your palette you are off to a good start in mixing greens. Better results come from mixing as Robert has outlined above. having said that I sometimes use an Olive Green from the tube but always mixed with blues, yellows and bits of red, it makes interesting silvery greens when mixed with Naples Yellow, and useful greens with other yellows. Similarly I sometimes use Oxide of Chromium as a starter for more subdued greens. Viridian and Phalo greens are no go areas as far as I am concerned.
When painting seascapes I frequently use Cerulean, for its green bias, mixed with a yellow for the sea greens.
However the only rule for greens as far as I am concerned is 'not straight from the tube'.
Posted
Syd, those are all mixed greens. Terry Harrison has devised a formula for mixing greens which saves you having to do it yourself (and frankly, I wish he hadn't: because you're learning nothing from using someone else's ready-mixed paint; but then Terry never was one to let a marketing opportunity slip).
What's being discussed here is tube greens - gets complicated, of course, because many of those are basically mixes, and pretty horrible some of them are, eg Hookers Green, "Olive green", in all its loathsome varieties (good for painting that colour which grows on cooked potatoes if you leave them in a dish on the draining board for a couple of weeks; do not ask me how I know this - but not for much else).
The point is not that El Tel hasn't produced some acceptable greens and bunged 'em, with a little help from Daler Rowney, in a tube, but that the .... groping for a word here; generic greens? regular greens? in tubes are likely to give ghastly results unless they're mixed. Assuming Daler-Rowney list the ingredients on Terry Harrison's greens, which they probably do, you could mix them yourself from the basic pigments, so they're not what is generally understood by "tube greens" (and they're not available as such in oil or acylic, either: yet .... he'll get round to it eventually, I daresay).
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
I'm with you Dermot but must admit I do have sap green and olive green in my palette - they are both somewhat subdued greens. They are great in that they are not 'in-your-face' colours and I use them mixed with a range of earth colours to provide a whole range of greens. And, yes, I do sometimes use them in their 'raw' state but only in very small areas where they can provide a highlight or a bit of contrast. As for viridian et al - I avoid them like the plague.
Interestingly if you look around you not all foliage is green - I have used raw sienna and burnt sienna on their own as a contrast in mixed planting and they work really well if sensitively handled.
Posted
I've just driven across to my daughters to drop our grandson back who had a sleepover with us last night. It's about 30 minutes each way through country roads and lanes and such a lovely drive. The colours are a real joy - all those lovely earth colours and hardly a green in sight.
And yet somehow it's rare to see a good autumnal painting with all these colours which looks natural and not contrived.
Edited
by MichaelEdwards