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Does anyone else have a real aversion to green?
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Message
Posted
Random question I know, but I thought it might be interesting!
Other than when i am doing something realistic colour-wise, like grass or trees, I have a real issue with greens. I don't know if it's just the range that is available in acrylics, but whenever i am going through all my paints and picking out the colours to use in my more abstract stuff (colour-wise) before I mix them, i never ever gravitate towards the green paints. I don't know what it is about them, I think it sort of feels like they either go to dark/sludgy or can over power any other colours you use alongside them.
Anyway, maybe it's just me and no one will reply to this! But I thought I'd just throw it out there.
Posted
Don't know about an aversion to them, but a lot of people have trouble mixing them. I find the greens available in acrylic tend to have a rather strong character - more so than in oil. So unless you want a universal green, i.e. one that permeates and dominates your whole picture, I would tend to mix them - either from blue and yellow, or a green-blue and earth orange for dusky ones, or by adding something else (red, burnt sienna, raw sienna among other things, even lemon or cadmium yellow) to tube greens. The aim there is broadly to de-saturate them: to calm them down so they look more natural and less strident, or to warm the often rather cold tube greens up a bit.
Posted
I tend to be very poor on mixing greens so tend to buy tubes of ready-mixed. However I always find I am disappointed in the sap greens because they come out brighter than I would wish. Also a lot of artists like to use viridian in mixes but, unfortunately I always make a pig's ear of it. I love green, but it just doesn't love me. Perhaps I should persevere with mixing my own.
Posted
I prefer not to have green in my paintings. It is not a colour I want to have on my walls. Of course I have to resort to it in flower paintings, and small smatterings of it in landscapes.
Green seems to be out of vogue currently. If you look at popularist, decorative art hanging in places like Furniture Village, green is a rarity. I don't read Interior design magazine's, but someone, who does might like to comment on this.
However, there are some interesting greens available in acrylic (Lime green, green gold, olive).