A Word about yer Greens....

This really applies to all media, but as I've been working in oil lately, I'll put it here. Ready-mixed greens - what do you think of them?  I've just finished two oil paintings (I've zhooshed one of them up a bit now, but all the basics are the same; might post it when I've photographed the later stage). In one, if you've seen them, the one of Tennyson's Monument, my favourite place in the world, was painted by mixing my greens from combinations of Manganese Blue Deep (even the Hue colour is good for mixing greens) and Cadmium Yellow, Yellow Ochre, and Lemon Yellow.  In the other, a very green painting of a local nature reserve, I used Pthalo Green, mixed with a variety of other colours, yellows, Quinacridone Violet.  I much prefer the one with the greens that I mixed from blue and yellows; if I were going to paint the other one again, I might use Viridian - because I found Pthalo Green so strident that I had to keep modifying it, toning it down, and ... regretting it. I've used Sap Green - the permanent version - in the past; I've used other greens as well.  But I have to say that in future, I'm going to mix with, basically, blue and yellow.  Pthalo Green is good for mixing chromatic blacks - as is Viridian.  But while Viridian can make soft greys, mixed with a crimson or Burnt Sienna, Pthalo always seems to creep through and announce itself.   Perhaps I'm just not getting the trick of it - but I wonder if YOU use it, and if so, what you think of it - for a painting heavy on green, it really does seem to me to act like a bully on the palette. 

Thanks for those responses - I think my mistake recently was to use too much Pthalo Green, using it as a base colour; you can certainly mix all sorts of colours into it, it's actually very responsive to that; but always - I look at the painting and what do I see?  Pthalo-rotten-Green!  I suspect the answer here is to use it little - to let your mixes of blue and green carry the bulk of the painting, using Pthalo (or better, Viridian - a good Viridian is softer) for the sharper accents.   Anybody got a good word for Terre Verte in landscapes?  I notice that my tube of it is very, very old - so obviously I rarely use it.  I feel an experiment coming on.... 

Interesting revival of an old thread!  Pthalo Green is very hard to manage, in any medium - it is extremely lightfast, which is good; but powerful beyond words, which isn't so good.  Viridian - on its own is, I agree, horrible (I sense I've probably said this before....): but mixed with Burnt Sienna, or Permanent Rose, even Cadmium Red, it makes a huge array of greys and a powerful black.  It can give you  the colour of trees in high summer, if toned down with Burnt Sienna.  Charles Evans uses Hookers Green in watercolour and acrylic - also horrible on its own, but very useful indeed mixed with yellows, and it also makes a great black, when added to a crimson.   Terre Verte is gentle, kindly, and I ought to use more of it than I do - snag is, it's not compatible with acrylic (so far as I know). Now for those lovely caveats to which we all so look forward!  Sap Green is indeed a useful colour, but - what's in it?  Always pays to check - the original pigment (made from plant material) was fugitive; and some modern variations might be too - plus, nearly every manufacturer uses a different formula.  Viridian is quite often not real Viridian, but Pthalo Green - check the pigment number: Viridian is easily manageable; Pthalo isn't - it's included in the Michael Willcox School of Colour sets: I can see why, because it's much cheaper than, eg, Viridian, or Cobalt Green.  But - well, in all media I've found it VERY hard to control (our late friend, Syd Edward, hated it, and thought you insane if you used it).  I bet Alan Bickley can master it though. I'm pretty sure I'm repeating a lot in my earlier post, but maybe it's useful to do that now and then.   I agree with you - Tessa, probably others - that greens are best mixed with blues and yellows, and sometimes with Payne's Grey or Black.  I've got away, I think, with using Viridian (obviously, mixed with other colours) but somehow - I always see Pthalo Green leering at me through any mix in which I've used it: I'm not sure I don't expect to, and thus see more than is actually there.  But I do approach it with huge caution. A YouTube watercolourist - and a seriously good one - Lois or Louise Davison (my awful memory for names comes to get me again) has been having a bit of a fling with Perylene Green; I've tried that, and it does give dark, earthy greens, mixed with a little blue, yellow, or Burnt Sienna/Indian Red.   David Curtis, which I know I've said before, has used Cobalt Green - but then, he's a professional artist, selling his work: the expense of it would probably deter most of us, and has so far deterred me pretty effectively.   I thought it worth coming back to this even if I DO repeat myself, and some of the rest of you, because the one thing that's common to nearly all landscape painters is the anguished cry "how do I deal with all those greens?" - well, there are ways; though my advice is, try mixing them yourself before resorting to any tube green: drop a bit of earth red into them; don't forget that foliage and grasses cast quite deep shadows; and remember to make full use of the complementaries and near complementaries - reds and oranges.  

Alan, our lips are sealed.