Tony Paul looks at the subject of how to mix greens and shows that it is far simpler than most of us imagine!

Colours

• Lemon yellow
• Titanium yellow
• Cadmium yellow
• Cadmium yellow deep
• Indian yellow
• Yellow ochre
• Naples yellow
• Cadmium orange
• Cerulean blue
• Phthalo blue
• Prussian blue
• Ultramarine
• Manganese blue
• Indanthrene blue
• Cobalt blue

Mixing greens in general

Arguably, greens are the colours that students find more difficult to mix than other colours, but there is no reason why greens should be any problem at all. All of the following are mixes of two colours to ensure that there will not be a muddy looking result, even if the mix is a muted colour.

How to mix bright and dull greens

The biases of the component colours are particularly important when aiming for bright greens.

Most colours have a leaning towards another colour. For instance, cadmium yellow has quite an orange hue, while lemon yellow leans towards green. Ultramarine blue leans towards purple, whereas phthalo blue is greenish.

If the biases of your blue and yellow are towards green, they will make a bright green; if they are not, a dull green will result.

For these colour mixes Tony uses oils but the principles apply to any medium.

So you can see that you need lemon yellow and phthalo blue to make a bright green. A mix of ultramarine blue and cadmium yellow makes a duller, but still very useful green.

The names of the colours vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and from set to set.

By making simple charts like those above you will find which of your colours make bright greens and which make duller ones. Note the names of the colours on your charts for future reference.