How To Mix Colour – Greens
How To Mix Colour - Greens
Leaves are green or are they?
Colour mixing greens - sometimes there are ochrey greens, blue greens, grey green, brownish greens, and even red greens and purple greens.
When you paint blooms and fruit, its important to know how to create a variety of colour in your greens.
It makes all the difference to your painting if you can respond to your image and colour mix a variety of colours in the foliage.
The 10 Minute Green Colours Eye Opener
Take a ten minute walk in your neighbourhood or in a leafy garden or park near you in your lunch hour.
Tune into how many variants of greens there are right under your nose! Take snaps on your smart phone ir digital camera and in no time you will have an incredible range of greens and non green leaves.
Notice the leaves that are more ochre than green, leaves that are red, and can you see any purple leaves? Succulents are often grey and silvery.
Leaves with the sun lighting them from behind can turn a brilliant lime colour. Are you with me?! Hopefully now you can agree that not all greens are just green!
The next challenge is to train your brain to accept this incredible range of possible colours so you can create the same diversity in your paintings.
The best way to do this is to colour mix some greens yourself, increasing colour options available off the shelf by adding other colours to your greens.
I have some commercially prepared greens I frequently use. These ones are from Winsor and Newton.
From left; Chromium Oxide Green, Phthalo Blue Green Shade, Olive Green, Sap Green and Cobalt Green.
These are just some of the greens available. You can use the greens in other ranges if that’s what you have, to try this exercise.
To see my MIXING GREENS colour demo video you can go to this youtube link
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Below the green selection I have picked some colours to mix with those greens to create more variety that might help to match some of the greens we are seeing in actual leaves. You can see I have mixed Graphite Grey with Cobalt Green to make a dark blue grey green.
Then I’ve added Cadmium Yellow Medium to create a light green. I could add white to that to create any more.
With the Phthalo Green Blue Shade I’ve added Cadmium Yellow Medium to create a bright mid green.
With the Sap Green, I’ve combined it with burnt umber for a lovely dark brownish green.
You could equally create more options mixing alizarin crimson with a sap green, cerulean blue with any of the green colours.
It’s a good idea to get your green paints out and try mixing them with other colours to create a bigger range of greens. Use your photo snaps of leaves as inspiration to push your palette further and to open yourself to new possibilities.