The trouble with green

When I first started painting out of doors the green thing overwhelmed me. This was all I saw. A sea of green. I was ready to pull out every hair on my head and go back indoors. Over time I began to notice (see) there was a lot of reds and oranges mixed in with all this green. Better yet, I began to see greens -in a different light- no pun intended. I saw greens as “cool” or “warm”, “tinted” and “untinted” and also intense and muted. That was a eye opener. I don’t buy quantities of different greens. I use the other colors to change the two greens I DO use. Sap green (which I mix) and Viridian green. Ultimately, don’t sweat the color, think more about the values. From that day forward, Green was tamed and I lived happily ever after- out of doors.

When I first start a student in watercolor, I usually won’t let them use a tube green for quite awhile. I let them mix and mix from the reds, yellows, and blues that are on their palettes.

I guess I’m relatively Chromophobic. Garish greens, and particularly gaudy violets, affect me as much as hearing a piece of music where all the musicians are playing out of tune. It’s usually best to stay away from tube greens. As Rick R. points out: think more about the values.

Thanks for this letter Robert, I’m going to print it and keep it with my stuff. So far nobody mentioned mixing greens from yellow and black which has been very useful to me.

Many people, especially males, have red-green colour blindness which affects the way they see these two colours. My father had this condition and didn’t like any shade or tint of green in his clothing or household items. My sister’s son inherited this from him (the chromosome is sex-linked, i.e. on the X gene and passed through a daughter, not a son)

Green has been my favourite colour since i was born.

I can appreciate the “green” concern. I took a week long class with a watercolourist on GREEN. We did classroom study on GREEN, then the afternoons plein air painting GREEN landscapes. This class was in Ontario, which sports every possible shade of GREEN. I still have a problem with defining GREEN when trying to get the value right.

Thank you Robert for agreeing with me when you said some of the greens should be left out in the garden for the fairies. My personal non-favorite is Viridian as far as I am concerned this colour should never see the light of day on your pallet.

Colors seem to not be specific ‘colors’ to my way of thinking. Black, for instance, appears to be red black in the foreground and green black or blue black in the background to me. Green appears to be yellow greenish in the sunlight, blue green in the shadows, and red green (brown green) in between the two, when I look at a scene. Time of day and time of year also influences.

Excellent instruction today. Man, I had trouble getting these ideas across to my painting students until I set up some demonstrations in the early 1980s — then, it was a piece of cake. Chocolate cake. With sort of a green icing.

I say… No. It’s the trouble with black. I say it kills the work. It is my last resort. And then … I prefer to mix a black … one way is Phthalo Green and Magenta or another red. I get the most amazing deep black blue.

In watercolor at least…for dark green, a little phthalo green (that’s right) mixed with burnt sienna. Just try it once and see. Also, for the deepest green shadows, purple is a great substitute for dark, dark green. I live in the desert and had to learn greens when I spent a lot of time in Britain.

As color mixing instructor, I find it unfortunate that so many painters struggle with green. This is a color that has so many possibilities with your yellows and blues (throw in the occasional orange). A simple color chart will show you many options and the discoveries are really fun.

Rick R. loves Viridian Green. Sandra T. H. hates Viridian Green.

Best advice I received long ago was to make one simple decision first–is the green you are looking at more blue-ish or more yellow-ish? That has been my starting point ever since. Works for any medium.

My first watercolor teacher gave the best advice EVER… no tube greens or blacks. Mix them all. She made me paint a “green chart,” combining every yellow on my palette with every blue, then adding the reds to get neutrals. Not just a great learning exercise, but I still use that chart as a reference when I need a particular green or neutral. I still don’t buy any tube greens. For landscapes, my favorite greens start with French Ultramarine Burnt Sienna, then I add a range of yellows. Always a dab of Permanent Rose here and there at the end. Works for me.

The trouble with green is that it is a secondary – so symbolic and we must trouble it into existence. I like and use your ideas for preventing coloring book green in my paintings – except for when I WANT that shade.

Funny you should say what I have been telling my adult students for about 15 years…. add orange to your greens to make them look more natural. Also, yellow oxide/ochre with ultramarine, cobalt or cerulean blue makes for a variety of lovely greens. Enjoy your letters.

My husband has never bought a tube of green paint in his life, preferring to mix his own greens always, and get the colour and hue he wants for each individual painting. I asked him once years ago why he didn’t have any tubes of green paint, and he said he didn’t need green paint, he mixed his own. His greens vary from painting to painting, never precisely the same as they are never squeezed from a tube. His base is mostly primary colours and he mixes most other colours anyway.

I was in the Arizona desert with three various yellows and three blues and could not mix a green to match the Palo Verde tree or native cactus. My problem was solved with Lemon Yellow and a touch of Ivory Black. Only a little black gave me a very light green. More black gave me deeper greens. Sometimes a small touch of a blue, red, or orange gave me the exact green I wanted. Yes, I carry Ivory Black in my pallet of only five colors, including white.

Phthalo green with alizerin crimson makes the most beautiful black, and greys. We’ve had so much rain in Georgia this year, I had to paint with all greens for a week or so. Visit a green place to understand green.

Here in the mountains of western North Carolina we live in a “tyranny of green” in the summer. This year, with twice the expected yearly rainfall already, it is an absolute revolt. Mixing greens is an essential skill for the landscape painter. I recently posted a tip sheet on my blog, for my students and pals. I am happy to share. I see we have the same ideas, and I like your tip about the violets.

Almost every painting has some pthalo green. It is a wonderful color. But as with all colors, it is rarely used “straight from the tube”.

One other way to paint green is to wait for an overcast day – it will reduce the temptation to use “loud” greens!

When I first took painting classes at the tender age of 13, my teacher, Morton S. Harrie, taught us to mix our own greens before going out to paint. We would mix yellow and blue to get a starting hue and then add a bit of this to yellow to make four graduated lighter greens and on the other side add ever larger bits of black to get 4 more darker greens. Thus we were prepared for any eventuality, green-wise and learned to add red, orange or purple to our paintings to get the effect we wanted. We ended up mixing piles of each green and loading them into emptied toothpaste tubes to carry with us on our excursions.

I found another way to paint greens is to not use green paint at all. Mixing yellow with black gives a more natural looking sap green. Adding blues and oranges to that mixture to capture the hues of different trees works well. For a sunny green, I mix cerulean blue with yellow.

As I read this I breathed a sigh of relief. My greens are never green. I used to feel like I was cheating, or really out there when I would mix all different colours into green, especially orange! Thanks for confirming my experiments and thought process to get there weren’t crazy!

I live in Maine, the Pine Tree State, which I swear is even greener than Vermont. My wonderful teacher, the painter Tina Ingraham, demystified greens for our plein-air class by telling us to think of them not as GREEN per se, but as YELLOW, RED, or BLUE. Once I started noticing not so much the hue but the temperature of greens, it helped my painting immensely.

– very cool – obviously a universal problem – thanks

Thanks Robert for a timely letter on greens. I am looking outside my Ottawa Window and see a myriad of greens like you would not believe and I just don’t think formula approach works for most of us – it is always a challenge. Your advice ” to keep looking and doing to get the hang of it” is right on and I hope to build my green skills (pardon the pun) one day. This week I have used all sorts of colours other than orange to get to the desired green – I will start to include oranges to the experimentation. I should add that I often use its complement, ultramarine blue and even cobalt blue, as a green in my paintings; an under painting in primary colours can also help to create some very nice effects.

You didn’t mention that colors change according to the color surrounding it or next to it. I.E. if green is surrounded by citron yellow, the green will appear more blue. Change the yellow to blue and the opposite will happen.

Your comments on green are welcome. I have found Perylene Green and especially Shade Green (Da Vinci) for watercolor quite useful for dark areas. Dark areas of green often look almost black and it is tricky to get them looking dark enough and yet still green. It’s tempting to put in a lot of dark blue, but that can have a deadening effect, I find. So I mix Sap with a red–but save time with the hues mentioned above.

Could not disagree more with your choices for greens.

I’ve found that if you have a few yellows on your palette, nice soft earthy greens can be mixed with a touch of black.

I thought that I was the only one who panicked when I looked at a scene with green grass, green trees and green plants.

In a plein air class with Lois Griffel she dis allowed any tube greens…saying liveliness came in the mixing/neutralizing and paying attention to contrast and temperature.

Just go heavy on the Viridian over any other color in the palette, add the white, and you’ll have the true shades of paradise. ;-)

For all that is written about greens, there are very few artists that can successfully paint them!

With bright emerald green or even the dreaded Phthalo green, nice soft natural greens can be mixed if you have black, white, yellow ochre and cad red on your palette.

You’ve probably said and heard about green as much as you want for a while. However, just to see what would happen, I think I’ve tried every combination of mixes mentioned in all the recent responses.

I use thalo green, blue shade. With just a small amount of it and any combination of the other colours on my palette I can mix any kind of green under the sun. I like contrast so I will add black to it to make a very dark green.

This is a great conversation, thanks to Robert and everyone.

As a pastelist, I find greens difficult as we can’t mix a big patch of green then go lighter/darker in value or warmer/cooler in temperature and keep the green “married” throughout the landscape. Any help out there??

I stopped painting landscapes awhile back, because I had trouble with greens. I tried mixing them from blues and yellows and using phthalo with various yellows and some red added…. but it was still a challenge. I figured there are lots of people out there doing landscapes, so I would do something else! I do interiors, still life and street scenes, which have a minimum of green in them, usually. I do admire those who have mastered the balance of green with other colours in the mix. I tend to paint a slightly expressionistic style with brighter colours, so I love phthalo and other vivid greens. I do tone it down too. Interesting comment about having a hard time selling works with green…an artist friend said that, too. Is it true? Surely a lot of you are landscape painters who use greens and are successful? Isn’t green supposed to be restful?

Re: the framing dilemma – My solution has been to paint on large two inch museum mounted canvases. I also paint the sides so that they can be hung framed or unframed. The choice is made by the purchaser. As I am basically a collage artist, it is interesting to see the work from all angles, even the sides.

I too use olive green, almost exclusively, adding red at different levels. Works for me. I have taken art classes from instructors who always mix their own green. When I asked why, they really didn’t know, other than to say that that’s the way they were taught.

Years ago when I did my art shopping in Reibe’s art Supply in Melville, on Long Island, NY there were printed aids alongside Winsor & Newton’s oil colors. I saved one: Color Mixing Chart by W & N themselves.The only green used pure on this chart is Veridian. The other greens are all mixtures using blues, yellows, reds, and I find it much more adventuresome mixing to get a green that sings to me than squeezing a green straight from the tube.

Mixing black with yellows, cads or oranges is a quick easy way to produce fabulous realistic greens. Try using different blacks or Payne’s Gray, with different cad / yellow combinations.