watercolor lesson: greens

Watercolor Lesson: Greens

Greens are dominant in most landscapes and often provide real challenges for beginning painters. Architects and landscape architects are traditionally fond of olive green and are often surprised to find out that it is actually a green gray: all three primaries are present and the red quiets down the color intensity of the yellow and blue mixture.

Mixing greens requires some practice with each palette family and with the staining colors.

Basic Greens. for each palette, the delicate transparent, staining and opaque palettes, mix the yellow and blue in varying amounts for a range of greens from yellow green to green to green blue. For example, mix azo yellow and cobalt blue to get a nice bright green. vary the amounts of azo and cobalt to mix a range of greens. Repeat this for each of the other two palettes, pthalo yellow and pthalo blue, and yellow ochre and cerulean blue.

Green Grays. Now mix the family red with each of the green mixtures and do a number of variations (you will see the green going from a green to a brown so be careful and use your eye judge). for example, mix azo yellow, cobalt blue and add rose madder to take the brightness away. Next for the same palette family, instead of using the family red, as in red madder, mix a staining red such as pthalo red or alizarin crimson to see the more intense version of the green gray. do for each family.

Mark down under each mixture what the colors used are so you have for reference.

More later, have fun painting.