Mixing Natural Greens

Color chart for practicing Natural Greens

If you're an artist. like me who loves painting florals and/or landscapes , you have to make peace with the color green. It is often the most challenging color to handle. Many of the paints in tubes like Viridian, Winsor Green, Pthalo green( which is the same as Winsor), Hookers Green are much too cold to accurately depict natural looking greens. So often artists avoid these colors. Of course you could always mix your blues and yellows to get a range of greens, but there are so many nuances of greens in nature, it's a good idea to have every tool at your disposal.

 My tip is to take the tube greens and add a warmer color to them to warm them up.You can add almost anything- yellow, orange, red, burnt siena, alizarin crimson, even violet, to warm up a "too cold" green. The chart shown here is an exercise I do with my students where we mix a range of greens starting with Thalo green to come up with warmer greens on the right( vs the top thalo green which is right out of the tube). You can get everything from a bright spring or tropical green to a deep, rich evergreen tree type of green depending on what you mix into it.

 I recently did a quick demo of this for a watercolor class I was teaching. You can view it at
http://youtu.be/GObTq57wDQI

Go out and enjoy painting some spring greens this week and give it a try!