Greens that don't look like a highlighter
Okay. Warm and cool, you've got the idea now — every color you own leans one way or the other. Let's use that, because green is where it actually matters.
Green out of the pan, straight from the tube color or the pan color with no help, is a problem. It's flat. It's got that highlighter quality, that Crayola-box brightness that doesn't exist anywhere in an actual landscape unless you're looking at Astroturf. Nothing outside looks like that green. Grass doesn't look like that green. Even in June, up the canyon, with everything soaked from runoff, it doesn't look like that green.
So we're not using it. Or — we're using it as a starting point and then wrecking it a little, on purpose.
Why straight-from-the-pan green fails
Most beginner sets come with a green pan already mixed for you, usually something like Sap Green or Hooker's Green. It's convenient and it's also kind of a trap, because it teaches your eye nothing. You just squeeze out "green" and slap it down and it sits there looking like a highlighter got sad and gave up.
Real green, the kind you're looking at out a window right now if there's anything alive nearby, is never just green. It's got yellow in it, or blue, or brown, or all three, depending on the light and the plant and the time of year. My opinion, and this is just a preference thing, is that you should mix your green from blue and yellow every single time instead of grabbing the pre-mixed one. It's slower. It's also the only way you learn what makes a green look believable instead of like a marker.
The mix
Grab a cool yellow (lemon-ish, not the warm golden one) and a cool blue (phthalo or a cyan-leaning blue, not ultramarine). Cool plus cool gives you a clean, believable green. That's your base.
- Wet your palette well, mix a decent puddle of the yellow first.
- Add blue a little at a time. Small amounts. Blue is strong and will take over the second you're not paying attention.
- Stop when it looks like a green you'd actually believe is a plant, not a green you'd believe is a plastic plant.
Now here's the part that actually matters for today's lesson: don't stop there. Take that green and mud it up on purpose. Add a touch of brown, or a touch of your leftover gray from a few lessons back, or even a little of that warm yellow you didn't use. Just a touch. You're not trying to ruin it, you're trying to knock the shine off it.
I say this every time and I mean it: mud is fine, actually. A little mud in your green is the difference between "toddler's marker drawing" and "actual hillside." The foothills out here in August are basically dead grass and dust, and that color is way closer to gray-brown-green mud than it is to anything labeled "Green" on a tube. Learn to make the mud on purpose and you've got a color that actually does something.
Practice: paint the same patch of green four times
Take a scrap piece of your cheap paper. Divide it into four boxes. In each box, mix a slightly different green:
- Box one: yellow-heavy green (more sun, spring-feeling)
- Box two: blue-heavy green (shade, evergreen-ish)
- Box three: green with a touch of brown mixed in (late summer, dry)
- Box four: green with a touch of gray mixed in (overcast day, distant hillside)
Same brush, same water amount, just shift the ratio each time. Let them sit next to each other and look at how different four "greens" can be. That's the whole lesson, honestly. Everything else is just you doing that on purpose, forever, every time you paint something alive.
One caution worth saying plainly: if you're using tube paint instead of pans, don't squeeze more than a pea-sized amount out at a time. It dries out fast in our air and you'll waste it, and some pigments — the cadmium-based ones especially — you don't want built up under your nails for weeks. Rinse your hands, don't eat lunch mid-painting with paint-crusted fingers, normal stuff.
Leonardo's greens
I did this same exercise at my kitchen table with Leonardo a while back, him with the big fat "kid" brush I don't actually let him use on anything of mine that matters, and I watched him just mix green with total confidence. No hesitation, no fussing over the ratio, no worrying if it was the "right" green. He just went for it, slapped it down loose and uneven, and it looked more alive than half the careful stuff I've made.
I've genuinely tried to paint more like that since. Less checking, less correcting mid-stroke. Your first green today does not need to be right. It needs to go down on the paper so you can look at it and decide what it's missing.
Before next time
Keep those four green boxes somewhere you'll see them, taped to the inside of your sketchbook or wherever. Next time we're going to use one of them on an actual shape instead of a box, and you'll want to remember which ratio you liked.