Painting Lesson - How To Mix an Endless Amount of Greens

You can learn how to mix an almost endless amount of greens with just a handful of tube colors that you may already have on hand.

You may be asking yourself: "Why would I want or need to mix my own greens when I can just buy tubes of green paint and use those?"

It's true, there are some very nice tubed greens on the market today. Thalo Green and Thalo Yellow Green for instance, are two of my favorites. I use these two greens if I am outdoors painting and I don't have the time to mix my own greens from scratch and believe me, they come in very handy sometimes. Apart from those two, I have no other greens on my palette. Everything else I mix from various blues, yellows and other colors.

If you aren't a landscape painter, then you can probably get away with using tubed greens, but even tubed greens may have to be modified depending on your particular subject matter. Using colors straight from the tube can sometimes be too intense.

If you do a lot of landscape painting then you should really learn how to mix your own greens.

If you are constantly using the same tube greens in your landscape work, your paintings are going to lack variety and excitement. That goes for your mixtures as well. If you use the same yellow and blue to make greens, your paintings will suffer. The key is to use a variety of different blues and yellows along with other colors from your palette.

Why so many different colors you ask?

If you spend any amount of time outdoors in nature, you will notice the vast amount of green that is there. But have you ever taken the time to carefully observe this color?

If you look closely at the natural world around you, you will see warm yellow and orange greens, cold blue and violet greens, dull grayish greens and bright colorful greens. So it will be much easier to reproduce those greens on canvas if you have a variety of colors on hand.

Mixing your own greens is exciting and a great learning experience. You will have a deeper more intimate understanding of the properties of your oil colors and it will make you a much better artist in the long run. You will also have a chart of colors to reference over and over again. No guesswork and no wasted paint. Besides, once you see how many different varieties of greens you can mix from a small handful of colors, you are going to be hooked.

So now I would like you to reinforce what you have just read in this article. You are now going to create your own color charts filled with greens from the various colors that you have on hand.

Step 1

First, you will need some kind of support. Canvas paper or board works wonderfully. Divide your support equally into 1 inch squares with a pen or pencil.

Step 2

Next, grab your paints. I recommend using one cool and warm version of blue and yellow. For my first color chart I used Cadmium Yellow Light, Lemon Yellow, Ultramarine Blue and Thalo Blue. I also used touches of Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Orange and Alizarin Crimson to modify the greens even further.

Step 3

Lets run through how to create your first row of swatches and from there, you will hopefully be able to create the rest. Squeeze out a small mound of Cadmium Yellow Light. Squeeze out just a small drop of Thalo Blue. Thalo Blue is a very strong color, so it won't take much to make a green. What I like to do from here is create three different values for this mixture. First I make a medium value green for the first swatch. For the second I add more yellow to make a brighter green. For the last I tint the original green mixture with Titanium White. The possibilities are endless really as you can vary the amount of yellow, blue and white to make more swatches.

For the next row, take the same green mixture you made for the first swatch and just add a drop of Cadmium Red Light and repeat the same steps for three more versions of green. Repeat the same process for the remaining rows by adding Cadmium Orange and Alizarin Crimson.

That should keep you busy for a while! Then, when you are finished with your first chart create another one with a different combination of blue and yellow and repeat. Are you beginning to see the vast amount of greens you can create? Enjoy!