IT IS NOT EASY TO BE GREEN

When you are admiring botanical art, lovely pink and purple flowers attracts you right away. They are simply so pretty.

But if you are the artist you know that the secret is hidden in the green leaves. When I first started as a new artist, I keep avoiding the hard part of dealing with green but preferred to excel in painting. Than the time to practice the greens came and I started to investigate about it.

For me the solution came with the idea of ‘’the basic palette’’ that every artist recommends. I made a chart with too many different artists mixtures, and I found out the same idea in each of them. Start with a palette that consists of 2 blues, 2 yellows and 2 reds, one of which is warm and the other cold. That is a good start!

How does this warm and comes from? We create the colour pigments from nature basically. This pigments differ in their Colour Coordinates.

See what is in a warm colour like French Ultramarine, and a cold Pythalo Blue, which is almost similar in every basic palette. You can just see from the pictures if they are warm or cold. If we look in deep technically that is clear from the eye, French Ultramarine is grinded from Lapis. It’s Colour Coordinates are: sRGBB (18,10,143) We call this Warm Blue. Where as the Colour Corrdinates for Pythalo Blue is sRGB ( 0,15, 137) which tells us the Red as 18 in French Ultramarine is 0 in Pythalo Blue, that makes the differance. (Of course always relative to each other)

Than lets place these warm and cold colours in a colour wheel. We should locate them in the colour wheel just in two sides of the blue. The warm one closer to Red, The cold one closer to Yellow.

We have 3 basic mixing portions, referring to the colours we mix that creates the secondaries. Green Segment, Purple Segment and Orange segment.

Your will create different greens according to warm or cold pigments your are mixing. If your two primary pigments are in the same segment, than they will create a Clear and Bright Secondary Colour. If they are in two different segments but close to each other they will create a Mid-İntensity Secondary Colours. If they are in different segments and far from each other they will create a Dull-Muddy Secondaries.

Cool Yellow and Cool Blue will create a Bright Green.

Cool Yellow and Warm Blue will create a Mid intensity Green

Warm Yellow and Warm Blue will create a Dull Green….

Let’s check it by painting

Moral of the story is: Check your pigments if they are Warm and Cold. Begin to mix afterwards. Try not to use a tube of colour that consists of many pigments on it until you feel confident about mixing. And try, try, try.

In the end we do all this for fun. So don’t forget to listen to Kermit the Frog’s Song. It’s not easy to be green. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRZ-IxZ46ng