Experiencing Joy Through Art

   Hello! I hope your Monday is going well so far. Here we are at the beginning of a new week…one that ends with Halloween, one of my favorite times of the year after the holidays.

   As a painter of landscapes one of the most challenging things we can come up against is handling huge areas of green in a painting. While tubed green paints are a good thing to have on a palette (I have two on mine) often beginner painters will use the greens that come straight out of the tube to paint trees and grass. 

   This is a big problem since most tubed green such as Phthalo Green, are too saturated and lean towards blue which gives leaves and grass an artificial look…I suppose you could use those colors to paint astroturf! 

  For today's post I wanted to touch on a specific rule of thumb you can use when painting greens…particularly summer scenes when the landscape can be an almost unbroken sea of green. The secret to tackling this is to remember how nature herself works. When a new leaf grows on a tree in springtime, and then matures in summer it is filled with chlorophyll which gives it its deep green color. Chlorophyll is the chemical which helps the tree convert sunlight into sugars it can use for energy. 

   In the Autumn when the tree senses the weather turning cold, the tree pulls the chlorophyll out of the leaf and back into the trunk revealing the color underneath. So when trees change color in the Autumn they don't “turn” red or orange, as much as the red or orange that was always there underneath the green is revealed. This means that the greens we see in nature are always “underpainted” with warm red and gold colors. Herein lies the key to painting successful greens. If you start with an underpainting of red and orange before putting on the greens of your leaf and grass color, you will create much more interesting and natural greens that don’t look artificial.

   You still should not use a color like Phthalo Green straight from the tube…even with a red orange underpainting. The greens of nature tend to be warmer yellow-greens. Either mix the Phthalo Green directly with some orange or create muted greens from mixing yellow and blue. Ultramarine is a great blue to use for mixing natural greens. It’s tendency to lean towards violet automatically creates more muted greens.

   Have some fun playing around with greens on top of a warm red and ornage underpainting and see what you can create!