Whenever I get into a discussion about color, the perennial favorite pigment to dislike, or downright hate, is almost always green!

It's a mean one, that green (and no, I do not think it's an accident that the Grinch is green!)...

Or is it?

Yes, green can be challenging, it can quickly "kill" a painting if we use the wrong green or a green that looks nothing like what you see expect to see in nature, and it can make avoiding its use seem like the best possible way of handling green.

Making Friends With Green
Have you ever slowed down to try and learn more about the color outside of working on a piece of artwork? If you haven't, then you've learned first hand how ornery green can be!

Depending on the palette of watercolors you are using, it can be even more frustrating because you may not have a "natural-looking" green on your palette. Meet Viridian Green:
Viridian looks like crushed emeralds and when used alone, it is a very obnoxious color that screams, "Hey, look at me!" There are few places in the world where viridian appears in nature but, when we mix it with yellows, ochres and blues on our palette, the color becomes useable, appealing and more natural.

Viridian is an inexpensive pigment so it is most likely to show up on travel palettes that offer 18 or 24 colors for the cost of one tube of watercolor paint.

Green Isn't The Enemy, It's Just Misunderstood!
Not to make light...well, wait a minute...yes, to make light of green being a cantankerous color to use, it really isn't the enemy and it's often misunderstood. A few of the misconceptions about green are:

• We think there's a lot of green in most landscapes (Hint: It really doesn't take as much green as you might think it would!)
• Convenience greens are easier to deal with than greens mixed on the palette (Hint: not always!)
• Green is comes from mixing any yellow and blue (Hint: Yeah, no.)
• Green is tricky to work with (Hint: It's really not!)

Taking time to learn more about the green(s) on our palettes can help us start to create artwork with the color green that we actually love rather than just tolerate.

Convenience Greens
Many artists resort to "convenience greens" as a way to have a decent, dependable green on their palettes for those occasional spots of unavoidable green. Convenience greens are the paint manufacturers' answer to the struggling artists' woes with green. Most of the single pigment greens on the market either are strong and/or the color is not attractive by itself.

Convenience mixes are a quick way to get a repeatable green that works in small amounts. The trouble comes when you want to create a landscape or your need more than one green. It pays to know what pigments make up each convenience mix so you know what you can add to get the color you want without making mud.

Last But Certainly Not Least
Temperature (warm or cool), value (light or dark) and chroma (bright or dull) all play a big roll in our success with working with green.

If you're interested in learning more about the pigment, green, and making friends with it, join me for An Imaginary Trip to The Classroom: Working With Green! To learn more about the class, please click here. Class starts on Thursday, February 20th.

More Resources
If you would like to learn more about green, the articles below can get you started: 
Part 1: Frustrated Or Fearful Of the Lovely Green Pigment On Your Palette?
Part 2: Frustrated To Fabulous Green Pigments
Part 3: Another Green Tutorial

Whichever way you choose to learn, I do hope you'll work with the green pigments on your palette outside of a piece of artwork so you can develop a level of comfort and excitement when working with green!

In the first Green Tutorial (HERE), we discussed making friends with those greens on our palette by blending them with other pigments on our palette.
In the second Green Tutorial (HERE), we put what we learned in the first post to work by painting individual leaves.
In part three of this Green Tutorial, we're going to apply what we learned about painting leaves by painting a basket of flowers and last, a charming cottage garden in England!

A Pretty Basket of Flowers
The image at the top of the graphic is from a postcard I started at Selby Gardens but did not get a chance to finish. There were hanging baskets everywhere just brimming with blooms. This one was full of Impatiens. In the first layer, I laid down a scribbled wash of yellows and greens after I completed the pot.

In the second step, I add spots of color to represent the flowers. Again, these are mostly little scribbles of color without any real attempt to look like a certain flower but rather something generic.

In the third step, I started adding in darker greens. I used my base green mixed. This included yellow mixed into my icky palette green to make it more natural. I then added blues and violets to get a variety of darker greens.

In the last step, I went even darker and when I felt I had enough darks built up, I add some "raggedy edges" to the edges of the plant mass to make it read more natural.

Notice the lack of details. There's nothing there but suggested shapes and a variety of colors. I've used my darkest darks to indicate the areas in shadow so that I am suggesting a light source (see the small penciled sun in the left corner just above the border).

When we're out on location doing quick sketches, we don't have a lot of time for details, but we can certainly suggest them to our viewers!

English Cottage Garden
Below is the "inspiration source" I used for an English cottage garden sketch.

Click to enlarge

I gave myself a maximum of 30 minutes to create a sketch based on the image. Knowing my time limit helped me to focus in on what I liked best about the image—the row of trees with the garden and lawn below it. I love the cottage in the background, but with only a half hour, I decided to forego it until I had a bigger window of time to tackle it and do it justice.

In the top image, you see my beginning sketch...just a few outlines to tell me where things belonged. Since I planned on letting the paint do most of the work, I didn't need much. Notice I've used the rule of odds with five trees.

Also, I wasn't shooting for a copy of my photo but rather my interpretation of the garden. 

In the second step, I painted in the lawn using a smooth wash that had a mix of the yellows, oranges and icky green on my palette. Next I mixed blues and yellows with the green to get the tree "balls" with squiggle shapes to suggest trees.

I added the back lawn using more green and less of the yellow and orange.

In third step, I add spots of color to suggest flower shapes and then I added in a very dark background to help establish the middle ground. This also helped to push the foreground closer to the viewer.

Again, this was all done with squiggles except on the left side in the background where I used long strokes to suggest long pieces of grass.

Starting in Step 4, I begin to build the flower garden at the base of the trees. To make sure I was going dark enough with my first layer in this area, I also added in some of the dark, dirt color. If I waited to add the darks until last and my first layer looked too light, I would have to paint yet another layer over the first. Layers take time to dry and are not ideal for location work. It is best to limit them as much as possible by going dark enough on the first layer.

In Step 5, I added more detail in the background, closed up some of the white skips and adjusted some of the background darks.

In Step 6, I've completed the foreground garden and added in a second layer of "squiggles" over the tree balls to give them more of a leafy texture.

I've added in turquoise and Indian yellow which are no where to be seen in the "Inspiration Source" photo.

In the last image, I've added in the sky with some fluffy white clouds meandering by to give the image a more complete look.

This entire sketch was accomplished with a base green and by adding the other pigments on my palette to it.

If the green on your palette is not a natural green found in nature, it helps to go ahead and build a puddle of a base green and working from that. Be sure to use lots of pigment and as little water as possible. It may take yellow, blue or both to make the green look like something you would expect to see outdoors.

The rest of the work was done via texture, shapes, temperature and value.

Texture - the trees, background and part of the flower garden are nothing more than squiggles. The lawns are a smooth wash.
Shapes - the grasses in the background are long lines as are some of the shapes in the front garden.
Temperature - notice the warm yellows and greens that make up the grasses vs. the cool greens that make up the tree balls and the darker areas of the background on the right and directly below the trees.
Values - by using darks, I push the background further into the back. By using lights, I am pulling the trees and the front flower garden towards the viewer into the middle ground. The light value lawn also moves towards the viewer. I also used lights and darks to give the trees roundness and volume as well as to separate them, one from another.

Greens are here to stay and it only makes sense to make friends with them if we're going to find ourselves outside in a England or a Garden (click the words for upcoming workshops!). Just looking out the window can bring greens into your view!

Questions? Questions about greens or another troublesome pigment? Let me know in the comments! 

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

“Information does not become knowledge nor does it become powerful until we after we apply it and make it our own.” 

Think about it…how often have you heard a piece of information that seemed helpful, but had no relevance to your life because you had no use for it or didn't put it into use right away?

It is much the same with learning new information with art. Unless it is applied and we make the information our own, it will continue to be just that, information.

However, when we apply it and grasp what it means to us, even if we only get an inkling, then it gains in power and it truly becomes knowledge!

So it is with color charts.

You've created color charts and you've begun to "see"  that icky frustrating green pigment may not be quite so frustrating after all. It's still kinda icky by itself, but we now know there's hope for it.

Without applying what we learn from some of those super-cool mixes we came up with from the first part of this tutorial, well, it's kind of a waste of time. The color charts don't really help us to take a step away from frustrated and towards fabulous. Sure, we have a hint, but we don't have any application.

Welcome To Part 2: Applying Color Mixing To Simple Subjects
If you're like me, there were a few mixes that really caught my eye and appealed to my color sense. (Color sense or preference is as individual as our fingerprints!)

Look back over the color mixes you created and evaluate which ones sparked your interest. They don't have to be "traditional" leaf colors. If you like some of the zanier color combos, play with those as that indicates where your interest lies.

Begin With Simple Shapes
Draw out a few leaves on a piece of watercolor paper or in your sketchbook. The leaf shape can be quite simple, as the focus of this exercise is color mixing rather than rendering a perfect copy of the leaf. If you happen to live somewhere in the world where the only green leaves at the moment are on the artificial arrangement sitting on your table, it's quite acceptable to use leaves from the arrangement.

Draw a simple leaf shape. Someone got the munchies and this add interest to the shape.

I have also taken a photo of some leaves I picked up on my way out to the mailbox today. Click this link to download a high-res copy of the leaves I used. (I specifically chose leaves with interesting color combinations to help with the learning process.)

Mixing on the paper

Once you're ready to paint, choose a two-color combination from your prior mixing exercises. If you have not created any color mixes, take a look at this post to learn more.

Try painting both colors on the paper and let them mix rather than mixing the two paints on the palette and then applying it to the paper. On a different leaf shape try mixing the colors together on the palette before applying the paint to the paper to see which you like best.

Adding the third and fourth color to the combo

Once you're happy with the results of the first two-color leaf, choose a different combination and paint the leaf shapes again.

Note the legend at the bottom of the art.

Remember to keep color notes (legend) at the bottom of the shapes so you can refer back to the color you used to create a specific result. See example on the right.

After you've exhausted the two-color combos, move on to three- or four-color combinations and repeat the process of mixing the paints on the paper as well as mixing them on the palette before applying the paint to the paper.
In these last few images, I have added the color mix I created in the first exercise in the corners of the art to show where I started. In the example on the right, I started with a mix of yellow and the palette green. To get the darker spots, I add a hint of brown at the end.

In the next example, I used a mix of yellow and blue on the paper. I then added in touches of the palette green as well as brown at the very top of the stem.

Whether you mix on the paper or the palette, there is no right or wrong way. There are different uses for each method for various subjects, but it mostly comes down to which style you like best.
In the last example, I used yellow and the palette green for the leaf on the palette. I then added violet and brown for the darks as well as a hint of orange. I allowed the violet and brown to mix on the paper. You can combine techniques in one subject.

While I'm sharing only three of the leaves I created, I have many more. I highly, strongly recommend you play and paint as many leaves as you can stand! Why? Because the more we do, the more we understand. As the information is used and understood, it becomes knowledge and with repetitive use, it becomes reliable. That's where the power lies. It is only with constant use that our knowledge can begin to help us create consistent results that are predictable and remove the guess work!

Next we're going to tackle foliage in the shape of bushes to build on what we've learned from our leaves.

Did you do the first part of the tutorial and come up with lots of great mixes? Are you going to try your hand at the leaves? If so, send me a link in the comments or via email—I'd love to see what you've come up with and even more important if this series is helping you to turn your greens from frustrating to fabulous!!

Even better, come and join me at Selby Gardens in March for a two-day workshop and put your knowledge into action! Click here for more information.

Part three of this series is here.

In a recent conversation, an artist shared she had just purchased a pre-filled watercolor palette and it only had one green pigment. Not only did it have only one green, she confessed, she didn't even like the color. She explained it was a very "fake green" not found in nature and she didn't think she could paint a garden whether it was her own, a cottage garden in England or a botanical garden like Selby.

Since she was new to art journaling, she was not ready to spend a lot of money on tubes of paint she wasn't sure she'd ever use. I get it. Setting up a custom palette can be an expensive undertaking when you go with quality grade watercolor pigments and it requires a commitment to invest in costly supplies. (If you're looking to try top artist grade paints without the big outlay of cash, consider an ImaginaryTrips.com palette here.)

Does this mean she (or you) can't paint a garden if you only have one green pigment on your palette and you don't even like the green?

Absolutely not!

A Simple Exercise
To learn more about the green pigment(s) on our palette, we need to have some organized fun! We need to play with all those pretty colors to see what happens when we start mixing them together. I say organized fun because we want to be able to replicate any successful mixes easily. and to do that, we need to make sure we label each and every mix. If we mix with abandon, we may or may not know which pigments combined to give us that fabulous now color.

For this exercise, I used a palette of eight pigments by Yarka White Nights or Gamma brand.

Step 1. Choose a shape and draw it out on a piece of tracing paper in pencil. Flip the paper over and trace the lines several times with pencil. I chose a leaf since I was playing around with greens. The shape itself is not so important as long as the shape can easily be divided into two parts and the shape is large enough to allow ample room for playing. (My leaf was approximately 1.5 inches long by 1.25 inches wide.)

Step 2. Either on a piece of watercolor paper or on a page in your journal, trace several shapes using the tracing paper as transfer paper. I scattered the leaves around the page, but the shapes could just as easily been in neat and tidy rows. I found it more entertaining to scatter the shapes.

Step 3. Choose a green pigment and paint it from light to dark in one leaf or shape. (Example 1) This is the base color and should be labeled as such. This shows how dark the pigment is when fully saturated as well as how light it is when it is diluted with water.

Example 1

Step 4. Choose another leaf and select one color to mix with the base green. The first color I chose was yellow. At the bottom of the leaf, I painted a small spot of green and a small spot of yellow so I could look and see at a glance the two pigments I used to achieve the greens within the shape. On the right side of the leaf, I started with the green at the top of the leaf and then the second color at the bottom. I let the two paints touch and mix in the middle of the leaf without help from me. This allows for both pigments to retain some of their original characteristics as well as to combine with a second color to make something new.

Step 5. For the other side of the leaf, I mixed the pigments together on the palette before painting the mix onto the paper. I call this homogenizing the paint because you eliminate most, if not all of the original pigments' personalities to form a new color. Because I was attempting to create greens, I pushed the new mix towards green whenever possible. I also lifted the paint on this side while it was still damp because sometimes the mixtures were more pleasing when they were not fully saturated.

Step 6. Once I ran through the eight colors on the palette, I started mixing two pigments to make green. I mixed yellow and blue to see what type of green I could make. Since I only had one yellow pigment, I then moved onto creating with three pigments by adding a touch of orange to the yellow to make an Indian yellow before mixing the color with blue and with green.

Other combinations I used were yellow and brown mixed with green, blue and violet mixed with green, red and yellow with blue...all in pursuit of finding pleasing green mixes.

Oh, What You Can Learn
Every mixture you create is not going to make a pleasing green, however, it may make a gorgeous gray or a moody black or a rich brown! Just because it didn't make green doesn't mean the new mix is not useful.

Look closely at the areas where the paint was lifted while it was still wet to determine if there may be a useful color not the paint is not at full strength. Make note of any combinations you dislike so you'll know to avoid that combination in the future. If there were any combinations that were especially pleasing, draw out a few more shapes and explore them further using more or less of each pigment to find out the range of the two or three pigments when combined.

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!
Many greens available on the market and in pre-filled palettes today are mixtures of greens and yellows. Occasionally, you'll find a green mix with orange, white, blue, or even violet pigments.

When you throw blue into a green mix that contains orange, what do think will happen? It will most likely turn to a grayed green as orange and blue are complements. If you have a green that has yellow in it and you add a bit of violet the results are likely to be gray as well.

Is it bad if it makes a grayer color? Oh no! Think about a foggy morning when everything is shrouded. Those grayed greens come in handy for shadows, foggy and overcast days.

Some palettes give you the composition of the pigments used to create each pigment and some do not. Even if the information is not provided, you can often tell if a pigment is a mixture depending on how it mixes with the other colors. Use this knowledge to avoid making mud!

Label, Label, Label!
Create a legend for your page if you create a page of mixes. Be sure to include the palette you were using as well as a small example of each pigment in its pure, unmixed state. Make notes as to which side was mixed and which side the paint was allowed to mix on the paper. I find dating the page to be helpful also. This information can be invaluable later when you're sitting in the meadow in England and want to paint the leaves of a Early Gentian.

And just so you know, there are few things more frustrating than going through old mixing sheets and seeing a mix you really, Really, REALLY like and you have no idea which pigments were used to make it. I'm sure you can guess how I happened to come by that experience! Don't be like me—label, label, label!

Last But Certainly Not Least
Just as this works for green, this exercise will work for any pigment on the palette. The exercise can be very handy when you're considering adding a new pigment to the ones your existing palette. If a pigment does not mix well with over half of the pigments I use on a regular basis, I typically will not add it to my palette as I know I won't use it.

As you begin exploring the pigments on your palette, I think you will quickly find there are far more possibilities than you thought possible. The time you spend playing with the pigments NOW will pay huge dividends later when you're out on location.

Up Next...
In the next post in this series, we're going to take what we learned in our mixes and start applying it to creating a garden!

Part 2 can be found here and Part 3 can be found here!

When I posted the recent images of color swatches and the post of the blueberry video, I received a number of questions around how I chose the pigments on my palette—all 27 of them and I promised to address that it in a separate post. Today's the day.

I generally work from a split primary palette in that I have a cool and a warm of each primary, a selection of neutrals, some convenience colors (for painting on location) and then what I call "subject matter" pigment choices.

As an example, I LOVE to paint rusty metals and copper that has the green and blue patina, so I have added Anthraquinone Blue and Cobalt Teal Blue to my palette as these two pigments are extraordinary when painting metals.

I also like to include an unexpected "pop" of color in my work. I often drop in Cobalt Teal Blue for this, but I digress...

The palette used in the video has all M. Graham watercolors in it and is an ongoing experiment. There are 5 reds on that palette—Quinacridone Red, Naphthol Red, Pyrrol Red, Cadmium Red Deep and Scarlet Pyrrol. Do I need 5? No...I'm experimenting with them all to find which ones work best for me.

I have found I can't really find out if a pigment is a good addition to my palette unless I've used it in several paintings/sketches as well as completing some color swatch/chart pages.

To distill down my process for choosing colors* for a palette:
1. Do a color mixing chart. Mix each pigment with every other paint on the palette to see what I'm going in mixes. You will often find that another pigment does the same or better job than a newcomer.
2. Study what type of subject matter inspires me to paint—it may be florals, birds, rusty metals, architecture, the desert landscape, etc. Whatever it is, I assess my pigment choices for any paints that I can add that will enhance my work.** This is also known as a "color signature" and can make artwork easily identifiable to collectors as long as I am consistent in my use.
3. Add the pigment to the palette and commit to using it in a dozen paintings/sketches. Some sketches should be the focus of that pigment (the reason I paint said image) while others should use the pigment as a subordinate in mixes.
4. Add in pigments that "speak to me." Again, I add them in just as I do subject matter pigments and experiment with how they work.
5. Neutrals do not have to be Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber and Quinacridone Gold. There's nothing wrong with those earth pigments. They've stood the test of time. They've earned their place on the palette. However, there's more than one way to arrive at browns and grays. Scarlet Pyrrol and Cobalt Blue make a fabulous coffee color that when thinned down is the color of beach sand!

One of my favorite neutrals is Neutral Tint—but only the one made by M. Graham. It doesn't have any black pigment in it. Instead, it is made from violet and green. It doesn't deaden other colors and is easily influenced by the addition of blues, purples or browns when I need a super quick dark.

Approach your palette with an attitude of exploration. Test, experiment, and play. See what "speaks" to you in the way of color. Thinking that the pigments on your current palette are the end all, be all may work for you. I've found I do better when I think of my palette choices as an evolutionary process. As I grow, my palette changes.

Various color swatches, palettes and necessary pieces of flotsam and jetsam

I recently had lunch with Kathy of Catching Happiness, and was describing my very lengthy, messy, all-consuming process of choosing/updating pigments for my palette. She said, "You should have taken a picture!"

Well, KJ, this one's for you!

These photos were actually taken after the worst was over. I had and still have whole pans, half pans, tubes of paint and scraps of paper with a bazillion swatches scattered everywhere, and I do mean, everywhere!

I tend to go all out when I start to change my palette around and it's all I focus on until I make my decisions as to the changes I'm going to make.

"Your passions sweep you away." Fortune cookie from dinner over the weekend. They must have peeked into the studio!

How often have you gone into the art store and fell in love with a tube of paint based on a romantic name (Rose Doré) or the paint sample above the rack? All excited, you rush home, paint it out on a piece of paper and either think, "oh, pretty" or "ugh, not what I thought."

Maybe that doesn't describe you, but it sure describes me!

I have more tubes of paint than I care to count for those reasons.

One of things I've learned over the years is that until I know how well a pigment will play with the others ALREADY on my palette, it doesn't matter if it's a "pretty" or an "ugh."

Taking the time to test out the newcomer with my core pigments and see if I get any new, glowing mixes I can't live without is the only way to know if a pigment will make the cut. I sometimes find that I already have a color on my palette that does as good or better job than the new pigment.

There are a couple of pigments on my palette just because I love the mixes I can make by adding them to some of my tried and true colors. As stand alone pigments....they "ughs."

I highly recommend doing color swatches of all the core colors you have on your palette as well as any new pigments you might want to try—bet you'll be surprised!

Testing out possible color choices for Rainier Cherries All images can be clicked to enlarge!

Watercolor on Stonehenge Paper Click to Enlarge

Funky flowers. Another name would be memory flowers. And I was way off, but I had fun. This was painted using my regular palette of handpicked pigments. Back in this post I mentioned finding all the boxes of pretty pigments and so I decided to do a test run with the Sennelier and Schminke.

Sennelier Watercolors on Stonhenge Paper Click to Enlarge

The image above is closer to the flowers that I recall seeing, but in truth, the flowers were not that large and pretty. They were mostly blues and lavenders as they show in this sketch. This illo was painted using just Sennelier pigments.

Schminke Watercolors on Stonehenge Click to Enlarge

The last page of flowers was painted using Schminke pigments.....can you tell a difference between the three if I had not told you?

The things I noticed:
• The Sennelier pigments were a joy to paint with. The colors activated easily when water was applied to the pan and gave a saturated color when put down on the paper.
• The Schminke pigments did not seem to be as creamy to me as the Senneliers nor did they seem to activate as easily, but the pigments were bright, clean and saturated once they did activate.
• The Stonehenge paper is fabulous. The texture is very creamy and the paint seems to sit up on the surface but not too much so. Just don't think you're going to be doing a whole lot of layering or correcting as this paper is best kept to one layer.
• I also found that the Stonehenge mars easily when erased. Erasing seemed to easily alter the texture of the surface so all of the samples were painted directly with no pencil lines.

The biggest problem I had with both palettes were the color choices. I do not use a lot of phthalos or viridian in my regular palette and spent a lot of time trying to make the greens look natural rather than fluorescent. I didn't have too much trouble with the blues either, but all of the colors I used required some mixing. In a studio, that's no big deal. On location, where every second counts, that makes it a bit more of a challenge.

It pays to spend the time learning what mixes with what, what give you the look you want, what won't give you a good mix BEFORE you step foot out the door. I'll probably be showing some more work from these different pigments. I have to say I'm intrigued by the challenge of learning these pigments.

I hope you get a chance to get out and sketch this weekend. That's on my agenda as we're having a spell of cooler weather and I hope to take advantage of it!