The Finest Green (making a similar sort of mess as Percy…)

After a bit of a flurry of pigment buying, I have got to the point I have enough different pigments to have a bit of a go at making my own colours, to slightly more defined recipes than before. Though as weill be seen, it’s a bit of a chaotic journey and sometimes ends up making an almightly mess.

I have been thinking about, and playing with, greens. Greens are the bane of the landscape painter’s life. You need them, in abundance and in myriad varieties, but they are actually one of the hardest to get right.

Bruce MacEvoy discusses this issue in some considerable detail with which I will be enaging more in some future posts, but I will just note here two key points – one, that hardly any, if any, extant green pigments look anything like a natural green, and two, that (contrary to received wisdom, and even with the wide gamut of colours availible) attempting to mix greens from yellow and blue will not solve this issue. To mix a green, you need a green(!), a blue or a yellow, and a modifier.

This is why there are so many convenience greens.

I think like many people over the last couple of years I have gone from through some familar stages:

1: “Ooh, that’s a pretty colour I will put it in my pallette”
2: “Oh, I should be using single pigment colours, except of course things like Paynes Grey, because I should not use black, and avoiud mixed paints”
3: “I will use what I find useful, and work out how to use it properly, even if [insert name of some pre-eminant authority] says I should not do so”

While this is perhaps a trope, it is a useful learning progression.

Leaving aside contentious debates on pure pigments, split primaries and so on, it is a truism that the more different things you chuck into the puddle the muddier it can become, and we are taught to be paranoid of mud¹. But many natural greens are muddy and, here’s the biggy: while I will happily splash Daler Rownery sap green² about and call it a day these convenience greens are not aimed in most cases to be a ready made solution. They are a starting point. It’s knowing how to use them. And here’s why I think the single pigment obsession is useful – you learn what you can use to adjust a convenience green (hint, first try adding one of the constituent pigments, or a close relative). And then of course ignore it when you need to.

Spurred on by the chance acquisition of 100 grams of Prussian Blue³ (PB27) and subsequently some Hansa Yellow (PY3) I starated playing with the idea of creating some of my own Finest Greens⁴.

One thing I do love with mixed colours is granulating and seperating pigments and my aim in creating most of my own mixed colours is creating interesting textures. I am not sure all of these quite reach that, but I have ended up with a set of four conveneince greens, loosely inspired by the four seasons.

And now after 500 words of waffle, I get to what is actually the point of this post – going through the process of creating this set of colours; the aim and process and the accidents and chaos.

It’s (probably) a good idea to do a bit of experimenting, before throwing quantities of pigment into a pot, to get a vague idea of what you are aiming for. This whole experiment actually came about by finding quite a nice spring green from playing about with the Prussian Blue and the Hansa Yellow after making some single pigment pans and thinking that wpuld be a nice on to make. I threw a few other modifiers into the puddles as well, but ultimately came up with an idea that I needed about 2:1 yellow to blue.

Oh how wrong I was.

I think the issue (other than the bleeding obvious of Prussian Blue being of incredibly high tinting strength) was that the Hansa Yellow was very new, less than a day old, and the Prussian Blue had been drying for a few days and by eyeballing of the amounts was skewed.

Here’s what happened…

I started with 1g of Prussian Blue, 2g of Hansa Yellow, and ½g of Orange Oxide (PR101). This ended up really dark. I added 1g of Yellow. Then another. Then another ½g of Orange Oxide. I was getting nowhere so I backtracked with some more blue. Experimenting with this mix, I added some Ultramarine Violet Red Shade (PV15) which aimed to intruduce some subtle undertones and granulation to the mix. In the end this ended up as 1.5g of Prussian Blue, 4g of Hansa Yellow, 1g of Orange Oxide and 3.5g of Ultramarine.

Of course now I had a good 20 mls of the stuff, and that’s more than I really wanted to devote to one colour. So I packaged some of this, and decided to add more yellow to the remains. I lost track at this point slightly, but Autumn Green was born. If I run out of the 6 half pans I made, I will have to work out the ratios again and my notes went awry here, but I think I ended up using about a further 4 grams. So this wlould be in the region of 0.75g Prussian Blue, 0.5g Orange Oxide, 1.75g Ultramarine Violet and 6g Hansa Yellow…

Also, by this point, things were a right mess! With 6 half pans of Autumn Green I left it there…

Still searching for the spring green, though also with an idea to make all four seasons I went for 4g of Prussian Blue and ¼g of Hansa Yellow…

This is getting a little more towards what I was seeking, but still, still, darker. But I do really like this one, for a very simple pigment mix (I didn’t feel the need to add anything else) it has made a good green – Actually quite like a Zinc Green (one preparation of which was a mixture of Prussian Blue and Zinc Chromate).

So, here we go. Summer Green

In the end, for the spring green, after a few more experiments I decided to go down a different path, and use the turqoiuse shade of Cobalt Blue (PB28).

The first iteration of this, was very, very bright. I actually may make some but it was not what I was after, and needed toning down a little. I tried some orange ochre, but that was too brown. In the end I settled for a touch of Titanium Orange (PBr24) which gave a subtle granulation and a slight dulling, but also a slightly warm glow in the undertone.

I am actually very pleased with this one. The final recipe was 3.5g Hansa Hellow, 0.5g Cobalt Turquoise, and 0.5g Titanium Orange.

So of course the true test is in use. I did a couple sketches while experiementing, using the different colours in both wet-in-wet and stipling techniques.

When I made the Hansa Yellow into its own half-pans I painted, as I normally do, a sky with the leftovers in the mortar and pestle. This was a full wash of the Hansa Yellow into which I dropped some Quinacridone Magenta and Mars Black – giving quite a virulent sky. It worked quite nicely however, with this grove of trees.

As I said, I will be expanding some more on the great intricacies of mixing greens (on the pallete) in due course. But if you get the chance, whether with pigments or just ready produced paint in tubes, creating a “signature range of your own convenience mixes is a useful experiement, and could give you some startiing points when working. Knowing exactly what is in the colours here provides a better starting point for mixes than you may otherwise have, which is of value in your practice.

1. There’s a nod to some anthropological theories here… ↩︎
2. Which is far more like Hooker’s Green if you ask me. ↩︎
3. Which FYI equates to about three-quarters of a litre of the bloody stuff… ↩︎
4. Blackadder for those who do not get the cultural reference. ↩︎