Mixing greens and painting leaves

Green is a bit of a notorious color. There are many greens available from watercolor brands, yet if you use these straight from the tube or pan they can give weird results: very often they are very bright, very intense and not pleasant to look at.

What I found is the key to mixing natural greens instead of just making „a big green blob“ as one of you recently put it, is to add other colors to the mix, and to modulate the color within your mix.

Let’s see how I do this. I don’t mix my greens from scratch. (I confess, lol.)
I use a convenience green as a starting point. If you’ve never mixed a green from primaries, give it a go, it’s a great exercise to learn more about the colors on your palette. Simply take your blues and yellow and start combining them.

Anyway, I use a premixed green 90% of the time. These premixed colors are called „convenience colors“ because they’re not a single pigment color, but a mix of pigments, homogenized and standardized by our color overlords from the paint companies. I’m fine with that, because I simply don’t have the patience to mix green (a color I use very often) from scratch each time. If we look at what’s in those sap greens, it’s often a bright Phthalo green combined with a yellow pigment.

I like to use sap green because it seems closest to the greens I see most in the vegetation that surrounds me. I use Winsor sap green, in the past, I used the sap green by Schmincke and I found it a bit too vivid. The also have a very bright May Green which certainly added a kind of electric crackle to some of my spring sketches. One one of my other palettes I have a Holbein sap green which is also not too bad.

In the end, it comes down to what you prefer, what you need as a base green, and what’s available to you locally. I hear a lot of artists also like various Daniel Smith greens (which I haven’t painted with), and some artists actually like having very bright garish greens even if that means you’ll have to create mixes every time, as they’re simply too intense and artificial looking on their own: this includes the Phthalo pigments and most chrome oxide greens (like viridian). The upside is that they’re great mixers.

With my Winsor sap green a base, I almost always add a bit of yellow or blue to it to slightly change it: lemon or Winsor yellow create nice warm greens, great for fresh spring foliage, or leaves that are in sunlight. Ochre can add a slightly dull, earthy look. Cobalt blue, ultramarine blue or cobalt green can create cooler, bluer mixes that are great for shadow colors or darker accents. And of course combinations of all of these are possible, too.

Another way to make the green less prominent is to add a slight amount of red or orange, or an earth color. Since red is complimentary to green, it will reduce the saturation. I find very desaturated pigments like raw or green umber (a light earth brown) interesting for this, they add a neutral touch without changing the color abruptly.

This is particularly useful in landscapes when you need more neutral colors (= less saturated colors) to support your bright colors. It can also be useful when painting single leaves (in botanical sketches) when you want to add a shadow accent, or simply need a less bright green as a leaf color.

For leaves and foliage, I like to paint a light base layer, leaving white highlights as needed, and then add accents after that layer is dried (think of leaf veins, stems, patterns in foliage, a shadow). This can be a slightly darker color, or a more intense (less diluted) version of the same color.

Another approach that I like is to create layers with several slightly different greens in one wash. That means dropping a bit of a second color into your wet wash, or continuing the wash in a slightly different color. Particularly when you want to cover a big area, this can be a nice way to give a bit more visual interest to it. Think of big areas of foliage or grass in a park – why not add a bit of yellow or blue into it, just a touch. Or a hill that’s covered in trees.

When painting leaves, this could also mean letting the color of the the stem bleed a bit into the base of the leaf. This is what watercolor does on its own anyway, and it can be a nice effect.

I hope this has given you some ideas for painting leaves and mixing different greens!

P.S. A quick reminder that this year’s Sketchbook Revival is happening soon: Learn more about this free sketching event with over 130 artists (and yours truly!) here or sign up now