Channeling Winslow Homer

I have already mentioned that green is an important color and was once (in the Renaissance) considered one of the primaries.  It’s still an accepted idea among painters.   Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green would be called the “painter’s primary palette.”  Although the retina doesn’t seem to care about green, the later processing in the visual system does.     (See opponent processing here.)

Green is also a problem in landscapes because so much of a landscape can be green,  Therefore, there is a need to vary greens to make for an interesting painting and to make different trees stand out as unique and not have every tree the same boring color.

What I want to discuss here is that, if you have several blues and yellows on your palette already, it seems to me that most of the greens that are sold, e.g. olive green, could be mixed.  This would lead us to the goal of minimizing greens on the palette for the sake of conserving space, saving money, and above all to be rational about what we are doing.  Of course, you could argue that there is no need at all for a green, but, in fact, there is a saturation cost to mixing.  What most experienced watercolorists recommend is having some sort of a green on your palette , just one, that you can doctor by mixing with other paints, pushing it in one way or another toward blue or toward yellow, lighter or darker hues, and toward less saturation.

Of course, as I discussed under the highly saturated palette, there are watercolorists who have 6 greens on their palette to minimize any saturation costs that would occur by mixing paints.   In the studio I can see this, but for sketching outdoors, it’s a little excessive.

So what green to chose if you are only going to have one?  The first problem is that you are most likely going to want a natural looking green, one that can be found in nature.  There are greens that are just not natural.  Ironically they are often used in advertisements for environmentally good products (e.g. green products.)

There are two broad possibilities:  a convenient green or a single pigment green.

convenience greens

A convenience green is a green that has already been mixed with another pigment.   There are a huge number of these, but I think the most experienced watercolorists use either Hooker’s Green or Sap Green which already have a yellow pigment mixed in.  By the way neither of these paints are made the way they were in Hooker’s day , and sap green isn’t made from sap.   They are both made with phthalo pigments.  There are two, phthalocyanine greens:  phthalo green blue shade (BS) PG7  (used in Hooker’s green) and phthalo green yellow shade (YS) PG36 (used in Sap Green.)

You could argue forever about which of the many convenience greens should be used, but in the end the most votes would be for one or the other of these.

Sap Green is yellower and can work out of the tube for a green lawn in spring.  Hooker’s Green is darker and can work out of the tube for green leaves on trees.  But the point is that both can be modified with blue , oranges, and yellows to make most of what you need.

Hooker who was director of the major botanical garden in England (Kew Gardens) developed his green for botanical illustration but with completely different pigments than it is now composed of.  He used Prussian Blue and gamboge (that’s genuine gamboge).   Sap Green used to be actually make from sap, the sap of the green buckhorn berries fixed on a lake substrate of alum, but that, too, is no longer used.

Single pigment greens

Well, it is probably obvious from the previous paragraph that one of the shades of Phthalo Green is the most popular of the single pigment greens.

There are problems with Phthalo pigments.  Their particle size is very small, so they are very staining.  I was at a workshop in which a teacher referred to them as “weapons of mass destruction”. You can’t get them off the paper without scraping away the paper itself, and you often can’t get them off plastic palettes, out of your brushes, and off your hands or clothing very easily either.  They have strong tintorial power, so if they get into other paints they will change them radically.  But they are also going to be in the most popular convenience greens, e.g.  you aint going to get away from Phthalo green by buying Hooker’s green for example.

Phthalo greens have a moderately large “drying shift”:  When they dry, they get lighter in value and less intense but the hue doesn’t change (as in the Phthalo blue pigments.)   Less intense and dark toned isn’t bad in my opinion because phthalo green is often too strong and dark.   They are lightfast, but the yellows in some mixtures are not.  Also to my eye phthalo greens out of the tube are not natural looking greens.   Occasionally a weathered bronze statue will be a slightly lightened phthalo green, but for plants you have to do something with it.  But it’s fun because mixing doesn’t  desaturate phthalo greens as much as other paints.

Uthrecht seems to have addressed some of these Phthalo problems; and, if you’re like me and have a love/hate relationship with the phthalo pigments, you might want to try their paint.  Uthrecht’s pthalo green is paler with a weaker tintorial power so it doesn’t overwhelm other pigments so much with which it is mixed. It is also less staining (as is MaimeriBlu’s version.)  My hand slipped, and I just got some of Uthrecht’s phthalo green on my fingers.  I dreaded how I would have to explain for weeks having green fingers and enduring jokes about having a green thumb, but it miraculously washed off with soap and water!

Which shade should you use.  Most experienced watercolors opt for Phthalo green blue shade.

A word about other convenience greens

Yellowish green, which used to be called yellow chartreuse and is the color of the drink made in the monastery of the same name, can be made from PY117 which is diarylide yellow.  I don’t know how they get greenish because this yellow often has a mid range yellow hue.  I think you could just put more yellow into whatever green you chose to get this hue.

Underseas Green (Daniel Smith) is a mixture of quinacridone orange and ultramarine blue and easy to mix if you happen to have the orange.

I’m snubbing chrome oxide green and green earth.  Both of these are desaturated greens which you can do for yourself with other paints.

So what is my choice?

Hooker’s Green.  Why?  Except for statutes, phthalo green (BS) out of the tube has to be mixed with something to get a natural looking green.  Most of the time I find I start mixing with a yellow which is already in Hooker’s green.  I might add something to kill the color like orange, but the yellow doesn’t seem to detract from any goal I have in mixing.  Some companies made two Hooker’s green, one deeper than the other.

Of course, I  still also mix blues (and black) into yellows for variety in other greens.