Summer -- Mixing Greens

This palette is inspired by the myriad greens of summer.

Summer brings an explosion of new growth, and a whole palette of green foliage. Included in this kit are two very different blues – turquoise and ultramarine – and a lemon yellow, which together will mix a wide range of greens. Lastly, a mid red rounds out the palette and will beautiful neutralise the greens.

These colours on their own remind me of bright sunny days at the beach, with turquoise water, blue sky, yellow umbrellas, and red sand pails.

The discovery sheet will guide you through mixing many shades of green, and show you how to use these colours to their best effect, by making natural, neutralised colours, and placing them in the context of their complements. Finally, I pull all of this together into an example painting, which you can follow along with, or make your own work. If you’ve been following along with the other three palettes, they’ve all contained a green. This time we are going to play around with mixing our own greens.

Even though this palette is focused on green, we can also mix a nice range of oranges, and also some purples. And if you want to stretch yourself, you can do all these exercises again by mixing the two blues with the red instead of with the yellow to make a wide range of purples.

Example Sheets

Videos

For more instructional details on how to paint out swatches and on how to mix paints, see the howto videos.

Example Paintings

I’m basing my painting this photo of the hanging egg chair in a dark shady corner of my garden. I wanted to use the colours on this palette to convey bright summer sunshine filtering through leaves and creating a shady seat framed by light. Taken on a very hot day, the sunlight is almost too bright, and by contrast the shadows are very dark.

I started with a wash of light green, and added layers of darker greens on top. I wanted to keep the light framing the chair, and in the next layer, added a strong light and dark contrast around the chair, as well as making the right hand side receed. To finish the painting, I continued to resolve the area around the highlights, darkened the path, and added some more defined leaf shapes in the foreground. I’ve left the right hand side less resolved, since it’s farther in the background. I’ve also let the glare from the sunlight wash out in the background, like it’s too bright to see anything clearly. I’ve used red to combine with the greens to form dark shadow colours, and used a more saturated red to bring interest to the foreground and focal point.

Purchase

This kit is available to purchase in my Etsy shop.

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