Oh the Greens of Summer - Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Oh the Greens of Summer

Perspectives from The Artist's Road


Photo of Palette with Cadmium Yellow Medium Green Mixes JM Hulsey

Photo of Palette with Cadmium Yellow Light Green Mixes JM Hulsey

 Green Slice of Painting © JM Hulsey 

   A
s happens every summer, landscape paintings become filled with greens. The chlorophyll that does the miracle of converting light into energy in plants, absorbs most of the light of the blue and red spectrums and reflects the green spectrum wavelengths. It may sound simple enough, but what a myriad of complex and diverse greens it produces!

   This tiny slice (to the left) is from the background of a painting John has been working on of a typical summer yard planted with grass and terminating in a big bank of Hostas—lots of greens. The setting was lit by indirect late afternoon sky, cool in the main. The lush grass colors vary from cool blue-greens to warmish yellow-greens. The large, reflective Hosta leaves are a range of cool blue-greens with touches of yellow tinting here and there.

   The first step in painting this was to create a palette of color mixes of greens, from cool to warm, using the colors that are usually found on John's palette. To keep things simple, only Cadmium Yellow Light or Cadmium Yellow Medium were used to vary the temperature, chroma and value of each color. The two illustrations here show the vast range of greens one can create from these basic, common tube colors. Of course, one can mix greens from the primary blues and the two yellows also, but because this image was dominated by the green plants, a broader, more interesting range of chroma and hue in the greens was needed.

   Cadmium Yellow Medium was the warm primary and Cadmium Yellow Light, the cool one, used for this exercise. One gets an education in how important it is to consider the temperature of any primaries, such as these yellows, before making a color mix. Look at how different the mixes with any of these tube colors appear when the temperature is reversed. Cadmium Yellow Medium just kills the chroma of the Ultra and Cobalt blues, doesn’t it? (One should remember that effect any time a slight dulling of those blues may be needed). However, it does a splendid job of taming the chromatic intensity of Sevres, Pthalo, Viridian and Prussian Blue without losing their coolness. Even the dull, cool gray of Chromium Oxide Green Light gets a much-needed boost of energy and an enlarged spectrum of tones from that addition. On the cool side, the mixes with Cadmium Yellow light are similarly instructive. Ultra and Cobalt make similar mixes, but filled with subtle differences—good for dappled shadow areas, while Sevres, Pthalo and Viridian become almost electric in their bright intensity, no doubt useful for painting Caribbean waters! The intense green of Sap is tamed and made more useful, and the deep, dark, stainer Prussian Blue really shows its talent for value shifting into pleasing cool greens. I noticed that Chromium Oxide Green Light reveals some of the colors of the New Mexico desert as it is mixed with Cadmium Yellow Light. Interesting!

   If you are out painting summer greens right now, try this little exercise. It will add immensely to your mental library of colors that can be quickly mixed from these two primaries.


Copyright Hulsey Trusty Designs, L.L.C. (except where noted). All rights reserved1.
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About Us

Photograph of John Hulsey and Ann Trusty in Glacier National Park
We are artists, authors and teachers with over 40 years of experience in painting the world's beautiful places. We created The Artist's Road in order to share our knowledge and experiences with you, and create a community of like-minded individuals.  You can learn more about us and see our original paintings by clicking on the links below.
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