Mix Different Shades of Greens for Watercolor Landscapes With Primary Colors

1. Mixing Greens: Mixing green is simple, right? Just combine yellow and blue, and you'll get green. Uh, let me try that again. Yellow and blue equals green. Okay, one more time. Yellow, plus blue. Equals green? What's this? Okay, I swear this is the last one. Yellow mixed with blue, equals green. Finally, a beautiful landscape green. So what's happening here? The basic recipe of mixing greens is just combining yellow and blue, right? We've seen earlier that depending on the pigments we use, the results vary. But how do we know which yellow and which blue to use to mix our target green shade? Generally, a warm yellow and cool blue will yield a teal shade. A cool yellow mixed with cold blue will result in a vibrant green, while a warm yellow plus warm blue will give us an olive shade, and a cool yellow and warm blue will yield a natural green. But this isn't always the case. There are some factors that we need to consider. First, the ratio of pigment or water. Look at these watches. I mix the same yellow and blue pigments, but varied how much water or pigment I used. There's also brand variations. Here's cerulean blue from three different brands, and if you look closely, you'll notice slight difference. And at the right is royal blue and ndenthrone blue, named differently, but these brands basically use the same pigment. And lastly, the type of paper plays a crucial role. It might not be obvious to some, but if you use a paper that isn't meant for watercolors, you won't be able to see how vibrant that color is supposed to be. So, to have a deeper understanding of which yellow and blue work well for a certain shade of green, I spent quite some time to mix and match as many yellows and blues as I can to create this watercolor green recipes eBook so you wouldn't have to. Oh, and by the way, I'm giving a free copy of this ebook to anyone who completes this class. Just follow the steps in the next video. 2. Yellow / Blue Green: Our goal for this short class is to mix the different greens that we see in our reference photo. We have a blue green for the distant mountains, olive greens on the middle ground and darker shades for the shadowed areas, and a neutral green for the foreground. So how do we mix these shades then? Our first question should be, is it leaning towards yellow or blue, or is it a neutral green? For example, we have here Gambochnova and Prussian blue. If we equally mix them together, we'll get this neutral green. But we can even expand this by adding more yellow to get yellow green shades or mixing in more blue to achieve blue green shades. If you're new to color mixing and you find this hard to remember, just go back to our basic recipe. Yellow plus blue equals green. So in case you want to mix yellow green, and green equals yellow plus blue. That only means yellow green equals yellow, plus yellow, plus blue, meaning there's more yellow. The same goes for blue green. If you break this down, blue green equals blue, plus yellow, plus blue or simply more blue to the mixture. The name of the shade itself gives us a clue to the recipe behind it. For our project, we have blue green for the mountains and a neutral one for the foreground. Oh, and if you want to grab a copy of this eBook to help you decide which yellow and blue pigments to use, then follow these simple steps. Complete the class and upload your project, leave an honest review, and shoot me an email. I will then send back the eBook as soon as I can. Now, let's learn how to mix olive or tone down greens in the next video. 3. Muted Greens: There's a part in a reference photo where we'll need to mix a light olive green shade. We can change our green base color by simply adding its complimentary color. It could either be red, pink, or magenta. Let's start with red first. This is cadmium red. See how that tones down as soon as we added that pigment. We were taught that the primary colors are blue, yellow and red. But technically, with liquid pigments like watercolors, the primary colors are cyan, yellow, and magenta. Think of your printers, CMYK, where K stands for black. That means we can also substitute red with either pink or magenta. I have here quinacridone red, a pinkish wine, and quinacridone magenta, four alternatives. You can see that the results don't vary too much. This three pigments manage to tone down our base green color. But you have to be careful with the ratio because the more red, pink or magenta that you add, the more it leans towards a neutral color, in this case, brown. This is because complimentary colors, the ones that lie opposite each other in the color wheel, when mixed together, yield a neutral color, various shades of browns and grays. Here's a closer look on our green plus red pink and magenta swatches. In the next video, let's mix light and dark greens. 4. Light / Dark Green: With watercolors, if you want to lighten the mixture, then all you need to do is add more water, the more water you add, the more transparent the mixture will be. For comparison purposes, let us also use white. Adding white, on the other hand, we'll turn it into a pastel green and make it more opaque. Here's a comparison of the two. You can see that the green mixed with white was able to cover that black line to some extent. But this watch where we only used water is more transparent. Now, for our shadow colors in the middle ground, we'll need darker greens. Ivory black is one of my favorite pigments when mixing shadow colors. But if for whatever reason you don't like using black, then using other dark pigments like neutral tint or paints gray can be good alternatives. By adding a dark pigment, we now have completed our limited palette. I don't want you to feel constrained, though, with my color choices. So here are other mini studies where I mix and match different yellows, blues and either added black or its complimentary color red pink or magenta to mix different shades of green. You are completely free to pick your own pigments as long as you're able to mix the shades of green that you want. See you in the next video, and let's get started with our mini landscape study. 5. Landscape Study: Right. It's time to apply what we learned by painting this landscape scene. And again, the pigments I chose are Prussian blue, Gumbochnva, quinacridone red, and paints gray. Most of the time, I start by painting the element farthest from us, and that would be the sky. Prussian blue straight from the tube is a bit cool to my liking. So let's mix a bit of queen red to make it warmer. Use it to paint the entire sky area, then grab a paper towel and crumple it and use it to lift some cloud shapes. This is by far the easiest way to paint fluffy clouds for me. I hope you find this dip useful. Then let's look for an area to work next. Ideally, somewhere that doesn't touch the sky to allow it to dry completely. That would be the trees and land mass in the middle ground. We need to mix a light olive green. Do you remember the recipe? Yes, yellow, plus blue, plus a bit of pink or red. Use that to paint an absurd shape that mimics the landmass on the reference photo. We'll then need a darker green for the shadowed areas? Let's mix more paint on our palette and even add paints gray to help darken the color. Test it and connect it with a still wet olive green shape. Don't worry too much about the details for now, paint some blobs, and that will do. Next, we'll need a light neutral green for the foreground. Adjust the mixture so it is somewhat close to the reference photo. Make sure though that it's a different shade from the olive green and dark green in the middle ground. We can even add a bit of queen red to tone this down just a little bit. Then we can add paints gray to that mixture for the darker parts on the foreground. I am doing this wet on wet and being careful so that only the tip of my brush is touching the paper. Be careful when doing this, or you might disturb the first layer we did earlier. Use the same color to add tiny details on the middle ground. By this time, the sky area has already dried and we can then mix our blue green for the distant mountains. Again, blue green only means more blue than yellow in our recipe. Paint those mountain shapes and once covered, add paints gray to that blue green for the shadows on the mountain. To make this believable, add shadows on one side only. In this case, the left side of the mountains. Then we can use the same shade to paint grasses on the foreground and distant trees between the mountain and the middle ground. This is all coming together now. I hope you learn something new and are enjoying color mixing, even just a little bit. Some final touch by adding texture and tiny details, and we're done. You can create an effortless texture by using the dry brush technique where your brush is loaded with less paint and you apply light pressure as you drag it along the paper. Or use the side of the brush or change the angle on how you hold the brush to vary the marks that you are creating. You can even lightly dab the tip of your brush and spread the paint by tapping it with your finger. Keep adding details and texture as you see fit. Great job. Keep painting and challenging yourself. I'll see you in the next video on what you can do from here. O 6. What to do Next: That was fine. I hope you were able to mix different shades of green with a limited palette. Here's a quick review. We learned that using different sets of yellow and blue will yield to different results. We also reviewed that to mix yellow green, add more yellow and to mix blue green, add more blue. And if you want to tone down that green, just introduce its complimentary color that can either be red, pink, or magenta. To lighten the shade, you can either add water or white. But using white will make it more opaque and to darken it, mix in a dark pigment like black or a dark neutral. Now, here's a fun homework. Paint this landscape, which is almost the same shades as our project and experiment with other set of primary colors. By the way, this is a picture taken in our neighborhood. Here are mini studies I did where I mixed and matched different primary colors and simplify shades to help us focus on color mixing rather than the tiny details. This is a compressed class with faster demonstrations. So if you want a longer one the tangles color mixing, I suggest this other classes. Oh, and don't forget to grab your free copy of my watercolor green recipes ebook. Stay tuned and follow me for more classes like this.