Unraveling the mystery of how to make the color green the perfect shade you need, can seem like an intricate puzzle. The complexity lies not just in its creation, but also in recognizing the countless shades that exist even within a simple green landscape.
Shade Savvy: Tips for Rich Watercolor Greens
Green color is one of the most pervasive in the natural world. How many of us have struggled trying to paint it? This color can take a huge variety of shades, and whenever you paint landscapes, florals or living creatures, it’s crucial and challenging to choose the right ones for the situation.
For myself, I found it helpful to define three major ways of painting greens. Each one may be of use depending on your needs.
Follow along to learn how you can successfully paint green watercolor!
Let’s say you want to paint an illustration of a tropical plant, bird, butterfly or anything else that has an intense green color to it. This is where bright and overpowering tube greens can do a good job. For example, this watercolor of mine was painted using mostly Winsor (Phthalo) Green and Green-Gold right out of the tubes:
Lovebirds by Maria Stezhko
Here are a few swatches of interesting green colors you may want to consider adding to your palette:
Most of the time, however, you will probably want to neutralize tube greens and make them more natural by mixing in other colors. In particular, Sap Green can produce many beautiful green mixtures.
Here’s a very small fraction of them:
Mixing your own greens
Mixing you own green watercolor provides a wide selection of rich, natural shades that are especially useful when painting landscapes.
Green is a secondary color that is easy to obtain by mixing two primary colors: yellow and blue. In fact, “yellow” in this equation can vary, and range from Cadmium Lemon to Burnt Umber, for example. Blue colors are also plenty. In addition to that, green shades can differ depending on the proportion of mixed pigments. Just imagine how many variations are possible! Sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it?
It really helps having a color chart to reference to when you’re looking for perfect greens for your painting. Not only will it give you the opportunity to discover new shades, it will also let you find out which of them work best with your favorite paper. Mix all your yellows and blues with each other, and enjoy those beautiful green colors — cold blue or warm olive, dull grayish or bright emerald.
The truth is, there’s no the best formula for mixing greens — it’s a matter of personal preferences. Below is my color chart comprised of 25 shades that I use most often.
To illustrate this approach, here are two landscape watercolors. Please notice how much the mixed greens on these paintings are different from the tube greens I used for the lovebirds.
Red Cabin by Maria Stezhko
Mendocino by Maria Stezhko
Discover what colors make green
At the very heart of it, blue and yellow make green when mixed together. However, there are many other different shades of green that can be created – using various different color combinations.
So, let’s take a look at what two colors make green in the first color chart combination below.
What two colors make green
How to make green (video guide)
Unleash your creativity with our captivating video guide below, where you’ll unlock the secrets of crafting an array of breathtaking green shades. Learn how to infuse warmth into your greens using the power of yellow. Embrace this golden opportunity to elevate your color palette — dive into the video now!
The blue colors listed on the chart above; ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, RGH blue and pthalo blue, all end up creating slightly different shades of green when mixed with cadmium yellow.
One could also use a different type of yellow such as cadmium lemon, yellow ochre, or naples yellow. However, there is no need to get carried away with different types of blues and yellows to make green at first. As long as you have all the essential paint colors necessary you will be set to mix a large range of colors.
If you haven’t yet… grab my FREE Color Mixing Guide for additional helpful color mixing instructions and techniques!
How to make the color green muted
When learning how to create the color green, it’s valuable to understand how to achieve different shades of muted green colors. Let me guide you through the process!
Mix green and red for a muted green shade
You can create a muted shade of green by mixing red and green together.
The initial green colors in the chart above, are the same as the ones we created in the first color chart. Except now we are mixing the greens we created with cadmium red.
You can see a slight difference between the shades of green that red and green make when mixed together, when compared to the shades of green on the left. The shades on the right are much warmer and not as bright of a green.
How to use complementary colors
Whenever you mix a color with its complementary color it will make it less of its own color. For example, whenever a green is mixed with a red, these two colors mixed make green a lesser shade of green. The opposite is also true, in regards to the color red and green make. When you have red and green mixed together, the red will be a lesser shade of red.
To unlock and get a better understanding of how colors work together, make sure to spend some time learning about the artist’s color wheel. Along with this complementary color wheel seen above, there are multiple variations of the color wheel that can help deepen your ability to mix colors.
