Advancing with Watercolor: Working with Green "Summer Path"

Green - Kermit the Frog was right - It’s not that easy….Being Green

How do we paint green in a pleasing way???

It starts with observation Looking at nature and answering the question what is the mother color.
Green?
What flavor of green? Does the green have a lot of yellow? or is it late summer and the green has more red to it. Start asking questions and inevitably you will notice the green is always changing. So we have discover an approach to green and any other color that is variation.

THE PRINCIPLE OF VARIETY

Green is a secondary hue made from the primaries of blue and yellow. In nature we observe a lot of trees and foliage and the choice of which green to use always comes up. Is there an over the counter solution. The paint companies want us to think there is but in truth the magic happens when we break down the green from the tube with other colors

this principle applies to other primary and secondary colors as well. We can break the green in a variety of ways

We can use hard edges and contrast in foliage that is closer or in shadow, soft transitions wet into wet that transform the green softly and subtly And variations in between. We practice in our drills this week.

GRADATIONS

The compliment of green - red - use red to make your green more appealing

WHAT DO WE NEED THIS WEEK

In the exercises this week I am using a base green - in my case sap green dark but you can use any dark green. in addition, I am using a red, which is burnt sienna, a yellow cat and yellow light, and a blue ultramarine blue. That will be our pallet this week.

Brushes

A large flat 2” and a 1 inch flat, a couple of sabelette rounds large and small. And a mop brush medium size

I am working on Saunders Waterford 140 pound rough, two sheets for the demo and the sprint and some smaller scrap pieces for the exercises.

Tape, spay bottle, paper towel, hair dryer

WHAT WILL WE DO THIS WEEK

This week we will start with a demonstration, developing a painting of a small stone bridge and a forest of green, a little drawing is done in the beginning to place the road and the bridge, but little else.

After the drawing we build the painting going from back to front and lights to dark

After the demonstration, we will do a lighthearted sprint of the same scene, taking what we learned and trying to perform the scene with more spontaneity

THIS WEEKS DRILL

The drills this week are building some swatches using Green as a way to understand the idea of variety so to our base screen, we are layering colors of yellow, red, and blue by doing this. We get an idea of how we can observe, green and nature and a rich and very green in our painting.

In the exercise we do an extension of this putting a green swatch of color in the middle and painting outwards to the colors of yellow, red and blue