| Author | Message | ||
  John Preston |
Sounds like a really useful color. Marie, fortunately I'm old enough to know what "coke bottle green" looks like! Ben, I found the thread and I'm gonna try a tube of this stuff. Thanks to you both. | ||
ben |
hi John, look for the thead "a matter of black" (july?) for my perylene black experiences; hi Marie, you tried the perylene green! (you mentioned that ;-) | ||
marie |
John, I like perylene black. It's very dark, almost black, in masstone and moves toward what I would call "coke bottle green" in tints. Mixed with raw sienna or raw umber, it produces very muted, natural looking greens. Mixing with perylene maroon produces the blackest black I have ever been able to get. I find it to me the most useful of the new pigments that W/N introduced this year. If I did a lot landscapes, it would definitely be part of my everyday palette. I will try to post my sample sheet from when I gave it a test drive. | ||
John Preston |
To any who have tried it, What's Perylene Black/Green like? I notice it's listed as a black pigment but W&N calls it Perylene Green. | ||
Ben |
welcome Carol, the trick with 'mixed black' works with perylene black too (PBk31, WN brand). And it works with 'premixed blacks' like indigo and sepia (but not in all brands). | ||
Anonymous Painter |
To make green, I almost always start with Winsor (ph/thalo) green BS. It's cheap, powerful, and incredibly versatile. With Burnt sienna (and sometimes a bit of Winsor violet) it makes evergreen greens; with Transparent yellow it makes a wide range of sunny greens; with New Gamboge, it makes pear green, among others. It's powerful stuff, so learning to mix it is crucial, but I love it. Very diluted (and with a bit of blue added), it also makes a great cyan for low skies. Shortcut for mixing varied greens: Make up a lot of your mixed 'black' or dark (from the colors selected for this painting's palette) before you begin your painting. (In my case, this is usually Winsor green BS with a red, possibly a bit of yellow as well.) When you want to darken or vary your green, just add some of this pre-mixed dark. You can even glaze with the mixed dark, diluted, to indicate shadows on your greens. A foliage tip: Mix some varied greens, and paint a sponge (natural sponge) with them -- lightest green at the top of the sponge, the darkest at the bottom. Dab the sponge onto slightly moist paper, for soft foliage, setting up a rhythm by offsetting the sponge repeatedly for clumps of foliage within a particular tree or shrubs. Load the sponge with slightly altered greens or moisten the paper more, or blur the marks by very slightly dragging the sponge, to easily indicate different trees in the same painting. For close, high contrast (sunny day) foliage, apply the sponge to dry paper. To make it softer or blend it more after the paint has been applied, rinse the sponge thoroughly, squeeze it dry, then roll it lightly over the foliage. | ||
Grace |
Almost all of the greens on the market are made from Pthalo green mixed with a yellow(which yellow depends upon the brand). Just thought I'd throw that out. | ||
Robert |
I find the palette of cadmium scarlet(or red light), Indian yellow (only Maimeriblu's version--much different--special), and pthalo blue produces some very striking and harmonius landscapes. | ||
jandrle@speakeasy.net |
Indian yellow, prussian blue and Winsor Violet are my favorites for a leaf wash. Very dynamic and compelling. | ||
Eric |
Regarding Robert's statement about using local colors less: I'm always grappling with that one. On one hand I want to paint it the way it looks.(sky is blue, grass is green, barn is red, etc.) But if I push myself to get more creative and maybe paint it a different color than what one might expect the result is usually more interesting. I guess that's called creating art. | ||
joanna |
Robert remarks "We do have lots of words for green, mostly comparison words such as lime, olive, marine/sea, grass, kelly, chartreuse, etc. We can clearly discern varieties and nuances of green." And the comparison word "hooker's green?" you forgot that one! ahahaha sorry, could NOT resist. Thanks for the compliment. The finished painting has the "broken" arm healed up but I didn't snap a final shot before I sent it to the happy recipent, a golfing friend. The golfer REALLY was wearing red out back on the course, dressed just like this. I grabbed the digital camera and "moved" Bagger Vance over to the side of the sand trap that looked better to me. | ||
Robert |
Nice use of red to offset the plethora of soft greens, joanna. BTW--I have read in more than on place that the human eye is very sensitive to nuances of greens--possibly becasue of evolving in forests where the environment in mostly green. The fact that we see any shade of green as green while we see dull orange as a different color (brown), may be a result of hardwiring in our brains that our environment (jungle) is made of leaves and thus the substance of the environment is one constant thing (leaves) and it is green. In other sords, when i look at johanna's paintings and see all of the colors as greens, I am perceiving accurately, whereas if I saw in a painting oranges ,siennas, and umbers as three colors it would, in a sense be inaccurate since they are all shades of orange. Thus which vision is more precise--that which unifies all of the shades into a unified perception (green) or the other? We do have lots of words for green, mostly comparison words such as lime, olive, marine/sea, grass, kelly, chartreuse, etc. We can clearly discern varieties and nuances of green. | ||
joanna |
Re Marie's comment on eyes and sensitivity. Actually, the eye is very sensitive to green--this is why it's used as the background light for phase-contrast microscopes in the laboratory. In fish, those that hunt straight ahead are sensitive to colors, especially greens, and those that hunt from below are more colorblind. Humans might be the same way, with a tendency to colorblindness being found in some male populations that's attributed to an advantage to give them contrast in forest hunting. Strangely, I noticed more German men were colorblind than American men, not sure what this means. (My degree, despite my being a financial advisor, is in zoology and my professors worked on sight pigments in fish, so.....) Anyway, I try to mix green, adding something to "dirty" up the phthalo. I try to have yellow greens and blue greens in the same picture because I think it looks like sun and shadow, but I admit greens are a disaster sometimes. Can ruin a landscape in a second.  | ||
tachee |
enjoying this discussion. because of this green problem, i tend to winterize my landscapes. | ||
Eugene |
I agree with Eric. I NEVER use thalo green directly from the tube. To neutralize it I mix it with burnt sienna, raw sienna, or raw umber. I use the same colors to tame sap green which I like better than thalo. | ||
Eric |
I use yellows a lot for greens, especially sunlit grass. Your mind tends to think of it as green even though it's yellow. I also use a lot of olive. I never, ever use phthalo green straight from the tube. It's too unnatural-looking. I add a lot of yellow to it, and maybe some red to darken it or gray it down. So a solution to the harsh green color is lots of olive and yellow (more towards a lemony yellow) I'm really not that fond of paintings with a lot of green, so when there's lots of foliage I'll often turn them into autumn paintings. | ||
marie |
I think that the eye is inherently less sensitive to variations in green than to variations in warm colors. Philip Ball, in Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, describes how red enters the vocabularies of many cultures long before green or blue. In addition, many languages have multiple words to describe warm colors and very few to describe green. For example , bright yellow is called "yellow", a moderately dull yellow may be called "ochre", and an even duller yellow is "beige." Bright orange tends to be called "orange" and dull orange is called "brown." Green, on the other hand, tends to be simply "green" regardless of its intensity. (I believe that handprint also has some interesting discussion along these lines.) As a consequence, we tend to think of some kind of mental symbol of "green" instead of the actual color in that appears in nature. Grass and foliage are green, and so we reach for the tube of paint labeled "green" without thinking of the intensity of the green. My general rule of thumb is: * Use darks, namely blacks and blues, to mix greens. * Use green, especially pthalo green, to mix darks. | ||
Robert |
Lanscape painters, esp. plein air landscape painters--a widespread perception among artists is that landscapes contain so much green that paintings that are too literal are also too green--or that bright greens can easily get out of control in paintings. I was wondering, how do you address the "problem" of greens? Or is there not such a problem for you? I am starting to to make my paintings more value oriented and less color focused and am working toward including literal colors (or , to use an art cliche borrowed from literature "local color") less and warm or cool darks more (based in umbers and blues respectively). What are your issues and solutions in dealing with greens? |
