The Sunday Post-Lush , Beautiful Greens

At this time of year , we are surrounded by verdant lush greens
Perhaps not as much, but even here in the desert, as our "monsoon season"has started, things that were dried are now growing and greening.

"Arch Tango", oil on linen, 12x12

I often hear from students, Oh, I HATE green, it is so hard to work with!

Well, I happen to really love green...perhaps it is the bit of Irish blood in me, but I think it is a beautiful shade. It can be tricky, and there are reasons for that, but once one starts to think about some of the properties of color, then it all starts to make sense.

One of the the aspects is that green, particularly yellow/green is in the middle of the visible light spectrum, so human eyes can discern more shades of green than any other color !

Most vegetation is more of a warm yellow/green ... and it is not even close to tube shades.

To show this, here is my watering can up against a potato vine. The can would be close to a lightened viridian or thalo green. Notice how different it is from the vine. Way different!

Other times, in fact most of the time, greens are greyed, and not a brilliant emerald green that is seen so often in amateur landscapes.

"Cool Canyon Blues" shows vegetation that has a cooler, blue/gray cast. Even the brighter, sunlit scrub has light olive greens, rather than bright lime greens. 

A good way to grey down greens , especially needed when creating distance, is by adding violet. We think of colors getting cooler, and more greyed as they recede, right? However, if one were to just add blue, we end up with a bright blue/green. So by adding violet, which is made up of red + blue, we are adding the complement of green also, which is red. Sometimes it works to simply add a red to the greens as well, and then we end up with an olive color.

To get away from a landscape that seems overwhelmingly green, I will often push the color temperature of the green. That is, if it is warm ,I will go for a very gold/yellow, or if it is cool, I will push more towards a blue/violet shade. A good example of this is in the first image. The eucalyptus leaves were a cool blue, but I really greyed the leaves. This really made the warm yellow greens under the arch pop! 

Often, greens are affected by the blue of the sky, which is particularly evident in the shadowed side...so they need to be a bit cooler. 

So, we need to think about chroma...how bright a green is, color temperature...how warm or cool a green is, in addition to value...how light or dark a green is.

So, get out there and enjoy this verdant time of year !