Color Decoder: The Trouble with Green

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Learn how to use this versatile, but sometimes challenging, secondary color to great effect.

This article originally appeared in Pastel Journal. Subscribe now so you don’t miss any great art instruction, inspiration, and articles like this one.

When we think of the color green, most of us conjure up a natural landscape replete with green trees and meadows. For vacation, we often seek out green spaces as a retreat from our hectic steel-and-glass worlds. No wonder, then, that green usually is considered a color that evokes a sense of calm and peace. Green can symbolize the positive—life and vigor, youth and hope—but also the negative, as in inexperience, jealousy, and even decay.

The variety of greens in Chestnut Trees Above a River (ca 1900; pastel over watercolor and gouache on paper-board, 149⁄₁₆x20½) by August-Louis Lepère (French, 1849–1918), all of which are modified with reds, blues and yellows, demonstrates the artist’s skill at handling greens in what otherwise might be a boring overabundance of green. The yellow paper is used to great effect in warming up the cooler greens of foliage and grass. The yellow-greens and blue-greens of the trees and grasses also add interest.

The Beauty of Green

Green lives between blue and yellow in the visible electromagnetic spectrum, between 490 and 475 nanometers. In our context of dealing with pigments, green is a secondary color, which means it can be mixed, in this case, from blue and yellow.

When most people imagine green, they often think of “grass green,” but for us painters, there are as many varieties of green as you might find in a botanical garden: yellow-greens (lime); greens with a touch of orange (moss); greens with red or violet (olive); and bluish-greens (fir). Interestingly, in some Eastern languages, there’s no distinction between green and blue; green is considered a shade of blue. Because green is a transition color between yellow and blue and contains both elements, it can help harmonize those two colors.

In A Scottish Burn (12×16), green takes up the most real estate, but I’ve done made sure to vary the greens—from a yellow-green to a blue-green, plus rich and dull versions of each. Second, I’ve made sure to introduce plenty of red—green’s complement—and other colors analogous to red. For example, in the shadowed foliage of the tall tree on the left, I’ve scumbled a good bit of dark orange. The “burn,” which is a Scottish term for creek or stream, has a lot of red and orange in it.

A Brief History

In their funereal adornment, the ancient Egyptians used malachite, a rich mineral green procured from mines across the Red Sea on the Sinai Peninsula. They also manufactured a less expensive alternative by mixing yellow ochre with blue azurite. The Romans dug terra verte, which was a dull earth green, from the ground. They also made a more intense green—verdigris—by soaking copper plates in fermenting wine.

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Sap green, made from buckthorn berries, was used in the Renaissance period to color clothing for merchants and bankers. (Clothing color denoted social class or profession.)

Although green has been a commonly used color throughout the ages, most of these early pigments proved dull, toxic or prone to fading or discoloration. Because of the fickle nature of green, Renaissance painters preferred to create greens by glazing yellow over blue. Malachite alone provided a rich, lightfast color, but the color of the mineral varied and would change in the presence of acids.

In a scene that might otherwise have been overwhelmed with green, I’ve varied the use of the color from blue-greens to yellow-greens to create An Inviting Spot (12×9). I’ve also worked some rich reds into the shadowy parts of the trees and some violet into the shadowed parts of the grasses.

The Manmade Pigments

It wasn’t until new greens were made in the laboratory that artists obtained truly bright, stable and permanent greens. Scheele’s Green, an early version of the pigment called Paris green or emerald green, was invented in Germany in 1814. Although an alluring color, this arse-nic compound was so toxic that it was used as an insecticide and rat poison. This didn’t stop painters like J.M.W. Turner (English, 1775–1851) and Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903) from using it, however.

Viridian or chromium green, similar in color to emerald green but nontoxic, was invented by color-maker Pannetier in 1838. With the advent of organic chemistry, we have other greens such as phthalocyanine green, which was invented in 1935. Many of the earlier, unsatisfactory greens have been re-created as hues or mixtures of stable, nontoxic pigments.

Palm Trees, Late Afternoon Light (12×9) features a wide variety of greens: warm, rich greens in the palm tree foliage; pale, dull blue-greens in the distant hill; and rich, cool greens interspersed with cool pinks and violets in the cast shadows. The more variety you can use in your greens—and the more you can include a few near-complementary colors—the richer and more impactful the scene will be.

Quick Tips

These color swatches featured on Wallis Belgian Mist paper are green tints and shades from Blue Earth’s “Earth Green” set. Blue Earth notes, “Warm green is perhaps the most complicated color to formulate. The primary challenge is the lack of dark green pigments that are suitable for making pastels. While phthalo green is the go-to dark pigment for making greens in oil and acrylic, it’s not so useful when making pastels, forming a rock-hard stick that’s transparent. Long story short: It takes some fiddling to come up with a workable line of warm greens. Cool greens, however, are relatively easy to create by using cool-shade cobalt pigments. To desaturate, we use a complement or an off-complement. The purest color is the bottom row, with more graying from bottom to top. These are mostly cool greens.

Green is helpful for modifying both warm and cool versions of violet. Here, I use red-violet as the warm version, and in the second illustration, I use blue-violet as the cool. In the illustration above, I’ve taken two values of a red-violet—an intense, dark version on the top, plus a weaker, lighter version on the bottom—and have used these to modify two different values of green. The dark green is on the left, and the tint, on the right.

In the illustration above, I’ve used the same two values of green but have used them to modify two different values of blue-violet. The top row shows how a dark blue-violet might be modified; the bottom, a light tint of the same. For both illustrations, I used a soft plastic spatula as a blending tool. It’s interesting to note the variation in green that results from the blending—and how such a subtle shift in the violets’ temperature can make a real difference.

Green in Action

For landscape painters, green is often a challenge. Most landscapes display an abundance of the color, and as much as we enjoy the real thing in nature, in a painting the color can easily overwhelm the scene. Art instructors sometimes recommend that students facing this dilemma remove all the greens from their pastel box. This forces students either to find other options—such as painting sunlit foliage a bright orange and shadowed foliage a dull violet—or mixing a green by layering and scumbling. Blending yellow and blue, or two colors that contain these, such as orange and violet, can create a wide range of interesting greens. A third option is to mix red or violet into greens to moderate them. This approach also makes them appear richer than any one green alone. For shadowy greens, I like to mix in a little violet; for sunlit greens, I add a little warm red or even orange.

To serve as a complement to the rich green grasses in Creek Path (6×9), I’ve surrounded them with rich reds both in the water and in the more distant bushes. I’ve also added a few cooler notes of blue-green and blue-violet to contrast the warmth.

Believe it or not, that field beyond the juniper tree in High Desert Juniper (9×12) is filled with green grasses. I’ve minimized the green by creating areas of very pale yellow-greens and have made them seem greener by working in violets and pinks.

Green is also a useful color for figure and portrait painters. For centuries, it has been used to make flesh colors appear richer and warmer.
A green underpainting—bits of which show through the redder flesh colors—can make the flesh look more realistic. Surrounding a portrait with a dark, rich green can add a vibrancy to the entire painting.

Green is also commonly used in still life painting, as it makes reds richer; apples and roses, for example, can appear almost three-dimensional.
If you learn how to handle the color green effectively, you’ll make other artists green with envy.

Michael Chesley Johnson Workshops

Pastelist Michael Chesley Johnson (mchesleyjohnson.com) is the author of Outdoor Study to Studio: Take Your Plein Air Painting to the Next Level and other books, and is also a painting instructor who’s featured in several Artists Network TV videos (artistsnetwork.com/store). He teaches painting workshops throughout the United States.