ACRYLIC PAINTING 101: Lesson 11

Every time I teach this beginner acrylic painting course, I remember that there are a lot of people who want to paint landscapes.  Realistic greens can be a challenge to figure out for new painters.  This lesson is about a simple combination of colours that create a perfect green that is a great place to start working from. 
 
The chart is the same one we used in Lessons 4 and 5 to create a Colour Chart.
 
The colours we will be using for this lesson is Cadmium Yellow Light and Bone (Ivory) Black.  Black is a low chroma Blue.  If you put yellow and blue together, what do you get? Green.  Because Black is a low chroma Blue using Black to bring down the chroma/value of a paint doesn’t always work out so well as it will change the hue at the same time.
 
We will also be using the Neutral Grey paint mixtures that we created in Lesson 8. VIDEO & BLOG Post!

I would recommend caution when using photos to match your greens too.  I have found that the greens can be too chromatic (very garish) and often too blue   If you have a simple photo editing program on your computer you can lower the saturation on the image which will result in a much better image to work from.

​Cadmium Yellow Light starts at Value 9 straight out of the tube.  We will only be going to Value 2 because there are only 8 spaces across the full chart. 

There are so many beautiful colours in this chart.  I can see early spring green when the leaves are just unfurling after a very long cold winter. I can’t wait!  Soon! 
 
Then as the spring turns to summer, the leaves turn to darker greens.   
 
Now I don’t live where Silver Birches grow but I do remember them from my childhood.  If you know what the backside of the Silver Birch leaves look like…can you see that colour in this chart?
 
Can you see the colour that would be the sun shining through the leaves?
 
I would recommend making full tubes of the value paint mixtures from Value 8 to 2.  It will give you a great starting place and save a lot of mixing time.  Then you can drop the chroma by adding in the matching value of Neutral Grey paint.  
 
Here is the series of paintings that I did with this green mixtures.

The 2 handouts can be found HERE