Blog reader Diego Conte says:
Simple, strong value schemes never look muddy. This is something Rico learned from Daubigny, one of the French Barbizon painters.
"I am a young self taught artist in Spain, and your books are probably the best resource I have ever found. And your watercolour video is amazing. I'm recommending them to every artist I know."
"I don't know if there is any article in your blog on this matter, but since there is a chapter on your book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
, I think it is not a bad idea at all to ask this question. How could I establish a good green harmony using watercolours? My mixes always end up looking muddy on the paper when I try to use green... it always look too cool If I need it to be warm or vice versa. I see a lot of great watercolor masters simply avoiding it using ochre or brown colour schemes instead. But I want to be faithful to my subject harmony. I don't know if it is an interesting topic for such a thing as an article, but any short tip or direction would be great."
Thanks, Diego. Good question. Greens can be wonderful in watercolor, and it's a good goal to be faithful to nature.
The Spanish painter Martín Rico (1833-1908) is good to look at for how he uses greens. In this one he moves toward the blue-green hues. But it's not the hues, so much as the values that makes it work. He avoids muddiness by organizing the picture into three basic tonal areas: 1. light sky, 2. dark trees, and 3. middle-tone stream bank.
"I don't know if there is any article in your blog on this matter, but since there is a chapter on your book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
, I think it is not a bad idea at all to ask this question. How could I establish a good green harmony using watercolours? My mixes always end up looking muddy on the paper when I try to use green... it always look too cool If I need it to be warm or vice versa. I see a lot of great watercolor masters simply avoiding it using ochre or brown colour schemes instead. But I want to be faithful to my subject harmony. I don't know if it is an interesting topic for such a thing as an article, but any short tip or direction would be great." |
| Martín Rico y Ortega, watercolor |
The Spanish painter Martín Rico (1833-1908) is good to look at for how he uses greens. In this one he moves toward the blue-green hues. But it's not the hues, so much as the values that makes it work. He avoids muddiness by organizing the picture into three basic tonal areas: 1. light sky, 2. dark trees, and 3. middle-tone stream bank.
Simple, strong value schemes never look muddy. This is something Rico learned from Daubigny, one of the French Barbizon painters.
Here's a small detail of the same painting. He uses a variety of greens, including blue greens, grey greens, and yellow greens. That doesn't mean he necessarily had a lot of separate green pigments on his palette. It just means he was conscious of varying the chroma and hue of the mixtures. Rico was also interesting in the way he left little white dots on the picture, which gives it a little sparkle.
Some artists leave green off the palette altogether and mix their greens from yellows and blues, because that way there's always variety in the mixture. In foliage there is variety of green in each leaf, variety in each small group of leaves, and variety from one tree to another, and variety from foreground to background.
But all that variety must happen within those simple tonal areas, and that's what's a bit challenging.
Here's one last watercolor by Harry Sutton Palmer. Those greens are all composite mixtures, and none of them are too high-chroma. They're probably muted quite a bit from what he actually saw. And he obviously worked hard to simplify his values to the general midtone of the leaves, the light sky and distant area, and the dark areas of the tree bases.
Diego, I hope that helps. Good luck with your greens. Enjoy them while they remain before autumn and winter come.
Here's another watercolor landscape, this time by an English watercolorist namedHarry Sutton Palmer (1854-1933). Even though his range emphasizes yellow-green, he uses a subtle variety of colors, which would be more evident in the original.
One of the secrets to both this painting and the last one is that they chose not to paint a bright blue sky. A bright blue sky behind bright green leaves might look good in a photo, but it can often be deadly in a painting. However, green foliage against sky filled with a high white cloud layer can be very attractive.
Diego, I hope that helps. Good luck with your greens. Enjoy them while they remain before autumn and winter come.
Previously on GurneyJourney: The Green Problem
