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Well we made it, it's officially summer, with that comes the sea of green. For some reason, the fall, winter and early spring are much easier for me. We hit the sea of green and I struggle. I prefer seeing the bones of the landscape. When summer is on they are mostly hidden. I turn to the sky this time of the year or will seek out Queen Anne's Lace, when it is in full bloom. The landscape seems a bit monotonous and green is a difficult color to deal with. A lot of artists can attest to this.

 

Green is a primary color, did you know that? It's a primary color in visible light. If you take the three primary colors in visible light (red, blue and green), mix them together, you get white. Green is not a primary color in an subtractive color scheme, like what we use to paint with. The primary colors in this instance are red, blue and yellow. Mix them together and you get black.

 

 

 

My first two years of painting saw no green on my palette. I always mixed it. When I began ramping up my plein air schedule I added Viridian (a very blueish green). Saved me tons of time but then it's easy to get addicted to these secondary tube colors. Viridian out of the tube is a very cool green.

 

 

 

 

Mixed with white it makes a real minty green that you might find in Caribbean water or a fifties kitchen where you could mix up a grasshopper cocktail.

 

         

 

Over the course of the last few months I've removed green from my palette, again. It was difficult to mix a nice green with my original palette. French Ultramarine leaned too far to the red end of the spectrum to get the greens I really wanted, and even Cobalt Blue resulted in the same issues. I've since switched out French Ultramarine for Prussian Blue. Prussian Blue leans way more toward the green side and produces really nice greens.

 

 

 

 

By removing the French Ultramarine I lost the ability to make those intense purples that I like to use, especially in shadow areas. The solution I come up with is to add Dioxazine Purple, a very intense purple that when mixed with either Alizarin or Prussian Blue gives me those purples again.

 

Here's a few examples of recent work using the new palette with no green. The greens in these paintings are made up with Hansa Yellow medium, Prussian Blue, Dioxazine Purple and maybe a touch of Alizarin Permanant.

 

 

 

 

As for now I'll be making my way through a sea of green. Catch you to you all when the Queen Anne's Lace is in bloom.

 

 

Curt