Many years ago I spent a week in Tuscany, painting watercolours with friends. My colour palette consisted of the colours recommended by il Professore the previous year. I struggled with them but didn’t understand why. One of the colours was olive green. I hadn’t brought an extra pan of olive green with me, so when I ran out of olive I had no green. You get green by mixing yellow and blue, right? So I thought. Well, it depends on the yellow and the blue you have. The yellow I had was Cadmium Yellow Deep which, I can tell you, is a very warm yellow, practically orange. Orange and French Ultramarine do not make a nice green. Orange and Indigo do not make a nice green either. Without any green I decided to try monochromatic with Indigo, but wasn’t too succesful with that, either. Indigo is a terribly strong colour and I’ve been sort of afraid to use it. Go wrong with it, it doesn’t wash off like some other colours may do. I still have that monochromatic painting, a view of the mountains where Cortona is nestled. Hmm. Maybe I should have another look at it… maybe there is a part of it that could be salvaged. Anyway, it took me another few months to realize what the problem in mixing greens was: I didn’t have a cold yellow. Once that thought struck me, I drove from the summer cottage just to by a pan of Winsor Lemon. My greens were saved. How il Professore managed to get by without a cold yellow is still a mystery to me. But manage he did, superbly! Last week one day I got email from The Watercolour Academy. This is a bit funny, because I belong to a group called Akvarelli Akatemia. We have nothing to do with each other. The Watercolour Academy had this lesson on how to mix watercolours and I have just finished doing the lesson plus more. Just look what beautiful shades of green you can get with the right colours to start with! And compare them to what I had to deal with those years ago in Tuscany. You can click on the images to see larger versions of them.
2 Comments
Carla Buchheit
16/8/2014 12:10:16 am
The color studies themselves are so lovely! But, it's easy to immediately see the difference between cool yellow and warm yellow. In the warm series many of the colors feel muddier; would that study feel different if it too had 20 squares? Would it be more 'jewel tones' in that case?
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Piisa
16/8/2014 07:14:26 am
I guess I could go on and on mixing colours. As to my sister's challenge, it's still a challenge. Funny thing, I saw the painting finished in a dream last night. It was covered by glass and there were reflections on the glass so I never saw what I had managed to get on paper.
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AuthorI'm Piisa and I will be sharing with you my thoughts on this and that, maybe even on whatever. Archives
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