Mixing guide
Greens that look like actual leaves
Straight mixed green looks like sweets. Knock it back with its opposite or with an earth color and it becomes a tree.
The reason painted foliage so often looks artificial is not that the green is wrong in hue. It is that it is too saturated and too uniform. A real tree contains dozens of greens, almost all of them muted, and the differences between them carry the light.
Every green you mix should be tempered by something: its opposite, an earth color, or a trace of the light falling on the scene. And distance changes green more than almost any other color — far greens go cooler, bluer, lighter and flatter, all at once.
Photograph your own foliage in sunlight if you can. Pictures off the internet rarely have one clear light direction, and without that you are guessing at the very thing you are trying to learn.
The mixtures
Each one worked out on a real palette with the spectral model. The number after the mixture is how far it lands from the target: under 2 you cannot see the difference, under 4 it does not matter in a painting.
Sunlit leaf mass #8FA14A
Warm, light, and more yellow than you expect.
9× Cadmium Yellow Light +5× Ultramarine +2× Titanium White
8× Yellow Ochre +7× Viridian +2× Lemon Yellow
Medium wash, roughly 1 part paint to 1 parts water.
6× Yellow Ochre +3× Titanium White +2× Ultramarine
Leaf mass in shadow #43533A
The bulk of a tree. Cool and muted.
7× Yellow Ochre +3× Phthalo Blue +1× Burnt Umber
7× Yellow Ochre +3× Phthalo Blue +1× Burnt Umber
Full wash.
10× Ultramarine +9× Yellow Ochre
Distant hillside green #7C8C7A
Aerial perspective has taken most of the color out.
10× Ultramarine +8× Yellow Ochre +7× Titanium White
7× Ultramarine +5× Yellow Ochre +1× Burnt Sienna
Thin wash, roughly 1 part paint to 3 parts water.
10× Ultramarine +8× Yellow Ochre +7× Titanium White
Grass in flat light #6B7A46
Neither warm nor cool; the baseline green of an overcast day.
9× Ultramarine +7× Cadmium Yellow Light +2× Burnt Sienna
10× Yellow Ochre +4× Viridian +3× Ultramarine
Full wash.
8× Yellow Ochre +4× Ultramarine +1× Titanium White
Worth remembering
- Mix six distinguishable greens for a single tree before you start, and keep them separate on the palette.
- The lit side of a leaf mass is often more yellow than green; the shadow side is often more blue than green.
- Keep the most saturated green for the nearest, best-lit passage, and let everything else fall back from it.
Your paints, your photo
These mixtures assume the palettes above. Tick off what you actually own and pick the color straight out of your reference instead.