Quick & Easy Tips for Mixing Green
From clear to muted and bold to soft, we’re sharing three easy recipes for mixing gorgeous greens. Although this tutorial mainly focuses on mixing green colors in watercolor, one can adopt these same principles when painting in oil, gouache, or acrylic. So, let’s spring right into how to mix green!
When mixing colors, understanding how a paint or pigment behaves will help ensure consistent results. Attributes like transparency, granulation, tinting strength, and color bias will not only influence mixes but also how colors appear in a painting. Much of this information is on every tube and at our website so you can choose and use Da Vinci colors with success.
Easy Green Mix #1: Modify a Ready-Made Green
At Da Vinci, we strive to develop greens that look great straight from the tube, but to create a pleasing and realistic color scheme in a painting, tube greens (often referred to as convenience greens or colors; learn more about those here) can easily be modified. Single-pigment greens like Viridian or Phthalo Green work extremely well as shortcuts for mixing saturated, natural greens, but multi-pigment greens like Sap or Olive Green are also easily modified.
Another way to quickly gain a world of greens, especially in oil or acrylic, is to add varying amounts of white, gray, or black (also correspondingly called tinting, toning, or shading) to an existing green. This technique can be used with any tube green and is also a great way to expand colors when using a limited palette.
Pro tip: Adding a varying amounts of black to yellow will often produce a wide range of greens also, and this can work especially well with acrylic and oils. Give it a try!
More Da Vinci greens that can work well as modifiers:
Easy Green Mix #2: Combine a Yellow & Blue
Most of us learned in early childhood that yellow and blue make green, and although there are color theory arguments against this old adage, using a yellow and blue two-color mix is still one of the easiest ways to create green.
A general rule of thumb is that mixing cool, clear blues and yellows will produce the brightest, boldest greens, while mixing warmer blues and yellows will produce more muted or mossy greens.
Prussian Blue has often been hailed as the best blue for mixing the widest range of greens, but any blue can be combined with nearly any yellow* to create a number of greens. Because paint colors possess varying attributes in regards to transparency, granulation, and tinting strengths, most artists keep several different yellows and blues in their everyday palettes.
We mentioned a good rule of thumb—cool, transparent colors (e.g. Phthalo Blue mixed with Hansa Yellow Light) will typically produce the brightest greens that are reminiscent of spring while more opaque blues and yellows or earth yellows (e.g. Raw Sienna or New Gold) will often mix into rich, olive greens—so artist palettes that contain several blues and yellows will produce the widest range of greens. However, this “rule” doesn’t always hold true. As you can see from the graphic above, it’s possible to create a beautiful range of greens with only one yellow and one blue!
Below is a list of popular Da Vinci blues and yellows that you can use mix and match your way to spectacular greens.
Try these Da Vinci colors for mixing bright, bold greens:
Cadmium Yellow Pale or Lemon
Da Vinci Yellow
Hansa Yellow Light
Cerulean Blue Hue
Phthalo Blue
Phthalo Turquoise or Seaglass
Try these Da Vinci colors for mixing muted, earthen greens:
New Gold
Soulshine
Yellow Ochre
Cerulean Blue Genuine
Prussian Blue
Ultramarine Blue Green Shade
*When using blue and yellow to make green, be sure to pick a true yellow pigment, or PY for "pigment yellow." Pigment information is listed on our website and on each tube's label. Earth yellows made with brown pigments (PBr) will often create gray or brown when mixed with blue, not green.
Easy Green Recipe #3: Discover Your Favorites
There are plenty of other colors that can be mixed to create great looking greens. Although some of these color combinations can be tricky to master, exploring unusual green mixes is a great way to learn and can often result in some surprisingly pleasing colors.
Begin by exploring various mixes using the colors that you already have. Try mixing two colors from the tips that we’ve mentioned above, using varying ratios of each, and then experiment more from there. Be sure to take good notes so you can remix your favorite greens at a later date. Below are a few examples to get you started, so now it's time to discover your own unique Da Vinci green!
For more about Da Vinci greens and the colors that we offer, see our article.
Explore More Da Vinci Greens
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