Some painters have talked about the “Tyranny of Green” and this perhaps more than anything is the summer painter´s challenge: to make a statement, create interest without being swamped by greenery. It’s everywhere: grass, hedgerows, bushes, trees, even garbage bins.
Here are a few tips:
- Don’t use green out of the tube, in fact don’t even think of green as a colour. Only combinations of yellow and blue exist in my world. Each time I mix a yellow and a blue the result is slightly different!
- Emphasize the “blueness” or “yellowness” in the colour, toned and darkened with brown perhaps or washed out with white.
- Paint things rather than “greenery” – a bush and a tree need to relate, but make them distinct. I invariably vary my combinations of colour, value and brushwork.
- Underpin green with a brown base. Brown is complementary, toning down excess greenness and with the brown peaking through, the whole thing sings: Subtler and more vibrant, it can be both! Work a little brown next to green with watercolour paintings too!
- Layout dark green areas with Ultramarine Blue (or blue-black). Everything is better this way, forms, shadow areas, and working greenness over a dark blue base is a doddle.
- Paint in 3 zones: foreground – mid-ground and background: https://www.davidkearn.com/methods/painting-in-three-zones/
