Greens, Greens, and More Greens: Revisiting Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing, chapter 4

Like many watercolor books, Jeanne Dobie devotes a specific chapter to mixing green. My best guess is that this is because green is quite prevalent in landscapes because, y’know, chlorophyll. Dobie calls it “the most challenging of all colors to mix.”

Dobie calls out multiple ways that greens can go wrong; I appreciate that she showcases too low chroma (“dull, grayed mixtures”) and too high chroma (“too artificial for a landscape green”) as both problems, rather than focusing on just one side. To solve the problem, she claims, “The secret is the choice of pigments and the sequence in which they are mixed.”

What’s the secret???

I read it so you don’t have to: here is the precise recipe that she gives:

• Start with Viridian (PG18)
• Add a equal amount of Aureolin (PY40)
• Add a tiny bit of red (wildcard, pick your favorite red)

I wasn’t expecting such a specific recipe. It’s not particularly useful to me because Viridian and Aureolin aren’t colors that I use, Viridian because I find it weak and expensive, Aureolin because it is fugitive. To be fair, she does suggest a variation later on where you use Winsor Green (that is, Phthalo Green), but it still feels like a limitation that the book calls for specific brands and pigment formulations instead of proposing a general rule. I think the useful idea here is “mix a bright green, then add a tiny bit of red to neutralize.”

I’m not really sure what the deal is with the idea of mixing them in the right “sequence” (she insists you must pick up green first, then yellow, then red). Sequence matters in glazing, but I don’t know if I believe that it matters much in mixing. My best guess is that this is a stand-in for the amount you need: the most of the green, some of the yellow, and a tiny bit of the red. These ratios might change if you used different pigments, though.

I also wouldn’t say this is the only good way to mix green, though Dobie insists that it is. She dismisses the mix of green and yellow ochre because “yellow ochre is an opaque color and as such reduces the amount of light reflecting through it.” But this doesn’t necessarily apply to colors like Raw Sienna, which aren’t mentioned. And what if you want an opaque green?

She also oddly dismisses the idea of mixing blue and yellow, for reasons that I frankly don’t understand:

[T]he ratio of warm and cool in your mixes is of the essence. With the ordinary method of mixing blue and yellow, the green color is half warm yellow and half cold blue. If, instead, you start with viridian, which is half blue and half yellow, and add an equal amount of yellow (warm) plus some red (warm), the blue or cool content is dramatically reduced. The result is greens that are kept warm and lively.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing ch. 4 (pp 27-28)

Uh…

So I guess she feels that greens should be warm? I guess it depends on what you’re painting, doesn’t it? Also if you want it warmer, idk, what if you just used less blue? I don’t get it.

Exercise

There isn’t an exercise separated out from a project in this chapter, though the project instruction includes the words “experiment with mixing” which I guess is an exercise by implication:

To develop a repertoire of your own distinctive greens, experiment with mixing and then choose a scene that invites you to paint it green.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing ch. 4 (p. 28)

Hey, wait, I’m supposed to develop my own repertoire of distinctive greens? I thought I was just supposed to use viridian, aureolin, and red, but ok!

The first time I covered this chapter in 2022, I mixed out as many blue/yellow combos as I could from my current palette, seemingly oblivious to the instruction to avoid blue/yellow combos. This time around, though, I am curious to explore the role of reds, as discussed in the chapter.

Phthalo Green (PG7)

I started with just DV Phthalo Green BS (PG7) and added various reds. I tried them both as gradients, mixing on the page, and as palette-mixed flat greens.

General impressions: Reds added to PG7 tend to neutralize it to a black or very dark green, similar to Perylene Green. Maybe it is the cheap Canson XL paper I am using, but all of these seemed to separate a bit, even the non-granulating ones, leaving a light wash of PG7-colored background color. As a result, these all scream “I was mixed with PG7” to me.

Red by red:

• DS Perylene Red (PR178): Page mix turned pale and gray. Palette mix is a nice dark green with a cool/bluish undertone.
• DS Quin Fuchsia (PR202): Page mix also got a grayish quality here, with odd light spots. Palette mix is also nice and even cooler.
• DV Perylene Violet (PV29): Both are nice, dark mixes. The palette mix looked near black when wet, but dried lighter.
• DV Quin Red [Coral] (PR209): Page mix is very strange. Palette mix is nice, but dried pale.
• Hol. Pyrrol Rubin (PR264): I was surprised that it was easier to get a flat black that stayed black from this mix than from Perylene Violet.
• DV Red Rose Deep [Quin] (PV19): A violety page mix. The palette mix doesn’t read as violet, but it is quite cool.
• DS Pyrrol Scarlet (PR255): This mixes here are quite a bit browner than the others I tried, since I used a scarlet with an orange undertone here.
• DS Venetian Red (PR101): The page mix was quite unpredictable looking very different wet and dry. The palette mix is quite nice, with very subtle color separation.

Phthalo Green (PG7) + Nickel Azo Yellow (PY150)

These mixes are more similar to Dobie’s in that i started with a mix of green and yellow and then added my reds to that. My green and yellow were DV Phthalo Green BS (PG7) and DS Nickel Azo Yellow (PY150).

General impressions: These are mostly much more brown-undertoned, “sap” style greens, which I think is the preference of Dobie and many other artists.

The mix of three colors is much more successful at seeming interesting and deep and not being obvious about what color components they were made from. People often claim that mixes made from 3+ colors look “muddy” but I think this proves that sometimes three colors are a better option than two. With three levers to pull, I was able to make more specific adjustments about how warm, cool, or neutralized I want the green to be.

Comparison note: Mixing three colors is trickier than two and I had to make some judgement calls about how to balance each color. I tried to generally make a nice color with each trio. In some cases the red-to-red comparison may be unfair because I inadvertently added more or less yellow and that may be more of a factor than the red that was chosen.

Red by red:

• DS Perylene Red (PR178): Again the mix seems to turn strangely light-hued in the page mix. I found the palette mix very beautiful.
• DS Quin Fuchsia (PR202): Overlap on the page mix was brown and ugly but the palette mix is quite pretty, with a cool but not obnoxious undertone and dark darks.
• DS Venetian Red (PR101): A very brownish mix.
• DV Perylene Violet (PV29): Also somewhat brownish, and gets dark (though dried lighter than it looked wet).
• DV Quin Red [Coral] (PR209): Ugly page mix, nicer palette mix, but not dark.
• DS Pyrrol Scarlet (PR255): Very brownish mix. Looks like an alligator to me.
• Hol. Pyrrol Rubin (PR264): I quite like this palette mix and it gets quite dark. Similar to Perylene Violet.
• DV Red Rose Deep [Quin] (PV19): Surprisingly warm, swampy green, but perhaps I just used too much yellow.

Phthalo Blue (PB15:3) + Nickel Azo Yellow (PY150)

Hyped by the success of the three-color mixes, I decided to try again, but this time to fly in the face of Dobie’s warnings and use a blue/yellow mix for my base green. I used Holbein Phthalo Blue Yellow Shade (PB15:3) along with my Nickel Azo Yellow from before.

General impressions: These are my favorite! I was able to get even more variety in the exact hue of green by adding more blue or more yellow. I was able to get hues similar to those in the Phthalo Green/yellow mixes by adding more yellow, or ones more similar to the Phthalo Green-alone mixes (only with less of the obvious PG7 undertone) by adding more blue. I don’t get what Dobie is on about by hating on blue + yellow mixes.

Comparison note: I am essentially mixing all three primary colors here, which gives me an enormous amount of possibilities – not just limited to green but I could make almost any muted/lower-chroma shade of violet, orange, brown, gray, black, etc. As a result the coolness/warmness of the greens varies across this page. I just tried to make nice greens.

Red by red:

• DS Perylene Red (PR178): Had these best water control of all my PR178 tests here. I got quite a cool green, but again this is mostly controlled by the blue/yellow balance.
• DS Quin Fuchsia (PR202): Also very nice, muted, dark, balanced green.
• DV Perylene Violet (PV29): Got quite dark.
• DV Quin Red [Coral] (PR209): Not as light-drying as most Quin Coral mixes; very brownish.
• Hol. Pyrrol Rubin (PR264): Very dark, almost black-brown. I think I could have made it more similar to the Perylene Violet mix with more blue.
• DV Red Rose Deep [Quin] (PV19): Another swamp green! Maybe PV19 just does that?
• DS Pyrrol Scarlet (PR255): Very dark; which makes sense since Phthalo Blue + Pyrrol Scarlet make black.
• DS Venetian Red (PR101): One of my favorites, a rich, textured, balanced dark green.

Overall Impressions of the Experiment

My favorite general practice was using Phthalo Blue + yellow as a base green, then modulating it with a little red.

I can see what Dobie means by the sequence being important, not because the palette mixes are actually different depending on the order, but because it is easiest to make a nice bright green first then mute it. That said, if you accidentally add too much red, it’s easy enough to just add more of the other colors until you’re happy.

Of the reds I tried, my favorites were:

• Pyrrol Rubin (PR264): Mixed as dark as Perylene Violet with less drying shift!
• Venetian Red (PR101): Complex and lovely mixes!

Project

It’s time to return to the second half of the exercise/project sentence.

To develop a repertoire of your own distinctive greens, experiment with mixing and then choose a scene that invites you to paint it green.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing ch. 4 (p. 28)

So, basically, “pick something green and paint it.”

She then goes on to describe her own painting as an example, concluding,

As you paint your own landscape, see if you can make the brightest, most intense greens the center of interest. Try to make your greens slightly grayer or cooler in the distance. Then mix as many other greens as you wish for the rest of the scene. How refreshing it is for a judge, or any other viewer, to see a painting without the same familiar greens in the foreground, middle ground, and background.

Judge? What?? The addition of “any other viewer” almost as an afterthought is so funny here. As if she suddenly realized that ordinary people don’t have to think that much about art show judges.

What are “the same familiar greens”, anyway?

I actually quite resent how this passage made me feel judged (literally, but introducing the idea of a judge), without actually giving me any useful guidance.

What I think would be a better project is more like the one for Mouse Power, where she had you mix grays in various ways. If she hadn’t painted herself into a corner by dismissing all the other ways to mix green, she could have suggested that you paint a scene where you mix green in different ways, choosing from:

• Plain green (+ optional red)
• Green + yellow (+ optional red)
• Blue + yellow (+ optional red)
• Green + earth yellow/yellow-orange

I think that’s a better assignment, so I went for that!

For my green-focused scene, I chose this 8-year-old reference which I found while going through old photos for my Camera Roll series.

Here’s my many-greens painting:

Here’s a quick summary of my greens strategies:

• Background greens, cool and muted, are blues + earth yellow: a mix of PBGS, Cobalt Blue, and Naples Yellow Deep.
• Bright midground greens are blue + bright yellow: Azo Yellow for the bright yellow with PBGS to fade it into a light, bright, yellow-green.
• Foreground greens are mainly a blue/yellow/red mix: PBGS, Nickel Azo Yellow, and Perylene Violet, as explored above. I changed the balance of the three colors to make them cooler or warmer, darker or lighter.
• Foreground pine takes the same mix, adjusted to be more neutral, with Venetian Red added. Venetian Red neutralizes the blue, gives the mix some heft, and also adds some warmth and soft brown tones to the darker green pine needles.
• The very light pine needles use a light-valued blue + earth yellow mix: Naples Yellow Deep and Cobalt Blue.

Chapter Rating

There are some obvious cons here, such as the insistence on a specific formula for greens that does not take into account variations in the reader’s palette or even what is being painted, and the weird dismissal of blue + yellow as a valid way to paint green. It may be out of pure bullheadedness that I insisted on using strategies Dobie warned against, including blue/yellow and earth yellow.

But there are also some pros. I’m not above admitting I learned something from taking the time to explore the “adding red” green strategies.

The paradox of working through this book is that I find so much to nitpick and criticize, yet I also need to keep my mind open to what I’m able to learn – whether that’s by direct instruction, or in an indirect way by the assignments I come up with based on the material.

I guess I’ll give this chapter a B.

Key Useful Ideas

• Mix bright greens, then use a bit of red to neutralize them.

Back to chapter 3 / Forward to chapter 5