Recently, I painted about the blue and yellow paints you can use to avoid getting green in the sky. But here’s a secret: you can use any paints you want if you use the right techniques. Read on!
I’ve arranged these tips in order of effectiveness, with the most effective at the top. If, for whatever reason, you can’t or don’t want to use the top tips, the others will still help.
For each example, I’ve used a combination of Nickel Azo Yellow (PY150) and Phthalo Blue Green Shade (PB15:3), two colors that would love to turn green when given half a chance.
Paint your blue and yellow in different layers.
While exploring chapter 11 of Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing, I found it was difficult to mix a bold, juicy green using indirect mixing across different layers (aka glazing). We can flip this struggle into an advantage when we don’t want green.
Example, Step 1
Paint a monochrome yellow gradient along the horizon, fading up to the white of the paper.
If it’s easier to paint the stronger color on the top and fade down, you can turn your paper upside-down.
Example, Step 2
Only start your second layer once the paper is bone dry.
Paint a monochrome blue gradient fading down from the zenith of the sky to clean water.
Your increasingly transparent blue layer will show the yellow underneath, but the paints won’t directly mix since the yellow is dry, which limits the “green-ness.”
When I have time in the studio to layer, I often use this trick to make my yellow-to-blue gradients and create that look where the sky is “yellow and blue at the same time but not green.”
Put pink in between the blue and the yellow.
I learned this tip from Claire Giordano, who is the master of quick and practical tips that you can use outside. You can’t green if the yellow and blue don’t touch! Instead, yellow + pink will make orange, the pink + blue will make purple, all a great range of sunset sky colors.
Example
I graded up from the bottom, starting with Nickel Azo Yellow, then adding a band of Quin Rose, and then working Phthalo Blue down from the top to meet it.
You don’t need layers for this (although you can use them if you like). You can slap your yellow, pink, and then blue down on the page at the same time and let them mix on the page, as I did above.
Below, I used soft wet-on-wet layers to reduce mixing of the bands.
Advanced move: You can somewhat conceal the pink by dropping it subtly into your blue and/or your yellow, so the overall effect is still of mainly blue and mainly yellow.
Leave a little gap between the blue and the yellow.
Prevent your colors from touching by leaving a little gap of white (clear water) in between them.
Example
Grade yellow up from the bottom to clear water (flip your paper if desired).
Then, without waiting for the paper to dry, grade blue down to clear water from the top. Make sure to stop well before you hit yellow.
Keeping your paper just damp, instead of very wet, will limit how far the colors travel. When in doubt, keep more of a gap than you think you need.
Use this tip when you don’t want pink in your sky. As we learned in An Artist’s Guide to Sunrise & Sunset, it’s clouds that make the sky pink at sunset and sunrise; if you’re painting a cloudless sky you may need a clean blue-to-yellow gradient.
This isn’t just a time-saving trick; actually it represents reality well. A lighter-valued/more whitish color at the mixing point often looks more convincing than green because you are painting light, which uses additive color mixing rather than subtractive color mixing like paint. In other words, when two colors of light combine, the mix looks lighter.
Limit brush strokes/LITHA.
“LITHA” stands for “Leave It The Hell Alone,” an acronym I learned in the context of allowing piercings to heal, but it also applies to watercolor in many cases!
The more you agitate your blue and yellow together, the more green they will become. If you’re adept at making two-color gradients with minimal brush strokes, trusting the colors to meet on the page without continuing to mix / agitate / smooth them out with your brush, you can get away with a blue-to-yellow gradient with minimal green.
Functionally, LITHA might cause a bit of whitespace in between your colors, similar to the leave-a-gap method. You might also get more unusual paint effects, such as the bloom lines in my Phthalo Blue, because you’re not smoothing them out. Another consequence you can see in my example is less control over where your gradient grades. I moved the yellow up too far, and didn’t leave enough room for the blue. I can correct that when I’m smoothing out the gradient, but not when I’m leaving it the hell alone.
Conclusion
There are many tips for limiting green in your blue-and-yellow skies, so hopefully you are able to find a method that meets your needs even if you have limited colors or time. If you can’t get one of the tips to work, try stacking multiple! For example, you could paint on multiple layers and leave a gap and for good measure, use colors that don’t easily go green! That should do it.
And if you get a little green in your sky? That’s okay! Sometimes the sky does look a little green. The rest of your scene can sell it.
Just don’t panic, and resist the urge to smooth out the gradient with your brush, which will only create more green.
Remember also that failure can lead to cool tips to use in different situations. I stumbled on some of these tips while trying get green and failing. If you end up getting a great green by accident, take note of what you did and try to do it on purpose next time you’re painting foliage!
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