Green

While many mixed green paints are available, there are not too many single pigment options. Greens are favored for convenience by many landscape artists, and eschewed by others who find it better to mix them from blues and yellows.

Van Gogh – mix green & neutral

Color List

Mixes:

My thoughts

Necessary slot? Nah. I feel the same way about greens that I do about browns: the fact that they are abundant in landscapes is not an argument for having them in your palette, but an argument for mixing them, because they are different each time.

That said, while most greens can be mixed, there are a few corner cases. Super-vibrant greens (such as spring yellow-greens) are much better mixed from Phthalo Green or Cobalt Turquoise than from cyans; even vibrant Phthalo Blue GS doesn’t mix as vibrant lime greens as Phthalo Green does. For some, this is a negative, but I think in their place, super-vibrant greens are great.

Favorites: Phthalo Green (PG7 or PG36 are pretty interchangeable) are the only ones I really use, and then only seasonally. Some artists favor weaker-but-granulating Viridian over PG7, which is the same hue. Chromium Oxide is mildly useful in the desert.

Mix your own: Some kind of blue (cyan, middle blue, violet blue, dark blue) plus some kind of yellow (lemon yellow, middle yellow, orange yellow, gold, earth yellow). You get different results depending on which combination you choose. For example:

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