Spent an afternoon in the forests near me today and made these two paintings on site. I am keen to develop my mixing skills. I watched a great little YT movie by Matthew White about mixing greens which really helped me. He talked about cool, neutral and warm greens. He uses for a cool distant green: cobalt turquoise, lavendar and raw sienna, for a neutral green: cobalt turquoise and raw sienna, and for a warm green cobalt turquoise, aureolin yellow and raw sienna, and for a more intense green he will add Quinacridone Gold to the mix.

Now I found that as a good rule of thumb keeping these three mixes seperate on my palette really helped me to simplify the scene, rationalize my colour choices and just help me design a better image. Within the range of all three greens you can lower or raise the temperature and saturation a little, add paynes grey or neutral tint to dial it down a little but try not to let one stray into the territory of the other. This way you have a greater control of your mixes and you can better control the sense of depth in your image. I will experiment within these ranges with other colours as well to see where it leads, I dont want to get stuck on these specific colours.

When drawing you would do a similar thing with tonal ranges. The tonal range of the lit side of a person or object should never be the same as the tonal range in the shadow side, divided by the terminator. So I was just applying this logic to my painting.

So yeah, armed with this knowledge I felt empowered to make a better painting and wanted to share it.

Below: this was the first one I made today, I kept it very simple so I could focus on the three greens.

Below: my palette washes