Parc Angrignon, windy pond (tonal yellows)

Yesterday as the weather turned I squeezed in one more small painting of a pond near the station in Parc Angrignon. I found a vantage point up on a steep hill under a tree. The wind was whipping up a fury making the trees bend and the water move in all directions. You may be surprised, but I used very little green to paint this picture, just little tints here and there. In fact, I explored the use of darkened yellow to make green. What? Yellow plus black = green. I didn't believe it at first when I read that on Handprint.com (MacEvoy), but sure enough it works. The trees, the lilly pads, most of the lawn, and the trees in the background are vanadium yellow (PY184) and touches of lamp carbon black (PBk6). In a few spots I tinted with PG7 like some trees in the distance and the closest parts of the lawn.

There are certain 'colours' that are actually not totally unique. For example, brown is actually a darkened version of orange, and beige is a lightened version of brown. In this sense, beige can be produced directly by adding grey to orange. Those are called tones, perhaps they can be understood as pastels. The colour called olive is mostly a semi darkened tone of yellow, although it may lean more towards the green side, or the dark red/brown side. Now that I have discovered this, I find that starting with yellow, darkening with black, then adding some diluted green as needed produces a much more natural looking green. The same mix but a bit stronger ends up being the shadow. The shadows of the trees, and below them, do not contain blue paint, they are tonal versions of yellow.There is more to say about this, in terms of making shadows, but I will save it for another blog.

5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2020