An occasion for colour

Awhile ago I made a painting trip out to Hamilton and found some great views there believe it or not. It was during that trip that I discovered the mixture of purple and green to create the distant trees on the horizon. To create the purple I would have mixed some combination of french ultramarine (PB29), cerulean (PB35), alizarin crimson (PR83) and rose matter (NR8). To that I added phthalo green (PG7). In effect, I was making a duller, bluer version of green, which was the correct colour albeit using a convoluted way of getting there. It is much easier to mix indo blue (PB60) with perylene green (PBk31) but I wouldn't have those paints until over twenty years later. 

After reading Handprint.com by MacEvoy I learned that blue plus yellow does not exactly equal green. It equals purple-grey-green. The reason for that is blue does not actually contain green reflectance unless you use a paint like phthalo blue or cobalt blue with green shades. Yellow on the other hand, is technically a mix of green and red reflectance. Thus, mixing blue plus yellow results in a little bit of blue and red (purple) and a lot of green reflectance, which gives the green appearance. If you are in doubt, examine the painting, and you will see pure green ribbons at the top half of the painting, and some adjacent blue + yellow mixes which look like olive green and army green. The bottom of the painting represents the purples that are within the greens, making their escape!

An occasion for colour, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, May 2022 (No. 3104b)