I am Jeanne Downing. Welcome! The focus of this tutorial is about brush mixing the greens that you would use for the leaves within a painting.

Down here on the lower right corner of my palette, I have laid out the colors that I am going to use for the greens in this particular demonstration. I have ivory black, cad yellow lemon, and white. First of all, I want to make a nice, dark, green, to use for the dark value in my leaves. So I am going to go into black and cad yellow lemon and work back and forth between this colors to make that dark value green. And as I come and add more yellow. I am getting more of a middle value green. Now there is still some dark in my brush obviously and then I am going to come over here in the white and I am going to work some white into that green and I can get lighter as I worked towards the left here and add more white, so that I have a lighter value of green. So now I have a dark and middle value color and a light value color. But I want some more white back into my middle value. I just work the white back into it. If I need to warm that up I can add a little more yellow. So this would be my basic color mixes that I am going to start with when I create my leaves and I can adjust the color as I need from one leaf to another. Now I am going to dry wipe my brush, pinch the paint between my thumb and finger and I am going to make some cooler value greens to use on leaves that I do not necessarily want the color turns into but this will add interest to my painting. So I am going to go back here on the backside of my black and I am going to pull out some black and a little bit of yellow, not much. Then I am going to work, pull a little bit of white into that. I am going to make a little gray or green, this will be a little cooler. As you can see this is much grayer because there is more black in my brush and less yellow. Remember that when you add yellow to a color or if the color is yellow, it is obviously warmer. I can work back into my black to get a darker value, if I need to. So I might use these colors back here for my basic set up for my darker greens, rather than my cooler and darker greens. If I want to get more white and lighter and value, I would just keep adding more white.

Now if the color set up said that you were to use—in parentheses Persian blue as a shading color then you would take the darker value green and you would sneak over here into the Persian blue and add just a little bit and this would be your second value dark within that green. Usually in order to make something dimensional, you need to add light, a medium, and a dark value. You will also need to have a shading value and you need to have a high light value. So basically, you are adding five values to that object to make it a look three dimensional and to give it form. So I am going to add just a little bit of Persian blue and that would be my shading color or as some people call it second value dark. Once you have applied that color, you could wipe off your brush. And then you can go back and paint another leaf. Maybe this one will be a little warmer and then you will need to add maybe for your high light, you need to add almost straight white. If you want to, you can come over here and sneak into this white and it will be mostly white because you do not have much paint on your brush now and you can work that quite as a high light onto your leaf.

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