Last week I wrote about my blue and brown watercolour pencils. I did review of the ones I use and don’t use (now that I have the complete FaberCastell set).
This week is green . Thanks Tina for the prompt. I hope that these are interesting and of use to someone.
Below is a drawing I did in 2012 ! of the green watercolour pencils I had at the time. I had been given a lot. I have added to them since then.
Below is the full range of all the green Faber Castell Albrecht Durer watercolour pencils colours.
My daily sketch kit still contains the greens that I was using in 2012 and a replacement colour that is included since then. These are personal choices that I use for my sketching in Melbourne.
- Earth Green
- Grass Green
- Chromium Green Oxide
- Pine Green. I was using Mineral Green in the Derwent brand, but wanted to get the nearest equivalent Faber Castell colour. This was purely personal preference, as I feel the Derwent’s are a little softer on the page and don’t sharpen to a finer point for detail.
There are a few things to note, which I mentioned last week.
- knowing the colours that you own enables you to be aware of the large range of colour choice that you potentially have.
- a colour can often change quite dramatically on the page when water is added.
- there is a huge range of colours available and many of them are very close
- you don’t have to use all the colours!
TIna ( who asked me about greens) is in the US and so the colours she uses will be very different. I describe a lot of these colours as “European”. I am not sure if this is correct, but there are a lot of blue/green colours.
It is good to be aware of the range that I have available to me. I will still only keep the four in my daily sketch kit, but I would be using strange unusual colours for commissions and my “You Can’t Draw in Books” project. I don’t do many commissions and they are usually buildings, sometimes with a few trees, grass for context. My “You Can’t Draw in Books” project involves drawing on a page of a book that was about to be discarded. The pages of different books vary in quality and age, most of them do not like to much work on them or too much water added to the pencil marks on the pages. in both cases, I would choose a single pencil colour if I had it instead of combining colours.
which greens do you use?
Let me know if you have any questions.
My goodness what a wonderful range of greens. Have you not added to since 2012?
I’d forgotten about bottle green being a colour .. it was our school’s sport skirt green (I’m in my 70s. Haven’t heard it mentioned in decades
Thanks Suzanne. Yes they have been added to and I have just added an extra sentence into the blog to clarify that!
My high school uniform was also bottle green. I think it was a standard colour at the time.
Thanks so much for this post, Alissa! It’s fun and informative to see all your greens. I guess I’m not too surprised to hear you are using the same 4 greens in your sketch kit for a long time. I have my favorite 3 or 4, and although I have many other choices too, I tend to use the same 3 or 4. Keep doing these color posts — they’re great! 🙂
Which ones do you use? I know you use watercolour pencils in a very different way to me, and I would like to know the are you favorites. Earth Green is the BEST colour for so many things.
I’m glad you asked! 🙂 I wrote a whole post on greens a few weeks ago:
http://tina-koyama.blogspot.com/2020/07/greens-frustrate-me.html
I have to ask myself why I was not subscribed to your blog! I am now.
I LOVE the title of your blogpost “greens frustrate me” I think many people agree.
Yes, these posts are very interesting! Please keep them coming. Green is my most challenging colour, it took me years to feel somewhat comfortable mixing greens in watercolour. As for watercolour pencils, my first set was strongly based on your set back then. It’s been very useful! Even though I have more colours now and other brands too, I tend to keep this set together and return back to it often. Instead of the Derwent mineral green I went for FC AD Hooker’s green, but I have barely used it. Looking at the images here the Pine green does look more useful (more yellowish and thereby more natural). As for ‘European’ colours, I’m in the Netherlands and thought I would not use the Earth green (no eucalyptus here), but it turns out to work well as a kind of neutral/grey! My feeling is once you know how to mix colours, it is more important to have a well balanced set rather than a set specific for the region – you will make it work one way or the other.