Mixing recipe
How to mix forest green
Target
#2C5F2D
Recipe mixes to #366136
Forest green is dark and cool, nearer to blue than most people expect. The mix is almost all blue: Ultramarine and Cerulean in roughly equal parts, with one part of Sap Green pulling it over into green. There is no yellow in it.
The recipe
Step by step
Build the pile from the biggest, lightest component and work toward the strongest tinter. Check the pile against each swatch before moving on.
- Start with 6 parts Ultramarine Bluepile #363258
- Work in 5 parts Cerulean Bluepile #2A4390
- Add 1 part Sap Greenpile #366136Strong tinter. Add it in knife-tip doses and mix fully before adding more.
A simpler mix
Ultramarine Blue and Sap Green alone, five to one, gets to a good match and saves a tube. It comes out a little yellower and less deep. Use it for mid-distance trees; the three-paint mix is the one for the dark mass of a near conifer.
What goes wrong
Both blues and the Sap Green are transparent, so the pile looks darker on the knife than it will on the canvas. Judge it in a thin smear. The temptation is to add yellow to make it look more green, which pushes it toward sap green and loses the depth. Add Sap Green a little at a time instead; it moves this mix harder than its single part suggests. Sap Green (flagged by the mixing guide as moving a pile hard for its share) is the paint to be careful with here: it goes in last, a knife-tip at a time, and a little too much cannot be mixed back out.
Related colors
Results vary with brand, lighting and medium. Acrylic dries a touch darker than it looks wet. Treat this as a mixing aid, not a lab instrument: it tells you which tubes to reach for and roughly in what proportion. Fine-tune the last stretch by eye.