Mixing recipe
How to mix olive green
Target
#708238
Recipe mixes to #6D813A
Olive is a yellow that has been knocked back, not a green that has been warmed up. The quickest way there is the oldest one: Cadmium Yellow with a little Ivory Black. Ivory Black leans blue, so it does the job of a blue and a grey at once and the yellow drops straight into olive.
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 3 parts Cadmium Yellowpile #FFD500
- Work in 1 part Ivory Blackpile #6D813A
Another route
Swapping the black for Cerulean Blue and a touch of Burnt Umber lands a hair closer and gives a livelier olive, with a bit more chroma in it. Reach for this one when the olive sits next to clean greens or when you keep black off the palette. The black version is the better choice for the dull, dusty olive of a tree in summer haze.
What goes wrong
The pile goes from pure yellow to olive in one step, so there is no halfway swatch to check against. Add the black in small amounts and mix each one through before judging. Overshoot and you get a flat grey-green, and because Cadmium Yellow is opaque it takes a surprising amount of it to pull the mix back. Ivory Black (tinting strength 4, where a cadmium is 1) 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.