Shades of Green

It was a hot and muggy afternoon with hardly a hint of breeze to move the hot humid air along. Having spent the morning catching up with family on Skype and doing some gardening as well as relocating the plants along the sunny side of the house we watched a movie. However the heat felt unrelenting and even the movie could not take our minds of it. Now I am very much for the heat. It does my bones and muscles a lot of good to be warm, supple and pain free. However the humidity tends to sap the energy ever so slowly. All I need is a little breeze and am happy as a hog in the mud!

So about 5 ish in the afternoon we decided to move out on to the veranda in the front of the house overlooking the garden and the road. I had suggested many a time that we should sit out and watch the world go by as the sun moves away in the afternoon and its pleasant to sit there. This time it was suggested to me that we might sit there and I sat down quickly. We got these camping chairs when we moved into this house as we had no furniture and needed somewhere to sit. The chairs are folding canvass ones with pockets to hold your drink, book and the phone so there is no real need for getting up often. So there we sat watching cars go by and an occasionally person walking or even jogging by! Waiting for that bit of breeze to begin cooling the air slowly.

So the talk of colours started from my husband’s comment that there are more white, silver or grey cars on the roads here. I guess that in hot sunny weather light colours like white, grey, silver, metallic beige etc. would reflect sunlight and stop the car getter hotter than if it was a dark colour car where heat would be absorbed by the car. Thus for the next few minutes we counted the light coloured cars and sure enough the numbers were more than double that of dark cars which were red, maroon, black and blue. My eyes were drawn to the neighbour’s garden and their beautiful tree with purple flowers. I had not seen this tree before and neither the beautiful bright purple flowers that actually can cover up the lighter green leaves.

We had seen two very big trees just on Circular Quay a couple of weeks ago and this week all these trees around my home have got beautiful purple cover. It is the Jacaranda tree and the website tells me there are 3 different coloured flowers. I started looking at the tree and thinking how would one paint this tree in water colour. I have been learning the art of drawing and painting with water colours by trial and error. I think the use of colour pencils is not within my skill mix. I just find that it is difficult to blend colours and shade colours in the way I would like. The water colours I have finally decided are more for a patient painter. You need to build up the layers and this is what will help to darken the colours where you want without it all becoming homogenous due to bleeding if the picture is still wet. I find that having to wait and build the picture is frustrating. While I do not have to finish the complete painting in one go I still like to see parts that I work on come alive.

Thus for this tree one would have to start with the background of blue sky and leave the bottom quarter white. This white would have to be filled with green trees that form the boundary of the garden across the road. I do would not go for the white railing of the garden. Then, to draw the trunk and branches of the tree. The shape reminds me a little of the broccoli head. The truck and braches form a sort of a triangle and the canopy of the leaves and flowers seem to form a triangle on top.. so we get a loosely constructed shape of diamond. The layers of brown would have to be built up to show the lighter shades and darker patches to bring out the texture of the bark and the places light falls on them. The one would have to dab in the leaves and finally the huge bunches of purple flowers.

The other strand of our conversation also lead us to this thinking about colours and painting. We had been talking randomly about the various museums we had visited and the paintings we had seen just reminiscing, that art appreciation should be counted as a meaningful conversation and I laughed that maybe I did not qualify to critique after all I only go with what I like and not any academic / artistic criteria.

So we talked about how much easier it was to blend and make up colours that were accurate to the shades we see in nature. The trees in front of us had many different shades of green. The trees in our garden (and I have yet to check out the common names) have two kinds of green. The one which has very dark brown cones, well almost black, with big flat seeds had got real dark green (hunter green) but the new leaves are a lot lighter green almost yellowish (green yellow). Believe me I am not making up the names of the shades as you can check it out on the weblink I have provided. The other tree has think long leaves and had bright red bunches of thin long flowers. Now that the flowers have died out and the seeds are all brown the green (India green)of the leaves tends to get overshadowed by the brown of the seeds.

The tree across the road has even lighter green leaves. Now we had to start comparing the depth of the greens as of course I did not have this chart of the shades of green handy! Next to it was another tree which had dark green leaves but with tinges of yellow on the margins. This made it seem like the green was covered with a thin layer of bright yellow. The effect in sunlight is that of real dark patches of green (office green) and large areas of yellowish green (lime). Now you can see there is a difference been the two shades of green I have described – lime and green-yellow. The tree behind is a pine with branches coming out from the dark brown trunk. The leaves are very dark green (Phthalo green). This from a distance at dusk looks almost black. There is another tree which has olive green leaves but also has paler look almost silvery in certain lights.

This meandering through the shades of green took us to night fall and the road lights came on. So we left the shades of brown on the trunks and branches for another day. Nature is wonderful with all the different colours and their varying shades and trying to replicate them in paintings is so difficult for a novice like me but what pleasure in trying!