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Alabama is an absolutely beautiful state.  I live near the middle of it, right at the end of the Appalachian Mountain range.  Visitors are often astonished at how lush and green and mountainous it is.  It seems like every species of plant must grow here.  Even now, in February, the landscape is surprisingly green because the winters here are so mild.  And right now the constant rain is encouraging new growth.  The downside is that, with so much lush plant life, there’s a lot of pollen.  And I mean a LOT of pollen.  (A side note: did you know the pollen molecule of a pine tree looks like the Death Star?)  This is pure heaven for ENTs and allergy specialists, and we keep them on speed dial.  But I digress.

               I’ve been working to paint the landscape around here more accurately, and that involves mixing about a thousand shades of green.  Needless to say, oil paint manufacturers don’t make that many shades and put them into individual tubes.  They don’t make the precise yellow-green that is longleaf pine needles in winter.  There is no tube that matches the shiny dark green of magnolia leaves or the suede-like brown of their undersides.  There’s no match for the kudzu, ferns, cedars, grasses, rhododendrons, and so on.  Part of my challenge to myself this month is to mix (and document) some better Alabama greens for my paintings.  And this photo is the first palette of greens I did over the weekend (there are several).

Some of these are useful right now, and I know in the future I’ll need the others for something or other.  There are plenty more mixtures to work out.  This only involved three yellows and three blues (plus a little of two other tube greens, a red, and white to tweak them).   There’s more work to be done on this little project, but in the future having a reference like this should make painting the local landscape a little easier.  And who doesn’t like easy?

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