When I first learned watercolour painting many moons ago, there was no green paint on my palette. I mixed every green from some combination of blue and yellow. I now use some green pigments when I paint, but I feel a pang of guilt when I use them, as if it’s cheating somehow. Silly stuff, really.

I still love mixing many greens in a single sketch, and it was fun to choose this sketch of Vancouver’s Stanley Park for a spread in my book “The Urban Sketching Handbook: Working with Color”. As I replicated the various greens in the sketch, I realized just how many variations on a theme I had used, and I could probably create even more with what I have on my palette these days.

For me the thought process always starts with a blue. If I want to make a light or a soft green…