A couple of weeks ago I painted this frog…

I was happy with the picture, but I had a bit of a mishap when mixing the paint for it; Not owning any green I mixed the greens needed from yellow and blue on a dinner plate. Unfortunately I used way too much blue and ended up adding a lot of yellow to make the two suitable greens – way too much green for one frog.

When I had finished the frog I decided to keep the plate of green (with some daubs of other unused colours around the edges) in case I could use the greens it again.

I used a small amount of the lighter green on the blue tit I painted,

Then I started taking part in Maria Raczynska‘s 21 days of summer; a challenge to paint pictures taking a maximum of 20 minutes to paint them.  I used some of the greens for the palm tree in the first challenge picture…

I mixed bits of other left over colours from the edge of the plate into the greens for the grass and background of the second 20 minute picture…

… and mixed/used some more for one of maria’s longer tutorials…

The more I mixed and used the colours on the plate the more the original greens got merged and new greens arose, giving greater depth and interest to the colours I was using. Suddenly my scrap plate of paint changed from being left overs to a palette I was picking up when I needed green.

I’m going to have to add some new paint to this soon, but up until now my scraps have gone a long way and using up leftovers has led me to find a great tool/process for making shades of green and (hopefully) more interesting paintings in future.

If you like the idea of using your scraps, click on Kate or Gun (first two names in the list  below) and join us on the 15th of every month – or just those months you feel like joining in.  Here’s a list of both frequent and occasional Scraphappiers (?) if you want to see what everybody else is doing.

Kate, Gun, Titti, Heléne, Eva, Sue, Lynn, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Susan, Cathy,  Tracy, Jill, Claire, Jan,
Moira, Sandra, Linda, Chris, Nancy, Alys, Kerry, Claire, Jean,
Joanne, Jon, Hayley, Dawn, Gwen, Connie, Bekki, Pauline,
Sue L, Sunny, Kjerstin and Vera

Until next time,

Bekki x