Olive Green

What color is olive green?

The story of olive green

The ugliest color in the world is a kind of olive green, and I put olive green in nearly every landscape I paint.

English took the word olive for the fruit around 1200, by way of Old French and Latin from the Greek elaia, and used it for the color from the 1600s. It describes the unripe fruit. Green olives are picked before they ripen and run from green to yellow; left on the tree they turn purple, brown and finally black. Olive the color is a snapshot of an olive halfway through its life, which is a strange thing to name a color after and exactly right.

Then the army got hold of it. Drab is an old cloth word, from the French drap, and from the 1500s it meant the dull light brown of undyed homespun wool. Olive drab, a brownish green, was first recorded as a color name in 1892, and within fifty years it was the color of the United States Army. A solid olive, it turns out, hides a man less well than a pattern does, but the army still uses it for straps and webbing.

Computers then gave olive a number. In the sixteen basic HTML colors, olive is #808000: red and green at half strength and no blue, which is how a screen spells a dark yellow. And Pantone 448 C, the shade called the ugliest color in the world and now used on plain tobacco packaging, was first described as a shade of olive green. The insult is recent. The name is eight hundred years old.

Painters have their own olive relative, and the best known is Hooker's green. William Hooker, 1779 to 1832, was a British illustrator of plants, and from 1812 to 1820 the official artist of the Horticultural Society in London. He needed a leaf green that behaved, so he mixed one from Prussian blue and gamboge, a deep yellow tree resin from Cambodia. Gamboge is highly sensitive to light, and Prussian blue fades in strong light too, so his leaves could not be trusted to stay put. The name outlived the recipe. A modern Hooker's green is a phthalo green, PG7 or PG36, with a lightfast yellow, and it is darker and cooler than olive: the shadow side of a leaf, where olive is the dusty top.

My view is that olive is the most useful green in a landscape and the least glamorous, and the two facts are connected. Nothing outdoors is the green of a tube. Grass has yellow ochre in it, hedges have brown, far hills have blue and gray, and all of that lives in the olive family. Learn to mix olive on purpose, in three or four temperatures, and you have most of a countryside. The ugliest color in the world does a lot of quiet work.

Pigment facts

These describe the pigment in general. Every brand's tube behaves a little differently, so test yours on scrap paper.

How to mix olive green

Olive green is the easiest useful color to mix. The quickest route is a yellow dulled with black: Lemon Yellow with a speck of Ivory Black goes olive instantly, and a little more black takes it to army surplus. The kinder route is yellow ochre plus a blue, because ochre already has the dullness built in; a touch of ultramarine in yellow ochre gives the soft olive of a real olive leaf, and more blue slides it toward Hooker's green.

Pair it with ultramarine and you have most of a landscape, from a sunlit field to a hedge in shadow, and neither color fights the other. Mix wet, and stop before it looks finished; olive dries a shade duller than it goes on.

Using olive green in watercolor

Use olive for the greens that are not the point: the field behind the house, the hedge along the road, the grass the figure stands on. Olive does the job of green without demanding to be looked at, which leaves the bright colors free to talk.

A graded wash for a field is my favorite use for it. Start with strong olive at the bottom of the paper, add water as you go up, and let it fade to almost nothing at the horizon. Distance in a landscape is mostly colors getting grayer and paler, and olive is already halfway there.

It pairs with almost anything. Next to Venetian Red it looks warm and Mediterranean; next to ultramarine it looks like weather coming in; next to Electric Rose it looks like a 1970s kitchen, which is occasionally what you want.

One thing I learned the hard way: olive plus more olive equals mud. If a passage of olive is dying on the paper, do not add more olive. Add a clean yellow at one edge or a clean blue at the other, so the eye has somewhere to go.

Olive green vs Hooker's green (and sap green)

Hooker's green is darker, cooler and cleaner than olive. It began as Prussian blue and gamboge, mixed by William Hooker for the leaves in his botanical plates, and the modern tubes keep the idea: a blue-leaning green for foliage in shadow. Olive is what happens to green when it goes brownish and gives up on being bright. Side by side, Hooker's green looks like the dark inside of a bush and olive like the dusty outside of it.

Sap green is the third one and sits between them: lighter and yellower than Hooker's green, brighter than olive. Add a little orange or red-brown to sap green and thin it, and you arrive at olive. Add a little blue and you arrive at Hooker's green.

If Hooker's green is the shadow under the tree and sap green is the sunny side of it, olive green is the whole tree seen from a mile away.

More color stories

Mel, founder of Tobio'sI make portable watercolor kits and I named the company after my cat. I write these pages for the beginner I used to be, one pigment at a time.