The Palette/green/Dug out of the ground
Terre verte
A weak, dull, grey-green earth, and the reason every saint in a medieval panel has a slightly green face.
Also called green earth · Verona green · celadonite · glauconite
- Hex
- #6E7F52
- RGB
- 110, 127, 82
- Pigment index
- PG23
- First used
- Roman wall painting onward
- From
- Verona, Cyprus, Bohemia, and marine sediments generally
What it is
Celadonite or glauconite, iron-bearing clay minerals formed in marine sediments.
How it is made
Dug, dried, ground and washed, exactly like an ochre. No processing beyond that, and none possible. It is what it is, which is a very weak pigment. Its tinting strength is so low that it barely affects a mixture.
The two source minerals give slightly different results: celadonite from volcanic contexts is bluer, glauconite from marine sands is more olive. Verona was the most prized source in Europe.
Terre verte, Green-brown pigment obtained from minerals. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
This pigment's fame comes entirely from one technique. In medieval and early Renaissance tempera painting, flesh was built up over a full underpainting of green earth (verdaccio) with translucent pink and white flesh tones laid over it. The green neutralises the warmth optically and gives the skin a cool depth that a direct pink cannot.
The technique works and it also fails, visibly, in hundreds of surviving panels: the thin upper flesh layers wear away or become more transparent with age, and the green underneath comes through. That is why so many medieval Christs and Madonnas look slightly ill. It was not a stylistic choice about otherworldliness. It is an underlayer showing through.
It survived into oil painting as an underpainting and a mixing colour, and it is still on shelves: a genuinely permanent, genuinely useless-on-its-own colour that solves one problem extremely well.
Where it is used
Flesh underpainting, fresco, landscape mixing, and anywhere a green needs to be dull. Cennini gives detailed instructions for the flesh technique.
The idea worth taking is complementary underpainting: putting the opposite colour underneath and letting a thin layer of the real colour sit on top. It is the same logic as a green colour-corrector under foundation, and the same logic as grading a photograph by pushing the shadows opposite to the highlights. Optical mixing through layers behaves differently from mixing in the pot, and most digital work never uses it.
Go and look at it
Duccio and Cimabue panels with green faces
National Gallery, London; Uffizi, Florence
The flesh has worn thin and the underpainting is showing. The pallor is damage, not intention.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Celadonite or glauconite, iron-bearing clay minerals formed in marine sediments.
- Opacity
- Transparent. It stains rather than covers, so it can be glazed over another colour.
- Lightfastness
- Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.
- Extremely weak tinting strength. It cannot dominate anything, which is its point.
- Absolutely permanent and safe in every medium, including fresco.
- Some modern 'terre verte' is a convenience mixture, not the earth.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #6E7F52
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 110, 127, 82
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 83°, 22%, 41%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 13, 0, 35, 50
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 51, -15, 22
- Perceptual. L* of 51 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Terre verte is a substance. A ground mineral scatters light from thousands of separate grains at slightly different angles, and no single sRGB value is that event. It is a flat average of a photograph of it, and the real thing is outside what a screen can emit. Use the number to specify a screen colour. Do not use it to judge the pigment.
Where it sits on the wheel
Hue 83°
Its opposite, by the diagram
The arithmetic opposite, 180° round in HSL. Useful, and not the same as the opposite a painter mixing pigment would name, that wheel was built for paint.
Lighter and darker
Towards white
Mixing with white does not only lighten, it dulls and cools. This is why a pale tint of a brand colour so often looks chalky, and why a designed light shade beats a generated one.
Towards black
Mixing with black kills the hue as it darkens. A better dark is usually the colour plus its neighbour round the wheel, which is what every painter does instead.
Can you set type on it
Handgloves
White on it
4.36:1 · Large text only
Handgloves
Black on it
4.82:1 · AA
Handgloves
It on paper
4.14:1 · Large text only
Handgloves
It on ink
4.20:1 · Large text only
4.5:1 is the floor for body text and 3:1 for large text, by WCAG. Treat it as a minimum you may not go under rather than as a target: plenty of pairs pass at 4.6:1 and are still unpleasant to read for a page, and the checker will not tell you that.
Read more, elsewhere
Colours next to this one
Back up
Foundations · Colour·green·Dug out of the ground