Are you one of many who feels this way?
One frustration I have with the latest papers is that there is virtually no true green in any shade unless you use themed Christmas or St. Patrick’s day paper. All the green is blue-green or yellow-green. Very little that matches the foliage I see outside in the trees or my garden or my grass. Do other scrappers share my desire for papers with the colors of nature ( not photo-realistic paper)? A line that has a range of greens from grass green to forest green, a range of sky blues,. and a range of browns the colors of tree trunks and dirt would be so helpful for scrapping outdoor pictures. Even the recent camping lines had yellow and olive green instead of foliage green. I looked at the summer scrapbooking magazines and found almost no true green used. When I used Scrapbook.com’s color-matching program it showed products such as green ink and paint, but not much paper. Any ideas?
This was a question for the Roundtable and while I think the green-yellows work well with nature and foliage, I definitely feel this audience member’s pain, as I’ve been on a desperate but futile lookout for true basic reds over the last few years.
Six Ways to Scrapbook Outdoor Greenery
I have a tip at the bottom of this article for those who love and miss pure green. But in addition to that, below are some ways that the other greens can highlight the plant life in your photos, and sometimes do an even better job at it!
1) Make the plant life pop by backing it to a different shade of green.
This is not my favorite green. At all. But it’s what I had. Still, it works with the green’s in my photos. If I had used a green that matches the green in my pictures, the edges of my photos would have disappeared, and I expect all the greenery in the photos might be lost to the background.
2) Use green-yellow to bring out the highlights and complexities of greenery.
The yellowy green in my patterned paper brings out the yellowy green parts of the trees,their fuller complex mix of greens. A more basic green would likely have brought more of the basic (middle-tone) green shade out. But then, it’s possible the brighter trees would compete with my kid’s faces.
I’d have to try it and see, but like the reader said, I don’t have any of that green to sample with. That’s okay, though, because the yellowy green works great.
Here’s another example of where I used just a touch of green-yellow to bring out the highlights in the greens and show the complexity of green in the plant life.
3) Use green-blue to compliment your greenery while also making it pop.
The only greenery on this page is in the bottom right photo. But I think the green-blue background is enough to pull out the green grass and trees in my photos while contrasting with it enough to make it pop from the background instead of fade into it.
4) Use an off-green shade to compliment the greenery while keeping the focus on your non-plant subjects.
Look at all the yellowy-green plant life in my background. My blue doesn’t keep it from glowing. It’s beautiful, but I wanted the background to remain the background so that Izzy and I would be in the forefront of the story.
I used a blue-green paint as the dominant paint color with a few strokes of green-yellow mixed in. It’s enough green to highlight the plant-life, but the true subject remains the subject.
5) Pair a green-yellow color with blue to get the effect of a bluer green.
I backed my photo to a green-yellow + blue. If that blue had been mixed into the green it would be closer to a truer green. But I still get a similar result with them separate. Together, they draw out the yellows, blues, and greens of the plant life in the background!
6) Make a monochromatic green page with off-green backgrounds and true-green foregrounds.
I like that the yellow-spectrum green of my background highlights the yellows in this picture. But would a truer green look prettier? Maybe. If that’s the direction you want to go, but can’t find the green paper you’re looking for, here’s what you can do to compensate:
- Choose a mono-chromatic green color palette with the greens that are available.
- Ink or paint a “matte” in true green on top of the yellow-green paper.
This will allow you to use the yellowy-greens that are available and still get the true green that seems to only be available in ink, paint, or cardstock.
Here’s a combination of that idea. I used cardstock and paint in true green on my muted green-yellow background. I happen to prefer green-yellow’s over true green, so my color proportions reflect that. You can add a lot more basic green than I do to get the balance of color you love.
Do You Need More Color Help?
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