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11 October 202415 April 2025

Exploring the Diverse Shades of Olive Greens: A Short Guide

While people might expect olive to only be the brown-tinted green of olives swaying on the boughs, the colour “olive” can be categorised as anything from a jewel tone, a mud brown-green, to a near black. It also represents the green undertone of black olives, even as they nearly don’t have any colour at all, their sparkling brown is only seen in the right light.

With this being our aim, the main divisions of olive as a colour can be defined as such: olive green, the main baseline colour; olive drab, which is the colour of military uniforms and, despite its name, it’s boring in the least; olivine, a jewel tone of olive named after the mineral silicate that it resembles most; and black olive, a type of olive green that is nearly not green at all.

As you can see, with such a variety of colours for us to use, we should consider palette creation to be a more complex process than it normally would be with only one tone.

Olivine

To begin with the least saturated green, olivine is a type of olive green that can best be described as light shining through olive green.

This is because the mineral that it is named after, the olivine nesosilicate, is naturally somewhat translucent, appearing in nature as what appears to be a type of green glass. Despite its resemblance to more humble glass shards, olivine’s origins come from the earth’s crust, at the upper mantle, ejected with lava and sometimes appearing as “green glass”, which is actually eroded crystals of olivine.

As a colour, this type of olive green has more yellow than the baseline, and can be quite variable – in partial light, it can appear very neutral, but in other light sources, it may be very bright and vivacious.

As a colour, it can be either matched with other shades of light green and grey to create a very neutral palette. Or, in a more interesting play, painted alongside bright oranges and dark reds to evoke greater passion, calling upon its origins in the earth’s mantle.

Olive Green

Moving down the line, we have the baseline olive green, the colour that can be used to create all of the other tones and shades in the list.

Throughout history, olive green can be either associated with peacetime or war – either as the green olive branch representing peace after conflict, as the olive wreath placed on the head of a victor in Greco-Roman times, or as the green of some military uniforms and old fashioned helmets during most of the 20th century.

Playing with this mixed history, and its associations as both a calming and an alarming colour in the cultural mindset, you can incorporate olive green to great effect with all kinds of palettes, either solid, mid-tone reds and oranges, or silk white and eggshell.

A personal favourite is to combine olive green with subtle, desaturated peach, ochre, dusty rose and terracotta. Then to paint using a thick brush to create the illusion of light, with olive green used as the main structure of a branch or a horizon, and the yellow being the areas with harsher angles, the light reflecting off of them.

Olive Drab

Olive drab is our personal favourite. It is named as such not because it is boring, though it can be very dull when combined with other colours without much thought or consideration.

“Drab” is a relatively old term, used in this context to refer to a type of desaturated brown, much like “dun” – olive drab being called that because it is an olive green that has been mixed with light brown to create a darker, more polished green.

With somewhat grey undertones and a darker overtone, olive drab lands at a completely different colour profile than the other olives on the list. While it still goes very well with khaki, sage, brown, and other shades of green, one of the very interesting colours that it can be paired with is magenta, or other types of light purple and violet.

In nature, many green plants have outer leaves with purple edges, including many types of cactuses and succulents, which can be either olive drab, sage green, or light, dusty violet. And often, the three all combine together within the same patch of cacti, or even on different leaves in the same plants. You can use this palette to depict purple fruit on the body of a prickly-pear cactus, or the spiraling leaves on a succulent, dotted with condensation.

ripening olives on branch — *Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV*

Black Olive

Lastly, we have the olive green that is hardly green at all, but is certainly olive in nature.

Black olive, which is, of course named after the fruit, is closer to a black or a very deep brown, but when viewed in the correct light, you can see all of the green undertones working hard to give it its complex colour. Because of its dark colour, one of the unexpected colour combinations that compliments this colour to great effect, is, well, olive green!

By pairing this colour up with its base colours, it brings out the complexity that it possesses, and reminds the viewer to look closer and appreciate how many colours are within black olive.

For this same reason, you can also use mustard yellow and light shades of cream, or brownish white, to bring out other complex notes within the same colour, coming together to create a very unique colour palette using all the colours that can be found within black olive naturally.

As you can see, olive green is a colour that has many definitions, and even more uses, all depending on the particular tone and shade of it that you’d like to use in your art.

Whether your intent is to use it for interior decoration, for textile art, or for all sorts of painting, traditional or digital, there are a great many things that can, and should be done with it, all evoking their own meanings and attitudes.

9 September 202415 April 2025

The Peach Spectrum: Discovering the Role of Peach Colour in Flora and Fauna

Peach shows up in many places in the world, both through flora and fauna, giving you much room to explore when trying to construct a peach colour palette to use in the creation of art and design.

The origin of the name “peach” is obvious – it comes from the colour of peaches, which often has a slightly yellow, somewhat cream-colored undertone, and a subtle texture cause by the fine fuzz that covers the exterior of the peach.

This, in addition to the pink flowers that most stonefruit, like peach and cherries, have, it is easy to imagine why peach has come to be such an iconic colour throughout art history, as well as being such a common choice for neutral interior scenes, like its use in drapery or carpets.

From summer stonefruit to blooms in the spring, to even the wings of elephant hawk-moths, peach is no rare sight in our world. However, just because it is a commonly-used colour doesn’t mean that it is forgettable, and it is through looking for inspiration for a peach-centric colour palette that we can start to appreciate it most.

Peach blossoms are often quite small, and come from small-bodied trees, like cherries, almonds, and some cultivars of plum.

This subtle shade of peach straddles the line between neutral and warm, having some orange shades, and even a little yellow and blush, in addition to the obvious terracotta within it. Traditionally, dusty rose blush and sage is used as the complementary colour to peach, though this is heavily dependent on the shade of peach, and how saturated the colour combination is.

Using peach flowers in gardening is usually used to give the garden a softer and feminine touch. Like all reds and purple colours, peach is a colour that highly attracts pollinators, such as butterflies and bees.

When using peach flowers as inspiration for a colour palette, it is a good idea to lean into the subtleties and gentle shades used in plants, like incorporating the bare, dark-brown branches of peonies and roses in full bloom to contrast the tone of peach, or to outline the peach interior of flowers with delicate shades of white, and the framing of olive green leaves.

Other than flora, one can also look to the world of animals for inspiration. While most peach birds – flamingos, rosefinches, and galah parrots, for example, use varieties of pink that is far too bright to be considered peach, there are just as many that fit the pill perfectly to be used as inspiration for a colour palette.

For one example, the subtle use of peach in species of tropical fruit doves, like the Jambu fruit dove, which has only a slight blush of peach pink on its face and chest, framed with a bright white stomach and a deep, verdant green coat across its back and wings. This, along with the detailing of black around the underside of its light orange beak, creates an incredibly, seldom-used peach colour palette that balances out perfectly, and can be a very unique choice when deciding the colours of, say, an outfit, or a painting.

Rather than using a bright pink as a base, like other birds do, fruit doves typically only have small detailing in pink, making the colour a pop that is eye-catching and iconic, identifiable to other doves of the same species without risking them being seen by predators from above. In the same way, using this peach pink in art as a subtle touch to centre a piece makes it identifiable, without risking it becoming an eyesore.

However, if birds and flowers aren’t the use of peach pink that you were looking for, look no further than the field of precious stones. While often not as appreciated as glossier or more rare rocks, the opaque exterior of the peach opal is an incredible sight, having a brightness that can be used to add life to a painting or as an addition to a multimedia project.

Similarly, rose quartz is a precious gemstone long gone underappreciated for its relative accessibility, as compared to pink diamonds or pink pearls, but still as a slightly-yellow undertone that can be very inspiring for creating a peach colour palette based on it.

Lastly, the look of rhodonite is beyond compare, specifically because of its imperfections. When found naturally, pink rhodonite is a pink and peach colour palette all on its very own. With veins of jet black framing gentle pinks and reddish whites, often being created in the earth as uneven, asymmetrical collections of edges and spikes that challenge our perceptions of peach and pink as gentle or passive.

With flowers, birds, and rocks, among many other occurrences of peach in the natural world, there are many unique places from which to draw inspiration for a peach colour palette, some of which have long gone under-appreciated.

When incorporating it into your artwork, there are hardly any mediums that wouldn’t make for a good choice, but some might be better suited than others.

Because of how peach readily flows into other colours, both warmer pinks and oranges, as well as whites and greys, and even yellows if used properly, watercolour is the natural choice.

For a unique option, I’d even recommend experimenting with watercolour on silk, especially because of how the ecru colour of raw silk compliments peach. However, it is also a colour that can be used well in digital painting, since digital programs give you the option to experiment with colours and saturation more easily than traditional forms of painting, giving you more control and flexibility when it comes to the use of peach without it becoming too bright.

Regardless of the medium you choose to go with, remember the ways that peach is incorporated into different colour palettes in the world around you, and the many uses it has both for blending in and standing out, and you should be on the right track already.

16 August 202415 April 2025

Nature’s Palette: Dusty Rose

Roses come in all sorts of colours and shades, with dusty rose being a particular shade of pink that appears in nature as a mixture of desaturated pinks and purples. While it is named after its frequent cropping up as a colour of rose petal, this is only one of many uses for this particular shade. Dusty rose is a light, pinkish red that is popular to use for natural still life painting, because of the blue undertones used to create it, making it a more natural version of blushing red.

With all of this in mind, how should one go about constructing a colour palette around a colour like dusty rose?

A good place to start with dusty rose is to explore all the ways that dusty rose appears in nature. As a natural shade, dusty rose can be seen in the feathers of all kinds of birds, particularly rosefinches, who have a base coat of greyish brown feathers with a pink head and chest, often darker and more vibrant in the case of the males. This is because pink, when it appears in animals, is often used as a display colour to attract mates or to communicate health to other animals of a like kind. Though sometimes, as is the case with more vibrant pinks, it is simply the case of ingesting pink pigments. Regardless, this pink stands out brightly against the base colours of grey and brown, with are desaturated in themselves, but occupy a cooler space than dusty rose pink. In this way, one use of this shade of pink is as a highlight, pared with more muted colours in order to make the pink more present and vivid.

Similarly, pink is used in flowers to attract bees and pollinators to them. While not as bright as purple or yellow, it is still a powerful colour when it comes to getting the attention of flying insects. However, when used in flowers and other vegetation, it is more often used as a part of the bid for attention, rather than the main even in and of itself. In this way, it is employed in conjunction with light greens, yellows, and even various shades of reds, going from brighter, paler pinks, to as dark and heavily pigmented as indigo.

Serving as a landing pad for pollinators of all sorts, the dustiness of the pink in question comes from blue and grey undertones in the pink, which temper it as compared to louder pinks in nature, and even natural plant “dust” – which can come from pollen, natural particulates, or even actual dust, which can inhibit the plant’s ability to photosynthesise efficiency. This dust covers the leaves of the plant, both normal leaves as well as flower petals, giving it a more natural, somewhat understated look.

Unlike other shades of pink, dusty rose can be so popular for many things. Whereas more saturated pink colours (such as rose quartz or magenta) can create a reflective layer or look painted-on, dusty rose has a dusky colour that’s closer to a shade within the natural spectrum of human skin tones. When using dusty rose in painting flowers, for example, the shade can be darkened or lightened up, while retaining the very particular features that it possesses – like the blue and grey undertones that balance out the warm tones of red and brown.

This means that not only is this colour good for painting flowers, but it also is a perfectly upper layer when using oil paints to depict human faces in particular. Or, for example, the warm colours of palms or inner parts of the human body, where there is a great deal of blood vessels to create a warm, living tone.

When using oil paints, thin layers of pigment are overlaid to create an interplay of light and texture, making it so, when viewed straight-on, you can see all the way through the many layers of to the surface coat of the paint. This is so that a warm colour like dusty rose would be accompanied by various layers of skin-tones, for a balanced reflect the browns, beiges, reds, and blues, that come together to create a human complexion.

With all of these sources of inspiration in mind, it is useful to remember some of the colours that can be used in addition to dusty rose to bring the colour out best, either as a background or as a source of adding nuance when painting details. For this particular shade of pink as well as all variations of red, a tempered, woodsy green is a wonderful addition to balance out the warmer tones.

For dusty rose specifically, however, it can be interesting to combine it with a desaturated green, especially when painting in oils. Or, on the contrary, using a more measured shade of green, like the color of opaque, creamy jadeite, or even as light as Pantone’s milky green, to create a very measured combination of colour. Other colours that can be used in combination include an off-white, like a light cream or one with yellow undertones in it, or shades of grey, both of which bring out the warm, saturated nature of dusty rose to create a more robust palette.

With all of this in mind, I hope that you have an understanding of the many uses of dusty rose, both within how it appears in nature and how it is used in all kinds of art. Looking at dusty rose, and all of the ways that you can incorporate it into your artwork, you should have all of the tools necessary to create a wonderful, well-balanced colour palette that centres dusty rose at its foundation with ease.