Another Yellow Tree

9/15/26 Maple Leaf neighborhood

Although I wasn’t able to ID it, this yellow tree is different from the Frisia black locusts I sketched last week. It has the same coloration: Lime green leaves most of the year that turn bright lemon yellow in September.

Color note: I made a lot of fuss last week about looking for the right yellow/blue mix to get as close as possible to Caran d’Ache’s Dark Phthalocyanine Green (719). As soon as I got out on location, though, I sort of forgot the plan and instead carried on in my usual manner: Applied the light and medium values of greens for the tree’s foliage (and bright yellow for the sunlit part), then applied Night Blue (149) to the shaded side of the tree. And guess what? Even though I didn’t use the assigned yellow to mix with it, Night Blue did its job beautifully anyway: It mixed with and darkened the various greens I had applied first, and the shaded side looks fairly close to Dark Phthalocyanine Green.

Lesson learned: None. I might learn to stop overthinking colors if it weren’t so much geeky fun!

Technical note: See those leaves in the foreground tree? I dabbed the waterbrush directly onto the blunt back end of the Night Blue crayon (which faces up in my bag’s crayon case) to paint those on. I really like how Neocolor II crayons can be used just like watercolor pans this way – and appear just like paint, too.