A strikingly opaque, dull green that granulates in midtone.
Experiment Results
Hue: A dull army green; grades to a pale sage.
Tinting Strength: Very strong. Difficult not to overwhelm mixes.
Gradient: Easy to grade smoothly and evenly.
Granulation: This color looks so smooth and flat in masstone yet is actually quite granulating the midtone. This can also be seen in the mixes (where it produced textured mixed with smooth colors).
Opacity: Exremely opaque, like, one of the most opaque colors I’ve ever tried! Goes on like housepaint. Still, it dilutes nicely.
Color Mixes: Mixed a range of muted browns and greens. Shockingly nice browns with scarlet reds; the mix with Quin Coral looks like Indian Red. I also like the bluer-toned muted greens from green-toned blues. With earth tones, you get even more muted, granulating sage greens.
What Others Say
[A] very opaque, lightfast and subtly granulating army green. Useful when paired with PY150 Nickel Azo Yellow or PY129 Green Gold for sun-lit floral greens.
Kim Crick, Watercolor Database: Green
[A] granulating dull green, best mixed with a yellow or a blue. It’s a great “desert green” for cacti, yuccas and agaves. Mix it with phthalo green to get a color that’s almost like DS jadeite genuine for way less $!
Lisa Spangler, What’s On My Palette?
PG17 makes an interesting “green earth” to complement a red earth such as venetian red or a yellow earth such as yellow ochre. It is useful to subdue bright synthetic organic pigments, such as benzimida yellow or phthalo green, which temper its dullness and combine well with its fine powdery texture. Because it contains both blue violet and red reflectance, it has interesting mixing behavior with warm and cool colors. It is tricky to use, however, as it will overpower or gray almost any other paint, and tends to color shift noticeably or produce a clayey color texture as it dries: test mixtures on scrap paper first. I find it works best in dilute mixtures with yellow or green to make naturalistic, dull olive greens, and in warm mixtures where a touch of it effectively desaturates or cools reds and oranges.
Substitutions: You can reproduce the same color and powdery pigment texture with a mixture of cobalt blue (PB28) or reddish cerulean blue (PB35) and a transparent yellow iron oxide (PY42).
Bruce MacEvoy, handprint.com
Color Mixes
Raw Sienna
This is a classic desert combination.
Transparent Red Oxide
A variety of brownish greens. The mostly-TRO one is sort of a Burnt Sienna hue.
Indian Red
I feel like with this paint, some mixes I thought would be good were bad, and some I thought would be bad were good. This is of the latter category. These are surprisingly nice browns!
Quin Coral
Khaki browns.
Quin Rose
A pretty muddy mix unless you have a use for a really dull army green.
Indanthrone Blue
I was hoping for a nice dark pine green but I wasn’t really inspired by this. Maybe okay for the shadows under the pine needles.
Cobalt Blue
Dull, granulating gray blue-greens. Can’t really think of a use for this.
Cobalt Turquoise
Now we’ve got a party. These granulators play really interestingly together, especially in the fairly balanced mix.
Phthalo Blue GS
Well… this doesn’t look exactly like Jadeite, as Lisa Spangler suggested it would. To me it looks like a brighter middle green, which to me looks more like a PG50 Cobalt Green. Still, a handy color, a real “green’s green” with the blueness of the Phthalo Green BS counteracted by the yellow-brown tones of Chromium Oxide, and the dullness of Chromium Oxide counteracted by the boldness of the Phthalo.
What Others Say
TOP 40 PIGMENT. Chromium oxide green PG17 is a very lightfast, very opaque, heavily staining, dark valued, very dull yellow green pigment… [I]t is perhaps the most durable green pigment known… It can be evocative in tints or mixtures but is obtrusively drab and lifeless when used full strength. …
PG17 makes an interesting “green earth” to complement a red earth such as venetian red or a yellow earth such as yellow ochre. It is useful to subdue bright synthetic organic pigments, such as benzimida yellow or phthalo green, which temper its dullness and combine well with its fine powdery texture. Because it contains both blue violet and red reflectance, it has interesting mixing behavior with warm and cool colors. It is tricky to use, however, as it will overpower or gray almost any other paint, and tends to color shift noticeably or produce a clayey color texture as it dries: test mixtures on scrap paper first. I find it works best in dilute mixtures with yellow or green to make naturalistic, dull olive greens, and in warm mixtures where a touch of it effectively desaturates or cools reds and oranges.
Substitutions: You can reproduce the same color and powdery pigment texture with a mixture of cobalt blue (PB28) or reddish cerulean blue (PB35) and a transparent yellow iron oxide (PY42).
Bruce MacEvoy, handprint.com
Bruce MacEvoy has more to say about PG17 in the context of convenience green mixers:
The sleeper is chromium oxide green (anhydrous chromium sesquioxide, PG17), a very dull yellowish green close to the hue of many sap greens (it is commonly used in camouflage paints). Unlike mixed sap greens, however, it is very opaque. In very diluted mixtures it creates a hazy, delicate texture and is quite effective at creating a wide range of natural, warm, muted greens when added in small amounts to any yellow pigment. Its opacity also lends substance to green passages that should appear heavy. If you have struggled to get natural looking landscape greens using the phthalocyanines, I urge you to give chromium oxide green a try (or viridian, for that matter). Just remember: the semitransparent viridian can be applied in fairly heavy concentrations, but the very opaque chromium oxide green works best in diluted mixtures or added to mixtures in small amounts.
Bruce MacEvoy, “Mixing Green”
My Review of Chromium Oxide Green
I held off on trying this paint; I didn’t expect to like it because I don’t usually like opaque paints, and I don’t usually like muted colors. That’s two strikes against this pigment! But I ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would, in specific contexts.
It works best in my Desert Palette. Its muted hue is perfect for succulents and cacti. Its opacity was also a boon because I could paint the sand layer first then just dot the plants over it. It is gently granulating, and mixes well with a wide range of earth tones, including reddish ones, making lively browns rather than the muddy grays you might expect.
It does have a dull, powdery finish in masstone, but like Indian Red, it is best used in a strong dilute to counteract the opacity and unlock the granulation.
I haven’t found much use for it in my usual boreal biome, where more saturated greens are more useful, even in winter.
On my palette? On my Desert Palette.
Favorite version: Winsor & Newton’s Oxide of Chromium is the only one I’ve tried, and I’m happy with it.