In this sage green icing color mixing demo I make sage green buttercream frosting with only basic colors. If you don’t have green food coloring, you can still achieve sage green with primary colors, and you’ll learn how to make sage green color icing with basic food coloring here. This is a basic sage green, and you’ll see how to adjust the color to make a dusty green that’s more muted for your fall cake decorating designs. Making sage green icing is basically taking a green color and making it more brown, without making it completely brown. In this article I used the green that I made previously to mix up a couple of shades of sage green.
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What color of sage green do you want?
Sage green is a color that has a lot of shades, so make sure you and the client (if you’re making the cake for someone else) is thinking of the same color that you are. This is really important because if a customer has a shade in mind and you make a different one, they won’t be happy. I use a paint color fan deck to find the colors that I want to end up with, but for sage green you need basic primary colors, and you’ll be making a basic green first, then altering it to get the different shades.
The easiest thing would be to get some food coloring that was already sage green. They’re already mixed to give you the tint that you want, but if you don’t have them, you can use blue, red, and yellow to mix them.
You can get Americolor food coloring at Oasis Supply Company or Amazon. On Oasis Supply, you can use discount code REMEMBER10 to get 10% off your order!
I also used white icing for this, so unless you want to use a tiny bit of each color to keep your icing really light, you should have some white on hand to mix the darker icing into it.
What colors to use to make sage green icing.
I started with Americolor Lemon Yellow, Super Red, and Royal Blue. These are good, basic primary colors without a lot of other colors included, so they’ll give you a good bright green color.
Start by mixing some green icing, then add a little blue to it. You should start with a light green, because adding the blue is going to make it darker. (Read about how to mix green icing the right way here.)
Stir all of the color in well, making sure to scrape the bowl and the spatula to get all of the food coloring off and mixed in. This is going to give you a darker teal green/pine green color.
Add a little bit of red to the icing. I used a toothpick dipped into the food coloring bottle to control the amount of red I was adding.
When I mixed the red in, it started making the icing turn to a browner tint, which is what I wanted.
Add some more red bit by bit until you get to a dark green color that’s not as blue as a pine green color.
Making a lighter sage icing color.
At this point the icing was very close to the darkest color on the paint cards, so that was good, and I could start mixing it into the white.
Adding the red toned down the blue tint and made it more brown, so it’s looking more sage than pine green, which is more blue. This gave me a good base color to mix into the white icing to get the lighter shade.
Now I’m going to add the darker icing to some white icing to lighten it up. It’s good to start with a supply of the darker color that you can add to white icing in case you need to color match more if you run out. It also gives you the ability to control the shade a little better, because mixing the color will usually give you a darker color.
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That ended up with a light sage green color that was definitely lighter and closer to the colors at the top of the paint card.
I wanted it to be a little darker, so I added a little more of the darker icing.
That gave me a nice light sage green, and it would be perfect for a fall wedding cake or leaves on a birthday cake. I could keep adding more of the darker a little at a time if I wanted to get a darker tone, and it would still be sage, not teal.
For an article about mixing teal buttercream, click here.
Watch the video of the entire mixing process here:
