 Hello and welcome to Monet Café. Subscribers, newcomers, friends, I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I hope you enjoy this Part 1 in a two-part series I'm calling Easy Art Principles to Better Landscape Painting. If you haven't already subscribed, I hope you will. Now let's get started. Before beginning the lesson, I wanted to let you know there will be two free, clickable images available for you. These graphics will help you understand the lesson even better. Hello and welcome to Monet Café. Newcomers and longtime subscribers. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today's lesson is going to be probably the most requested type of lesson that I get, which is more for beginners and some of the basics to painting. And I think these simple tips, I don't want to call them tricks, but they are principles that I've kind of discovered a way to describe them that I think is going to give some of you guys maybe an aha moment and definitely help you to create better and more beautiful landscape paintings. Alright, here we go. Okay, so often with a painting it's best to think about the value before you even start thinking about color. I love the expression color gets the glory, but value does the work or something like that. So value is that important. Now on the grayscale value finder, you can see that there's a, this is kind of just breaking it down into 10 different values. One, it's kind of not what you would think. One being black and 10 being white. Okay, you don't need to know that for this lesson, but that's kind of interesting that it's backwards than what you would think. And so first let's talk a little bit about the landscape. Now we are emulating the way nature really works. The laws of physics and we're really just reproducing how things behave in nature. Now how do they behave in nature? Well with a landscape painting or landscape scene, the things that are closer to us, now let's just talk about value, darks and lights, the things that are closer to us are typically, that we're typically darker in value. Now you know before you start thinking about a white flower, that wouldn't be darker in value. Okay, it's kind of relative in general. All right, like the foreground grasses, the foreground leaves or anything that you can see that's closer. Whereas things as they recede, they get lighter in value. Okay, so foreground to background. A perfect example of this is if you've ever been in a scene maybe similar to this, my whole family's from western North Carolina in the mountains and I used to just love to see the distant mountains. Well, if you see anything closer to you, a hill, it's darker. The distant mountains are paled out and some of them are so far away, you barely can distinguish them between mountains and clouds. And so once again, that's just the way our earth behaves and how nature works. There is a real reason for this. It's because the atmosphere is getting in the way between you and that thing that's so far away. So as artists, we just simply use this knowledge to be able to create our painting that's more believable. And also too, with respect to anything that is vertical in a landscape, trees, any structures that are vertical, they are typically darker in value because the sun is not hitting the sides of them. It's kind of in shadow. The sun is typically coming from above. But don't even worry about that right now. We are going to deal with this tree, but you can instantly see if you squint your eyes, that tree is the darkest thing in the landscape. Now, the next thing we're going to talk about before I even start to give an example is we want to identify the horizon line. Now, I know sometimes that might seem easy, like in a, if you're looking at the ocean, it's always a flat horizon line in the distance. You don't have any trees or mountains or hills or anything to worry about. But as in a situation like this, we have a horizon line that's kind of broken up. Where is that horizon line? Usually it's just a general line of where the sky meets the earth. Now, we've got a hill here. Okay. So that is not the horizon line. This would be usually seen way in the distance. And it's going to be somewhere around here. Okay. Cutting the link right through there. Now, this is in the way. This is obviously closer to you. But the, the imagined horizon line is back here. Okay. So we're going to keep the horizon line in mind. And now I'm going to do an example using these Tombow dual brush markers. Now, you can use anything for this. We're just doing a value study to learn the lesson. Eventually we'll get to color though. Okay. So these Tombow markers are great because they have different values from light to dark. I often use charcoal. I like to be able to use charcoal because I can kind of blend it to lighten the value. I can press harder to get a darker value. I mean, you can do this with whatever you have as long as you can change the pressure to get dark to light. So let's get started. I'm going to do a simple little artistic principle on value and this landscape. I'll only be using three different values of the Tombow markers. And keep in mind also that the value white of the paper is a fourth value. All right. So that's kind of a similar size to that. I did not plan that out, by the way. But first, let's go ahead and get in the basic shapes. And I'm going to use just this medium value marker here. And what we can do is we can just identify where things are. And it really works out nicely when you have things that are similar in size and the same type of dimensions because you can kind of see where it meets the side here. It's kind of like up here. Okay. And then where it meets the earth. Let's talk about the green part here. Okay. It's kind of like right about in here. And then we've got the mountains here. That's almost middle way. Okay. So this is just not really part of the lesson, but just I can't I can't help but see each. Okay. So and then we've got our tree kind of like right in here. So let's go ahead and get this tree shape in here. It's just kind of and I like to talk about how to try to create shapes that have interest rather than just round circles. And a lot of times sort of like geometric shapes are better. And then we've got our hill kind of coming down. Down. It kind of comes up. And then it kind of goes down again. And then it comes up. We got a kind of a shadow going on back here right there. So that's just a general, general shape for things. And then we've got our distant mountains back here. Just drawing those in. Let's keep it real simple. We've got a couple of different levels here, which that's one of the reasons that I chose this image. I think I'm going to go even a little higher back here with these mountains a little bit going on back in here. Right. So that's just a general idea of what we have going on. Super easy. Right. So now we're going to talk about value. Now that was the medium marker. So let me get the darkest. Let's go dark to light. Typically, like I said before, the darkest thing in a landscape scene are going to be vertical elements, of course, that are closer to you. So let me write some principles down here. And you guys have probably noticed I'm a lefty. I don't paint like this, but I still have that weird lefty writing. So often it's kind of hard for me to do this. So and of course, you know, if it's in the middle, it's going to be more of that middle value. Now what is the lightest? We already talked about what the darkest thing in the scene is, right? Let's go ahead and get this. Is this my darkest marker? Yes. So get your darkest value. Or if you're using a charcoal or pencil, you're going to press harder with this. And let's just block in that tree shape. Okay. So we're just getting a general tree here. All right. There's a tree. Now what is the lightest thing in the scene? It's almost always unless it's a, well, even if it's a night scene, because everything else is darker in the foreground, it's almost always the sky. And so I don't even need to do anything with the sky now because that's really, I only have three values here, right? But guess what the white of the paper or the cream of the paper in this case is my lightest value. So it's like the paper surface is the fourth and lightest value. So that's my lightest value. Now what is the next to, well, let's, let's go darkest to lightest, okay? So we've determined darkest value, lightest value, almost always. Now in determining the rest, we're going to base it on our imaginary horizon line, which is kind of, let me do like some little dotted lines here. Okay. So our horizon line is kind of going through there. So let's go ahead and start talking about the darkest value. Now in this scene, I'm not going to worry about doing in that there's a bunch of debris on the hill and all of that. We're not worried about that. This is a simplification lesson. So what I'm going to do is I've got some grasses and some things growing on this hill that are kind of receding. So I know kind of like right in this area is going to be my darkest value. So I'm just going to give an indication of like grasses and things just kind of in the foreground going towards the back. Okay. That's my next darkest value. That is, I made it kind of like the tree, but the spacing kind of doesn't make it appear quite as dark. Now as we recede into the distance, guess what's going to happen? It's going to gradually get lighter. I know this might seem basic to a lot of people who have been painting a while, but trust me, this is valuable information for people who are just getting started. And still it's kind of hard for me being a lefty with my camera in the way. And also too, there's other principles that I have in another video. Five ways to achieve depth in your artwork. We know another principle is things are going to get smaller in the distance too. Okay. So don't worry about that. So I can make things look a little bit lighter in the distance by kind of separating the lines. Okay. And I'm giving a little directional feeling to this hill here. Okay. Now also I'm going to go ahead and get the shadow in because we know the shadow is behind the tree here. All right. So we've got darkest, lightest foreground is darker receding. And then we've got this hill back here. Now it's kind of dark. Okay. Now that appears that it would be something against the rule, but it kind of has to do with some of the foliage and the things that's happening here and maybe with some shadows that it didn't appear to be a lot of clouds in the sky. But so it's got a little bit of darkness to it. But I'm not going to do it as dark as the photo because I'm going to use my artistic license to not make it quite as dark. Okay. And the sun shining right here on this hill. Okay. So now those distant, distant mountains are the lightest thing with respect to what's on the earth. So let me get my lightest one here. And I'm just going to give an idea of some of these mountains. Let me give a little bit more of a shape for the mountains. And I got my mountains a little too high. But you get the idea, I'm sure. So these things are going to be even lighter in the distance. So that's in general how value works in a painting. And if you, once again, if you, if you have a white flower or things like that, you want to keep things, you know, relative to what the object is. But these are just the general rules. Here's the chart that I created again next to me actually diagramming kind of what the chart actually says. And I thought this might be a helpful graphic to help you understand how value typically works in a landscape and how you can represent it as an artist. Now here's what I found interesting. And maybe, like I said, maybe your little aha moment when you're painting in the future is skies, even though they're light, okay? Typically lighter. They have a very slight dark to light going this way. So if that could help you to understand while you're painting, I think sometimes when we can keep these little things in our brain, we can learn. My goal is to get artists to learn to paint and not just copy. And so you can get your own reference photo and you can say, oh, okay, we can get Bob down with the reference photos. So when we can put these little simple principles in our brain and go, oh, okay, darker to lighter, horizon line, and then you kind of have an idea. Sorry, my arm got in the way. Anyway, I hope that helps. Now let's go on to talk about color temperature. Before going on to color temperature, I thought I'd take some of my own paintings, convert them to black and white to show you these principles of value in action. Notice in this painting how the foreground tree is darker and the background trees and bushes on the hill gradually get lighter in value. Also notice the foreground grasses in the front are darker and they gradually get lighter. Now what I said about keep the subject matter in mind, notice this road or sandy path that is obviously a lot lighter in value than the grasses. So, you know, once again, everything is relative to what the subject matter is. You're not going to paint that road darker, like very dark, but it actually is a tad darker at the very edge of the front of the paper than it is kind of moving up and back. So, again, keep your subject matter in mind when applying these principles. Now, here's the color version. Now, I thought this would be a neat example to show how important value is. And to me, I believe it's the primary principle when beginning a painting because this actual painting goes against what I'm going to talk about as the next principle in part two of this video series which is color temperature in a landscape painting. You will learn soon in part two that color temperature typically goes from warmer in the foreground to cooler in the distance. And can you see how this one is opposite? So, once again, because I got the value right, I could get creative with the color temperature and even the color in general. So, here are a few examples of what's coming up in part two where we'll talk about color temperature. I want you to notice in this image how the tree line gradually gets cooler in color temperature. There's blue trees in the background. Not only are the distant trees lighter in value, but they're cooler in color temperature. This one, again, this one's I get, you know, many of you know, I love dynamic color. But notice those distant trees that are very teal in the background. I really hope this lesson was very valuable to you, no pun intended. And I think this next one, part two, you're going to really enjoy where we talk about color temperature. Patrons, you will have a homework assignment based on this lesson, which I'll provide in the post of your Patreon post of this particular video. All right, guys, hope you enjoyed. Like, subscribe, come back, and as always, happy painting.