 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I am hoping this video is going to give some of you a color epiphany. I'm also going to be showing you easy ways to create color palette formulas with a basic color formula guide that should get any artist, no matter how new, on your way to beautiful painting. Also, go ahead if you don't mind and click the like, subscribe and the bell icon to get notified of future videos. Those simple things really do help the success of this video on YouTube and help ensure others get to see it as well. Also, if you'd like to become a patron of mine, you can do so on my Patreon page for only $5 a month. It helps support this channel and my patrons get extra content. All right. Now, if you are here right now watching this video, I bet I know something about you. You love color, right? And how can we not as artists? But I find color can be a bit confusing to artists, beginner artists and even if you've been painting a while. But one of the things I love to do on this channel is break things down in easy to understand ways. I often say painting isn't hard once you know the rules. And there really are some specific rules to color that aren't all that hard. And I've created a little short presentation. I'm going to show you that I think will give some of you an aha moment. So watch the short presentation. And guess what? When we come back, we're going to paint. And I'm going to show you these color palette formulas. And I think you're going to love it. And I think you're going to go, wow, I can really do this. I think most of us are familiar with the color wheel or the concept of the color wheel. And I'm kind of a why girl? It works. So I wanted to know these things. And I find when I understand it, I can apply the concepts more beautifully in my art. Credit is attributed to Sir Isaac Newton for discovering the color wheel. He is also well known for his discoveries of calculus and the theory of gravity. But while he discovered these things, he didn't invent them. The color wheel was invented by God. And it's based on the rainbow. And there are logical reasons behind why these colors work in an artistic and beautiful way. They're not just random, pretty colors put together. Much like a mathematical formula, there are reasonings why certain colors work well together and are pleasing to our eyes. So now let's explore the rules of color and much like a color calculator, we will be able to plug in the colors for harmonious color palettes. In the basic color wheel, there are 12 colors, which can conveniently be divided in half to reveal six warm colors and six cool colors. Most of us are familiar, even as children in school, of the three primary colors. The three primary colors in pigment, which are called subtractive colors, are yellow, red, and blue. I find the repetition of the number three in our universe quite interesting. The entire universe can be simplified to three basic elements, time, space, and matter. Each of these can further be explained by divisibles of three. Time is composed of past, present, and future. Space can be broken down into divisibles of length, width, and depth. And matter is composed of three different states, solid, liquid, and gas. So is it any surprise that our color wheel can be broken down into three basic primary colors? And the combinations of merely three colors give us all of the colors of the color wheel. Most of us are also quite familiar with the fact that combining the three primaries gives us our three secondary colors, orange, green, and purple. And if we mix the secondary colors with the primary colors, the result will be six tertiary colors. And now that we understand some of the logic behind the color wheel and why it works, let's go over the different color palettes. Perhaps the simplest is the monochromatic color palette. It's basically choosing one color and using different values of that color, lightness or darkness. Creating paintings with a monochromatic color scheme is an excellent exercise in learning about value. While the monochromatic color palette uses only one hue, with the next complementary color palette, we actually add one color. Compliments are colors that are opposite on the color wheel. The next color palette arrangement is called analogous color. And this is where we add two colors and they will be the colors adjacent to your original color choice. I find these color palettes create a visually pleasing and calming display of color. The next color palette is split complementary. And this is also created by adding two colors to your original color choice. With this color palette, you basically choose the two colors that are adjacent to the colors complement. Another color palette that adds two colors to the original hue is the triad. And this is basically what it sounds like a triangle or three colors equally spaced from each other. The last color palette is created by adding three colors to the original hue selection called a tetrad. It's a combination of four colors or basically two sets of compliments. Since choosing color palettes could be a rather dizzying affair for the beginner, I'd like to offer this limited color palette formula that only has 12 colors. First, we'll begin by choosing a hue on the color wheel. I'm going to choose purple or violet. It does happen to be my favorite color. And we're going to add that to our palette. Next, because good darks are important to painting, we're going to add our darkest dark. And basically with most mediums, you could simply add black. With pastel painting, you will choose a darker value of your original hue. And now we'll choose our color palette arrangement. I'm choosing the split complementary color palette. This means I'll be adding the colors that are adjacent to the complement of purple. These will be yellow, orange and yellow, green. And we will add those to our palette. And to choose lighter values that will work well with this color scheme, we're going to create lighter values of each of the colors we have chosen. And these will be colors that are about 50% lighter than the original color. And we will add these colors to our palette. And to get our lightest lights, we're going to do this one more time. And you can see the resulting colors are all monochromatic versions of the original colors. And to give our painting some life and pizzazz, we're going to choose some accent colors. I often call these my punchy colors. These will be analogous colors to the original color, which was violet. That means they will just be adjacent to the violet color. And we will add these two accent colors to our 12 color palette. And here is a limited palette of 12 colors that will work beautifully together. And by the way, this doesn't work with just choosing purple. You can choose any color on the color wheel and follow this formula. So let's review the formula again. First, you'll choose a color on the color wheel. In our case, it was violet. Next, you'll choose your darkest value. This can be done by adding black with most mediums. With soft pastels, you'll basically choose a darker value of the original hue. Next, we'll choose our split complementary colors. These are the colors that are adjacent to the complementary color of the original purple. And next we will choose lighter values of our original split complementary color scheme. And then even lighter values still to create our lightest lights. Finally, we'll choose our accent or punchy colors. And now let's finally take this knowledge to the easel and join me as I choose these colors as a 12 color limited palette. Since I'll be working in soft pastels, I chose colors as close as I could get to my 12 color palette formula. And by the way, my patrons will get a copy of that. It has actually a code for what pastels those were. As a reference image, I tried to pick something fairly simple. It's just a tree in a landscape and happens to be a photo of my parents property. I'll be working on Fisher 400 sanded pastel paper, but you can use whatever you have. And I'm going to be doing an alcohol wash, basically. I like to tone my paper, especially if I start off with something that's white or cream in this case. And even though my surface is 11 by 14, or in this case, 14 by 11, I am going to mark off an eight by 10 area to paint in. A lot of times I don't like painting to the edge of the paper. I like to give myself a border and some room. And I just marked it off with a mat that was a five by seven mat. Actually, the outside perimeter is eight by 10. And now I was deciding on a color for my underpainting. And the original pink I had picked out was a little dull. So I got one that was a little brighter. And now all I'm doing is applying the alcohol. I'm just brushing it on and pastel literally turns to paint when you add water or alcohol. Alcohol dries faster than water. And it also gives a little bit of a different effect than water. So you don't have to do it this way. You can literally just blend the pastel in and you can use whatever color you want as an underpainting. I'm going to be using this Prismacolor New Pastel. It's number 305. It's literally just for me to get a basic sketch. You're going to see how basic this is. And I'm just speeding up limited sections of this. Most of it's going to be real time. But I'm just making a couple of marks. I know kind of where my tree is by looking at my iPad. I know the branches to the right come past the middle actually. And so I just like to make a few marks and get in a very general sketch. I know I have my main big tree. I have two trees. I like to exaggerate things sometimes too. I wanted them to be leaning in and I've determined. I think the focal strategy is like these trees are reaching towards a beautiful sky. That's in the upper right corner. Got in my little shadow under the tree and now I'm ready to go. Now this is the color that I chose from the split complimentary original three colors. You know, I chose the purple to begin with. And then the split compliments were the yellow and the yellow green. And if I did this again, I might go a little lighter on that original purple color that I had chosen. It's a little bit dark. My darkest dark that you'll see me using by the way in a little while is the Terry Ludwig eggplant color. It looks almost like it is black, but it's not. It's a dark, dark purple. So I'm using this to get in my values. All I'm doing is a value study. I know the three elements that are going to be the darkest darks are the main tree. The foreground is always a little bit darker than the distant field and those two other trees leaning in. And by the way, I simplified this landscape a little bit. I decided not to do all of the trees in the reference image that are behind the main tree that are to the left behind the main tree. Now I'm using the next value lighter of the purple. It would be a monochromatic lighter value to get in the distant trees. Now, why do you think they are lighter? Well, that's because they're far away. Things get lighter in the distance and it's really easy to achieve this by just going a value or so less than your original trees in the foreground. Now this is that pipe foam insulation. I talk about a lot in my videos. It's really a great blending tool, especially on a sanded surface like this. And I just want to soften some things and lose all those spaces that are behind the pastel that I've already put down. You see, it looks real chunky. And now as I use this blending tool, it just creates more of a mass of this tree. And I'm not super concerned with the shape or getting the branches just right. I'm going to be doing what's called negative painting. So I just want to get in a loose gestural feel for these trees. And if anything, have them spreading out even more than you would originally think because you can always carve into them. Now I'm using the blending tool. I think I did wipe it off to get those distant purple trees or mountains that can be anything. All right, now here's one thing great about using a limited palette. It causes you to use colors that aren't even in your reference photo because you don't have a choice. You only have 12 colors to choose from. Okay, that's what it means to have a light touch. I've developed a light touch over the years and so much so lately that I actually dropped my pastel quite often. Now look how vibrant that yellow color is that I'm putting in the sky. That's not the darkest yellow that I had. That's the next in value. Remember we have three values of each color. We have the original split complementary, then we go lighter and then even lighter. So each color will have three values of that same color. And now I've got a little bit of this lavender that is the lightest value of the purple. And I'm just kind of lightening that sky up a little bit. I'm kind of experimenting here and playing. And again, I have a very light touch. You're still seeing the paper showing through. I do blend that sky later, but I don't like to over blend. I usually just blend at initial stages. And then the pastels eventually kind of start blending themselves once you get about three layers or so on. So I'm creating a little glow. I know my sky is going to be the lightest thing. And you can see in the reference image and that's just how it is in life in nature. And now that's my lightest yellow. That's the lightest light from that color family. And I'm just creating a little bit more of a glow above that distant tree line. That is really a nice little strategy to use for focal point. I don't want to do it too much over there. Again, I'm establishing my focal point kind of an angle going up and to the right. The trees are even leaning that way kind of for a directional focal element strategy. And now I'm adding that Terry Ludwig. Now it looks really like it's black, doesn't it? But I'm just really kind of gesturally getting in some of the shapes of the trunks of the tree. And I'm just making a few little marks and they're going to kind of disappear and reappear because of branches. I mean, because of masses of leaves on top of it. But these are just to help me kind of feel where the tree is going as I start developing it. And now I'm actually, it's not dark enough. Now notice that the mass of the tree before I'm adding this dark color was the exact same value as the two trees to the right in the distance. Well, we know once again, things are darker in the foreground typically. It depends on your subject matter. But especially trees, they're usually a darker thing in a landscape. And because that main tree is closer, I know I need it a value darker. Darker than the distant trees. And that's going to create that illusion that there are layers of distance. And so I'm keeping a real light touch with this. I don't want to press hard and I want to make the whole tree that dark. But I'm going to blend it in just a little bit more. And one thing before I get to it, I noticed, I don't know why my little pipe foam insulation tool. By the way, you can get it any hardware store, almost any hardware store. It worked great for blending and almost always does. But when I went to blend in this particular part of the Terry Ludwig eggplant, I've never had this happen. It started kind of just falling off the paper. I don't know why, but you'll see in just a second. Oh, and there is a darker element, which is the shadow underneath the tree. So just lightly sketch that in. Now here's where I'm using the pipe foam insulation and you may not can see it here. But notice how the dark is not staying very dark. It's kind of falling off again. I don't know why that happened, but I came up with a fix to make it work. And I wanted to give even a little more depth to the field. So I added really lightly just a little bit of that in the foreground. Now here's the trick with pastel painting and actually acrylic and oil painting too. It's really all about the layering. Don't feel like things have to look really great to begin with. You're really just getting in big shapes and values. And as you layer, you start to develop the colors and the mark making. So now do you see how that another blending tool is working a little better there? And I actually kind of use it just to carry it through, you know, blend all that up a little bit into the field. And now I'm going to continue to develop the main color. I've really only gotten in about one layer except for the sky and I'm going to work the whole. I don't like to get hung up on any one area because what I find happens with that is you over develop it and I find the colors and the values don't necessarily match the reference image. Because sometimes if you work one area and you get hung up on that, it doesn't flow throughout the entire painting. So that's why it's really best to get your main big shapes, values and colors in originally. And then you can begin to develop things. Your painting will have just be more harmonious and cohesive throughout and also keep that light touch. Now the colors in this, I want to talk about that a little bit. The colors in this are going to be a little bit different, but that's what I love about choosing this limited palette. You are forcing yourself to use values that work and not be hung up on the color. This is what I say all the time about when people ask me the question, how do you get so creative with color? And it's because I can zone out the color and just choose a value that works and you can have a lot of fun with color. So that's one of the blessings that this formula of a limited palette is going to do for you. And by the way, this formula, I wanted to give credit. I saw someone who explained this, another artist. I'm going to put her name and link, I can't remember her name right now, in the description of this video. I mean, trust me, I have totally put my spin on everything she talked about, but I liked how she described the way to come up with the formula. So I definitely want to give her credit. But the thing I like about that is it forces you to choose value over color, which definitely results in more dynamic color throughout your painting. And also your color won't be cliche. Notice this isn't the typical blue sky, green field. We've got so much fun stuff going on here. The other neat thing about the limited palette formula is that it works well for people on a budget. You can literally get a limited amount of pastels to work with and not have to have these extensive assortments of pastels. Now, if you're working in oil or acrylic or even watercolor, you have a little bit of an advantage in that you can mix colors. You don't have to have as many colors because they mix just like the beginning of this video, you know, like the primary colors. And with pastels, we do have some ability for color mixing actually on the surface. When you layer different colors like those distant trees in the background, see how they're kind of vibrating. It had that magenta as the underpainting and it had that purple color, the lighter, medium value purple on top of it. So they did kind of mix and it creates interesting vibrancy and energy. So limited palettes are really a great way to work. And it's also painting with this strategy is going to teach you a lot about color theory. If you're choosing your colors based on the color wheel and this formula, you're going to learn a whole lot. And by the way, I have not experimented with using this with other color palette strategies such as I did the split complimentary. And like I said in the little intro section, you don't have to pick color purple as your original color, you know, pick any color you want and use the same formula. But what I was going to say is I haven't tried this with any of the other color palette strategies or schemes such as the triad. You know, the triad has three color choices just like the split complimentary. So if you use the same strategy, you would end up with 12, a limited palette of 12. Now if you choose the tetrad, that's adding three more to your original color, so you'd have four colors. So you could still do the same thing, but you're going to have more than 12. So but play around with it. It works. And it really the principle behind it is you are choosing a color strategy that works, whether it's the split complimentary or just complimentary split complimentary tetrad or whatever. You're choosing a dark, then you're choosing different values, lighter values of your original three colors and you're choosing some accent colors. It's really not hard. And once you do it a few times, you'll become a natural at it. You don't even have to think about it anymore. So these colors are looking kind of fun, huh? I kind of liked it at this crazy stage. I love to play with color. And now you can probably see that I've gotten most of the surface with a few layers and I've developed my colors. And then I'm going to start going in and carving out the trees that one foreground tree is a little dark right now. I'm going to add some green highlights to it. My my darker of the greens, which is my original split complimentary color. Also, you may have noticed before this, I added the middle value green to the sky. That's again one of the advantages about using a limited palette. I had to pick a value that worked. Alright, so this is my darkest green, which is part of the split complimentary original three colors. And I chose a green that wasn't quite as yellowy green as I did in the little example on my computer demonstration. And this one is a little light in value. If I wasn't limited to the 12 colors, I would have grabbed a darker green. And but it's may it's forcing me to have to work with what I have. I do kind of use it sort of to blend it in to where these marks don't look so obvious. Oh, there's my I use the blending tool. I just kind of knock down the vibrancy of it a little bit. And then it gives the illusion of some of the clusters of leaves catching some of that light. Now, I like to share that when you're doing trees, notice, I haven't painted any leaves, it's more just shapes. And we create our interest in the tree, not by over painting leaves, because that's going to steal your focal point away. We want to get in almost like those photographs when you see things are kind of out of focus, you know, it doesn't draw your eye to something. And then there's one thing that's in focus. And that's a good strategy to have when you're thinking of focal point. I don't often use my fingers to blend, but I thought I just kind of knock these down. And so what I want to do is I want to create some focal energy by the negative shapes in my tree. That's kind of what I'm doing right now. See how I'm carving in. This is called negative painting. You're not painting the leaves, you're painting the spaces between. And they're called sky holes. And what that means is the sky is being seen behind the tree. So we're painting the sky into the tree rather than the leaves into the sky. And notice it makes some really interesting little marks and they end up drawing some focal point. You don't want to overdo the sky holes, especially with too much bold mark making. You can have some that are more of your focal strategy. But if you just overdo it, like if I did this all around the tree everywhere, it's going to look fake for one. And it's going to cause the viewer to get hung up on that. Our eyes just naturally go to areas of high contrast. That means something light next to something dark. And certainly when you're painting sky holes into a foreground tree, you've got your darkest element in the painting and then you've got your sky, which is the lightest element in the painting. They're going to draw attention. So you don't want to do it everywhere is the point. You want to pick and choose your areas of where you feel like it enhances the composition. Now, even though the sky is kind of lavender behind that, you know, the sky is kind of going from that pinkish, orangey yellow color down into more lavender and little yellow lavender at the bottom. Behind the tree in the middle sections, I know I'm past working on the tree right now. You see how I use kind of a blue? I was limited again in my choices. If I had chosen those lighter values to put in the middle parts of that tree, it would have looked so fake. It would have looked like popcorn on the tree. And the reason is when things get very dense and with branches and trees, you'll see a little light popping through. But you want to give it a little bit more of a value darker. Otherwise, it's going to draw too much attention. All right. So now I'm just kind of glazing in some of these colors. Also, I like to make my strokes enhance my composition and my focal point. And once again, think of like an arrow going kind of diagonally up from the lower left corner to the upper right corner. That's kind of where I want to draw the viewer in. Of course, give a few little interesting things. But that's why I'm making the grasses and things kind of go in that direction. Now, here's where I am using my blending tool just to soften some of the sky, some of the edges. I didn't want to overdo it. But I felt like the sky was competing with the ground with its chunkiness. So that's why I decided to kind of blend it in a little bit more. And whenever I use my blending tool, if I've used it on another area, I get a piece of tissue paper and I just rub it off so that I don't get some of that residue. Oh, look at my gray hair there. Hopefully you guys can pay attention on the painting and not that old woman whose head keeps getting in the way. I'm sorry, I kept putting my head in the way. But I added some of that lavender. I feel like I might have overdone that lavender. Could have had a lighter touch on that. In that background area, I do warm it up a bit with some of the yellow. Now, typically, I say this all the time with a sky. Typically, color temperature goes cooler up in the heavens and it goes down to warmer down at the horizon. Like when usually there's a sun in the distant horizon. Notice this one's kind of doing the opposite, right? We've got warmer up in the heavens down to cooler down at the horizon. And once again, here's where I'm adding that green. But I do warm it up over that lavender. It's a little artificial looking right now. So I get some of my lightest yellow color and I do warm that up a bit. And right there is where I'm adding some of the yellow. Just kind of gently layering it a little bit over the purple to warm it up. And I play around with carving in the sky holes behind the tree. It's really something that just takes finesse. And I find I have to fiddle with it for a while until I get it to where it feels right, natural and not overdone. And you can see how I have gone outside of my original 8x10 little border I made at the beginning of this process. And sometimes I like to get a matte. I have this old black matte that sometimes I'll put on if I know it's an 8x10 that I can just see how it will look. And it really kind of helps me frame things out. So now I decided to add a little bit more of that yellow. There were like clouds in the sky. And again, I wanted to create them directionally, kind of reaching up to that upper right corner. And this is where I'm getting pretty close to the finishing stage. I don't want to overwork this and muddy the color. And I decided to take the border off again. But I'm going to start focusing on some of my finishing marks, which will be additions of sky holes in strategic places. Also giving some energy to foreground grasses. I wanted to add a little bit more of that purple to the grasses and give some directional strokes just to create some movement. I'm going to layer a few more grasses on top of this. Once again, all kind of reaching towards the focal point. And now things in the foreground, you do see grasses, even though the reference photo didn't have tall grasses in the foreground, I thought it would be more interesting. So we have that license as an artist to be able to do these things. And so I turned sometimes I'll take some of these Terry Ludwig pastels because they're nice and rectangular. I'll turn them on their corner. And grass strokes are so much more interesting when they're in multi directions. And when they almost have broken lines to them. My accent color again, I wanted to use it to sneak in some places with just some interesting color. And this is pretty cool, right? How you can take 12 colors, create a painting that has some really interesting color energy and excitement and save a lot of money by not having to have a lot of pastels, right? My tree was still a little dark. So I did before I finished, I wanted to add a little bit more of the lighter highlights to it. Here I zoomed in so you could see some of those just a few marks on the distant trees. I'm just suggesting the type of trees. I'm not spelling it out. I added a few more of the lighter highlights. This is the lightest yellow just to create some maybe lighter values of some of those clouds. Once again, giving some energy and reaching up. And a couple more sky holes. And I'm just about done other than lightning out lightning up the tree a little bit with some more of the green. Now before I show you the final, I'm going to show you a black and white version. This takes the color away. I actually recommend you doing this often with your paintings because you can check the values better. And can you see that the values work? It doesn't matter if we used colors that might not be so typical for the average landscape. But once again, by using a limited palette, you're going to learn how to get creative with color and learn that less is often more. And by the way, if you're a patron of my Patreon page, you will be receiving my color guide of this limited palette, including the codes to what those little letters mean. I will also be receiving a PDF of the entire presentation of the color formulas and the color theories. And it will be a PDF file that you can save and use however you want. And if you're not a patron of mine, I will be providing the same PDF with all of this valuable information on my coffee shop. For only $2, you can download the PDF and use it for your own education. And how do you like that new logo, by the way? Love paint. It seemed to express our group quite well. I do have merchandise with this new logo right beneath this video. T-shirts and a coffee mug. That's awesome. So I hope you learned a lot and thank you for being a part of why Monet Cafe is special. God bless and happy painting.