 Hello, artists, and welcome to Monet Café. In today's lesson, I'm going to teach you how sometimes seeing less is more and is really kind of neat when we work from a thumbnail image. All right, let's get started. Hello, artists and welcome in the studio. Today, I'm doing a little exercise that I think will help you to improve your ability to see things more simplified. Often, we get too hung up on the details, and I find that working from thumbnails, you know, those little teeny pictures you see when you don't blow it up or something, they're the little teeny ones. And I find that these thumbnails are an excellent way for us to see more simplified shapes and to see the bigger forms to create a more pleasing composition. So join me in this lesson. I think it's going to be fun. I think it'll be educational, and I think it'll just be another step for all of us to get better as artists. Now, this is an example of a painting that I did from a smaller thumbnail, and I also think it helps it lend towards impressionism, you know, and to not get so fussy about every little detail. So that's the goal with this. And what we're going to do is I pulled a bunch of different photos that I thought had nice compositions. That's the one. But here's what I mean. Let me see if I can get where you don't see the light by working from a thumbnail. These little images here are little teeny thumbnails. And what happens is when we see them this small, we are just able to see the basics, the bones of the composition, so to speak. And I feel that it is often a great way to do a preliminary painting. I'm not saying you should finish the painting from the thumbnail. I mean, you could try, but there's nothing wrong with that. But if you do the preliminary parts to the painting, and then later look at the larger picture, we already have the basics, the most important things. Like I said, it's like the good bones of the painting when we get the composition right, and we get the values right. That's another thing, too. We can see values more clearly when they're small. You can so, it's kind of like squinting your eyes. You can so much more quickly see, in this one that we'll be doing today, what's the darkest value, this mass, what's the shape. It's kind of like a triangle on its side. You can see where the mountains are in the background. You can see that they're lighter value than the trees. You can see that the sides of the roads are a little bit darker. And so the same thing in all these other photos, too. It's just such an easier way, a much easier way to see the big shapes and the values. So I'm going to talk a little bit as we go. But I also want to share my palette that I'm going to get starting with. Started with, you can, if you would like to choose your palette, you can choose it from the thumbnail. But you know, it's okay in this exercise if you want to enlarge a little bit to get a better idea of what your colors are that you would like to choose. All right, so let's take a look here. I have just pulled out some. I usually like to, I'm sorry for my little, this is my little working palette, I call it. I love it because it's just a little box that I had gotten some Sennelier pastels. I think that's what these are. And it already had these nice little dividers. And I'm always like using it because it's just a neat way to kind of section things off. But I have my pastels, my studio pastels right next to me. So I can always grab more if I need to. I don't think I have the supply of pastels that a lot of professional artists have, but they work for me. And of course we're always wanting to get more, right? Of course I did get some more sets over this past Christmas time, which was really great. And I am using a couple out of this, these sets here. This is the Umber Shadows and Shades Terry Ludwig set. It's 30. And these are the nice little color charts they give you. I really recommend filling these in. They help you to know what to order if you run out. I'm using one of these a little bit darker value pastel here. And I'm using a couple of the Shades of Nature pastels by Terry Ludwig. I really love these sets. They're nice neutrals. All right. So let's get started here. I'm going to show you a little bit about what I've got. I went ahead and pulled some sky colors. These are my sky colors. I know that in the upper, I've got them arranged by dark to light bottom to top. Okay. It's actually opposite in the sky. We would have the darker values in the heavens at the top or part of the composition. Then it gradually gets lighter and a little warmer typically as we go down into the horizon line of the landscape. Um, as, as you can see right here, darker blues up top. This one is a cloudy day. That's why I have those light blues. And I like, I'm going to get a little bit of those turquoisey blues in here somewhere. So I got, you know, basically just four colors and values for the sky. Now I have also for those mountains, we know mountains get or things in the distance get lighter in value and duller in color and usually cooler in color temperature. So I've got these pastels here. It's usually best though. I mean, you could just do a mountain is purple. A lot of times we think of mountains in the distance as purple and this might be a nice purple color, but it's going to be way too light to put down first. So typically we put down a darker value first and then layer our other values on top of that. That's just typically how we work in pastels. These are some darks that I have. This is a Terry Ludwig. I think this is an eggplant. I want to kind of really reserve that one. I don't want to go too crazy on the darks. Um, but these are my other darks I have that the photo has a lot of, uh, autumn colors like fall colors. So that's why I've got some of these reds and greens and everything here. So these are my darks. These are some colors that I chose for the road. Now these are the ones that I said were the Terry Ludwig umbers, shadows and shades and shades of nature and they're like again, they're just neutral and that road has some stones in it and some grays. I might need to get a, I'm gonna, I'm gonna play around with that one. These are some of the colors that I'm going to use in those reds that are in the trees. I got a variety from dark um, to light, a little, some that are a little bit more in the pinkish family. You know, it leans a little bit more pink and some that lean a little bit of a, more of a warmer red and let's see over here. I just pulled out some neutrals, some nice neutrals that I thought I might use. I liked some of the um, grasses. This wouldn't really consider a neutral. These are a little brighter but um, but anyway, just some um, some variation in the grasses and things and I know there were a little bit of gold colors. I'll probably add to this, but I thought this would be something neat to show you guys of how I'm getting started. Now I'm gonna go back to the thumbnail. Just a second. Oh, let me tell you about this paper. This is a piece of pastel matte. I like this surface a lot. I mean, I would say I've been working on it less than a year. Um, I had just never gotten it and, and I really do love it. It's not as sanded as you are. It actually feels kind of, I wouldn't say velvety. It feels soft though and you don't have the um, the sandiness to it, but uh, it looks a little bright here. It's actually a dark, um, charcoal-y type of color, but my, my bright light here is really making it look lighter. So I've just got it taped up here. I'm going to show you the sample colors down here as I work. And now I am going to the thumbnail. Here we go. And that's what I'm going to be working from. So let me put my camera up where I can work and I'll talk you guys through this. Okay. Now I marked off, I didn't measure this perfectly. I know that this is such a basic landscape that I don't have to proportionately match this up with the reference image. So I just got a mat that I have that I know the interior is an eight by 10. And what I have here is a pastel pencil. It's just a gray pastel pencil that I used to mark it off. And it's a light color. It's easier to see on this darker surface. So I'm looking at the thumbnail, see that I've got a road. It's about halfway for the, the little grassy part of the road. And then I know I see this tree bank comes up a little higher than halfway. And really all I can see, I can't really tell a lot other than there's kind of like a, like a triangle shape here. So it forces me to just really work on big shapes. All right. And then I know I see I've got, I'm going to make this a little higher. I know I see I've got the mountains kind of coming off a little bit from here and they kind of come down. I'm going to make my mountain go back up here though. I don't like a mountain trailing off. I think it keeps the eye in the painting more when it goes up higher. And then we've got our basic sky. I don't really need to do anything with that. And now I can see that my, my road, it's like a road that curves off over that way. And then it comes down here and a little curve to it. And then we've got a bank here. And then another curve that goes off the page. And I can see it goes off actually higher than I've done it. So the road's going to be more here. Actually, let me get an angle. It angles in. And then it goes right here. And then it comes up and then it curves around. All right. So there's the one side of the road, the other side of the road. I see this bank comes up over. Let me get this bank a little bit higher for interest comes up and over. And then it curves kind of into this road right here. And then we've got a, we have to remember to these banks, they have height to them too. Okay. So they're not going to be just flat. I can tell that. Now I can see that the side of the road goes off kind of over to the paper right there. So that was a really simple way to get our basic composition in really quickly. And we've kind of got the same thing going over here. All right. So there we go. Look at that. That was so fast and easy to get a composition in with a thumbnail. And it just simplifies and makes everything so much easier. So now we're going to start painting. I'm going to get that darkest blue. I may have to move this again because my hand's going to probably run into this. I can already see that. Let me see if I can scoot it over without my iPad falling off. That should stay. I hope it stays. I'm going to lose the iPad here. Oh, isn't that a beautiful blue? Oh my goodness. Now I'm keeping a light touch. I'm not getting carried away right now. I kind of think I want to make the sky sweep this way more than just so flat with those clouds because we've got the road curve in this way. That would make a nice S-shaped curve to the composition. So don't worry if you don't think about these things right away because all these things come with practice. Okay. So there's that blue. Now I have this little bit of a warmer blue. Oh, I was going to mark these two for you. Okay. Here's the first blue in the sky. I believe this is a Sennelier that's just gotten kind of squared off from use. They're normally round. This is a Mount Vision. I like Mount Vision. They're a nice value. They're a big pastel. Let me see what I have here that's a Mount Vision. I have my iridescent ones that are not broken. Here they are. This is kind of what the size of the Mount Vision looks like. It's an iridescent set. I'm very blessed that Mount Vision Factory is here in my area, Tampa, Florida area. So I went to the factory and I bought all of their iridescents. They're a lot of fun, but I have plenty more Mount Vision. I have a lot of Mount Vision that I use for sky colors. They've got some really nice blues. So here's this pretty turquoise. It leans a little bit more towards a warmer blue or a cooler green. So let's get some of that in there. I'm just looking at my sky here. A little bit in my Patreon group about something that's called a fractured sky or a broken color. And it's when you lay colors of a similar value. Now this is a little lighter than the blue next to each other and you don't over blend them, but they kind of vibrate and play amongst each other. So it's really a lot of fun. All right, so now I'm going to go in and get my next color blue. This is that lighter blue. Let's get this one right here. It's pretty light. My lightest, whitish blue is this one. And that's really just going to be for some of the highlights of the clouds. But let me get this one in first. Now this is where I said I wanted to get these clouds kind of trailing out of the painting to give some interest to the sky. Yeah, that's nice. I like that. And we don't want to get over carried away with this because we're really just trying to get the basics of the color in. But I am going to go ahead and just hit on a few of these lights to get the overall impression. I like getting the canvas or the paper filled with color before I get too fussy with anything. All right, now let's get these mountain colors in. That's just a basic start. I've got my mountain. I know it's I'm looking at the thumbnail still and it's going to be a duller blue. Man, this pastel matte is just like butter when you work on it. I really, really like it. So just getting my basic mountain shape in, still keeping a light touch there. And now I know that I can put in, I don't even have to do this now. That might be a little bit light for purple. I'm going to hold off on this. That gives me a little taste of it. But I'm not going to get over carried away with that right now. I want to get my basic values and colors in. Now I'm going to work on my dark. I'm working kind of down in this one. Sometimes I just get my darks in first. But often I just work with covering everything. So I see that one of the darkest places is right at kind of the back of this road and some trees back here. There's like a little bank of trees and it looks like it might go a little higher up than I had drawn my composition originally. Okay, so there we got a tree bank going on. And I know some of these sides here, I drew them more architecturally, I guess you could say, than they'll end up looking. But yeah, we've got, I'm going to get a little more color in on this bank before I get crazy with that. But I know I've got some darks on the sides of this road here. Right? So we can tell it started to take shape a little bit. And okay, let's see now, that's a decent dark I got going on there. I might go ahead and grab some of these, this nice green that I see, because there's a lot of greens in this bank here. This has got a little, oh, I forgot to do my color there. Let's do the blue, the darkest blue for the mountain. Then I just barely had a little bit of that purple. So it's quite a bit lighter. So that's why I didn't want to add it just yet. Okay, then I've got my darkest dark here. And now I've got the screen here. Again, these kind of nice, warm colors going on. All right, so I'm going to go ahead. I know that it's a little lighter back here, but I'm going to cover it up with a little bit of lighter color later. We know we can, we can layer with pastels. And again, this is, I guess it was laying next to a yellow pastel. Let's see if I can get some of that off of there. Yeah, it's still picking up some yellow. I'm not sure why. This is a great American pastel. And man, is it buttery? It is just, it's one that's so soft that it's going to fill up the tooth quickly. So I'm going to try to keep it even lighter touch. This bank kind of comes into the trees a little bit there. And again, because I'm working from the thumbnail, I can kind of see, oh yeah, I want to go outside of my bit fairy a little bit because it wasn't quite an 8x10. So that'll remind me. But anyway, super softy here. So keep that in mind. All right, so that is that green there. And I also had on one of my other darks was this a little bit mauve-y, like a darker mauve. And we definitely had some of that going on. Actually, I think I need to add a little bit more dark up in this bank. I covered it up with some of that green. And so I'm just looking at some of those areas where there's grasses, and there's some things happening back here. And then they're just gradually kind of trailing off and getting smaller back in here. And same thing here. I want to make sure I get enough of these darks in here. I think I'm going to add a little bit of this across the road, even though the road is not that dark. Things do get darker in the foreground. So I'm just going to put a little bit of that right here at the entryway to the road. All right, I've got a little bit more darks back in here too that I'm just going to keep a light touch. Just get me in. Of course, everything's going to get a little bit smaller as we get into distance. Okay, now let me get a little bit of these mauve-y colors in. I'm looking at the reference image that's a thumbnail for value, color, and composition. And you're forced to just work more loosely and more basically, I should say, because of how small it is. This is where some of these mauves are back in here. All right, now I think we've got, yeah, back in here, the same mauve-y type of color is trailing off behind the bank of the hill here. Again, things get lighter in value as they get further away. So these reds are not going to be as intense, whatever you want to call this, mauve, red, it's a warmer color. It's still dark back there, but it's not going to be as dark and it's not going to be as bold in color as something that would be closer to the foreground. I am going to add some richer colors in these foregrounds. All right, so that's it for my four sky colors, my two colors that I have in the mountain, that I'm going to check that value as things progress and my three darks. And now I'm going to start adding some of these other colors that I see in the road and in the banks of the grasses. Okay, while you're working on this, even though it's from a thumbnail, don't forget to back up. Don't get so, I'm back away, so my voice sounds far away. Don't forget and get so into it that you forget to get the big picture by getting further away. You can really see if your values are correct or not. I see my mountain, even though I do love this blue color, it is not quite dark enough in value. Now keep in mind, sometimes when we're working on these dark papers, things can be a little deceptive at first, but that's why you want to get everything in first very loosely and lightly so you can make some adjustments, because value is dependent on what it's next to. So the surface doesn't really matter as long as you get everything down and then you start adjusting values based on the surrounding values in the overall composition. Okay, that's going to be a little too dark. Let me grab another kind of a blue or something that's a little darker. Here's a blue that I like more than this blue. That's the blue that I, you see how this one's darker? I'm not sure what this pastel is, but it's the right value and color. Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna get this mountain a little darker back here. It's definitely darker in this area that looks, like I said in the thing, it's going down, but I'm gonna make the mountain kind of go on up a little bit. There we go. Yeah, we needed some depth to that mountain and then I'll cool it off with the purple that I think. Did I put that down here? Yeah, this is that blue that I used. You see how it's a nice dull dead blue? Again, I want to remember to make the painting a little bigger because my opening was not quite 8 by 10. All right, now I'm just gonna play a little bit. I got the basics in. I can start working a little bit better. I'm still working from the thumbnail. I'm going to speed up the rest of the video for a couple of reasons. I'm still having Wi-Fi challenges where I am and I have to keep my videos under a certain time limit, but also to the main point of the lesson was to work from a thumbnail. It simplifies the composition. I did make some adjustments to my composition. I realized I didn't have the road curving just right and I also, I worked 95% of the painting from the thumbnail and it is a little teeny, teeny picture, but just give it a try. This is actually a homework assignment for my patrons on my Patreon page. Every Friday I give homework over the weekend and this is not like the homework from school where you're like, oh really? Homework over the weekend? This is fun homework and I really enjoy seeing when my patrons do the assignments and we actually have a special album where they submit their homework and we can all look at everybody's work together and also it's, it is neat because the more you participate the better your chances are, my patrons anyway, to win a prize each month. I have a drawing or I'm going to be having a drawing at the beginning of the month and those patrons who have participated the most have a higher chance to win the gift card to an art supply store. So it's a lot of fun and encouragement. I like to try to motivate you guys and you guys in Monet Cafe, you also will be seeing this video and even though I'm speeding this part up, I think you can get the idea, but the goal again is to work from a thumbnail, a little small image so that you can simplify your subject matter and I got a little road challenged in this one but I end up making it really loose and free by the end. So this is the final and I hope you guys enjoyed that. Give it a try and patrons of course share your homework in our homework album. All right guys, happy painting.