 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm bringing you a video tutorial on how you can alter the color of a reference photo. Often we get a reference photo that we you know we might want a different color palette so I'm going to talk about that and I called this painting perfect piece. I hope you're all having perfect piece. I'm featuring Giro pastels. You can see that box there. This is what is called the Elizabeth Mallory Poetic Landscape set. I love these pastels. They're very versatile. I love the the size and the shape of them. I do have a video where I actually give a review on these pastels or you know I do a whole painting with them but these are primarily the ones that I'm going to be using for the painting today along with some Terry Ludwig's. They work great on the surface I'll be using which is pastel matte. I'll talk about that in a minute but anyway I just wanted to show you the set and if anyone Giro pastels are available at like DickBlick.com places like that but this particular set is not you'd have to type in that name and you the company would come up where you can purchase it but anyway love these pastels let's get started. Alright for this particular painting for the darks you know we typically get the darks down first. I'm using Terry Ludwig pastels. I did get their set of intense darks one and two. They you know a lot of pastels the good ones anyway can be pricey but they are so worth it your results are so much better. It's just really one of those things with art that good quality materials do make a difference. Now that doesn't mean you can't start with medium quality or you know just to whatever your pocketbook can afford but when you gradually want to graduate to the better stuff there are certain pastels that definitely are worth the money and Terry Ludwig's and these your rows are definitely worth it. So what I'm doing here like I said I'm going to give a little commentary on this one. I give a lot of commentary on my patreon version and it is real time but you can still learn a lot right here on this video. What I'm doing you see the reference photo it's from pmp-art.com and I am really changing what's in the reference photo which is a lot of warmth. We've got a lot of green and we've got a lot of yellow and the sky and the distant mountain or tree or whatever some of that is it's kind of a almost like a cloudy overcast even though the photo is bright it's kind of a gray white in the background. So what I decided to do is almost like an analogous color palette but I'm doing a very wide analogous color palette. If you want to get yourself if you have one already that's great but get a color wheel little pocket color wheel they're very inexpensive and notice what a wealth of information is on the color wheel and on the back well with whichever one's the front or the back on one side of it it's got the descriptions of what different color palettes are. There's monochromatic which is basically doing a painting all in like purples every value of purple analogous color is using colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel. So what I've kind of done is I've worked with the primary theme of maybe like a violet magenta and I'm kind of going a little wider than that to some of the blues teal blues and some pinks and so you know I definitely was able to really do this rather easily. I know sometimes I'm people talk about this a lot that's a common question I get is how do I change a color palette how do you pick out your colors how do you know what colors to pick if you're doing that why wouldn't you have just painted that green and yellow lots of questions like this and sometimes I just want to change the mood and you can definitely do that with more of the blues and these these soothing colors to me I just really like these colors they feel peaceful that's why I called it perfect piece so basically also too I want to talk a little bit about the paper this is the pastel matte I bought a pad of pastel matte paper I really love it's not super sanded like you art paper as a matter of fact it feels rather smooth it almost feels like suede or something but it does take a lot of layers it works beautifully with these giro pastels or I should say these giro pastels work beautifully on the pastel matte and I also find that on this particular painting just so you know I didn't do any blending other than letting the pastels blend themselves I really feel you don't need to do as much blending you can and I've done that before on pastel matte but you know and a lot of other works when I work on your paper I'll use the typical pipe foam insulation blending method just to kind of fill in all those little spaces you get using your paper because it is so sanded and you don't even have to blend on that either but I find that you have to do it even less on this paper because it it just kind of goes on a little bit more uniform you see in the sky obviously there are still some spaces but trust me as you layer color all of that kind of just blends together and looks nice now I'm using a pastel here that if I was to use this particular color it's kind of like a taupe color on a cream colored piece of uart it would appear dark but because I'm working on there's the pastel again on a dark paper it appears light so if you don't understand value a lot you'd like to learn a little bit more I have a video I'll try to make it the featured video at the end of this if you want to look at it it's I think it's called value understanding value I think and value really value doesn't have any value until you put it on something or next to something it's very determined on what it's what it's on or what it's next to so I find that when you work with the darker papers values you would typically think of as dark end up looking lighter so you really just see it as you apply it kind of a method you know so that's a very interesting aspect about working on darker papers all right so I'm going to let you guys just enjoy this I wanted to share with you a little bit about what surface I was working on I do love the pastel matte this is a five by five size and it's part of the series I'm doing for my patrons called the 12 days of healing I'm inviting my patrons to paint with me for 12 days this is painting number eight I think and everyone who paints from these lessons and they're mostly getting the fuller version lessons they're sharing it we're all sharing it in a album a shared album I have on google and it's nice for me to just see what everybody else is doing and other people commenting so it's a really fun fun group fun place of course there's always even though the patreon page is five dollars a month and you can cancel it anytime you if that's even a lot I know right now our world is crazy you could always do the Monet cafe art group on facebook it's a private group you have to ask to join just to answer a couple questions and you can get so many of your questions answered by so many artists that are all helping each other it's a beautiful place almost 10,000 members in that group but my patreon group is a little bit more intimate I get obviously because there's less people I get to spend more time communicating with you guys and working together I really like the phase of this painting at this point I mean it would have been nice if I had just kept it a really a more limited analogous color palette instead of branching out into the pinks like I do later but this was a pleasing little painting for me I got up early in the morning to work on it and I've I've got to finish this video get everything taken care of because I've got to start now painting number nine in the 12 days of healing and get that shared with you guys as well all right enjoy this process please try it if you do if you're in the Monet cafe art group share it on there if you're a patron of mine share it in our shared google album and I can't wait to see what you do and I pray everyone is blessed please hang out oh also I never say this I always forget subscribe to my channel if you haven't already I really appreciate that it having more google subscribers I'm sorry youtube subscribers really does help my youtube channel so I appreciate it like this video comment if you like and come back often hang out till the end and I'll be bringing you more art lessons soon I'm finishing it up at this point and I really enjoyed doing this little painting you may have seen at the beginning I was working from my dining room table literally because my studio has so many pastels and things all over the place from doing so many of these challenge paintings each day so I hope you enjoyed I hope you'll try it I'll have more free art lessons coming your way and if you'd like to become a patron you can just click the link at the end of this video happy painting everyone