 Welcome to Monet Café studio and more color magic fun using the color cube. If you didn't see last week's lesson this is so fun and in today's pastel painting tutorial we'll create three easy color studies of a poppy field just like last week's lesson. This lesson promises to be easy to follow along with some simple but very creative color palettes. Also you'll love the fact that I'm sharing all of the products that I use to create this including my favorite new color toy the color cube. Also this lesson is not only great for beginner artists but also for the seasoned artist who wants to get a little more dynamic color in their work. So come on in the studio I can't wait to have you join me for this lesson. If you already saw last week's lesson using the color cube then you know what kind of fun we're in store for and also how much you can learn creating these color palettes that are going to stretch your knowledge of color and color confidence. Invented by artist Sarah Renee Clark the color cube one and two is like a virtual treasure chest of color palettes. I'll have a link in the description of this video to be able to purchase them or just check them out. I'll also have a link to my first lesson using these as well and we'll be using many of the same products and techniques as used in the last tutorial. I love doing these color studies in pads of Strathmore toned gray paper. This is another one that you guys loved. I gave a lot of information on color theory. I love it when you guys recreate from these and share them and tag me on Instagram and my Facebook page. I love seeing them and I'm doing three at a time and in my 9 by 12 pad of Strathmore toned gray paper I have them divided into 3 inch wide by 5 inch tall rectangles and I leave enough space at the bottom to be able to fill in the colors I use from the color cube card. Here I'm deciding on my color palette cards to use. By the way I think you only would need one of the boxes unless you just got to have it like me. And for these color palette studies I am primarily using this set of pastels. It is the Unison 120 set of pastels. I love that it's arranged by color family and value and it makes it easy to find colors and match them up. So I'm taking this first card for the first color study. I'm just lifting up some of the colors in the box of ones that I think will work and I add a few more to spice things up as well. Again I encourage you to go back and watch the lesson that I did last week using these same color cube cards and I have a more thorough description on how to use them. I'll have a link to that video in the description of this video. I decided to try a poppy field with these color studies and it is from Unsplash.com. I love that site for copyright free reference images. And what's neat about this is often we would think this is the only way you could paint this right? Red flowers, green field. But this is going to stretch us to explore different ways we can paint a poppy field. And here's a little tip, something I like to do often when exploring different color palettes. I convert my reference image to black and white. Notice how it took away the color and the poppies actually aren't even that apparent anymore. And that's because the value of the poppies is the same value, lightness or darkness, as the grasses. So whatever color we give to these poppies, they need to be a different color contrast than what you choose to do the grasses. You'll see that little trick as I work on these. And by the way, this first painting on the Monet Cafe channel will be sped up slightly, but you'll have full commentary. The next two paintings will be sped up quite a bit more with limited commentary. And if you would like the full version of this tutorial, consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. It's a way to not only support this channel for only $5 a month, but to get all of the extra content I'm always talking about. I even have a homework album for my patrons where they can submit their work from my lessons and they have a chance each month to win prizes. I'm so darn proud of them, can't you tell? Now let's get back to painting. I obviously used one of the color cards from the Color Cube to get my color palette, choosing a few different values from some of the colors. And now I'm using the dark blue to get in the darkest element, which was the trees, of course, and a little hidden path beneath the grasses will serve as a nice compositional element to pull the viewer into the painting. Notice too, my composition is thinner and taller than the reference image, but it doesn't matter for a subject matter like this. So now I've got my next blue. It's a little bit lighter in value and I'm just kind of scumbling in to get a little bit of a different color blue. It looks almost the same. Now I'm blocking in my sky and notice too, the last time and this time, I do a lot of blocking in, which I think is very important always when you paint, but especially when you're working on unsanded surfaces. Remember, we're not going to get many layers if this is the surface you choose to use for these studies. Blocking things in is going to allow you to work the whole and not get over carried away with detail. Now I'm choosing another color based on value. That's one of the things that these color palette studies do is it forces you to choose color based on value. And this is another reason why I think it's beneficial to work from a black and white photo. It allows you to see the value more clearly. You can squint your eyes and compare your black and white photo to your painting that you're working on without color getting in the way. If that photo, if I had it, it's original color with the green and the red, it's a bit distracting sometimes. And value just kind of makes everything really much easier to see how light or dark something is. Another thing I love about these color studies and this month's theme, especially getting sketchy, doing more sketches and color studies and and just studies in general is because we typically, I know I did this as an artist, I just wanted to jump right into things and create a full painting. I wanted my painting to really look like something that I was comparing to other professional artist work. And you know, it just doesn't happen that way in life and in art. For example, I think you can follow me as I work here. I'm using that little bit brighter blue to get in some of the middle ground grasses. But for example, consider music. If any of you play music or have played music, you probably remember taking lessons and take piano, for example. You don't start with a full sheet of music and expect to learn that complicated song right away. You practice with scales and and just exercises for a long time before you're able to play a beautiful piece of music. And it is that way with art. So beginners, a note to you, don't get discouraged if you feel like, gosh, my painting doesn't look like all the others I'm seeing. When beginner artists join my Patreon page, some of them are a bit intimidated by some of my patrons who have either just been painting or patron of mine for a long time or perhaps they came from different mediums and they have a few years experience in those mediums. And I do have to get in some flowers, right? Notice again, in the black and white photo, you can't even tell where the flowers are. So I'm having to make sure I use some color contrast. My values are going to be similar, but I need to use colors that are contrasting each other, causing our eyes to notice them and pay attention to the difference in color. I'm popping in a little bit of the darker brown because I know some of those poppy flowers just like I teach in many of my videos where there's flowers, I typically put in a little bit of dark first and build my flower up from there. Purposely trying not to put too many of those darks receding into the distance because we know things lighten up in the distance. Now I'm using a little bit of this brownish color to give suggestions of flowers in the distance. And now you can see that I pretty much have everything blocked in. And now it's time to just have some fun play with some of the color and the value. I'm adding a little bit of this beigey light color to the sky. And the reason I do that is I want my painting to feel cohesive and connected. And this is actually what's called color echoing using a similar color throughout the painting. And I really love how it brings the painting together. I added a little bit of that blue you can see in little bands in the back to give a little bit more of that shadow. I didn't want to use that really dark blue. And now I'm giving a little of those bands or it was in the background field to indicate some grasses. The grasses in this case are kind of brownish. And I'm adding a little bit of that topi color to the tree. Now look at the trees. That gave a hint of the trees looking green. Now why would that happen? Well it's because I put a blue down and I put a beige down on top. What makes green? Well it's typically blue and yellow and that beige was a warm color. So it gave a little bit of an illusion of green. Many people falsely believe you can't mix pastels to create new colors. And while you can't do that like watercolor or acrylic, you can actually layer pastels very gently to create new color illusions. I was really liking this very neutral palette. Almost every color up to this point was a color or value that was on the original card from the color cube. Notice how you can still see that underlying darker area receding into the distance. And I'll gradually be adding flowers and grasses very impressionistically on top, but trying not to totally cover up that darker area that looks like deep roots of grasses. Here I'm adding some of these blue flowers and just sprinkling them throughout the composition, gradually getting them smaller as they recede into the distance. And eventually they just make like linear blankets of color as they go way back into the field. Things just flatten out in the distance. Aren't these colors so unique? I thought it was just really appealing. I like to add a little bit of a darker value to the sky in the upper heavens. Typically that's how skies are and adding a little bit more of that color, giving an idea of just some wispy grassy marks. And these are fun because you can keep them a little bit abstract. They don't have to look just like the photo. And I really like painting like that anyway. Popping in a little bit more of this brown. And I think this is where I start to get a little creative. I thought, you know, I like this palette, but let me play. So what I did is I decided to go with a pop color and I felt like this purple magenta color worked well with the browns. It's still in that family leaning a little bit more towards the warm side of the color wheel. And I thought it made a nice compliment to some of the other colors in the color palette. And so I just have a little fun with this. Add a little bit to the trees. Again, this is color echoing, making sure things feel connected in your painting. And I am having to press pretty hard at this point because, you know, I'm losing my ability to layer. And now I decide I'm going to lighten up that. Oh, I covered over that color with the new color I was just using because I didn't use that one blue I had down there. So I just decided to kind of mark it out by adding the color that I had used. And now I'm going to add a highlight to these magenta brownish colored flowers. And so I just go with a lighter value in that color family, which was that kind of middle value pinkish mauve color. I'm finishing up at this point, I added a little bit of light value to the horizon line right there between the sky and the land, carving in a little bit of negative spaces between the trees to make like some sky holes and popping in a few more little fun marks and pressing really hard. So these show up. It was so fun creating a poppy field that was so different from the reference image. That's to me one of the fun things about doing these. And also it's a huge education for you learning about color, how color works, learning about value. So the great thing is you're having fun while you're learning. Here's a close up. And again, it's a bit abstract, but really fun and different. All right, are you ready for painting number two? And before that, if I could ask you very quickly to go ahead and like this video, if you like it, if you've been with me this far, you probably do. Also, I love it when you comment and leave me your feedback. Also, please subscribe. I would love to have you as part of the family. Now I'm using color card number two. I really liked this color combination. Oh my goodness, those orangey colors and that greenish yellow with the turquoise. And it's a palette that I would not normally go to or create. So it's stretching me to try new things. And I will definitely use this color palette again. And again, that's the great thing about these exercises is that you can keep them in a notebook like I showed you. Use whatever you want, but I'm using the Strathmore gray tones pad and you can protect them with a piece of tracing paper. You would just tape it. I always tape it just up to the top and keep them all in your notebook. And whenever you're working on a reference image you like, maybe you're not real keen on the color palette, you can go, aha, let me pull out my color notes notebook and or color study notebook. And you'll have your own great reference to color palettes that you've tried and you can pick out your favorites. So I highly encouraged doing these. Now in painting number two, you saw I did use one of the cards from the color cube. In painting number three, I'm going to show you just like I did in the video before this with similar content. You don't have to buy the color cube. I'm always trying to stress that I don't want you spending money you maybe don't need to be spending or maybe you just don't have it and you can't. I have other ways. I certainly couldn't buy all these things early on and often now I'm still on a budget. I often have companies that will give me the product complimentary to create a video and just so you know I do not create videos for products and say I like them when I don't. I will just politely refuse to create the tutorial. I only want good things to say so I use products that I really like. Look at that turquoise and orange in this. Put a little turquoise in the sky. I'm loving this color palette. Oh my gosh that turquoise color. I think I grabbed that turquoise. The really bright one little darker. That one from the Sennelier set called the Paris Collection. I still say it is the best value for quality pastels. It's a hundred and twenty half sticks of Sennelier pastels for about a dollar a stick sometimes less than a dollar a stick. You can get it on DickBlick.com or Amazon. I'll try to put a little link to that set in there too because the unison set that I used that I showed at the beginning of this video is a little pricey much more than the Sennelier set. But I think the Sennelier pastels are awesome. Alright so I'm finishing this one up. Here's a close-up and again another fun impressionistic almost abstract painting with a beautiful color palette. And here we go with painting number three and instead of using the color cube I pulled a painting that I like. This is a Monet painting. I thought I wanted to go a little wild and crazy with this one because the first one was maybe a little neutral and drab. The second one was a little limited in its color palette so I thought let's just pull out all the stops and get crazy. So I'm pulling out some of the colors that I see in this painting and there were a lot of colors in this painting and I think this actually made a good point. While I used more color in this third one I didn't necessarily like it any more than the others. As a matter of fact I really love the first one that I did even though I love that middle one too. I just I don't normally use those browns and tans and topy colors so with the one I'm working on now that has so many colors or you will see I've chopped off some of the colors at the bottom you could kind of see when I marked them down. I don't really like it more than the other two so don't think you have to have a million colors to be able to paint nice color palettes often like many things in life less is more and I find that if you limit yourself to color palettes or to colors in your palette it feels a bit more harmonious than if you just have wild and crazy colors all over the place. I started with a lavender sky on this one because I was pulling that from some of the purples that were in the Monet painting but I realized as I progressed into the painting it did not feel connected. Notice how there's not a lot of that lavender in my grasses there's more of that blue underlying color so guess what I just changed it to blue I did brush some of it off because this is an unsanded paper you can't get a lot of layers I used a stiff bristle brush and just brushed off some of that lavender I just didn't show the footage so I think it feels more connected now with the blue base underneath and the blue sky look at that crazy color but this one was fun too I thought it would be fun to look at these all in black and white first. Now do you remember when we saw the black and white version of the original reference image and the field portion was all rather the same value and I did deepen some of the darker values in my version but let's turn the lights on. I'm dissolving this transition where it just gradually goes from black and white to color. You know I learned something new every time I do these and I'm making it a personal goal to keep this one particular notebook to fill it full of color studies I think this is going to be such a useful tool for you hope you learned lots become a patron if you'd like to join my patreon family and please subscribe to Monet Cafe as always God bless and happy painting