 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today I'm bringing you a lesson on the beauty of painting with neutrals. Now I know I paint with bright colors often, but there's also a true beauty to a neutral palette as well. So we're gonna talk about that in this lesson. Come on in the studio with Jackson and myself and we're gonna have some fun. I'd also really appreciate it if you would take a moment right now to like, subscribe, and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. And I'm able to keep these free lessons coming because of the support from my patrons on my Patreon page. If you would like to consider becoming a patron it's only $5 a month and you get extra goodies and extra content. I'm gonna be sharing a lot about the products that I'm using. Oh, and I just have to praise the Lord. Often when I start a painting I have to just praise God. Does anybody else do that? In this lesson I'll be using primarily a couple of sets actually of Terry Ludwig pastels. One's called Umber, Shadows, and Shades, and the other is called Shades of Nature. These have such gorgeous neutral colors. I'll be talking about them more as I paint. The surface I'll be using is Strathmore Pastel Paper. This is unsanded paper. It's quite affordable and it's really great for beginners. Although I know a lot of people love the sanded surfaces and there's my little lovely set of the Umber, Shadows, and Shades. And I started this painting because my last tutorial with a similar scene was so bright with color. You can see it's sitting there to the left. And I often share how neutrals actually help to make your brilliant colors be more of the star of the show. So I wanted to really do a neutral palette, tone everything down quite a bit. And I held up that little Prismacolor new pastel I'm using here. You can use whatever to sketch. I don't recommend pencil like pencil lead. Pastels don't adhere to it well and it stays kind of shiny. And I'm going to be using, like I said, primarily the Terry Ludwig neutral sets I mentioned, but I am going to use some darks at the beginning to establish my darks. These are also Terry Ludwig pastels. And at the end, I'm going to be adding a little bit of color. Like I said, when you have a primarily neutral palette, it allows you to really draw some focal attention to colors that might be a little more saturated with chroma. And I thought that this would be a neat way to show this set as well. I really do love the set. I have used it quite a few times, not really primarily like I'm doing right now. And I am going to, in a little while, you'll see me put up the other little color chart. This one right here to the right of me is the one for the Umber, Shadows and Shades. Terry Ludwig is great because they provide these in their sets and you need to go in and fill them out because that's really the only true way to see what those colors look like. If you pull it up online or if you take a photo and try to look at it later, they never look exactly the same as if you physically make a mark on it. But what I was saying is that in a little while, you'll see me put up the other set, which is the Shades of Nature, the little color guide for that set as well. Because I use a few of those, but I primarily used this Umber, Shadows and Shades set. And by the way, these values are a little bit darker. So if you're looking to get a good set of neutrals and you need some that are a little lighter, go with the Shades of Nature. If you want them a little darker, you can go with the Umber, Shadows and Shades. And they're very minuscule, dark, like difference there. And they're both just gorgeous. I find these sets are, they lean towards warm tones. They're earthy. You know, that's how I think of them. And they're just so beautiful. None of them, if you look at the set as a whole, and if you say you just took a picture of all of the pastels and convert it to black and white, that's a really great way to see the values. A lot of these values in these sets are kind of the same. You don't have extreme darks or extreme lights within the set. They're all kind of a middle, middle value with some subtle value differences between the two sets. So that's a little bit about those two sets. And I'm continuing to work here just building up my darks. I'm not working from a reference image because I'm working from my little study, my little sketch that I do. I like to do a preliminary sketch often before I paint. And then I can use those little sketches just to create a painting kind of from just that guide of values. You can see it to my left there. And by the way, I am speeding this up, but a lot of the techniques I'm using for this painting can be found in the video right before this one. It's called 12 Easy Tips for Painting Water. And in this lesson, I give you a lot of the tips that I'm using in this video. You saw me a little while holding my fingers up measuring the height of the trees above the horizon line. And I kind of brought it down. Often images in a reflection are mirrored from what's above the surface. And this is another one of the tips. Reflections tend to pull down. So I'm using a chamois cloth to pull these reflections down into the water. Later, I will layer some pastels, some flatness on that water. And all these techniques I talk about in that video. So I'm going to provide a link to that video in the description of this one. And also I'll make it the clickable link at the end of this one at the end of all of my videos, I have a little suggested video. So you can find that one there. And again, this this video is more about using neutrals and more about these two sets. Now that one I just held up was the first one that I used in the Umber, Shadows and Shades set, the green that I added. I'm going to hold it back up again in a second and show you. It's the color that's to the lower left on that Umber, Shadows and Shades guide. And I mark on my numbers or my things so much. I think it's G454 because right there's where I made the mark. So that is the green that I use there. And now I'm using it's like a cool gray. And I believe it's the B623 on the Umber, Shadows and Shades set. And I'd like to talk a little bit now about value versus color. And really the neat thing about working with sets like this where you limit yourself is you're forced because you can't go to your go to colors, the ones you normally go to, we all get kind of stuck in these patterns. But when you work from a set like this, you're forced to choose by value instead of color. It's like, man, I can't really choose that dark that I really want this blue for the sky. And the only one you have available say is a is too dark. So you're forced to pick something that's lighter in value, but it may not be the color you were thinking of the cliche sky. Well, guess what? That's awesome because it causes you to have some interesting color combinations. And also it really truly is more about value, the lightness or the darkness in a painting than it is about the color. That was like a total aha moment for me when I started learning that. And I really stress value a lot when I'm teaching. So I chose a value that I thought would work for the sky in the water. I normally would have never chosen this gray to do for a sky. So it is neat to kind of limit yourself. Now I know if you're a brand new pastel artist and you're so happy, you've got your little cherished pastels and you don't have that many. So you may say, well, I can't just pick a set and work from it or I can't. It's the only one I have. So I understand that as well. So I like to recommend if you're getting started, let's say you're you're choosing some pastels and I know they're expensive, but let's say you could just choose a few. Choose a couple of darks. These Terry Ludwig darks are really great. This is the eggplant color that I talk about so often. It looks almost black, but it's a dark purple and you can control how dark it looks by the pressure that you put on too. So get you a couple of darks, maybe a dark purple and a dark magenta maybe or maybe a dark green and then get you some colors that are kind of your core colors. Cool greens, warm greens, cool blues, warm blues and if you don't know what those are, I have videos on that. You can find anything on Monet Cafe. If you go to YouTube and type in Monet Cafe color temperature, if you do a search in YouTube, it'll pop up. Just type in Monet Cafe and kind of what you're looking for and it'll pop up. So back to the colors. Warm green, cool green, warm blue, cool blue, purples, maybe some oranges, some really warm colors, some reds. What's that? Seven colors I've mentioned so far and then maybe some pinks, yellows of course and yellows, a dark yellow by the way, is brown. That's what a dark yellow is. So get you some of those core colors and then choose three values of each color. Okay, so let's say you choose, you know, let's say you have 10 core colors you choose and you do three of each, three values of each color. That's going to be about 30 pastels. Well, look, that's what this little set is. Now, this one doesn't have a lot of those values. Like I said, it's more even in value for the set. But if you choose 30 pastels of varying values, and when I say three values, one that's lighter, one that's medium, and one that's a little darker, you're going to have your dark darks like I recommended. So you can have between 30 and 40 pastels and really create a whole lot of landscape paintings by working according to value. Now, as you grow as a pastel artist, you may want to add a few more colors to your palette. And that becomes something that's more your style and your taste. I love the uniqueness of being an artist. Oh, but also too, in your palette, you might want to get you some neutrals. Everybody goes for those bright colors to begin with. But I recommend getting you some some pastels that are a little bit dull in color, and they're going to do exactly what's going to happen in this painting. You'll see at the end when I lay down, I'm going to put down some teal colors, and they really make this painting go from maybe a little dull in color to a more an exciting composition and palette of color. So that's one of the beauties of neutrals. Now, I am choosing for these trees. Once again, I'm choosing things based on values. I didn't plan on doing like an autumn scene, but I thought, oh, these rusty colors are really so nice and kind of the value that I want in these trees. And so again, I was forced to choose according to value rather than color. The greens that were in these sets weren't quite the value that I wanted or the color that I wanted. So, you know, so I'm just kind of playing around with these colors. Now, this is one of the concepts that I talk about in the little tutorial on 12 easy tips about painting water. Whatever is above the horizon line that's close to the water, you want to bring it down. We're mirroring things, so that's why you saw me pull some of those rusty colors down as well. And now I'm still working on kind of pulling colors down. I'm using some of the same colors that are in the sky and pulling them down into the water. And often two values in a landscape painting are darker in the foreground and gradually get a little lighter. Well, that kind of works for water too. So, I have some of my water in the foreground a little bit darker. Plus, another tip in the video on painting water, is that things reflected in the water, light elements, the sky, for example, will always be a little darker in value in the reflection. And that happens often with anything that's white, like a white boat sitting on the surface. The reflection is going to be just a little bit darker in value than the white boat. So, keep that in mind when you're painting sky reflections. And so, I'm just playing with some of these colors and measuring. You see how I kind of measured. I'm getting in where those little spaces would be between those two trees. It also helps to squint your eyes. And if you have a hard time mirroring images, you can take your board that your painting's on or your painting and turn it sideways. Often we can see mirror images easier when they're turned sideways. And another tip that's in the other video is if water is moving or disturbances on water, often your shadows of like your trees are going to be just a little bit longer. But when the water is still and flat, usually the image is pretty much the same kind of mirror image. And I'm continuing to pull things down. It was kind of like my little painterly technique for this particular painting. But after that, you will see me add some very light strokes of flatness on that water. Another tip that's in the other video, water is flat. Now, it can have waves or disturbances that kind of move in different ways. But when we're talking about still water, it is flat. So I will take a pastel and kind of glaze it over the surface and it will give that illusion of flatness. And then later I'm going to add some little lines of like disturbance on the water. Like little bits of wind are catching the water. Now here I'm adding a little bit of a dark bank. Often when we have grasses right beside water, there'll be a little dark edge where the bank of the grasses are. And now I'm pulling down a little bit more of those rusty colors. Keep in mind this is unsanded paper. And here is where I have added the teal. I am sorry I missed the footage. But can you see, you know, it's sometimes I don't like to complain. But it is hard filming yourself often when you have life and everything else happening. Now I'm adding a little bit of that Prismacolor new pastel I used at the beginning. I thought with this palette some of that kind of magenta color with the teal would look really nice. So I added some teal in the background trees. Then I brought them down in the reflection. You see how I mirrored that. I brought some teal down into the foreground water. And I'm also doing that. Now this is one of the umber shadows and shades colors. I think it's from that set. I apologize that I didn't show every single exact pastel I'm using. And I don't even have the shades of nature set or the color guide all the way showing. So I apologize for that. Now I'm adding a little disturbance of water right at the bank. Often you'll have water moving by the bank. Here are those little marks I talked about. I've already glazed horizontal strokes. You can see over those trees. Doesn't that make the water feel flat? It's really pretty cool. I'm continuing to make the water in the foreground just a little bit darker. I think it really helps to keep your eye focused on the light areas. If it was really light in the foreground the whole thing would look kind of flat. So um and again this is unsanded paper. So I thought it was really cool to use a neutral palette on unsanded paper and give you guys some tips about neutrals and the benefit of neutrals. I hope you learned a lot. I enjoyed this painting very much. I plan on doing more with these neutral colors from the Terry Ludwig set. And I hope you'll take a moment to like this video. It really does help it get seen more on YouTube and leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought about it and also become a patron if you'd like to keep these free videos coming. It's only five dollars a month. It blesses so many artists to be able to get these free lessons. So as always God bless and happy painting.