 Welcome to Moumne Café friends, subscribers, and visitors. Today I'm going to talk about using dynamic color while doing a pet portrait. Also some tips on pet painting. And a lot of times I get questions as to my color choices because you know I love color and I exaggerate color. So in this lesson I'm going to take a little more time to talk about how to get that dynamic color in your artwork. Oh, and here's my little pet right here. He's usually my sidekick, Mr. Jackson. Hello friends, visitors, and subscribers, and welcome to Moumne Café. Today I'm going to be doing a dog portrait. And if you've seen my channel, you know sometimes I get a little cameo appearance from my Jackson here. And surprisingly I haven't done a portrait of him, so I need to get to it. But anyway, I'm going to be doing a portrait of a little pug. Oh my gosh, they're so cute. But this one in particular is so adorable. Her name is Molly and her owner is so precious and sweet. I actually think she found out about me through either this YouTube channel or the Facebook group, Moumne Café art group. But anyway Jackson, you're heavy, so I'm going to put you down. But anyway, I want to talk a little bit about in this particular video how to get that personality in the dog. Because not all breed, not an individual dog within a breed, they don't all look the same. They have their own little nuances and personalities and differences in their expressions. So Molly is certainly a little beauty and a sweetheart. So I hope to really capture her personality in this. So anyway, join me now and we're going to have a lot of fun. All right, let's get started. Now it's always a good idea to do some sketching before getting started with any portrait, whether it's people or animals. And I like to do quite a few of them. And it's a good idea also to ask the owner for a few different photos, not just the one that you'll be painting. So I did a total of three sketches. I'm speeding this up real fast because it's not about the sketch. It's just about making the point that you want to get really accuracy by the time you get to the final painting stage. And so doing some sketches is great. I didn't measure as accurately in these sketches as I do in the final, which you'll see here. Now I'm going to be using in this painting a product I forget often. It's called Pastel Board. And I really love it. It's made by Ampersand. And it's a hard board. It comes in different colors in different sizes. The piece I'm using is an 11 by 14. And it comes protected covered in this plastic. But the grit of it is actually really nice. It takes a lot of layering. And I happen to love that neutral gray color that it comes in and some of the other colors as well. Now one of the disadvantages about these boards is they're heavy. They're not really great to put on your easels. So I just propped mine up on the bottom of my easel. Now here is where I got more serious about getting Molly's proportions and dog proportions in general accurate. And for me it was all about those eyes. Molly has such an expressive, sweet little look to her face. So I wanted to make sure I captured that. Now I love using when I'm using like this gray board. I like using a combination of charcoal pencils for the sketch. And this is a neat set. It comes in different values. You've got dark, black, medium, black, gray, and white. So I'm really doing a value study with my sketch. And it's almost like taking value notes so that when I get to the final painting I kind of have a roadmap to go by. I want to show you also my pastel choices. But I'm going to get a little deeper with this and actually give you some reasonings as to why I chose these particular pastels. Now here I am in Photoshop and I hope this is large enough for people to see. But what I've done, I'm going to play around with this a little bit. What I've done is I've pulled up the photo of Molly that I'm using as a reference photo, agreed upon by the owner. And I've also put up here in the corner my pastel selections. I'll probably enlarge those a little bit as I talk. But what I want you to notice is I'm going to go through the photograph and give you my reasoning for enhancing certain colors. I really hope this helps some people. Actually, let me take this and kind of enlarge this picture of Molly real quick. It's hard for me because when I do the screen recording, it's hard to see things. All right, let me scale it a little bit. All right, so let me make this a little bit bigger and now we can kind of view it better. All right, so in looking at this right away, and I don't know where this ability came from to be able to see certain colors, it may just be working with it a lot. But I've gotten to where I can just look at something and see where that color is that I'm going to enhance. Now, for example, let me just pick this eye. It's the right eye of the dog with the left eye on the screen. This particular eye right here, I'm going to blow it up again, is full of color. Oh my goodness, there is so much color in this eye. And at first glance, you think, oh, that's just like a lot of gray, a little bit of brown, and that looks a little bit of a bluish gray. But you can really magnify those and punch up those colors for your final painting because let me show you what I see. I'm actually going to go ahead. I don't do this when I'm working from the reference photo, but it's something you can do to get an idea of how to do this. I'm going to go ahead and adjust this image. Oh, I have to finish transforming it. I'm going to adjust this image with the saturation and the vibrance. I'll just show you this little scale. You can change and Photoshop the vibrance and the saturation. I'll leave it right up here so you can see it. Vibrance just kind of makes things more vibrant. You can see it's a little bit like it kind of punches up the saturation a little bit. Saturation is more of the actual color. When I do that, let me just punch up the saturation all the way. You can see, doesn't that look like more green in there? Look at this. Look at this green, that little teal green in there. Look how that red just popped out. Isn't that awesome? What you do is you kind of look for the subtleties and you punch them up. You intensify them. I'm going to take it back down. Now it's back to looking dull. You don't have to paint what you see. You can interpret it. Again, now you might, since you saw that enhanced like it was, you might now be able to see, oh, yeah, that is kind of like a neat teal bluish green. This has got a little blue down in there and this right here is going to be your highlight. Notice and you want to keep your highlight. This is not an example of color, but you want to keep your highlight formed with the shape of the eye. This is a round spherical object, so notice how that highlight is curving around it. So little things like that. You get a little white highlight right there, so there's a lot going on in this eye full of color. So it's just a really, really neat way to be able to see color, is to look at it, analyze it. Oh, I got to get out of this before I can do anything. I'll just leave it like that and then intensify it, you know, with your color choices. So actually, let me go here. I need to move this here. Now let's look at this side. This is also full of color. Look at the reds in here. You've got reds. You've got oranges. Now here's an interesting thing. A lot of times people paint the whites of the eyes as white. But let me show you something. This is not white. This little part of the eye right here. I'm going to use something like a little color picker here. Let me get my paint brush over here. I know you can't see what I'm doing. Let me make it smaller. I'm going to show you what this color really is next to white. So let's look at something that is kind of white. Probably the lightest thing is kind of up in here right now. So I'm going to use this little thing called a color picker. I'm going to hold it down. It has a little eyedropper. I get to pick that color. I just picked it. Now let me take it over here to something that is white and let me show you the color. You see that's not white. That's kind of a grayish color. So you want to make sure you're really, really analyzing these colors and not just doing what your brain says. Now let me look again at some other things going on here. You may notice in the final painting that I have a lot of blues and purples going on in the nose, okay? We have a tendency to just go, oh let's just paint this nose all gray with maybe some little black highlights. But no, there's so much color going on here. There's lots of greens going on in this nose right here. There's purples all throughout here. Let me punch up that color again. Let me intensify it with the vibrance and saturation. All right. That's the saturations really making it really warm too. Let me get the vibrance here. Okay, you're starting to see some of those greens now and I'd have to take some of the warmth away from this. It's a little too warm to see all the other stuff. But you can really, really interpret, take the subtleties of the color that you see and punch them up, intensify them a little bit. You know, maybe a lot if you want. So that is just really something that you can do. It's not all that hard. You just got to practice, but start small. Practice with something simple. Don't start a big, huge project. Like right now, I'm just as I'm talking, I see purple in here over the eye. I don't know if you can see that, especially probably not if you're viewing this video on your phone, but there's purples in these shadows. I also want you to notice something too. I found this photo very interesting. Look at the division here. The right side of the photo is warm. You see the warmth in the muzzle here and the warmth over here. Look at this side. This side of the nose. It's cool. You see the cool in the shadows here. Everything over here is cooler than it is over here. And, you know, a lot of times photos aren't correct, you know, and you don't want to follow everything that's in the photo. But in this case, it made for a really neat interpretation of this to become a painting. All right. So now let me talk a little bit about these color choices right here. I'm going to kind of blow this up a little bit. Let me transform this. Thank you for bearing with me for this. Okay. So I'm blowing this up. I'm going to leave the little part of the dog showing here so you can see it. All right. So I have, I already knew there was a few things going on here. I know I need colors for the dog's fur. Okay. So we've got a good gradation. Some of the shadows behind the dog's fur is actually very reddish and you can lay down your darks and then lighten them up as you color. You'll see as I'm painting how I do that. I put the dark is, you know, like even in this little area of his head, don't just put brown down. I put a darker reddish color and then I I glazed pastels over it to lighten it up and have that showing through. So it's kind of underneath. So look at all these neat and pretty reds, oranges, and yellows I've got. And my lightest light here, well, in the whole painting, the lightest light is probably this one or maybe a couple of these. These are pretty light too. Okay. So I don't have any white in here. This is kind of a neutral gray, gray, blue, purple, something. So these are my fur colors. All right. Now let me go over here to my darker fur colors, like that are going to be in this warm side of the muzzle and the eyes. See, this is at the square like this big square ones. They're Terry Ludwig pastels. And I'm not going to go through a whole pastel example here of explaining what up they all are. But I let color guide my choice rather than pastel. I mean, sometimes, of course, you want to use your, your softer pastels at the end of the painting. But if I don't have that color, I just use it, whatever, you know, whatever it is that I need, I grab it and I use it and I make it work for me. Okay. So, so these are some of my darkest darks here. These are some of my darkest darks here, but I haven't kind of divided up by color temperature. Okay. Again, so fur colors, warmer fur colors, some of my darker warmer fur colors. These are some of my cooler colors from value scale from dark down to light. Now I've got a little bit of blues and some blues that have more greens, teal-y blues in here like this. But these are going to be my cooler temperatures in here from dark down to light. Now I love purples in the shadows. There's lots of purples that you can punch into this painting and give it some life. Purple just adds life, you know, it's really, really a fantastic color. Now these down here, it's very important for me anyway. I've learned, I didn't used to always add many neutrals in my work, but to put some neutrals in because these punchy colors are going to show up even more with some of the neutrals. And also neutrals are in areas where you want them to recede or you want them to not have so much focus because you don't want your whole painting to be shouting. And now here are the, the spicy colors right here that I love. I added, I think one more before the painting was over. I think I maybe before this whole painting was done. I might have added two more pastels. One was a really pretty blue teal color and like a brown, another neutral I think. So these are the spice colors. This red, if you just kind of squint your eyes and look at this, that red is like popping. And these are some of the colors that I used in the eyes. Okay. And that really made those eyes stand out for Molly. For me, Molly's eyes are just so expressive and such a sweet look. And I really wanted them to be the focus of the painting. All right. So I hope this helped you a little bit with the color choices. I'll try during the painting process to talk about it a little bit more. And I hope that helped. I know I've had some of you saying, I really want to know more about how to choose color. Okay. So hopefully that helps. All right. So let's get started with the painting. I had someone make a very useful and practical comment about something I used to do and I haven't done it in a while, which is to actually make some marks of my pastels and show you the colors. So I've put a little piece of newsprint next to the sketch here and I'm going to actually show you the colors next to the painting. Now that is my darkest dark. Believe it or not, it's not a black. It's more of a dark purple. This is a dark, dark blue gray. So I'm going to speed this up a little bit, but it's the same colors you saw in my little plate. And I liked my little gray plate. It happened to be one I already had because it kind of was similar to the gray background that I'm using. So it made my colors kind of accurate. Color and value is dependent upon what it's next to. Darker colors look darker on something or a color looks darker on something light than it does on something dark. Okay. And I had a little video not too long ago that I gave some neat little visual illusion examples as to how that works. So you've got to keep that in mind with whatever service you're working on or whatever colors are next to each other. But don't get overwhelmed by all of this. A lot of it is just trial and error in practice. And if you're just beginning, this may be a little bit like, whoa, look at all that stuff she just talked about. But don't think you're supposed to know all this right away. You're not. It'll come. It will all come. And I have plenty of other videos that talk about more simple paintings and exercises that you can do. And as a matter of fact, I guess I'm not going to speed up me putting these colors down because it's kind of nice to talk. As a matter of fact, my goal, when my life gets a little bit more stable, I won't go over my saga again that some of you know, is to make some very user friendly beginner to intermediate videos to where it is a step by step where you can literally just follow right along. I'll show you at the beginning of the video what the end result's going to look like. And we may have some products that are affordable for you. And I've got something I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag yet. I've got something in the works that could be very awesome for Monet Café and for beginners who would like to get supplies that are affordable and good for these videos that I'm making. So I can't say any more about it, but it's very exciting. So anyway, lots of great things coming on the Monet Café art train. All right, now I'm going to speed this up and then we'll get started with the painting. Now I really apologize here that I typically have my camera on my right side because I'm left-handed. I was trying to do something a little different. I've had some of you know, in my, in the Monet Café art group on Facebook that I've had a shoulder injury. It's actually doing so much better. And I really think due to a lot of prayer, we've got such a great group on Facebook. But anyway, I was kind of trying to, it kind of hurt to turn the way I was turning with my camera to the other side, but it didn't work. So I ended up moving it to the right anyway. So for this first part on this eye, you're not going to be able to see the marks as good as you do in just a minute. Okay, so this part doesn't last that long, a little bit of the work on the eye, and then you'll be able to see my mark making a lot better. But you know, you can already see how I have intensified the color in that eye. Now you can, the cool thing about colors, you can go bold to begin with. You can always tone it down if you need to. But I wanted to definitely exaggerate it at the beginning. So I've sped this up a little bit here. And for the most part, the rest of this video is going to be just watching me work. The main point was for me to do that part in Photoshop to kind of give you my reasoning for color choices. And I've actually only got so much ability with my computer and my internet speed where I live now to work. So that's why sometimes I have to kind of speed them up at the end here. So bear with me and I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you guys enjoyed this. I know I did. And I hope you learned something about using dynamic color in your artwork. And you know, it was such a blessing for me just looking at this sweet little face. What a precious little baby this girl is. And I hope you'll try some pet portraiture and try some experimenting with color. So happy, happy painting. It was a blessing to be with you today at Monet Cafe.