 Come on in Monet Cafe Studio with me today friends. I'm happy to bring you the first in the series in the month of June called It's Not Easy Being Green. And here we go. Welcome friends to Monet Cafe Studio. I'm really happy to bring you the first in this month's theme, the month of June, that I'm calling It's Not Easy Being Green. Some of you may remember, I got that from the Muppets, Kermit the Frog. I'm showing my age here. He's saying the song It's Not Easy Being Green. And that's often how it is for landscape paintings. It's not easy to paint an all green landscape. We don't want it to be monotonous and all green. So I've got some strategies and techniques I'll be teaching you this month, plus having a lot of fun on how to diffuse or tackle that green landscape to bring some more color and life to it and make it artistic, painterly and interesting. So I'm actually gonna be doing two paintings for this and showing you this technique that will bring some life to those green landscapes. So let's do it, here we go. The surface I'll be using is a professional sanded pastel surface, but as I always say, use what you have. I certainly did when I first got started. Often I could not afford these sanded papers. And the reference image I'm using is from unsplash.com. The reason I chose it is, yes, this is definitely a mostly green landscape. I'll have a link to this reference image in the description of this video. And I actually cropped it to make it more of a vertical format, taller and skinnier. But if you're a patron of mine, I went ahead and cropped the image or stretched it out actually in Photoshop to make it the same proportion as how I'm painting. So if you're a patron of mine, you will be getting a copy of this. And on that note, what is a patron of mine? It's simply a way you can support this channel, get extra content, all for only $5 a month. And you can do that by going to patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. And before we get started, do me a quick favor, go ahead and hit that like button, subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon to be notified of future videos. What we're doing or what I'm doing is I'm going to use some colors that are not green. And by laying those colors down first, it's going to give some color contrast, even if you decide to keep your landscape mostly green. If you don't layer too hard or press too hard, the influence of that underpainting is going to show through and it's going to bring life. It's just going to make your painting more interesting period when you use an underpainting that's got some vibrancy to it. So in this reference image, you can probably see it is mostly green except for the sky. There's a road, I love road themed reference images. There's some fence posts, there's some distant trees and everything does look very green. So by creating this underpainting, we're going to really give it a great beginning to have some more color interest. And what I'm using here, these are Derwent Ink Tense Blocks. I like them because they're vibrant. You put them on and then you add water and they just come to light. So Derwent Ink Tense Blocks come in various sizes. I got the Mac Daddy, which is the 72 set. And you don't have to use this for the underpainting. You could just use a pastel. I mean, I've got some pastels right here. By the way, if you're a brand new pastel artist and you're looking for a neat way to store some of your pastels, this is an appetizer tray. I use it now just to kind of clean up when I've been painting a lot. I just loosely organize them according to the color wheel and I keep my neutrals in the middle. So this is a cheap and easy way to have a kind of a starter pastel palette as a pastel artist. But what I was saying is you don't have to have the Derwent Ink Tense Blocks. I could literally take, ooh, isn't this a pretty reddish color here. I could literally take a pastel and do what I'm gonna be doing with these and layer it with pastel and then wet it with water. Pastel is paint. It's just in a dry form. So when you add water, it does liquefy it. There are some mediums like these Ink Tense Blocks that might be a little bit more bold in color. That's why I use them. So again, use what you have. All right, I'm gonna get started painting one of these and then get to the second one. Here we go. I actually decided to work flat for this first portion and I had to get a sip of coffee. It is Monet Café, you know. I also decided to keep these paintings right next to each other. So I'm just measuring my surface here and I'm going to put a little piece of tape. These are some little tapes. My daughter-in-law got me. They're also called washi tape or masking tape. And I liked it. It had different widths and I chose a width that was, I don't know, what is that? Like a half inch or so or maybe three quarters of an inch. And I did this so that you could see the paintings right next to each other. I also decided to create them simultaneously rather than one at a time. You'll see that. Here I'm sketching out the basic composition. It's a pretty simple composition and I am speeding this up substantially because you can't really see the sketch all that great. Anyway, I'm using a very light pencil. I'm not trying to get any serious detail with this just enough really to block in the big elements and shapes. All right, really speeding up the second one here. Okay, and now it is time to go ahead and add what's called an underpainting and a really great way to tackle a green landscape. This 72 set of Inktense blocks actually has two levels to it, which is nice. But again, you don't have to have that product to do this lesson. You will need some water if you're going to wet it like I am, if you have a water-friendly surface, a paintbrush and some paper towels. I like those just to control the flow of water. But as I was saying, you could literally just use a soft pastel for this step. What I often do is just use a pastel and some sort of blending tool like a paper towel or this piece of pipe foam insulation. And I will just layer the pastel late on its side and then blend it with some sort of blending tool. Or in my case, I'm going to be using water and you could do the same with a soft pastel. Like I said, a soft pastel is paint. It's just in a dry form. So I often just use pastels with water or alcohol to blend things. Again, make sure you're using a water-friendly surface. So here I have my Derwent Inktense block and which is literally just compressed ink. You're going to see it come to life. One of the reasons I like using this product is because, bam, the color is fantastic when you add water to it. So all I'm doing right now is focusing on the lighter values in this scene. I'm only using two values, yellow and the red. The yellow's for the lighter values and the red is for the darker values. Real simple, huh? So that isolates things into simple two values to get started. Now, you notice on the left side, I'm using cooler colors. I'm going to be using this blue for the lighter values, same as what I did on the right side. The lighter values being the land and the sky. I did do the road darker and the trees darker. And I wasn't real happy with the other blue that I had. I decided I wanted something with more of a purple. So I chose this kind of a purple, kind of a warm purple to create the darker values in this. So here you can see I'm doing the same thing. Just my darkest value is the trees and are the trees and the background trees and the road. And now it's time to have some fun and you're going to see the color explode. I am going to tell you why this helps a green landscape soon, but let's just stay with this for now. Okay, I guess you can see how the color is just fantastic. I like to work in sections. Sometimes I will let colors just blend together. I mean, you could mix this yellow and red together and get some pretty orange colors. The neat thing about compressed ink or these Dermont ink tints blocks is when they dry, they dry, they set themselves. They're not reworkable like watercolor and there's an advantage to that because if you let one area dry, you can go over it and you don't worry about it blending into the next area. But I like to go ahead and do it all at once. So I do keep my strokes directional when I'm doing this. And by the way, I am speeding this video up substantially because it's two paintings in one and I wanted it to be short enough for you guys to see it. And I think you can follow along. As I always say, you can slow my videos down on YouTube by going to the gear icon at the lower right side and click it and you can choose your playback speed. I always recommend to turn the volume down though because my voice will sound really weird if you slow it down or speed it up. All right, so I'm still having fun with this one. Now I'm gonna go ahead and share with you that golden or warm colored under paintings for green landscapes are one of my favorites. And that's because warm colors are complimentary to greens and blues. If you look at a color wheel and you look opposite of green, you're gonna see red and opposite of blues, you're gonna see oranges and yellows. And so those make wonderful color contrast to a green landscape. But I wanted to go ahead and do one that was blue and purple to show you that it still can be done. It just has a little bit of a different final result. However, both are better than working on just a white surface. And now we're gonna get started with the pastels. And if you're a patron of mine, you will be receiving this Patreon only content where I give you a little bit of color theory. I actually show you my pastel palette and talk a lot about the differences in greens, cool greens versus warm greens. And I go into how I arrange my pastel palette according to the color wheel. So if you're a patron of mine, you'll be getting that extra footage. All right, so let's take a look at these pastels I've chosen for this painting. Now that you know a little bit more about warm versus cool greens, you can see my warmer greens are on the left. Here are my cooler greens. They lean a little more towards blue. And I also have some warm colors that I'll be using kind of for the road and a couple of darks. This dark I use just for the darkest elements. These are for the background mountains and just, you know, me with purple gotta have a little purple. And those are the colors for the sky. I think I add a couple more to this, but this is pretty much it. And I do consider both of these paintings kind of like a study. This was mostly just to tell you and teach you about how putting down color before you start a green painting is going to really help those greens not look so boring and monotonous. And I think with this one, I usually would not choose cooler colors as the underpainting in a green painting. It still worked, but I still prefer the warm underpainting. So this is kind of like two or three lessons in one. You know, why should you use a warm color for a mostly green landscape? As you can see, I'm using this purple, kind of a dark value purple just to get in the darkest values that I see in the image. And I'm using, this is a chamois cloth or chamois, however you say that name. And I use it to blend on surfaces that aren't overly textural. And this surface color fix made by Art Spectrum is, it's got some grit, so it takes a lot of layers, but it's not so gritty that I can't use this or even a paper towel works for this. So blending things in just kind of softens things a little bit and gives a little bit of a consistency to your painting rather than it feeling so choppy. Now you can see I'm working on each painting. One at a time, I'm using the same color on the left and then I'll use it on the right. This pastel is a Terry Ludwig pastel and it's a little bit, and this one's even lighter, another Terry Ludwig, a little bit lighter in value. When you're painting a sky, typically values get lighter as they go down to the horizon line. They also tend to get a little bit warmer. Not always, that's just a general rule of thumb. And usually they're a little darker and cooler up in the heavens. So that's why I put a little bit of that blue that was just a tad darker. Now, can you see how the underpainting is already just kind of peeking through? And the more you resist the urge to overwork your painting, the more you're gonna see the influence of that underpainting. I got carried away with a whole bunch of things while I was painting this. I had to stop and come back and stop and come back. So I overworked it a little more than I had planned but I think you'll still see the influence and the difference of what an underpainting can do to a mostly green landscape. So now I'm using a green that's, this one is, yes, my darkest value green. And I'm just gently layering it over areas that would have some of that green and are still a little bit darker in value. So mostly the grasses and the trees. And doing the same thing on this side. Actually, I think this one is a little bit lighter and a little bit warmer, very soft pastel. I think that one's a Terry Ludwig pastel as well. Now my background trees, they're a little dark right now. What happens with trees in the distance, they're gonna get a little bit lighter and a little bit cooler in the distance. So that's another thing that can really help your mostly green landscape. I'm gonna have one of the other lessons in this series is gonna talk about just simply changing color temperature when you're working with a mostly green landscape. Like what I'm doing right now, this green is cooler in color temperature. I'm using it where things are far away and where things might have a little bit of shadow. Greens even cool off in the shadow. They lean a little bit more blue or a little more teal. So that's why I would use this color in kind of the shadowy areas of this landscape. So again, I'm gonna have another lesson where I talk about tackling a green landscape basically by exaggerating the artistic principles of the fact that greens typically get cooler as they recede into the distance and as with everything, they get lighter. So often, especially when we're beginner artists, we see a green landscape and we just see green. We might lighten things up a little bit but often we don't realize that we can exaggerate those basic principles actually that are in nature. It's just laws of physics. But often photographs lie. I know that might sound strange but a photograph, a camera simply just takes in all the information and often doesn't interpret it the way our eyes see it. That's why it's always best if you can, unlike my life, do what's called plein air painting. It means painting on location. I dream of doing that one day. Maybe when my husband and I get our house built and our lives slow down a little bit, I can actually do that. I can't wait. I don't think I'll do it in summertime in Florida but I would love to do it when the weather's good. All right, so what I'm doing now is I'm still using greens. Look, I'm using mostly greens. I'm just using warmer and cooler greens. Warmer greens for areas where the sunlight is hitting. By the way, I haven't gotten to my warmest greens yet but by the way you want to determine early on where is your light source? And in this I could tell from the reference photo the light source is from the upper right, from the right side. That's why, as you can see right now, I'm getting some warm highlights. What does the sun do? Well, it warms us up, right? And it warms up color and lightens up color. So that's why trees often have lighter leaves on one side because the sun's on one side or the other. And so I'm just looking and observing in this photo areas where the sun might be hitting on that right side. It's kind of on the right side of some of these little banks even where it's kind of curving up from the road. And by the way, there was a shadow or some shadows obviously since the sun is on the right side there were some trees, you can't see it but you can imagine it because there's these long shadows casting across from the right to the left on the lower part of the road. You'll see me develop those as I go. But in between the shadows were these little areas of light peeking through. And that's where I add my lighter and warmer values and colors of green. Again, because that's what the sun does. It's gonna lighten things up and it's gonna warm things up. So now I've got one of my lighter value greens that I use in this scene. And it is again, just to gently layer over some of the areas that I see are the lightest. Now right now at this point you can really easily see the difference between the one on the left with the cooler underpainting and the one on the right with the warmer underpainting. I don't know about you but I prefer the one with the warmer underpainting. I think the color is vibrant. But that doesn't mean that cooler underpaintings don't have their place. Even in a green landscape, if you just want a mood, color is so evocative. It gives you a feeling and a mood. So if you want a calming soothing mood or a mood where things might be foggy or a time of day where it's overcast I would go more for those cooler underpaintings. But if you want something that's more vibrant and almost feels like a bright sunny day or even maybe a little more autumn feeling you might want some of those warmer underpaintings. So that's really interesting how just the tone of the surface before you start adding those greens can have such a dynamic and wonderful effect on your final painting. So again, this is the first lesson in this month's theme of it's not easy being green. And so the goal of this one is to help you to realize don't be intimidated by mostly green landscape. Tone your surface. You don't even have to do it like I did. You could tone it one color. If you're a beginner artist, just get a beautiful golden orange or yellow or whatever. I happen to love vibrant pink underpaintings. That would be gorgeous for this one as well. You may also want to play around. I've had some of my patrons do this where you do some studies. Always, always, always do studies and more studies. That's how you're gonna get better. But do some studies, mark yourself off an area and make them small and tone your surfaces maybe four by five, five by seven. Tone them all different colors. Do one that's a vibrant green. Do one that's a purple, one that's a blue, one that's an orange, one that's a pink, one that's a red. And do the same painting on each one. I guarantee you, you're going to learn so much. You'll also learn what your favorites are. You know, all of us have our own little style and things we lean towards. That's what I love. I love that in my Patreon group where I can have a lesson. In my patrons, we have different sharing platforms and one of them's called a homework album. And I can get in there and I can look at what my patrons have done from my lessons and it's amazing how everyone has such an interesting style. I just think it's so interesting how God made us so unique. I think there's a verse that says we are fearfully and wonderfully made. So we need to embrace our differences because it's what brings color to this world. Can you imagine if we were all the same much like if the world was just black and white different values? Oh, I just praised the Lord that he gave us color. And there are so many fascinating things about color. I have some videos on that that are just a sign of intelligent design. Okay, I'm gonna quit on that tangent. Some of you guys know where my faith is and I just can't help but let it out. And okay, we're gonna talk about painting now. You can see I've added some, you know just a general idea of some of the shadows that are crossing the road. And I'm also going to cool things off even more in the distance. I noticed the background in the reference image look like there might be another band of trees or some mountains in the far distance. And I am again exaggerating the rule of color in that things cool off in the distance. That's why mountains, you know they're probably green, green trees, but they look blue or purple as they recede into the distance. So we can even break out that artistic license and just exaggerate that. So that's another way a mostly green landscape. You can go, hey, I think I wanna get some more color to this. Let me add a band of mountains in the distance. Or they could even be trees that are very, very far away. It doesn't matter. It's whatever you paint, it's amazing. You just suggest something and the mind, the viewer, the observer of your painting will put it together. So you don't even need a lot of information to do that. Here I'm darkening up the shadows a little bit more with some of that purple that I originally used. And in hindsight, I kinda wish I'd just left it alone and just done a little bit more of the highlights. Cause right here you can really see the difference between the underpainting of the warm colors and the underpainting of the cool colors. I worked on this a bit more. I added the fence posts and a little bit more brightness to the grasses. And I'm going to show you the final now and I want you to see if you can see the difference. This is the cool version with the blue undertones and this is the warm version with the yellow, orangey, red undertones. Again, this is a great way to approach a very green landscape. These underpainting techniques will bring life to your green paintings and create some color energy. I hope you learned a lot. I have more coming in the month of June on green painting fun and green landscapes. So if you've made it this far, I hope you subscribe, become a part of my Patreon family. And as always, God bless and happy painting. And I wanted to welcome you to the first in this month's series that I'm calling. What am I calling? Ha ha ha.