 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok, and today I want to talk a little more about color theory and some things that I think may be a blocking point for some of you in trying to figure out how to use color theory and how to actually apply it to your artwork. So let's talk about that. A few weeks ago, I posted a pair of videos all about warm and cool greens to try to help you understand the color temperature aspect of color theory. Color theory covers a lot of different areas, and that was just one of them. But the questions that came in here and on social media and by email led me to believe that maybe I should go backwards a step and talk about the reason to understand color theory because a lot of people think that color theory is going to tell them what color to pick, that somehow this science of color theory, just because it has all kinds of graphs and charts you can make, is going to tell you what color to choose when you're going to create a certain object in your art. But color theory is not a set of rules. It's not to say that every time you draw an apple, a green apple, it's always going to be the same color because green apples can be different color. They can be different color in different lighting or different types of green apples. Look at these two. They're both green apples, but they're very different. One is warmer, one is cooler. And when you're choosing what colors to use, your eyes are going to tell you what you're seeing. So you need to assess the color itself, the hue, the value, the intensity, temperature, et cetera, all those aspects of color theory. And then apply color theory so you can make the color you need because most mediums are not going to have the exact color that you want. And you're going to have to figure out what color is in that shadow. And you can look at that color and decide, is that warm or is it cool? Is it saturated? Is it desaturated? Lots of different aspects of color theory can give you the language around determining what that color is. But color theory doesn't say every time you paint a flower that's going to be a particular color that it's always going to be warm in the highlights and it's always going to be cool in the shadows. Sometimes that's true. Other times it's not. It depends on all the objects around it. What kind of light it is, what kind of day it is, all different kinds of things. So you need to practice learning to see color first. It's one of the reasons when I do any video here on YouTube, you'll hear me say a lot. Go look at pictures. Go to Google and just find some pictures of what you're trying to color. Because seeing the color is what is really important and then apply the color theory so you can create those colors. So I hope that that small caveat around the importance of color theory will help to explain why there's not just a scientific answer to very simply, you're always going to use this type of color in this area and that type of color in another area. You're going to be looking for what you see. Now this painting that I'm working on, I thought I would try to apply some color mixing and I wanted to see how much I could do without any pure colors. Like all of this is mixing of colors. A lot of times I do use colors straight out of the palette because I know how my colors react and I let them mix wet on wet on the paper. But this entire thing was mixed in the palette itself so that I could neutralize some colors and brighten others up and change the color temperature, change the saturation level. All those different things that I can do when I'm painting with watercolor. If you're using markers, you can do that with layering. If you're doing it with pencils, you can also do that with layering and using blending solutions, those kinds of things to build up different colors. So this video applies to other mediums even though I'm using watercolor in this. When you're creating something, and here I wasn't looking at a reference, but I had an idea in my mind for the types of colors I wanted for a lot of these objects. And this is on a giant piece of paper. This is a block that I've had for years, I'm trying to use it up. So I decided I was going to try to just do an epic drawing and then paint all the shapes in. This is much tighter than my normal type of watercoloring. You may notice it's just very different, but it gave me a chance to play with all of these color theory ideas. So here I'd done this entire section in a dirty version of a yellow ochre, because I didn't want to use the pure yellow ochre, but it wasn't dirty enough. It wasn't rock-like enough. So I started using a warm purple for some shadows and then used some lifting with a clean brush to just pull some color off the edge and soften and let those edges of the rocks blend. And then I switched to a more bluish purple so that I'd have different types of rocks in the rock wall. And throughout this whole painting, this wall changed more than anything because I just wasn't happy with what I had done. And the great thing about art is that a lot of times you can just keep going over things and fixing them. Now eventually they get really muddy and the wall did get muddy by the end, but it's in shadow, so it was okay. This is a pass where I tried to just put some more purple across the entire thing and leave just smaller highlights because the color was still too bright, was standing out too much, and all the objects in the foreground were getting drowned out because this area was screaming for attention. So I moved on to some other areas and these shingles that I put on this, oh my goodness, this took me forever to paint these shingles because I wanted to layer some colors on here. It was really hard to mix this much, this huge area of this pale green and it's a combination of three different greens to create the green that I wanted and I needed one version of it for the shadows in the area underneath of the roof and then some other green in the area that's out in the sunshine. It was painful and I don't know that I'll ever try that part again, but there you go. The thing that brought commonality to all of it because I had to mix up the color again and again trying to get it to be about the same, the thing that brought them back together was all of the texture that I added on top. So sometimes you can use that in order to change the temperature of the color because you're adding texture or details in a different color on top of a base tone. And so the yellow green that was underneath all of that was dirtied up by the other colors that were painted on top of it. So this is now the section where I decided I was going to add deep dark shadows. The roof casts a really heavy shadow on this wall. So I needed all this to just really disappear into the background. I painted that same kind of purplish color over top of it all once again to push all of that toward the back and to darken those highlights in because they were still just way too bright. And you can see here with the rest of the shingles that I was putting in, the ones on this outside edge that are out in the sunshine are much brighter. And the ones in the shadow area underneath of my hand, that's all much darker, but they're both warm greens. Just because it's in the shadow doesn't mean it's all going to be a cooler green. And in this particular case, I wasn't looking at something to determine the color. In my mind, I've done lots and lots of artwork throughout my life so I can make a guess at what these colors might be. You might need to go to Google and look for a picture of a building that has a particular light cast on it and analyze the shadow colors in it. Pull it up on your iPad or your computer and make it really big and see if you can figure out what kind of color temperature is in each of those areas and then be able to translate that by mixing whatever medium colors that you're using. Try to put them all together so that the object itself has a consistent color across it. So I wanted the whole building to look like it had these green shingles and needed some of it to look like it was out in the light and some of it to look like it was in the shadows. That was probably the hardest part of this whole painting. Even though the rest of it took me, I think it was three days to do this. Partway through, I was texting a friend and like, I think I bit off more than I can chew. So I needed a little extra encouragement to get through this one because it took a long time. I still have like five more sheets left of this paper and I do want to use it and get rid of it. But this painting was actually a test because I have some large paintings that I want to do. I thought a more illustrative style might work better than my normal kind of splashy watercolor style. So I chose to just do a drawing that had all the elements from, well, not all, but most of the elements from the 30 days to more confident watercolor class that I teach in one painting. So those who've taken the class will recognize the pots, the different flowers. I've got rocks in there. I've got railings. We learned fences, but you can do railings as well, doors, all different kinds of windows, window boxes, lots of different subjects in that course, but they're all in one painting. I was pretty excited to be able to put all that together. And this is available on Society Six if you would like a print or the original is available on my website. Now, before we go, I want to let you know on Thursday, I'm going to be doing more color theory and it's going to be a live video with Etcher, Etcher Studios, but here on my channel, we're going to talk about the color wheel. We're going to talk about making color mixes out of your colors that you already have. You do not have to get my colors for this. I want you to learn the colors you have, bring some watercolor paper and a brush and water, of course, and your paints and have your watercolor paper divided into two inch columns so you can swatch these the way that I'm doing. And then you can trim them down to make a ring like I have done. In May 1st coming up, once you get all that homework done and you have all those swatches for your colors, we're going to paint trees. Over on Etcher's site, I'll be teaching a class and these are some of the practice trees that I've made in an Etcher accordion sketchbook. I was practicing mixing colors, practicing textures, looking at pictures on the web for different types of trees and different types of lighting. And I landed on this one, which is going to be the lesson for the course. And we're going to paint live. This painting will be doing the tree and learning how to make the texture and the varied colors. We'll do negative painting for that background area, leaving some white for a path, painting some positive grasses, lots of interesting techniques in that class. On Thursday, you'll get all the information on how to register for that. And that's about it. I will see you on social media all week long, talking color theory. And I'll see you Thursday here live. Bye bye.