 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm glad you've joined me here today where we're gonna talk about how to create paintings with explosive color. This is part of my dynamic sky series actually on repurposed paper that I'll be talking about soon. I'm calling it fire in the sky. Hello and welcome to Monet Café and this video is proof that Monet Café is not a physical place but it is wherever you are and wherever your painting space is. As and where I am right now I'm not in my home studio but I am bringing lessons to you still from my parents basement. Many of you may know that my mother passed away not long ago and I'm here staying with my dad and we're just all helping each other through this grief and loss but I've set up in the basement here. They have a beautiful home and a beautiful basement but I'll give you a little tour of kind of what the setup is here and I'll be here as long as it takes to help us all get through this. So here is a little tour of my setup. The basement area I'm working in is actually bigger than my small home studio. So I have plenty of room but I did have to pack up a lot of supplies just to make sure I had what I needed. Lots of little things. I did actually video on some of those carry-all bins just a video or so ago from Arteza. I love those and I brought plenty of pastels so I didn't have to worry about not having something. I took their coffee table and put it underneath for a second layer under of papers and things I need. These are some extra supplies I have in the windowsill. Those are my neutrals there. So I definitely have lots of room which is very nice. Now lighting is always a challenge especially not just when you're painting but when you're producing videos. So I have my ring light you saw there. I love my ring light. I have that in my Amazon shop by the way along with a lot of other things in my videos and I have my computer editing setup station on one wall. Of course I have some pastel books for my patrons. I'm trying to get started back with story time that we have on my Patreon page. It's a lot of fun. Now this is the backside of my studio area on the other side of the fireplace. A beautiful cozy room which is definitely comfortable and peaceful. So I'm creating some paintings of skies dramatic skies on some repurposed pastel paper. I have a video where I showed how I repurposed this piece of pastel paper. It's you art paper from a previous painting and now I have already applied the underpainting using acrylic ink and watercolor and you art paper receives that beautifully. And I've also already applied some darks with one one little new pastel for the darks. So I'm gonna get started with this painting. You will see it from start to finish and I'm glad you're here. I hope you'll subscribe if you haven't already. Like this video, make some comments and I look forward to seeing what you have to say and see if you try repurposing paper yourself. All right here we go. Here I am marking off my painting area on the repurposed you art paper like I mentioned. My reference image is one that I took from my own backyard and I really liked that long format. So my paper even though it was wide wasn't quite the same dimension. So I just have a piece of masking tape here even though I use artist tape a lot. Masking tape works well as well and the area will end up being 8 inches by 21 inches. And now let's get started with this underpainting. I love underpaintings because they really give a roadmap for your final painting and in this one I'm using a combination of acrylic ink made by Dayla Rowney. You can use whatever brand you want and watercolor. So this is the golden color. I think this is Indian yellow acrylic ink. This video won't be about the underpainting necessarily like I do in a lot of my videos but you can still see the process. And what I'm doing here is I'm really just, I put some just directly on my brush here because I wanted it a little darker. What I had used before was a little bit diluted with water. But what I'm doing here is I'm really just getting the concept of the painting, the big shapes. I have a video I just shared on that and now I'm moving to watercolor. I'm just looking at this reference photo and I'm trying to create a little bit of the color and the energy. Now at this point you do not want to get too tied up into details. This is about the motion and the energy and just really giving yourself a good painterly very loose start. So this is proof though that you art paper is definitely water friendly. You know it is because I washed this paper off from a previous painting and now I'm using it once again to apply some wet mediums. The watercolor, I don't think I've ever combined watercolor and acrylic ink for an underpainting but I didn't quite have the colors of acrylic ink that I needed for creating some of the colors on this. So once again this is just a big energetic base to begin the painting. I'm continuing to use the watercolor to get some of the darker cloud shapes in the sky and again just creating big shapes. Also when you do this use the biggest brush possible. It really helps to create that painterly feel. And now I'm pretty soon I'm going to be adding some acrylic ink. I know that I can get a little bit of a darker color with acrylic ink and I want to go ahead and establish some of those darker areas. This is Purple Lake acrylic ink and I believe I did use this green one here. I'll have to get the name of that color. And first I just used the Purple Lake. Now I mixed that right from the jar. I didn't add any water to this and I could have used my other big brush but I think I didn't wash it out or something. So I'm using this just to get in these tree shapes. Generalities is all you need at this point. Actually my paper was still wet here. I didn't wait for it to dry. If I had waited for it to dry the Purple Lake acrylic ink would have showed up even darker. So just getting in my shapes and then once I'm done with this I am ready for the pastel. Once my surface is dry I'll be using a new pastel spelled in new pastel by Prismacolor. This one's called Spruce Blue. They're a little bit harder. I do like my Prismacolor new pastels. They're great for initial layers and I find myself using this little Spruce Blue for my darks. I needed to re-establish my darks. Now I'm going to make a point early on in this video that you'll see as I create the painting. You'll see this in action. I am typically going to be working darker to light. Now I know that those background trees are going to be lighter. Oh let me pause here. This is a little piece of packing foam. It's like the little packing peanuts and it's really great for blending. Being away from home I didn't have all of my supplies. I usually use a piece of pipe foam insulation but I asked my dad could we find anything that has a similar consistency and I found these packing peanuts and I think I'm going to order them. Just keep them in my studio because they're really really great for blending. Okay back to the background trees. They're a little darker now but you'll see me in this painting working dark to light and I'll be talking more about that strategy throughout the video. Now here are the primary pastels I used. I love this Paris collection made by Sennelier. These are gorgeous. Now this is 120 half sticks of pastels and I love buying half stick sets because you get more for your money. You don't have to buy the whole stick. You get double the pastels for the same price typically. Look at these gorgeous oranges and reds. One of the reasons I chose this set for this particular painting and this is a great set with lots of different colors and values. I will be using another set of pastel for a few colors that I will show in a minute. So what I've done here is I have gotten one of the darker colors. This is sort of like a gray very neutral gray purple and it's not so dark like the trees but I'm just doing kind of what I was doing in the under painting. I'm establishing my large shapes. Now because this was a piece of repurposed paper and because Sennelier pastels sometimes have little edges on them when they're fairly new. If you just use one fresh out of the box they have these little tails. You kind of have to grind them down but because of those two aspects it's not going on as smoothly as maybe it would with a brand new flat piece of UART paper. But I don't worry about these things because I know that in time pastels start to layer themselves and usually with initial layers I do a little blending anyway. I'll break out my little packing peanut again. You see that? That's exactly where I'm talking about where it had a little ripple in the paper. So don't stress out if that happens. I do have a lot of comments here on the YouTube channel also in our Facebook group Monet Cafe Art Group and from my patrons from my Patreon page where you're a little bit like oh you feel like things aren't just working out because it doesn't have this smooth application but typically that's just the nature of this medium. Often we get our things smoothed out the more pastels we add. Now here you'll see what I was talking about the Sennelier pastels. This is one I haven't used yet and sometimes you kind of have to sand them off a little bit to get a smooth flat edge. So I just put me a piece of watercolor paper next to me in order to be able to do that with some of these pastels. And because this is such a wide format painting I'm having a little bit of a hard time and finding a place to put the little reference image like I like to insert for you guys to refer to while I'm painting. By the way my patrons from my Patreon page you will get some extra goodies from this video. One will be the actual reference image in your Patreon post and also you're going to get a breakdown of my colors. I'm going to give you a color chart. And by the way if you're not sure what a patron is I have a Patreon page. It's patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. $5 a month is all it is to just support this channel and it helps keep these free videos coming but you also get not only some extra content but also it's really just kind of neat. I get to see your work more and I have a lot of other little special things that you can unlock by becoming a patron. I have the special groups, special Facebook groups, special Instagram group and a Discord server, all kinds of neat little things that our patrons can experience. So it's awesome and I love my patrons. Thank you all for supporting me. Alright, so back to my point about working dark to light. Some of these color choices that I'm making for the sky are not only darker in value than I may end up with. They are also more brilliant in color. You remember the title of this video? How to create dynamic color. That's one of the most common questions that I get is how do you make those color choices? How do you punch up the color in your painting? And let me brag on the Sennelier Paris set though. The 120 pastels that you saw that I showed earlier. It just is full of dynamic color choices. It has some brilliant oranges, reds, turquoisey colors and I've found it really is a great overall set. If you're looking to invest, Sennelier is a great brand but you're going to see my unison set soon. That's also a great set. Alright, so look at the color choices I'm making. You don't see that brilliant pink or magenta I'm using in the sky. It's really more subtle. But what I'm doing is I'm taking the colors that are already there and I'm intensifying it, making it more dramatic. Now the neat thing is just like with the value, I can tone down the color and the value by my layering choices that I make later. I'm going to talk a little bit right now about focal point and that will tie in to what I'm about to talk about with how you can neutralize certain colors. You want to identify your focal point early in your painting and I think from this reference photo it was pretty easy to see. It was that brilliant contrast between the light bright yellowy color of the sky and that dark cloud. High contrast is really something that our eyes naturally go to for a focal point. We're just that's just how we're created to see things that are high contrast with color and value. And so I knew that was the focal point. So my strategy is to keep that the highest contrast with value and also the most intense with color and mark making our eyes also go to edges and sharp lines more than they do soft edges. So back to my point about laying down some of these colors that are just more brilliant and dynamic. I will choose to keep some of them intensified with color. But as the painting progresses, I will actually neutralize some of the colors that are extending out and above and away from that focal point area. In other words, I don't want the eye to be drawn to the edges of the painting. I want it to come into that focal area and the other elements will be more subdued around the edges. Almost like a little halo or eclipse effect around the edges. So in those outer areas, I will neutralize the colors more, soften the colors more, and and I can do that by right now I'm doing it. Actually, I'm taking this little kind of a mauve pastel and I'm layering it and softening some of the darker colors, making the values a little less intense. Now I know there are going to be some spaces in between these clouds and once again, I'm choosing a darker value that I later will add lighter, bluish, leaning a little bit more towards turquoise values. Those little spaces of the sky that's showing in between the clouds. They make some really interesting little negative shapes. But you see right now, this color that I'm using is a darker value than I know my final will be. But it's going to give a nice contrast for the lighter value I lay down on top of it. And now back to my little packing peanut that makes for a nice little blending tool. They're already in the perfect little shape. This is almost the size that I prefer to use my pastels. You'll see me at some point in the video actually breaking some of the Sennelier pastels into smaller, in half basically. When I show my unison set coming up pretty soon I think. It's the unison 120 half stick set. The unison half sticks are actually just about the size of this little packing peanut that I have in my hand. The Senneliers are a little bit longer. So you might even get a little more value with your pastels with the Senneliers. And so they actually can be for me anyway broken in half again, just to get a little size that's like I said about the size of this packing peanut. So remember when I talked about some of the initial applications not going down so smoothly and I said don't worry about that. The pastels will actually start to blend that. But also we can use these little blending tools. Now I don't blend a lot at final stages of my painting but I do in the initial working part the initial stages of the painting. I'm doing this not only to kind of smooth out some of that paper showing through but also to soften some of the edges of the clouds. You know if I was to give a piece of advice that I would think would be really up there with importance with pastel painting I would say that remember that the painting is a process. Often I think we we think it's supposed to look good before it really will. You may have heard a lot of other pastel artists say and you may have experienced this early on that your painting has to go kind of like through an ugly stage first where you're kind of like what is going on here. And so that might be something that initially might deter some people from pressing forward and pursuing this medium because you kind of just want to get results real quickly in your painting process. And it's a process and when we learn this process and we learn how to apply things and to be patient about it then we start to really embrace it and understand it's just the nature of this medium and really most painting mediums I would say even with oil and acrylic you you do kind of the same processes with blocking in, working big shapes to small shapes, working big values and color and then gradually getting to where you're honing in on the final finish. So don't get frustrated if you feel like your painting is going through an adolescent stage and you just feel like man I'm not really good at this. Oh my gosh my husband can attest to the fact that I did this so much early on a painting. Even when I started to get okay with pastel painting I'd start something and he'd hear me comment oh my gosh look at this is a mess. He says you say that at every painting but once again it's the nature of painting process. But the more you paint the more you start to realize this it's just the way it is and you gain more confidence. Alright here's something I would like to mention I'm creating a little bit of negative shapes in these trees right now. Notice how I'm carving into the trees some spaces rather than trying to draw individual branches but I wanted to make a note now I'm moving on with this pastel now but with regards to some of those brilliant colors that are going to be behind the trees peeking through with they're called sky holes it's the little holes in between things in the trees with things as with sunsets or really with any kind of background behind the sky the colors and values uh well let me talk about value first the values are going to be a little bit darker in those tree shapes than the sky just on the outside of it like say you've got a brilliant yellow sky behind the tree well in those little spaces in the in the negative shapes you're going to go a little bit darker in value it's basically because the branches are acting as a filter and if you put the same light value in those little spaces those negative shapes it's going to look like popcorn it's going to just stand out too much and be very unnatural now with the color in the little sky I'm sorry I'm not still working on the tree while I'm describing this but with color it's going to be a little bit more neutral sometimes you can have a few of them that are really brilliant if you want a good focal point but for the most part the leaves and the things of the trees are going to neutralize the color a little bit so often we go a little darker in value with the sky holes between the tree branches and a little bit more neutral in color so that's just a general rule of thumb so that was me just making some little notes kind of that I want to remember to do that all right you see I've been adding look at these brilliant colors once again all from the Sennelier Paris set and I am punching up this color it's really what is already there to a degree in the photo I often say too sometimes I think I see color in a photo that may just be so subtle and then I punch it up and if you want to get better at seeing color subtle colors I have in my patreon group I've given you guys a lot of if you're one of my patrons you know what I'm talking about I've given you guys a lot of little color tests and color games one's called this an app called I Love Hue HUE and it's a free app I think it's android and iphone but it's a color game and it will start to help you to see the subtleties of color and the better you get at that the more that you will be able to see those subtleties in a reference image or in life and punch them up make them a little more intense I sometimes see green in a sky that you initially wouldn't even think to put that in the sky or purple in a landscape and you know and sometimes too also just learning the rules of color allows you to get more exploratory and creative one is color temperature I have a video that talks about color temperature and if you understand it we know that things get cooler in the shadows right like a tree if you're hot in the sun you go out and you get in the shade of a tree and you're cooler so colors also get cooler well what happens when colors get cooler they get more blue or more purple so often in your shadowy areas you can add a little hint of blue or purple even if you don't see it at all in your reference image so you can learn to not only see the subtleties of color and intensify them if you learn the rules of color and color theory you can exaggerate those as well so those are just a couple of little tips once again i'm trying to stay true to the subject of this video which is creating dynamic color in a painting and you know after all i love the fact that many people do realistic painting and i'm amazed at some of the realism that can be achieved but for me personally as an artist i like to get creative i like to explore things that may not be there and to me that's kind of what art is we're made in the image of god i got a little feedback on my last video or a little negative comments for you know expressing my faith but i can't help but adore god's wonderful creation and we're created in his image to create ourselves now here is the unison 120 half stick set that i have been talking about i love this set as well i just had one of my patrons ask a question in our facebook group just for my patrons he's like which one should i get the 120 senelle a set or the 120 unison set he asked this even before this video and i recommend them both really you can't go wrong with either one they both have some brilliant color but i do think the paris half stick set has a bit more vibrancy in color um i love actually how the unison set is laid out so user friendly it has the colors and values laid out so easy to identify and also it has some great neutrals in the set as well so both very good sets again you can't go wrong with either one and now i'm doing like i said before i'm using one of the senelle a pastels this is one of the ones that i broke in half notice it's a little more neutral it's kind of a mavi color and this is what i was talking about being able to go back lighten values see the clouds getting a little bit lighter a little softer neutralize things a bit it's not quite as purply i think i had applied some purples you can see that purple over to the right in one of those right clouds now so um once you get the bold colors down you have the choice to be able to neutralize them soften them or not and so i always recommend getting your little bit of a darker value in first and perhaps a little bolder color in first and then you have those decisions with layering that you can make later to hone in on your focal point and that means sometimes neutralizing things that are further away from it i'm using the same color here to kind of get in some of those clouds um this is also another focal point strategy that i'm using i believe it's called convergence it's another term i think they use for it is pointing you notice how the clouds are all almost kind of coming in and pointing hey viewer look at that focal point right there where the bright yellow is going to be and so i'm doing that not only with the clouds i'm doing it with the landscape notice the type of strokes that even though they're preliminary strokes in the foreground i made them all kind of sweeping up and over a hill coming in towards that focal point area and so i believe i've really started personally as an artist to focus on focal point a lot more in the last few years i believe it's what uh makes a great painting there's a lot of elements of course that make a great painting but when you have a really really good focal point and the viewer sometimes doesn't even know why they're drawn to the painting but you as the artist have used your artistic license and your knowledge as an artist to lead the viewer's eye to the area that i think usually is what initially drew you to that reference image to begin with that's definitely what was powerful about the reference image to me was that it just looking into the distance now i get a little philosophical and faithful here because i do admire creation i admire our creator and what he's given us and so when i look at an image sometimes i personify things i think these trees are looking at a grand show a beautiful color display that the lord is giving them and it's causing them to look to the future look to the light and look to hope again i mentioned at the beginning of this video i've lost my mother recently it's actually been about a month now and um she saw the lord everywhere and what a believer oh my goodness i'm just so blessed i've had such an amazing mother i miss her so much but i look at things and i can see the hope that god has given us and i'll i'll stop there like i said i i don't want to offend people i did get some not so nice comments really some very nasty comments if you want to know the truth um from my last video not many most of you just don't even care what i go off on a tangent with but it is what it is i gotta be who i am and i know a lot of you like that and appreciate my honesty so notice now how i'm giving some little highlights of that sun is catching up on some of those clouds some of those brilliant colors are on the underneath side of some of those clouds also another rule with color temperature is things are going to obviously be warmer at the source of the sun thus the bright yellows oranges and reds but they're going to get cooler as they get away from the sun so notice how the colors as they're moving away to that right side there they're getting more pink and they're getting more um that magenta color and eventually getting even cooler so that's just the way nature works things get cooler away from the sun so another little color rule that you can keep in mind that will help your art even when the reference photo may not show it very um obviously a reference photo sometimes just inspires you and then you've got to take these rules and this knowledge that you've learned to create a painting that once again like i said lets the viewer see what you see and what you want them to see so i loved creating this painting i put on my um inspirational music i have some music that i listen to while i paint and it's music that i can't share on here youtube will give me a copyright strike if i share the music that has a copyright and by the way if you haven't heard the cello music of hauser oh my goodness it is absolutely beautiful it's one of my mom's more recent favorite artist and he's actually beautiful to look at too he's a handsome man and i can't help but love him because he looks so much like my youngest son or my youngest son looks like him so he's a beautiful person and seems to be a beautiful soul and his music is just gorgeous so if you want to find some good music to listen to while you paint it's usually very inspiring i haven't mentioned yet but i wanted to mention that i have sped this video up just a tad so that it's not so long this painting i think probably took over two hours maybe pushing closer to three i had to stop and start a lot with some stuff i'm helping working with my dad and helping him with a lot of projects like i said while we're working through the loss of our my mama so so anyway but that's fine and so it did take you know a little longer and i knew i wouldn't be able to upload all of that footage so but i think i am going to add some music since i was just talking about music at this point while you watch the rest of the painting process i might speed up the tail end of this video a little bit more to keep it under an hour but you've gotten 30 minutes of commentary here and by the way i'm gonna add a song here let me go see what the name of the song is it's from the youtube audio library that's a place i can go for my youtube videos where i know the music they provide does not have a copyright and that's not always my favorite music so i really have to search to find songs that i think are pleasing to go with the painting but this one is called almost in f and then it has tranquility after it i don't know if that's part of the title but it's by kevin mcleod he has a lot of music in the youtube audio library so i hope you enjoy this all right okay i gotta talk now right here is where i was talking about focal point my highest contrast with lights and darks is going to be in this area my most distinct mark making is going to appear notice right now how your eye is going to go right to that area over and above any other area in the painting and it's because of the intensity of color the mark making and also the contrast between lights and darks all right now listen to the music i hope you'll subscribe to this channel if you haven't already i hope you'll find me in all those little places i have at the end of my video like this video i love it when you comment and become a patron if you'd like it it really does help when you support this channel all right guys enjoy and don't go anywhere i'll be back at the end of the video i think i may have missed a little bit of footage here but i wanted to go ahead and give some commentary here now remember when i mentioned those background trees were a little too dark before i put them darkest value down first i am toning them down a bit now but using warm values typically when it's a bright sunny day i cool off the trees in the distance but because this is a sunset and there's so much light coming back there a lot of times we warm our background trees up by putting warmer tones and it creates that glow the sun is glowing down on these trees also notice the ground i have decided to do what happens in nature a lot of times the colors from the sky will be reflected down upon the ground and i used focal point strategies to also create that pointing feeling which is why everything feels like it's being your eyes just being pulled into that direction also to notice the color and value changes in the foreground they are going well let's go back to the back trees there they're going from the lighter values of the sun because that brightest yellow is way back there and they're gradually getting a little darker notice how they get more orange and then eventually i've even got a little might not can see it in this video a little bit of those pinks and magentas coming forward into the foreground towards the viewer's eye here is the final and actually i didn't have to speed up the video anymore so i hope you learned a lot and enjoyed this i'm going to show you again these are the senelier pastels i used i have a habit if when i use a set to turn them up so you can see or i can remember which colors i used but once again my patrons i'm going to make you a color chart with all of these colors i used and i pray you guys enjoyed this learned a lot and as always happy painting