 Welcome beautiful artistic people to Monet Cafe. If you've ever wanted to make your reference photo a bit more dramatic, colorful, and interesting, today's lesson is going to be great for you. Join me where there's lots of tips and techniques in this video full of artistic fun. Hello and welcome artistic friends, visitors, and subscribers. If it gets a little noisy in today's lesson, you'll see why I often do voiceovers. We have a lot of work going on at our house, so you may hear a little bumping outside of my studio walls. But today's lesson I think is going to be of interest to many of you. I often get questions about how to interpret color differently than what you see in a reference image. Typically what I do is I look for a reference image that is somehow exciting or artistic in some way, but often it doesn't have everything right. You can have things that you may want to change with the composition, things you may want to change with the color palette, things you may want to change with the mood, coolness, warmth, all of those things. It's like, oh, where do I start? What do I do? So I think you'll like today's lessons where I take one reference photo and I interpret the same photo in two different ways, okay? I often, if I find a reference photo that I like, that there's something about it that I just really am always drawn back to, you can take it, and I often have taken the same reference image and just do various interpretations and my own feeling or mood to that reference photo. So join me in this lesson. I think you're going to love it. I do have it at the very beginning. Some of the lesson is me in Photoshop describing some things about the particular reference image. So I'll put something in there where you can skip ahead if you want to skip that part and just get to the painting. But it will have, for those beginners who are trying to learn a little bit more about composition and color palettes and how to achieve that sense of distance, I think that first part of the video is going to help you. And real quick, I wanted to say a special thank you to one of our subscribers and members in our Facebook group, Marissa. I recently did a portrait for her of her sweet little pug and she was so kind to send me a box full of gifts that was just amazing and just at a beautiful time in my life to receive that gift. One of them happened to be this cute little Boston Terrier puppy that I keep with me in my studio now. He's so cute. It's just like my little dog, Jackson, which some of you may have seen in my videos. And she also sent me too many other gifts to mention. Some watercolors. She made a little palette. Oh, there's the knocking. She made a palette of watercolors. I mean, just such a personal touch to this. So, Marissa, you are a beautiful and precious soul and thank you so much. All right, let's get to this lesson. Now, this is the pastel surface that I will be using. It is a pastel paper, which is called a pastel card, because it's a little bit thicker than, like, say, you are a paper. And it's made by Sennelier. That is a French company. And it's called LaCarte Pastel. Sennelier also makes their own pastel, soft pastels, which I love. And I love them on this paper. Now, they come in these pads. And for this particular painting, I used the larger pad, and I simply took a piece of, I think it was exactly this paper, this color right here. The pad comes in various colors. And this pad here, this particular color, I like the warmth part of the knocking again. And I basically just split it in half to do this two paintings from one sheet. So one thing to keep in mind with LaCarte Pastel card is that it's not water-friendly. So you do not want to apply water to this. But, you know, that doesn't bother me at all. I really love this nice surface. Let me see if I can get up close a little bit with it here. It's got such a nice grit to it. It's perhaps a little more coarse than, say, like, you aren't 400. But I really like it. It lends towards that impressionistic style. And I'm also going to bring these paintings up a little closer so you can see them. This is one of the interpretations. I meant to keep this horizon line down a little bit lower, but it inched its way up a little bit. But I did this one with more of a cool, more of a daytime early morning, perhaps, mood. And this one is more of a an evening or early morning. I have seen marshes like this in Florida, myself, that they just take your breath away with the beauty and the color. So it may look a little over colorful, but I promise you I have seen color that's just magnificent like this in marshes. So I interpreted this one a little differently, added some grass instead of just water. So that's what we're going to learn today is how to interpret a reference photo multiple ways and to get a little more creative and dynamic with your reference photo. All right, let's get started. Here I am in Photoshop. And I thought this would be beneficial. I know everybody doesn't have Photoshop so you won't be able to do what I'm doing in the way that I'm doing it through this program. But conceptually, you can do the same thing, whether you're just doing it in your mind, or actually printing something out and cropping it and doing some of the things I'm doing. But this is more just for a lesson and doesn't have to be anything that you have to have Photoshop or even any computer skills for. So just follow me as I go. Photoshop is a great tool for me to be able to describe some of these concepts. All right, so what do we see here? It's a lovely photo, but I do see some things that are couldn't make it better compositionally. I've talked some in my past videos, there's various different ways to approach composition, but a very simple one is knowing the rule of thirds and basically all that is is you can just visually do that. You don't even have to do what I'm doing, but it's it's real simple to divide things, you know, kind of into thirds. I'm just going to do it here real quick so that you can get the idea that middle section is too big. But anyway, in general, you just divide your your photo or whatever you're working with into thirds. And now I can see that that horizon line, the horizon line is just where the sky meets the land. And that horizon line is almost right in the middle. And that's not a real strong composition. So I know that it's going to be stronger, more visually pleasing, if that horizon line is either in the upper third, or the lower third. And you you've probably seen some paintings where they take the horizon line. I mean, whereas the third might be right about here, I've seen some where the horizon line is even way lower like this. And I love some of those. In that case, the sky would be the most dramatic part of the painting with just a little bit of the horizon showing. So you know, you've got some choices to make. But in general, let me move these so they're not distracting. In general, I'm going to have to play around with that horizon line. And I've seen paintings where the horizon line is in the center. But there will be other things in the composition that make it a strong composition, rather than a photo just like this. All right, so what I'm going to do here is I mean, you could literally do this with folding your reference photo or using some photo editing software or, or cutting it if you have it physically. But what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to make the sky the priority. And that happens when I put the horizon line in the lower third. Okay, this is just a way I'm going to crop it. You'll see here, I do see some interest in them. If you see my pointing her those grasses right there, I really like those. So I do want to come down low enough here to still have those but also to keep that horizon line down in the lower third. Okay, so there's my crop. All I have to do in Photoshop is literally go to crop and it's going to crop that. Okay, so now my horizon line is in the lower third. And don't you see how that's a much more pleasing composition? I do love this in here. We've got some neat things going on that's going to be of interest. I love the you I accentuate these things. Now, here's what I would do. Some people might just paint this and paint the water, you know, you just have trees, one bank of trees, bank of trees, maybe some distant trees, and just a wide almost like a V shape of water. But what I would try to do is what makes a painting interest is interesting is when the eye has these places to go that are just like little hidden things or something that's intriguing. And what I would do is I would take this water here and make more of a big wide S shaped curve. That's another compositional element to where it would come back. You almost see if I zoom in on this, hang on, let me put my mic down and I'll zoom in on this so you can see. You can see there's a little sliver of water that might be a reflection, but you could accentuate it by making a little sliver of water here and maybe even just do a little more back there so you get this big curve going on here. So that would be a way to make the composition stronger. Let me zoom out a little bit more now. Alright, so there we go with a lower third horizon line, which makes the sky the bigger part of the composition. And what I would do with the sky is I would accentuate that as well to create some energy and movement where it's almost coming in a sweeping motion from here and then in a dramatic way accentuating that drawing the eye back there. Alright, so now let me go back and change that to the horizon line, not being in the lower third, but being in the upper third. And what that's going to do is that's going to accentuate the water more. Okay, so here's just a general idea of putting it in the upper third. And now I'll just go to crop. Okay, and that makes a great composition too. In this case, you've got this water that is more of the interest and the sky is not as dynamic. And I like this one too. So choices choices, right? Hmm. Gosh, I'm not sure this is tough. What would you pick? Alright, maybe I'll do a combo painting and I'll do both. That would be interesting. Maybe I'll just do two paintings at once. That should be pretty fun. It actually I don't think I've ever done that. Let's try that. We can always get creative here in Monet Cafe. Alright, so let's get started with this. Okay, here I am giving an example in Photoshop of what I typically do with my pastels to accentuate the sense of depth in the painting, create more interest and just a stronger visual interpretation of the painting that's going to make it more dynamic and painterly and beautiful. What I'm going to be doing is I'm taking some of my Photoshop tools and I am going to show you this is just a little brush tool where I can pick colors and change colors and brush over things in the painting. Again, don't get intimidated by the Photoshop stuff. It's really not that big a deal. Anybody can learn it with just a little perseverance and practice. But all I'm going to be doing here is cooling off those back trees and decreasing the darkness. I want to I want to lighten up those background trees because we know that things lighten up and cool off in the distance. So I'm just I'm going to zoom in a little bit here so you can see exactly what I'm doing. Okay, so all I've done here is zoomed in closer to where you can see those background trees. And of course, you know, when things are in the distance, there's not a lot of detail also with things in the distance. But I'm using my brush tool. I've taken a similar color to what they are. I've cooled it off, leaning more towards the blue part of the color wheel, blue or teal. And I've decreased the the darkness. I've made it lighter. And so what that does is it pushes those distant trees a little further back. Now these trees are, if I zoomed out, you could see the ones I'm working on now are a little bit closer. So I don't have them quite as teal or as bright to change that. Let me zoom out a little bit now since I'm getting out of the screen. So now you can see how I've just taken certain areas of trees that may be further away. They're a little cooler in temperature. They're a little lighter in value. And believe it or not, this is easier for me to do with actual pastels than it is with this system of using the color picker and the brushes and everything. You've got to change a whole lot whereas your hand can basically do all that very quickly with a pastel. So anyway, you get the idea there. Let me zoom out a little more and show you kind of just the final. I don't want to bore you guys to death with this but kind of give you an idea. Now here you can see the two different versions. The one on the top is the one I edited in Photoshop. I didn't do it very dramatically but you sense the subtle differences. I cooled off the background trees. I brightened up some of the trees and lightened up some of the greens in the trees that was just so dark. I added a little bit more coolness and blue to the water and those things will just, you can probably see the difference there between the bottom original and the top that's enhanced. Now that's what I'm going to do with the pastels is to enhance those colors and make for a more dynamic painting. Here is where I have split that one piece of the Sennelier pastel card in half and just taped one on top of the other. My little hinge system you may see that I've used in other videos as well. It's just an easy little way to put a piece of tape on the back and then have it sticking out a little and put a piece of tape on the top. But I did decide to do them individually rather than at the same time basically because whatever I do on the top painting, if I started working on the top piece first, a lot of times with the gritty pastel card little pieces of pastel dust could fall to the bottom painting. So I'm working on the bottom piece. I'm doing the lower horizon first and this is the one that's going to have the cooler color temperatures to get started. So I am going to speed this up a little bit because this video would get way too long if I didn't but I'll add some commentary here and there. Here we go. While I did go ahead and establish the horizon line and the tree line for both paintings at the start, I chose not to work on both at the same time because like I think I mentioned before pastels, especially darker pastels, could drift down and fall down onto the lower painting. So I start on the lower one first and then I switch them. Now these are my pastels, just kind of a general selection of some kind of daytime, some nice blues for the clouds and the water, greens for the trees. I do add more as I go along. Here I'm adding more dark value colors on top of the tree line. Now what I first originally used there was a harder new pastel just to kind of get in my basic landscape skyline tree line and I'm adding various darks on top of that which will create interest. You can add a few different colors of darks. They're really going to make more exciting play of colors in those dark shapes. Now I'm basically just getting in my shapes with some of the different values and colors that I have here. As again as I said to begin with colors cool off and pale out in the distance. I'm comparing a couple of greens there. I used the lighter one for those that are further away. Perhaps a little too light there but I play around with it as I go. You don't want to get too fastidious or fussy at this stage. You're just kind of getting your values in because you can always change things. I find that if you get hung up on one particular part of a painting it's really going to affect the mood of the entire painting. So you want to keep it loose to start. Now there I just added that I'm using my blender. It's a little piece of pipe foam insulation. But notice the tree line on the left. The dark that you see at the bottom there is the shadows that are going to be or the reflections that are going to be in the water. I basically just pulled down the darks. They show up more in that front area. Now I'm going ahead and getting in some of the colors and values in the sky with those clouds. I apologize too that I can't really fit the reference image in on this. It was such a wide format. It was hard for me to squish a reference photo in there. Now here's where I'm getting a little creative with color. I didn't see a lot of purples in the sky when I looked at the reference photo but I could tell there were some gray colors. And purples are a great way to accentuate grays. You just use the different values according to what's in the scene. So again I'm working big shapes and values. That's all I'm doing right now. Big shapes keep it loose and painterly. The values correct values is what's going to really make your painting look professional and painterly and color is really second hand to value but it's what's going to establish your mood to your painting. So I'm keeping a little moody here, a little darker perhaps. I think I lighten it up a bit at the end. But I'm just going to paint a little bit here and I will definitely be back to add more commentary. I wanted to mention here my application of pastel for the water. You're basically glazing over and you want to use directional strokes. You want your pastel to flow the way the water would flow. I often paint with keeping it in mind as to what I'm painting. Like when I move that pastel I think of it as going over flat water. Sorry for the auto focus problem there. But you can see how that water just glazes over and eventually it's going to glaze over those reflections that are in those trees to the right. Those lower reflections I pulled down. So you just gently glaze. You want to keep a light touch when you do this so as not to fill up all the tooth of the paper. But I'm liking the mood here and I've mentioned this often in my videos. I have the opportunity when going back and doing a voiceover and watching my own creation to see places where I kind of think I may should have stopped. Because often we overwork things. And while this point it's still a bit unfinished. I do like the mood. I like that that really I probably go overboard with liking a painterly look. Things unfinished. But anyway now I'm just establishing some of the darks. I want to go ahead and get some of those grasses. Even though I've got the reflections in the water down there. These are going to be some of the like the roots to those grasses that are coming up. A little bit of that dark back there. Not too much because remember those trees are far away. I think I even lighten up what I just put down there. So you can see now it's just really got the basics in right now. And so this is when you can go in and start playing and having fun. And you know I'm hoping you're seeing how I definitely took the reference photo. And made a more dramatic feel. And then next I'm going to probably just finish this one up with the music. And then we'll go on to the one that is a whole different color palette. With the warm colors and the oranges and the pinks. And the same rules apply. I'm just using a different color palette. So let's finish this one up and I'll be back. Okay so I've finished this first painting up. And now it's time to move to the other one here. As you see I'm switching them. I give a little tap on the back of my painting sometimes just to remove some of the extra pastel dust. So now again the one on the bottom. So as the pastels fall not on to another painting. And this is the one obviously. Oh here are my pastels. I basically have a lot of pastels that I've done some previous paintings for. That I didn't feel like getting up and getting any additional. So I just sort of reorganize them in color and value by color and value. So I've got my worms in one area. You know like my oranges and my pinks. I've got my greens kind of by cool and warm greens. And my purples and my blues. And that way it's easy to grab a color that I need. And I don't even think I added many additional colors to this. So here we go with the warm color palette. Already have the new pastel that I used to just get in the tree line. Same technique as the other painting where I'm just re-establishing some darks. And if they, I always say how things are lighter in the background. Don't be confused when you see me put a dark in the background. It makes a great base for when I add the lighter colors. So those trees in the very far distance are going to get lighter. But you can go ahead and establish them as dark to begin with. Now I'm getting in some more of the darks. Adding some more colors here I think. Also just kind of getting the composition in place. I'm looking a lot at my reference image. Sometimes you can't see me here but sometimes if you're watching me paint and you're able to see my head you'll see me constantly turning my head. While we do can have the license to reinterpret a reference photo you want to make sure you're looking at your image a lot to get the basics correct. Not sure what I was pointing out there. Oh yeah here's where I'm going to start to establish the mood. I sometimes will lay a color down just to get the mood going. And I look at that orange it's like a really vibrant orange on top of that already sepia type of colored paper. I really like working on this colored paper from Sennelier the LeCart card. Because it already has I talk a lot about warm under paintings and when you put landscapes paintings on top of that the warmth always tends to make the color more interesting. So it's already a warm color. So again these colors that I'm laying down right now are just to kind of establish that dramatic sky. Same reference photo that may have looked a little boring in color but I'm reinterpreting it with a new and dramatic color palette. Also too I squint my eyes a lot when I'm looking at my reference image and even though some of the more orangey and pink intense colors are to those trees over to the right that I'm working on there. The lightness or brightness is coming more from the left side of the back tree line. You'll see me establish that a little bit more later. So see how that already just set that mood right there. And I know if you're just beginning oh let me say here I'm adding more of those warmth. You notice how I had a warm sky? Well I'm making my trees a little bit warmer and even though they're in the background you know how to say things cool off in the background this is one of those exceptions to the rule where if you've got a really warm sky you can add some of that warmth to your trees. All right here's where I am um brightening up where the sun would be setting um or rising. I tend to think of this more as a sunset than a rising sun because I have seen oh my goodness I have totally seen skies like this. I'm spending most of my life in Florida. My entire family is from the mountains of North Carolina and I I actually went to college there and lived there um for a little period of my grown-up life um but the there's so much beauty in all places but in Florida the marshes are just amazing and uh it it's just phenomenal to me how they can change so much and so many different colors and views and uh moods that are established with the way the sun's rising and setting. Now here again is where I'm notice those back tree lines instead of doing the light teals now on top of that very warm dark color I added I'm adding some of those pinks now I am going over and adding some of the greens so you still get the idea that those are trees I am very sorry for that jump in um in the video right there I forgot to turn my camera on but here is where I actually reinterpreted the photo by instead of it all being water in the foreground I wanted to make it a bit more interesting than just that big wide swatch of water so I decided to add some marsh grasses um now if you feel a little bit intimidated by adding things that aren't there my only recommendation is to or my best recommendation is to practice practice practice and look a lot at your environment learn some of the rules of how nature works and um how um how the grasses behave and also learning a little bit more about perspective and how things um get smaller in the distance and and the way they lay on the plane um of the painting or the photograph so those things all just come with practice and um you get better and better but become a student of nature um and I know that's kind of a something that happens naturally when you're an artist if you're a somewhat new or beginner artist you may find that you're already doing this you just kind of get lost in this um almost trance-like state of just looking at things all the time and squinting your eyes and seeing how things look in nature and that's a wonderful habit to create um and you really do start to look at the world differently when you start focusing on your artistic career I love that aspect about being an artist you know I had um in college a major in graphic design and I had a class um I can't remember which particular class it was to where oh it was a photography class and the um the professor of the class ask the students in the class anyone could raise their hand what the sky looked like that morning and of course some of the kids lived on campus and they probably just rolled out of their bed in their dorm room and went to class and didn't pay any attention being a commuter student you know I had this really kind of a nice drive and I always looked at the sky coming in to school and it was absolutely a beautiful sky I knew how the clouds were I you know I kind of just was enjoying it and and so it was really nice to be able to answer that question and I remembered it it made an impact on me that most people don't even look at at our world anymore and and especially with this whole new phone phenomenon where you know many of my subscribers are my age um around my age 50 60s we've got oh my goodness we've got all kinds of ages but those of you who are in my age range you remember the world before all of the internet and everything and I do think we've become a little more dull to seeing things so that's what is beautiful about becoming an artist you do start to look at the world more again if you're hearing all that bumping in the background that's just more construction at my house so anyway I'm creating a nice little pathway using these grasses um to lay down the grasses and then later I kind of glaze some of the water over them I'm establishing some more reflections there and those grasses in the other painting the reflections were mostly those trees and the water but now these grasses are in the foreground here and so I want to get their reflections and basically you just emulate exact it's like a mirror if you turn to the painting sideways it would have a mirror image of what's on top and what's on bottom and then I just used my little pipe foam insulation to kind of blend it down I just pulled down and it makes a nice kind of blurred effect now I've got I've established basically the composition and the color palette and now I'm just going in I'm thinking about where the sun is hitting you know you've got those bright um set uh sun setting over there on the left side you know some of that's gonna flow over and be reflected into some of those grasses you want to keep in mind you only want the the lighter values and the colors kind of on the tips of those grasses because the back sides are still in shadow since the sun is way over there in the left going behind the trees there now here's my little glazing effect keep a light touch and I'm just kind of glazing over the reflections I already had there and I'm adding a little bit you know there was some some pink in the sky and some orange in the sky I know that that water down the middle part is going to really reflect those brighter colors I use this blue here's what I just call punching it up sometimes you just want to add a color that has some spice to it and there was so much orange and so much pink going on that I thought those cool blues would make just a nice interest to the painting so I'm being a bit interpretive here but you can do that you know once you learn the rules and everything you can definitely get more creative than what is in your reference photo and that's the point of this whole video obviously this painting that I'm doing here has a great change from the reference image now I'm just kind of doing some pizzazz with the pinks in a minute I'll go ahead and just play the music here but in a minute now I'm adding a few greens to those backgrounds to establish them as trees but in a minute you'll see me doing that reflection on the water down the middle there all right guys enjoy so I'm finishing this up and you can obviously see how I have intensified and changed the color quite a bit from the original reference image I did want to point out notice I some of that lavender that I added to those distant trees also pushed them back a lot still had some of those pinks in it but the cooler temperature of the lavender caused those background trees to recede even a little bit more so I hope you enjoyed this video I know I had a great time painting this and I'm hoping to finish this video now because it's my birthday today and I want to do some painting all right guys happy happy painting if you haven't subscribed yet please do so always comment if you have any questions and join us in our Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook if you haven't already all right happy painting