 Come on in the studio and learn my secret for revealing hidden color. I'm gonna be using some Romanian pastels made by the Jay Luda pastel company and I will teach you my easy Technique for creating color excitement even when a photo is a little dull with color And I'm gonna do my same trick with alcohol like my last video you guys loved that video Thank you so much, and I think you will benefit from my strategies and tricks I'll teach you no matter what level of artist you are. Are you ready? Here we go Hello artist, welcome to Monet cafe studio Pardon my casual attire, but sometimes it's just fun to paint in your big t-shirt Chilling out listening to some music. I'm glad you're here with me today I'm getting to something that I have been wanting to do for a long time with a lot of little interruptions I have been working with the Jay Luda pastel company They've been kind enough to give me some selections of their pastels and for months now We have been working on me curating a Monet cafe set And so I have not yet had time to play with them as much as I would like in order to choose the pastels so these are some of the Jay Luda pastels that I'm going to be using to create a Beautiful Marsh scene this month's theme is Marsh madness So come on in the studio with me while we play with these pastels. They're gorgeous They're luscious the colors are amazing, and I think you're gonna love them I found an absolutely beautiful kind of misty foggy Marsh scene from unsplash.com And I was intrigued with this color palette It was rather neutral with a subtle analogous palette But I could instantly see that there were some colors in this reference image that I could really Accentuate and I'm gonna pop this over in Photoshop and show you kind of how I do that Again, this is a beautiful photo and I like it as is. I love this Almost monochromatic maybe a little analogous color palette analogous is just when You use colors that are kind of next to each other on the color wheel so I see a little bit of cool greens a little bit of blues and Little hints of maybe some pink in there, too So I want to show you with the use of Photoshop kind of how I mentally Stretch color or exaggerate color and like the title of this video How how do you see colors that aren't there and the way I look at it? They really are kind of there. I just push them up a little bit with vibrance or saturation So I'm gonna use a tool that's in Photoshop here. It's called a color picker I don't I'm moving my arrow here so you can see where it is on the screen It's just a little eyedropper tool and in Photoshop. It's on this bar to the left and the color picker is Literally what it sounds like it if you click anywhere in this photo It's going to show you what the color is over here on their little color Gauge here without going into too much detail about this you can pretty much see that the Dissaturated or grayscale colors are all on the left dark at the bottom light at the top and as you move to the right It gradually increases in saturation now Let's use our color picker and I'm going to click on Different areas within this reference image and I want you to watch over here our little color indicator as to where this Little circle moves to and how the colors change and I think you'll kind of be surprised if I click kind of up A little bit higher in the sky right in this area here Watch what color it is Wow, that's a lot warmer than you would think right and I'm actually seeing that there are some warmer tones kind of in the Upper and middle part of the sky here if I come down a little lower notice how the red got a little cooler and I would say pinker There's more pink and what is pink pink is a light value red. Okay, so let me just let me click this And I'm going to go over here to my paintbrush and just show you that it is indeed pink if I went up to it Yep, see there's pink Let me undo that and So there are pinks in the sky here now. I'm gonna get the color picker again And I am going to choose somewhere else in the reference image in the sky I'm gonna come down a little further closer to the tree line here. Let's see what happens Wow, look at that. It's kind of a little bit of a lavender color I'm gonna come down even further and click Look at that. It got a little bit of a cyan or turquoise color, right? Look how many colors are in that sky now notice Every time I clicked it the circle is way over here on the more grayed out version of that color It's a more neutral color. That's what a neutral color is and so that's why this this scene feels very neutral and Easy it's not screaming with color by any means but we can still train our eyes to notice these subtleties of color and Make them not quite so neutral So we have that artistic license to be able to do those things now I'm gonna click around a few different areas in this photo and See if you can tell where things go or what color it changes in the upper right corner there I'm gonna click down here underneath some of these trees on the left on this little thing of land Look at that. There's some green down here It's very subtle hardly noticeable because it's very dark and it's still kind of neutral And let me click this little body of land right here. I but what do you think it's gonna be? Let's do a little test It's kind of another cyan turquoise a little bit teal and So that is a beautiful color as well So if you ever want to take a reference image and what I call punch up the color that's exactly what I'm talking about noticing the little subtle nuances of color and Making them a bit more vibrant. So I'm going to go to my Vibrance adjuster and saturation and I'm just pulling the vibrancy up higher Can you see how those colors just really came to life and you can do the same thing with Saturation now Photoshop isn't the only place you can do this. There are so many free photo editing apps That you can do this with so look I'm just taking that saturation up Look how that photo just came to life because we just took what was neutral and we made it more highly saturated So you can totally train your eyes to do this and get to where you don't even need a photo editing app at all All right Now let's tackle this painting and as I already shared these gorgeous pastels are from Romania That's actually where my daughter-in-law is from my son met her on a mission trip and the rest is love story history So these pastels are so luscious with color. I'll be talking about them more as I paint the surface I chose is pastel matte. I chose to work on white for this painting because I wanted to do a technique I just did in my last video and by the way, thank you guys that video did quite well You guys loved my alcohol application with soft pastels And so that's what I'm going to be doing with this painting as well But I have some special footage for my patrons only of some new things I discovered since this painting All right, and here we go. I love this pretty purple. That's a little bit of a neutral purple I'm just kind of visually Getting an idea of where some of these shapes are now. I got to tell you something. I love about J. Luda pastels their Application is some of the smoothest Of any pastel brand and what I mean by smoothest they're very soft So there's a lot of very soft brands that I love Terry Ludwig Just too many to mention But I should say it's consistent when you put it on its side, you know how some pastels they have bumps or Ridges and you don't get a really smooth stroke or even consistent stroke That's a better adjective to use and J. Luda pastels It's like they're just manufactured to be so consistent on the sides and the edges So what I'm doing here is I've gotten my tree shapes in I'm getting just some ideas of where some of these land shapes come out My trees obviously get smaller in the distance and now I realized remember in Photoshop How we were seeing some greens in there? So I got a really cool green and a cool green leans a little bit more towards blue It's not like grass green or green that you think of with the sun shining on leaves So that kept it very nice and cool and oh this pastel matte had a an Imperfection in it, and I think it was my fault because I got bent when I was traveling with the pad so now I've just gradually gotten some of the The blues and a little bit of a minty kind of bluish green because values get lighter in the distance and they get Cooler, so that's why my distant trees are cooler and lighter now I'm getting down some of this other pretty a little bit brighter turquoise in the foreground. This color is 3d. That's another thing I like about The J. Luda pastels they have the color number embossed right on the pastel now that does wear off You know if you're using the pastels, but when you first get them if you want to make a little color guide it's so easy to do with those color numbers on Right on the stick and my patrons are going to get some color notes of mine I'm going to try to give you some of the colors that I used and I'll tell you how to become a patron of mine on my patreon page a little later So you can get all the goodies too and these colors serve as my underpainting I'm going to do like I mentioned what I did in my last video use 70 percent isopropyl alcohol You can get it any drugstore just a nice soft brush any brush will do I wouldn't use one that's too coarse and Just a little jar to put the alcohol in now remember when I said I'm gonna have some extra footage for my patrons The extra footage is going to share something. I discovered the last video where I used alcohol I did not use the pastel matte surface. I used a surface called Fisher 400 and Man it it really does work well with the alcohol the pastel matte. You see how it's not Painting as smoothly go back and watch my other video and you'll see what I mean The Fisher 400 just allowed the alcohol to really blend the pastels Can you see how the strokes are still showing especially in the water in the foreground and I made it work because this is an under painting So it's really not that big a deal The point of doing the alcohol wash is just to really get a nice base of color That's gonna serve as what I like to do is have some some colors peeking through the rest of the painting and I knew that I was going to have a lot of lavender's purples some turquoise blues and the the pinks and the magenta's That I kind of pointed out in Photoshop So that's why I wanted to get this cooler a little bit more of the greens and the teal and turquoise colors Underneath and then later you'll see me add the magenta's and lavender's and more blues So again, it still worked on the pastel matte But I'm gonna show you I'm gonna kind of recreate this painting again a little small version of it With the Fisher 400 and the J Luda pastels and I'm telling you those J Luda pastels They just blended like gorgeous paint when I put it on the Fisher 400 So you can see all I've done is get me in a little base with these nice cool colors a little bit more greens And it does dry lighter I put the blow dryer to it you can see it lightened it up and doesn't that already feel moody? So under paintings are a great way to get started. You also cover up your surface So it's not just all this white surface staring at you. So I didn't want to go too dark too soon So I got the same J Luda pastel by the way when I showed all of those J Luda pastels before on my Tabletop there were 12 at the beginning in their own little set that are called their darks They have a dark set now. This is another one of them It's kind of a dark blue and I have to thank them because They made this dark set per my recommendation I was trying to choose some pastels for the Monet cafe set and I mentioned some of the darks weren't quite dark enough for me anyway, and so they worked with me and and they created a dark set after we talked about that So this is their darkest that I know of anyway And it's a nice just dark kind of smoky color And so it's where you want to really get your focal energy For some of these trees the trees that are closer to you and then are get more of the focal attention I'm still working with some of the imperfections In that paper I worked around it and it ended up being okay now I have a little piece of chamois cloth here chamois. It's kind of spelt like that I guess it's a French word and what am I doing here? I'm taking some of those darker areas under the trees and creating the reflections see how I'm just pulling straight down You just pull them straight down and it's amazing how just that little technique really gives the feel for reflections Now here's another gorgeous. Look at this bluish pretty color. This is kind of like that one. I was pointing out Same color family as that one distant tree when I said oh my gosh look at that blue So I decided I want to get some of this blue in the water and I'm kind of Carving into some areas with it to do some color echoing. It's called there's that that's the area I was talking about behind that tree and color echoing is where you Incorporate some of the same colors throughout the painting and I always find that it's easiest for me to do that While I still have it in my hand So I just look for other places in the painting where I might see that that color that where I could use it And it creates things in harmony now This is a little bit lighter and it's a little bit warmer. It's kind of a minty green and I have sped this up a bit You can always slow it down using the gear icon in You on YouTube. It's the lower right hand of the video screen There's a little gear and you can slow the video down But look at how pretty this pink is remember we had some pink in the sky and I know that it's gonna be reflected in the water too So I just went ahead and put it in the water and see how I'm kind of turning my pastel I'm using the broad side. I would say the entire time I've used the broad side of the pastel and I'm just kind of turning it sometimes Depending on the subject matter to fit it in between areas Sometimes I'll have it horizontal and sometimes see how I just did that Sometimes I'll have it vertical and that's just so that I don't get that big wide part of the pastel everywhere I'm kind of carving it into areas now. I noticed in the reference image a lot of times There's a lighter area above the tree line in the distance It's usually a lighter value, but I was seeing this pretty blue above the horizon and so I thought again I'm just gonna give it more vibrancy and more saturation. So I'm literally just doing the example that I showed you in Photoshop I'm taking some of the colors that are already there and I'm just giving them more Saturation or more vibrancy and the trick with pastel painting one is keeping a light touch You don't have to fill up every part of this paper. That was a mistake. I made early on. I was like, oh my gosh I got to get this. I got to press really hard. I'm using the chamois cloth again here to soften the sky So keep a light touch because what happens is as you layer things start to blend together Now I didn't want the sky a little softer. So that's why I use the chamois cloth I don't always though sometimes I don't use any tool to blend with But the layering is where the magic happens because if you keep a light touch When you layer one color and then you lightly layer another color on top They start to interact with each other. You're not totally covering it up Because pastels are an opaque medium. They're not see-through So you make them a little see-through by having a lighter touch and then some of those colors will just peek through Interact with each other sometimes even kind of vibrate with color. I love that. All right So I did kind of blend my I would call this a second under painting in a way Just to kind of soften some things up and give it that I wanted a misty foggy feel that was Kind of what I saw in the reference image. So that's why I did a little more blending than I often will do all right, so now I've got my Base ready to go and I'm gonna start adding some more of these greens I didn't want to go remember to the like warm green category because I didn't see really many of those When we use the color picker. So I'm using this really pretty darker teal green and I thought it was a great green for a scene that is I Would say a little less sunlight you see you don't see any sunlight here If there was a it was a bright sunny day, you'd get more of those warm greens But this is somewhere where the the clouds have covered up the sun or it's just you know Really far back and it's got obviously a cloudy or a foggy sky So what's gonna happen is the greens in the tree and it's darker, too The greens in the trees are going to be cooler So I loved this green isn't that pretty and you'll notice that when I add some of these colors in the trees I just pull a little bit of it down into the water now this one is a little bit warmer green Can you see that but I thought it would be fun to add just a little bit of green that has some warmth And I'm just adding it in areas where I'm an imagining that the sunlight Even though it's filtering through some clouds would be coming from and I just drag a little bit of it down into the water Just to make that reflection feel a bit more believable and consistent So it's just you know little light touches and carving notice. We're not painting leaves we're painting shapes and It's really all you need because the brain can put together a lot from a little Information and I think you'll be able to see at this point if you look at my reference image that I have in the lower Right of the screen. Can you see how my photo has a lot more color to it? I decided to accentuate some of those cooler greens and you could take the same photo and Manipulate it color-wise to be various scenes with just a little bit of knowledge about color theory And how color works I could turn this into a daytime scene with some bright sunny blue skies and I would add warmer greens much bluer blues in the water and in the sky and or you could turn it into a Moody scene where it looks like the Sun is setting and use a lot of warm Browns and golden colors and reds and oranges So that's always a fun project to do that. I've done that on the Monet cafe channel and on my patreon page Matter of fact, it was just a couple of months ago The theme was called variations on a scene where we did just that we took a photo and We painted it in various different color palettes and different styles as well Sometimes you can have marks that are a little bit more controlled and then sometimes you can get crazy and get all gestural So, you know, you're the artist and it's always fun to just explore and that's one of the suggestions I give so often when people say, how do I get out of an artistic rut? Well, you play like a kid again. You try something new or you do something small. Oh, that's a whole nother video I'll have to work on now. I'm just carving into some of those distant trees where you can see I just took some of the pastel. That's the sky color carved it into the trees I put a little neutral in the sky, too I felt like some things were a little too saturated. So you'll see by the end of the painting I kind of tone some things down Because I do like a little bit of neutrality In many most of my paintings so that the colorful areas will really gain the attention and now here on the Monet cafe channel I'm gonna substantially speed up the rest of this painting and you can still see the progress and Learn a lot as well. But for my patrons on my patreon page You will get my commentary and the slower speeds for the duration of this painting and the extra content I was telling you about where I do this painting again on the Fisher 400 and you'll see how smoothly these J. Luda pastels behave with the alcohol, but don't go anywhere Monet cafe subscribers You're gonna see the rest of this painting come to life before your eyes And let me ask you a real quick favor before we continue Would you go ahead and like this video leave me a comment and by all means subscribe? You can't know how much this really helps my video to get shared more by YouTube Also, if you'd like that extra content and goodies I'm always talking about you can become a patron on my patreon page to receive that content. It's real easy It's only five dollars a month and you become part of a family of artists all learning and growing together And I love that I get to see your work. All right, let's finish this painting I wanted to make sure to mention that I only used J. Luda pastels for this entire painting and for the second painting that I have on my patreon page I will have a link in the description of this video to the J. Luda company where you can order their pastels And their site is J Luda colors dot com these pastels are made in Romania It's a father-son team that makes these pastels and I'm telling you they are so great to work with Just lovely people and even though they're in Romania. They ship. I think almost everywhere for free So that's really great. And also if you use a coupon code they've given for my channel SJ 10 I'll have this in the description of the video you get an extra 10% off and very soon They will be offering a set of pastels curated by little old me and Some of my favorite colors from their pastel selections. I'll be sure to make a big old announcement when that happens All right, you can see I've been adding more color to the water Also glazing some of the pastels over to make the water feel flat and now I'm just adding a little bit of a lighter This is like a little teal blue kind of color very light Just to indicate some little breaks in the water often. There are little breaks right next to the bank The Marsh Bank I'll show you the final in a second But I wanted to show you all of the pastels that I used from my J. Luda collection or selection that they've provided for me And again if you're a patron of mine, I give you the color notes with even the color numbers And here is the final and I think you can see it's quite different from the original photo with the neutral Very subdued colors and it has much more color excitement So I really hope you learned a lot about how to identify and punch up those hidden colors Now here's a quick little sneak peek at some of the footage that my patrons received I was just curious how the J. Luda pastels would behave on a different surface rather than the pastel matte and how they would Liquify with the alcohol and boy was I happy that I did this little experiment And this is Fisher 400 sanded pastel paper the same paper that I used in my other video right before this one Where I used the alcohol and oh my goodness these J. Luda pastels Liquified so beautifully with the alcohol on this surface and here's the final of that little painting I decided to give it more of a night moody scene So see you can take a photo and recreate it in many different ways and color palettes. All right Monet cafe family I hope you learned a lot you guys bless me so much I feel like I've come to know many of you through your comments on these videos as always God bless and happy painting