 We're focusing on painting neutrals this month in Monet Cafe and the prettiest neutral I've ever seen is my little dwarf hamster Chi Chi. Isn't she a beautiful neutral shade? Well, I'm gonna be using this neutral palette Chi Chi wasn't so interested in it She was more interested in her apple, but we're gonna have a lot of fun Creating a painting that is done with primarily neutrals. Now. I did use some violets and some Brighter colors, but the neutral palette makes them stand out even more You're even gonna get a quick lesson on creating your own neutrals. So here we go I would love it if you would go ahead and like this video and Subscribe to this channel if you haven't already click the bell icon to be notified of future videos Also, if you'd like a little more instruction consider becoming a patron of mine. Oh, I patreon page It's only five dollars a month you help keep these free lessons coming to Artistically hungry people all over the world before beginning to paint with neutrals. It's good to understand. What are they? How are they made? What colors make a neutral? So I did this little experiment by the way This is a full lesson on my patreon page. That's an example of my extra content But what I'm doing here is I'm just emulating the color wheel taking some of the colors on the color wheel What I would call their pure form and I'm making four marks of each color And I'll be using those marks to give you a little mini color theory lesson on neutrals tents and shades And I'll speed this up a bit just to get through all of the mark making of each four little Swatches of that original color. Let's begin with the row of yellow the very first color I'm leaving alone. I call that the pure color the second one here I'm adding white that's called a tent it lightens the color the next one I add a little bit of black now if you do this yourself you may have to blend the colors a little bit That's called a shade it makes that color just a little bit of a darker value now The fourth one is where I'm going to create a neutral you basically do that by combining Complementary colors. I used that purple. I had the one at the bottom is a little too dark that I added So now you have the example I'm just going to go around each one and create a tent a Lighter version of that color by adding white to each one. So there's your definition of a tent It's just a lighter value of your original color And now I'm going to do the same thing with the third in the little series of colors making a shade a little bit of A darker value now when you have your original color a tent and a shade These are basically just what's called monochromatic color It's a color with values a general color family like blue or yellow or orange with different values Lighter versions of it or darker versions of it now We're going to create some neutrals again once again going opposite on the color wheel These are complementary colors just adding the opposite color I'm using these little packing peanuts to blend my fingers were getting dirty and we're basically neutralizing the color by combining Compliments colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel and I'm just going to keep doing the same thing But I want to give you a little bit more information about neutrals now. These are Neutral I'm neutralizing them But most people consider a neutral a gray a gray is definitely a neutral and a gray is more of a combination of a few colors I'll explain a little more about that at the end of this little mini Education presentation so you can see as I zoom in to the purples here how we have the original color We have the tent the shade and the neutrals This is a great thing for you to do yourselves Because you really I learn by doing not just by hearing or seeing so But you can see how these colors on the ends are all getting Neutralized now what happens if we were to add all of these colors together You'll see me here beginning to add each of the colors in the middle I first start with yellow and I work my way around the color wheel and as I add each color the Middle section is going to become more Neutralized in color and with pastels they blend a little differently than other mediums such as oil or acrylic So I do have to kind of blend with my finger But you see how it's continuing to get more and more neutral eventually becoming a gray so you can have different Variations of neutrals it doesn't always have to be all colors combined here I'm making a tent and a shade on either side of that gray So that again is a mini lesson in neutrals how they're created the full lesson is on my patreon page But that's kind of a good beginning to getting started with this now I'm going to be using some pre-made neutrals. This is the Jack Richardson They're that the hand rolled pastels. I like them. They're so soft and it's called color wheel neutrals I fell in love with these pastels as soon as I saw them and you know, they're neutral But they're just so beautiful still so don't shy away from those neutral colors And as I create this lesson, I'll share with you some of the advantages of using neutrals the surface I'll be using is by Luxe archival. Oh my goodness. I love the surface. It's a sanded pastel paper of professional quality I love the fact that it's water friendly and it doesn't buckle a lot even if you add a lot of water or alcohol and I'm using one of the 11 by 14 sheets and I tape it to a little piece of foam core board Many of you might know that I've been working flat just for filming purposes And this makes it easy to take it out and tap it off I was inspired by a reference image on unsplash.com Notice this nice neutral palette, but there were some things I decided to change so I used my artistic license You'll see as I work and because this surface is obviously very light. It's not quite white. I like to do an underpainting I want to get some values down To give me a roadmap to create a loose beginning and to cover up that majority of the light surface What I'm using is a little prism a color. Well, it's little because I use it all the time They're normally long rectangular sticks, but it's a prism a color new pastel and I believe this color is 350 spruce blue it's called and Watch what happens when I add water to this remember this paper is water friendly and I'm just laying the pastel on its side It is a soft pastel. It's a it's a harder soft pastel Which is actually a good way to begin a painting because it doesn't take up Quite as much of the tooth of the sanded surface. So here comes the magic. I like using a big Bristle brush that has texture. This is an old brush. I don't even remember where I got it But I'm just using water. Sometimes you'll see me use alcohol like drugstore alcohol Sometimes I use other mediums to blend with but guess what good old free water Well water used to be free my my grandmother wouldn't believe that we're paying for water today But anyway, it's not that expensive. So it works great So just one pastel and some water and you get a nice loose beginning and while it dries Let me share with you again this Jack Richardson soft hand rolled color wheel neutrals. I always recommend making you a little color guide To your pastels. I had some weird light shining in from my window there I was painting in the morning, but again, I love this set mark your colors though make something like this I just used brown craft paper and then you have a nice reference to if you run out of some of your pastels And you want to order more and I didn't just use the Jack Richardson set I have a little palette of neutrals a lot of them are missing because I have them out for some other pieces I was working on but I'm just picking me out some nice neutrals once again now You know what they are they're muted colors They're a combination of complementary colors and various colors to dull them out a bit now The power as I'm picking these out Let me talk the power for me of a neutral palette is its ability to Stay in the background to stay second fiddle or supporting character in your painting rather than stealing the show You're gonna let the show stealing be your final or Whenever you add them you're brilliant bright more saturated colors So what you're doing basically is you're maximizing a neutral palette and you're minimizing your brights your high saturated intense colors and They're going to stand out more because they are on a palette of neutrals So I've been learning that over the years my tendency is just to grab really saturated colors Now these are not neutrals, but I'm grabbing some of my green and teal kind of family Some that are a little bit more High chroma or high saturation and some that are a little more neutral. So I'm just kind of using my Intuition with this as far as a color palette using that reference image as a guide. I will pop it up here Basically the reference image I changed it because I didn't feel a sense of depth in it I love the colors and the neutrals, but I wanted to add some distance now these pastels are my terry Ludwig I love their pastels darks set one and two I ordered both of them at the same time So they come in the same palette, but yes, even those reds are kind of considered darks. They're the darkest of various colors Now these are going to be the colors that are my brights the ones that I just pointed out those purples and on the background Of a primarily neutral palette those purples. I pointed out are going to really pop So what I'm doing now is I've got one of the terry Ludwig dark pastels and I'm just I have an image in my mind like I said, I'm using the reference image as inspiration but what I've done is I've created various levels of trees and We know or if you're brand new you may not know that values get lighter as they recede into the distance So my and also vertical elements are darker like trees. So my trees are going to be my darkest In the foreground and they're gradually just going to get a little bit lighter This is a terry Ludwig that is a little bit of a lighter value than the first one The next one colors. Oh, and I'm adding a little bit of this cooler blue Colors also cool off in the distance with temperature. So I'm just using kind of some of the rules of physics what really happens and Just creating a painting from imagination a bit using those rules and Also, too if these things sound foreign to you Don't worry the more you do them and the more you watch these videos the more you'll figure it out I chose some Barely pink and lavender colors for the sky. I didn't want a sky that was super white or bright there was kind of a mood to this and I wanted to keep it kind of cool. There's not a lot of warmth in the sky Now that's a little bit of a blue that I'm adding too. So just really really loose strokes and If I could give any advice that I did not do when I started I felt like I had to finish everything With the first few layers and I've learned to embrace the looseness keep that especially in these distant trees They're gonna be loose now I'm using something that I've used quite a few times that didn't work in this case It's a packing peanut like you get in your packages to protect them It works great on pastel matte and a lot of surfaces, but this looks archival is so gritty that it was Deteriorating my packing peanut. So I had to go back to another blending tool. That's also rather inexpensive It's a piece of pipe foam insulation. I learned this trick from artist Karen Margulis and she's fantastic She's been my mentor for many years When I was just figuring things out. She was paving the way. She's so good But anyway, and she may have learned this trick from someone else too. That's what we do in art so I'm just using it to blend and Kind of soften things up a bit And now I'm going to add some more darks to these vertical trees Because it's rather flat when you don't combine colors So I felt there was a little warmth in the reference image and I'm not even sure why I'm sharing the reference image It's pretty dark Again, it just inspired me the neutral palette and the colors, but I don't really follow it But it does have some warmth to some of those grasses and I thought I'd add that to the trees as well so when you create the darks for your darkest elements your trees your foreground grasses Often it's a good idea to use a combination of darks. You're going to create a much more interesting Final color for your trees and again avoid the tendency to Feel like you've got to make these look like trees right away My style leans impressionistic anyway, so I like things loose and just suggested So I'm getting things blocked in that's what the stage is called You basically want to block in your major shapes colors and values And now I've chosen a few more values a few of them from the Jack Richardson set To finish this blocking in stage. I know I've got that it's like a hill Again, this is out of my my brain, but I just imagined these flowers reaching up And kind of peeking around as to see what's around that corner and I love different levels of trees So I'm kind of giving some values that I know will work going along again with the color theory principle that color is Warmer in the foreground cooler in the background Value is darker in the foreground cooler in the background So I know that field also when things are flat like a field. They're lighter Flat things like a field is going to be lighter than vertical things like trees in a landscape painting I know that hill has It's kind of rolling So I know kind of the edges of it in places where it's rolling It's gonna have a little bit of more of a shadow like around the trees. So that's why I added a little bit of that pretty Blueish purple lavender that's in that one set and then I make the areas where the Sun is hitting a little bit lighter So it just gives a little suggestion of a distant hill again. This is going to end up being a very dreamy Ethereal type of painting and when I first started painting I would have considered this Just the messy stage and I would have had a lack of confidence in In where this was headed but as you learned to paint with pastels, especially using sanded surfaces like this You start to embrace the layering process and you realize you were building upon your painting kind of from the ground up and Now you can see how this tree will start to come to life I've got my combination of darks for some color interest and I'm just imagining the light is kind of coming from Above and back Kind of shining down just a little bit on some of those tree branches that are sticking out So you can see they're getting the little hint of trees. Now. What am I gonna do with this background tree? I'm gonna lighten and cool off or neutralize that green a little bit So it feels further away lighter value in the distance Same thing with some of the other trees now. This one was it appeared a little bit closer Than the one I did before so I added a little bit more green to that one now I am what am I doing? Oh, I'm making a little peeking in of some maybe some really distant trees far away And they're even lighter now wanted to cool off that field a little bit too I'm imagining a palette that's not only neutral but a little cooler in color temperature in general You say I don't have a lot of reds or I have a little bit of that warm kind of burgundy color in the trees But that's gonna be it other than the fact that purples are a little bit warm The flowers will be a little bit of warmth which will also give them a little bit of attention Not only will they be less neutral than the main major palette They'll also be a little warmer now You can see I did add a little bit of warmth down in the grasses with some of that kind of burgundy color and a little bit of a Oh, I don't know it's kind of like a warm lavender color in some of the grasses that's starting to give some of that interest and It's just staying really loose at the stage and what I will be doing eventually is Adding some of the flowers. I don't want my flowers to look like they're just pasted on top of the grasses because we know that flowers if they're in a field some of them are going to be buried some of them are covered by grasses and then there are a few that are peeking their heads up or maybe a little closer to the viewer so that you can see them and So I am going to get some of those flowers in so that I can actually bury them You put them in so that you can cover them up But that gives more of the believability now I don't often blend with my finger, but sometimes I'll just kind of knock things down a little bit just to soften them up And now here we go with those purples. These were some of the darks From the Terry Ludwig dark set. I can't remember if the purples were from set one or two It might have been set to But there's some really nice purples now. I know some of them will be lighter, but I love to layer things With contrast I like to get darks down first before I layer the lights now I wanted some of them to also be kind of a cooler blue as well I didn't want all of the flowers to be purple and when I looked at the reference image I could just see hints of a little bit of blue in some of the flowers as well and I would say that Primarily when I paint flowers, I'm really just painting their general shape I'm not trying to get accurate with every single little petal and Often when you do that, especially if you do it with every flower It's going to get too busy now. You could take a flower or two and give it a little bit of a Strokework or whatever that's unique to that species of flower But I really just like to suggest and I'm putting in as you can see some of the darker purples That's a couple of reasons. One is because it's going to stand out Against some of the other colors in the background that I have down already But it also acts as a nice base to start layering some lighter values on top of it And as far as the flower placement goes again I took the whole reference image away because my painting is so different from the reference image But as far as the placement goes, I usually imagine flowers and grasses and elements in a painting as being a song that is Really harmonious with the rest of the painting. I often personify elements and I think of the flowers as people that are Reaching up. I just love flowers that are reaching up reaching up to the heavens. I mean what what can be happier than that and reaching in and like a symphony of reaching towards something hopeful and My flowers always seem to be reaching towards something you can't quite see at the horizon So that's my my line of reasoning or my strategy when I start painting Now I did use a little bit of this purple that was very neutral for little tidbits I like to add little tidbits of color. I realized I needed a little bit more Green and grasses in the foreground. I actually still have it kind of Blank looking in a few spaces. So you'll see me develop that also these Jack Richardson pastels because they're round They make really nice rolling strokes for grasses So you have various strokes that you can do you can lay your pastel totally flat for broad strokes You can angle it for strokes that are you know kind of in between broad and narrow Or you can roll it like I'm doing here for nice whimsical grasses and I like to twist it too By the way, if you haven't seen one of my videos, it's actually became a very popular video on Monet cafe I think it's called 12 Stroke techniques for soft pastels and Something like that, but it basically has 12 different Markmaking strokes that you can make by the way, why would I pick a darker pastel here for grasses? Well, it's because it's layering over areas that are light if I tried to use that color on top of the trees It wouldn't have shown up So keep that in mind if you're layering over something dark like grasses use a lighter pastel if you're going over something lighter Use a darker pastel the same thing goes with flowers. See those are barely showing up there so you need to keep the value in mind for contrast when you're adding elements and As I said before if you're a beginner, don't let this stuff intimidate you Trust me. My story is one of frustration because I didn't have all these pastel videos on YouTube I was hunting and pecking and trying to find Ways that I could paint. I chose pastels because they were user-friendly. I loved the fact that they didn't dry up They just waited patiently for me whenever I would leave because my life was so crazy. I I kind of started when I was a Single mom for a while. I had three boys I had unexpected divorce and I was Painting for therapy. I needed something. So anyway, that's that's a really long story You don't want to hear that one. I better stick to painting So you can see I'm adding a few of these little neutral lighter marks in here different shapes and now You saw me hold up that can of Blair low odor fixative and what I'm going to be doing with this another technique I learned from artist Karen Margulis is Spraying this area that I'm pointing at right here. The reason is now fixative almost always darkens your painting Sometimes you purposely darken it. I never spray fixative at the end of my painting. That's a question I'm gonna have a video of ten most popular questions. I get but you can see the little Areas where I sprayed it here just in that area. Now what it's going to do it did darken it a bit, which was fine But I like the little splatters too It gives it that impressionistic feel and I just sprayed a little light coat just in the foreground there But what it does is it actually adds a little bit of texture back to your painting? So that I can add some marks and some strokes that are giving me one more layer Or maybe a couple more one more definitely and it really gives that feeling of Grasses on top of things so I start adding more grasses and more strokes that Really give to that or lend to that buried feeling now I loved this little see that neutral teal that I added. Oh, I just thought that color was so pretty I like the color harmony in this piece sometimes I just kind of intuitively go for it when something like this and It doesn't mean it was always intuitive. It really just comes from painting a lot and Observing a lot. Do you find yourself if you're a beginner artist looking at the world differently? Isn't that fun now? I am gonna add a little bit more Flowers and texture and grasses and I've talked for like 25 minutes here so I'm gonna add a little music finish this up stay till the end and You'll see the final and I'll share a little more information with you guys. All right. Enjoy. I Slowed it down for some real-time footage here at the end. I hope you enjoyed that I I really Love music and I like adding music that I think complements the painting I'm a little limited because I have to use copyright free music. That's available on YouTube, but Hopefully you liked that song. I think music and art just go so well together plus I play guitar I write songs and sing myself. So anyway, that was a tangent But I hope you learned a little bit about neutrals now notice how the majority of the painting is a neutral base and feeling overall and The violet colored flowers are the only thing with really highly saturated color Most specifically just those violets even some of those are kind of neutral But I'm adding a little pop of dark in just some areas not every flower Because now I heard Marla begetta say this if it's everywhere. It's nowhere So we want to keep our focal energy and strategy working So just add those little elements of lights or darks in places that will strengthen your focal point and This was the final definitely Impressionistic and fun with some energetic mark making and I enjoyed this I literally painted this in one session. It probably took about an hour and a half, but I hope you enjoyed this I hope you learned a little bit about neutrals. Try that little exercise at the beginning now If you're a patron of mine, I'm having a drawing to where one of my patrons Who submits work in the homework album? We have an album I get to see your work from my lessons and one of my patrons will win This set of Jack Richardson color wheel neutrals So another perk for being a patron and plus we just have such a great family. All right guys I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned a lot. Happy painting. Come back and God bless