 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and in this lesson we're continuing with cloud painting. It is cloud painting month. I love painting clouds for their atmospheric beauty, life and color. In today's tutorial you'll learn what I'm calling the three color method for painting glorious clouds. Don't go for those boring grays when painting clouds, so get ready to learn this technique that will bring your clouds to life. Hello friends and followers. I'm artist Susan Jenkins of Monet Cafe. I'm happy you're here during the month of July which is cloud month. We've been having fun on my Patreon page and in the Facebook group creating cloud paintings. Your work is just beautiful, but today I'd like to bring another cloud painting tutorial to you explaining color in clouds. Often we think clouds are gray or maybe a little bit of purple, but value is really within a gray scale and clouds have so much color. Oh here comes my little Jackson. Come on Jackson. It's okay. You can come in. So come on join the fun. I am excited to bring you this lesson and I think you're gonna learn a lot. All right guys here we go. Would you take a moment to bless this channel by liking this video, commenting once you've seen it and subscribing. Also click that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. And a big shout out to my patrons from my Patreon page. Their support is what keeps these free videos coming to hungry artists all over the world. Plus you get extra content all for only $5 a month. The surface I'll be using for the three color demonstration of painting clouds is Canson Métonce. It's an unsanded pastel paper. This is the gray tones pad. So when creating grays in clouds rather than using the standard what we consider a gray, very void of color, very neutral. I mean these are all very nice but they lack life. And in nature there are so many different colors combining to make that appearance of gray. Light is just reflecting off of so many things. Clouds have way more color than we imagine when we try to paint them. And yes you can mix colors in pastels because of the beautiful ability to layer. Now what we can do, the typical way to make a neutral color is by mixing compliments. Now you could totally do this. We could go with a blue violet and a yellow orange or a blue and an orange and they will definitely neutralize each other. And then you can add white to lighten it up. Let's do a little example of that. So let's just get this purple that I have here. And I'm just going to layer down some color like we've got the underside of a cloud. And I'm going to go and get the opposite. It's not exactly the same. It's in this kind of color family here. And I'm going to go with more kind of a yellowy orange. And we want to try to find a value that is similar to this value. And that just means the lightness or the darkness. I'm going to pick out a orange type of color, orangey yellowy color. And I'm going to show you a little trick for checking your values. It's really pretty easy. Lay out some value choices, take a photo and then convert your photo. Sorry for the reflection of my ring light above. Convert it to black and white or just take all the saturation away. And then by taking the color away, you're easily able to see the value differences. And I can see the two on the outside, the purple and the darker orange are actually closer in value than that middle orangey yellow color. And they don't have to be exact values, but just something close. I found this one, which was kind of in between the other two orange values. And I thought it worked well. This is a way that we can mix and create our own grays. And sometimes you do have to add a few layers to get them actually starting to blend together. But you'll see, let me put the actual color here and you'll see that we gradually start to get a more grayed out cloud. And as they start to blend, they will gray out even more, much more interesting. Now, if we wanted to lighten that up in any area, we can simply get a lighter value and lighten it up a little bit. I'm going to use some of this right here. Let's say this cloud is a rain cloud and we know the heavy parts are going to be underneath and let's say we've got a little bit of light kind of on some of the top parts of these clouds. So that is way more interesting than perhaps doing it like this. Here, I'm just using the selection of grays that are in the set, different values going from dark to light. And you can see how dull and boring that looks. Now I'm just doing a few more of these with the same technique. This one is kind of a cool green and the opposite color for this would be more in the pinkish red family. So once again, checking the values again, green and red are compliments. And it gives a really warm kind of cloud feel. It feels like a summer cloud full of rain. Now I'm going to do one with the compliments of orange and blue. And I really like this combination. And sometimes they take a little while to blend. And I suggest you just play around with this two color method for creating your own grays. Now let's talk about another way to make grays that are even more interesting and exciting. I learned this little trick from artist Deborah Seacour. She is an amazing artist. I know it was the Lord's blessing meeting her early in my pastel art career. She is just outstanding. Her heart to give is so great that she created an entire PDF book that is free. I will provide the link to her book in the description of this video. And she is so just expressive about her faith in the Lord. And I know the Lord has blessed her with so many of her gifts and talents. And of course her generous heart to help others. So thank you Deborah Seacour for your knowledge about painting clouds. So what she suggests to do is rather than just going with the two compliments, blue and yellow, orange, for example, she suggests using three colors. It's called a triad on the color wheel. When you make a triangle, you can do that with the primary colors, which what are the primary colors? We've learned this from school blue, yellow and red in pigment in light. It's actually different. But in pigment, we know that if we mix blue and red together, we get purple blue and yellow. We get green red and yellow. We get orange. You see how it just shows you that the color wheel is really so easy. Yep, right there in the middle. So that could actually mix together to make a neutral color, those three colors, but these are the primary colors, meaning you can't mix anything to get these colors. They are just inherent to that color. Whereas secondary colors, secondary means you have to mix two to get to it. OK, so this is a secondary color. These purples, it can be mixed with two other colors. OK, so let's keep that in mind. I'm going to show you two different examples to mix clouds using a triad arrangement or choices. All right, so let's first just do the one with the primary colors. All right, so these colors will produce a neutral. Let's take a look at that. So let's say we have a cloud here. I say it's one of those just pretty kind of stormy clouds. It's really big down here. OK, we've got a cloud here, and I'm going to mix these three primaries together to get a neutral. You can see this is all red. Let's put the colors over here. I'm speeding this up because it's the same process, just gradually layering. And it takes a few times for it to neutralize. And I ended this more on a red note. It could have been more blue if I had added one more blue layer. So the three primaries are already non-mixed colors. OK, they are pure, if you want to think they're primary. However, if you go with your secondary colors and make a triad, make a triangle, we're already leaning more towards neutral colors because these are a mixture of two colors themselves. So the secondary colors of violet, green and orange make a beautiful gray because they are already neutralized a bit themselves. If you can understand that concept there. So let's go with a violet. I don't have that many nice violets in this set. So let me see if I can find and I find that with a lot of sets of pastel that there aren't many great purples in it. So I often will order some purples myself. Let me go find a good violet. All right, this is the quickest one I could find. But it's kind of already a little bit of a medium value purple. So let's go with that one. And we're going to go with a orange and a green. All right, OK, and then let's go with a green kind of like that. All right, you see how those are the triangle purple, orange and green. This is kind of a neutral purple already, but it works if your purple is is pretty intense too. All right, let me explain a little as I'm working here. Basically, what's happening when you're using the secondary colors is you're getting more of all of the colors of the rainbow because purple is red and blue. Orange is yellow and red. Green is blue and yellow. So you're getting a great neutral because you're using all of those colors in essence. That may seem weird to use green, but it really does work well to neutralize things. And then you can go back in and blend and get more of a color influence if you want it to be a little bit more of that bluish purpley color. Can you see how things are beginning to gray out quite nicely and also to you don't have to always use these exact colors. I would let your scene determine how you lean towards certain colors. If it's a scene that has a lot of teals in it, you can still go with teals and make a triangle on your color wheel, a tetrad basically, and use those colors so you don't have to stay stuck into these particular triad colors on the color wheel. But I happen to like these colors a lot. Now, if it's a stormy cloud, I'm putting in some deeper purple underneath to give that feeling of rain, heavy rain underneath the cloud. And you can just kind of continue to work it, letting the pastels blend themselves. Sometimes I'll use my fingers just to kind of knock some things down a little bit. But I really like, especially after you've worked a bit, to let the pastels do the blending work. Now you can see how nice that's starting to look. Also, too, I could go back to this one on the top. Notice how I mentioned I had it a little leaning on the red side. I can add some more blue to it. And also, too, you want to make sure that whatever you're doing with the clouds is going to be harmonious with the scene. You often want your colors in your clouds to echo down on the land because color has an influence everywhere. It's always bouncing off of things. So that's a good way to make sure your painting has a sense of unity and congruency. I feel like you could even add a little bit of magenta in this cloud. Look how fun that is. Isn't that beautiful? So pretty. And now let's put some of these principles to work. I'm going to use this combination to get my grays in a little four by four painting that's part of this cloud painting series. So let's go for it. The surface I'm using is a tan little piece of pastel matte. I love the surface. The reference image is from this is an album I have exclusively for my patrons that has lots of my cloud photos in it. Oh, and I had to throw in a picture of my mama or two in there. But anyway, I am definitely a sky watcher and I love taking photos of clouds. And the one that I'm using for this particular Oh, this is one that's coming soon. I'm going to show you how to do this sky and those lights on the back of that truck. But the one that I'm using right now, you know, I'm really pretty confident I took this photo, but someone already recreated from it and said thanks to someone else for that photo. So, you know, photo management is kind of hard. So if I'm mistaken and this is someone else's photo, please shout out to me so I can give you credit. I never save them unless they are photos from our groups where people say, hey, feel free to paint from this. But I'm pretty sure it's my photo. So I obviously sped up the sketch a little bit and you don't need a lot. It's just the general gesture of the clouds. And I put down a dark base for the foreground there. And now I'm adding a really pretty purple. OK, remember, this is part of that three secondary color system that I'm going to be using. I am adding a little bit of dark. You want to keep in mind that your clouds should never be darker than your foreground. The sky is always lighter. Even when it's dark, stormy clouds at night, they're just going to be lighter. But I'm going to be layering other colors over this. There's still going to be, you know, a little kind of dark. This is a dramatic sky. But it will lighten up as I add other colors. All right. So there you have it. And again, I'm just speeding this up so we can get through this. I wanted to give you the lesson to begin with. But you still should be able to follow along. And here I am adding a little bit of blue to it. I mean, like I said, you can tweak these things a little bit. It's just kind of toning down that purple a little bit. We're still working with cooler, bluish-purple colors here. And I'm adding some of this to the sky. Skies are typically darker in the heavens and get lighter as you go down to the horizon line. Now here's where I'm adding a little bit of that green. Now I chose, this is my second secondary color, you could say. I chose a green that was already a little neutral. I'm using a set of pastels that's literally just sitting next to me, and I'm just trying to work with what I have. Now this particular pastel, oh, these are Schminke pastels, by the way. It just had, it was textural. If you ever do that, you grab a certain pastel in it. Just feels gritty. Well, that's how that orange one was. But that's once again, those three secondary colors that are already a little bit neutral because they're a combination of two colors. And it really does make just a nice neutral feel for clouds. I know I'm speeding this up a bit, but the painting in real lifetime actually took about 30 minutes or so. And I also too, I got a brag on this surface, the pastel matte surface that I'm using. It's a sanded surface, considered a sanded surface, but it doesn't feel sanded like UART or Fisher or Sennelier, LeCart pastel card. And if you're brand new to soft pastels, gosh, I totally remember when I was new, I was like, what the heck is a sanded paper? And it's literally a surface that has a texture to it. And it allows your pastels to get layering. If you were to use pastels on just a flat piece of paper, a copy paper, you wouldn't be able to layer, it would fall right off. But pastel matte is unique in that it doesn't feel gritty, but it allows for a lot of layers. So at this point, I've gotten in a few of my major cloud shapes and some of that sky and I'm blending with just a piece of tissue paper here. This works great with pastel matte, but not so great with other surfaces that are a little too sanded. So this is just what's called the blocking in stage, getting most of the painting surface covered and you take it easy at this stage. Don't get too detailed with anything. And as you can see here now, I'm just putting in that tree line in the distance. It is really far away. So I'm just getting some little tree shapes in there. They don't have to be exactly like what you see in the photo, but I like to keep in mind what would make a nice focal point. And I felt like that main diagonal cloud shape, that's one of the main focal points is it's just pulling you into the painting. And so I know I want, I move, you'll see when I add my light underneath the cloud, I put that in a position that I think is going to be a good focal point. And that's why I wanted that one little darker tree area kind of to work well with that cloud to complement, in other words. I'm adding a few of the other smaller cloud shapes. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute, but I wanted to share that now I'm starting to go in and I don't keep everything exact to the photo. Parts of it is at the upper right. Some of it is sky showing through, some of it's clouds. And I kind of zone out and just think about the shapes and the values first. Now here's what I was talking about with echoing of color. The cloud colors that I have will, or the painting in general, feel very disjointed if I don't have some of the same colors of the cloud reflecting down into the land. And it doesn't have to be anything dramatic, just little hints of those colors, perhaps in strategic areas in your field. All right, now I'm doing a little bit more of those clouds. Clouds in general, when they get into the distance, they're going to lighten up and they're going to get closer together just like things do in, on the earth. Like I talk about flowers. Your flowers up close are going to be larger. They're going to be bolder in color. They're going to be typically darker in value. They're going to flatten out and lighten up, get more neutral and get smaller in the distance. Well, that's the same thing that happens with clouds. If you turned your painting upside down, you would see it works exactly the same as things on the land. And here you can see I've been adding some of the general warm tones to where the sunset is happening. And keep in mind your light source. When your sun is setting in a scene, you're going to have, of course, warmer value, warmer colors and lighter values around that area where the sun is. I usually resist the urge in these situations to go with a white. I would have done that early in my art career. I would have just grabbed a white and say, oh, that's white, but it's not. It's really just bright, light color. And of course, sometimes when you're beginning, you're a little limited with color choices. So just work with what you have. But colors are gonna gradually get a little cooler as they move away from the sun. What happens when you move away from the sun? You're gonna get cooler, colors get cooler. So keep that in mind. That's why I chose some of those pinks as I moved further away from the sun. So also too, your sunset is going to have some influence on some of the clouds above it and on the earth below it. So often when I have the sunset right over the trees, now I'm just darkening this up a bit. But before I'm done with the painting, I'm gonna add a little bit of warmth to those trees, that little tree line. That's kinda like my focal point right there. I got the clouds zooming into it. I've got a few of the trees beneath it and I've got that beautiful sunset there, which is a high contrast area, making a nice focal point. And here I'm just adding in some of these other lighter areas, kind of the sky in between the clouds. And as I paint here a bit, I wanna reiterate the point of this lesson. That main cloud and the other kinda smaller cloud to the right of it, right above where I'm painting there, were created with the three secondary color system using those, a triad of colors using the secondary colors. And it really does bring life to that cloud. Think of some of these clouds. If I had just used the grays that I used at the beginning of this demonstration, it would have just been lack of character and life and beauty. So I really do love combining three colors when making clouds. I don't always do it. Sometimes I'll just use two complementary colors. Sometimes I'll just let the scene dictate what I grab, but I really feel it adds some energy and life to beautiful cloud paintings. And I am using some of these blues here to create some of the other highlights on some of the clouds. And as I said before, I don't really feel like I'm painting every little individual cloud. I sort of zone out, squint my eyes a lot and I look at the values. If you squint your eyes and look at my painting and then look at the reference image above, you can see that the values are similar. And here you can see I added just before this some of that pink down into the land, some of those warm tones. And I'm keeping them consistent with what's above. It's kind of like I say when creating reflections, you're taking what's above and you're reflecting it down below. You're doing the same thing with some of the colors in these clouds onto the land. I am gonna be darkening the foreground a little bit more. You can see how the clouds have lightened up a bit. And I'm also gonna be adding some more of those pinks. Here we go right here. I found this pink too was kind of like that orange that I used earlier in the demonstration. It was a little textured and gritty. Now I'm using this particular color that is a little warmer than the previous kind of pinkish color. Why would I do that? I'm getting closer to the source of light, the sun. So I just made it a tad warmer. Now I darkened up the foreground a little bit. If you squint your eyes, you can see the foreground is darker than the clouds and I'm pretty much finishing up at this point. But this I would say is more of a study. Here's where I'm warming up some of those trees in the distance. Ah, I really like that final touch. So do some studies like this. Even do some practice cloud color combinations like I did at the beginning of this video. The more you do, the better you'll get. If you're a patron of mine, you are going to get my actual reference image. I'll be including in your Patreon post. If you're not a patron of mine, I would love it if you would consider becoming one. It really does support this channel. Only $5 a month, you can cancel it anytime. And you get extra content and I get to see your work. So here's the final. It was fun, definitely impressionistic, which is my style anyway. Hope you guys learned something in this lesson. Also, if you did, please leave me a comment. I love to hear from you. There are more cloud painting tutorials on the way. I gotta get busy. I have the footage. I just have to edit it. God bless you all. I love my family here on YouTube and all of my subscribers. And if you'd like to find more of my work and follow me and all of these places that are on this end screen, please do so and happy painting.