 Welcome friends and visitors in Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today we're going to talk about how you can use a complementary underpainting to make your paintings pop. And why is it that sometimes you can see an artist and their painting is just so full of color and you wonder why yours might look maybe a little drab and dull? Well, complementary under paintings are a way that you can create that pizzazz and burst of color in your artwork. So I want to go into a couple of little articles and things I can show you before we get to the painting today that may help you understand it better. Now first in order to understand how to use complementary colors as an underpainting we have to first know what complementary colors are. If you just think of the word complementary as a complement but it's actually the opposite or directly across on the color wheel. So if we're going to have a painting with mostly blues and greens which happens to be a lot of landscapes which we focus on a lot in my channel the opposite on the color wheel of those colors is going to be warmer tones more in this side. So that's all it's not hard knowing what complementary colors are it's just the opposite of the whatever it is on the side of the color wheel. Okay so if you're doing cooler and greens you're going to get more of the warmer yellows, oranges, reds and magentas. Okay so those are the colors we focus on when doing a complementary underpainting. Now this is an article that I found on the artist network website. It is a great description of how this particular artist uses complementary under paintings. It's by Michael Chesley Johnson the artist and let me just show you real quickly. I'll provide the link in the about section of this video but you see this painting that you know it has a lot of greens and blues in it but it's so interesting and so intriguing with color. You can kind of see the bits of the red beneath that foreground tree but he goes on to explain how he approaches a complementary underpainting. First he has his photo and he goes into details about how he looks for the values then he gets his initial sketch in you know how he chooses his composition and then now notice these complementary colors that he's used. He has the the darker values of course for the trees the vertical trees anything verticals always a little darker and the reds and this burgundy here is the darkest value. He's got his yellows for the sky and the water and he's got his medium values more for the land. So that's kind of a basic idea of how to get down complementary colors and like I did in my video he also does an alcohol wash. I think he actually does a turpinoid wash. What that does is it sets the color so that when you go back over it with your pastel you're not going to get the bleeding or the blending of the pastels together. The video that I'm making here of my painting that I just recently did I did not do an alcohol wash and you will notice the the blending of colors. I was kind of in a hurry but you see how these colors just start to pop when you put it on top of that complementary underpainting. It's just beautiful so let's get started and I will show you my technique and I hope you learn something. All right now here I'm just basically laying down a sketch as a guideline. I'm using UART sanded paper 400 grit and a reference photo from a site I use often paint my photo and it's www.pmp-art.com. You can find some great reference photos on this website and I'm just basically getting in the generalities here. You don't want to get too specific with this. I liked this photo already because it had a good composition to begin with. It was very nicely divided with the rule of thirds that I talk about often. The back horizon line is in the where the water or the land meets the sky is in the upper third and that group of grasses that's going across the painting in the foreground is in the lower third and so I'm just basically getting in some general shapes always working big or less detailed to more detailed and the sketch shouldn't be that detailed at all and this is a new pastel in you pastel. It's a harder pastel that I'm using just to get the sketch in. Sometimes it's good to establish some of those darks just to get an idea of where things are. Now here I am using the complementary colors that I spoke about before on the warmer side or the opposite side on the color wheel of the blues and I'm using the darker colors. I sped this up a little bit. The darker reds will be anything vertical. Trees and grasses are always going to be darker in value and the sky and the water is in the yellow. That's a lighter value. The sky and the water is almost always the lightest thing in a landscape painting and of course you see that oranges, orange and pinks I used are going to be the ground. They're a medium value. Now I'm just going ahead and laying in some of the colors. I went ahead and got down the underpainting and I want you to notice too that I did not on this particular painting do what I often do which is called alcohol wash or you can use water or turpenoid. I've never used it before but I've heard you can and you basically do a wet wash over your underpainting before you start laying down the other colors. As you notice I did not do that here. It was a little bit of just a time constraint. I really do like adding the alcohol wash because it sets your underneath colors so they don't blend as much with the colors that you're starting to lay down. So as you can see I'm just getting the values in now and getting my general idea in and I apologize for the speed video. I know a lot of you ask about real time videos and I promise I'm trying to get back to that. Many of you know my life was a little turned upside down due to our home flooding and my art studio flooding when Hurricane Irma was here. So my family is we're still getting everything together but I try to sneak in a little painting here and there and I absolutely love being able to pop into the Monet Cafe art group on Facebook. Please join us if you haven't already. It's just a great place to learn and grow and just experience beauty. There's a wonderful artist of every level on there and the thing I love about the group is that no one ever feels or they shouldn't feel very quickly they feel welcome. They shouldn't feel inferior if they're just beginning in their pastel art journey. So the group makes everybody new feel welcome and there is never a question that is not a good one to ask. You can ask anything in that in that group. So please just come on over to the Monet Cafe art group in Facebook. Now you can see here I'm laying down some of the you notice that the greens on top of that orangey color underpainting and a little bit of the cooler greens and blues and now I'm working on the water a little bit. So this is going to be a little bit of a faster tutorial here again for time constraints but you're getting the idea of how you start with the warmer tones and then you just gradually start adding more local color which means the color that's natural to the scene on top of your underpainting. Now a lot of you know if you've been around my channel very often I get a little creative with color as long as you get the value right you can do that. For example there's in the reference photo there's no pink in the sky and there's none of those really rich pink magenta's in the trees but the value is close so you know you can do that and I just love to explore with color it's part of the fun of painting. So enjoy the rest of this painting and I hope to upload another video soon. At the end of this painting I had a correction I had to make so I show how you can kind of erase the pastel painting. I won't show it in this video but it's coming up soon so you know you don't have to be so afraid if you do something wrong you can you have some degree of correction when you're pastel painting. So enjoy guys and I am just happy to be making a video or two here and there and if you haven't subscribed to our channel already my channel please do and click the little bell icon if you want to get notified of upcoming videos. So join us if you would like and enjoy any upcoming videos and I am so happy to be back creating in Monay Cafe. Happy painting!