 Welcome artistic friends to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. In this lesson you're going to learn some of my tips on how to transform color. You know often we have a beautiful reference image. This one is from pmp-art.com but it might be a little lackluster with color or just kind of a basic color palette. Well if you've been on my channel long you know I love to exaggerate color and interpret the landscape. So in this lesson I'm going to show you some of my neat little color tricks of colors that I lay down to create a foundation that's gonna be vibrant and have some pizzazz. And perhaps encourage you to grab some of those colors that you hardly ever use. So get excited as I take you on this journey to take your paintings from drab to fab. My painting is on a five inch by five inch surface and it's on a pastel paper I have never used before. I was so excited to see the amount of layers this paper takes and it's actually part of my 20 in 20 challenge I'm having this month where members of the Monet Cafe art group and patrons on my Patreon page are creating 20 paintings in 30 days. So I have already prepped my surfaces. Different pastel surfaces you're going to learn a lot this month as I paint on each of them and I have them all in a square format. The surface that I'm using for this painting is one that I've never used before. Well I've used pastel premiere but I've used the white. This one happens to be a 320 grit it's sand it's like sandpaper and it's more textured than the one that I used before which was a 400 grit. Now the texture allows you to get lots of layers down so part of this painting was me experimenting with how many layers can this paper actually take. This is the pastel premiere white which was the 400 grit I used in a recent tutorial and by the way this surface is water friendly. So let's talk about these pastels. I like to sometimes just grab a set of pastels when I'm doing lots of paintings like this so I grabbed my Terry Ludwig Maggie Price set because it has a lot of vibrant colors. I don't think they have that available except on the Terry Ludwig site directly and I chose I pre-chose some colors. Notice those bright pinks and that pretty vibrant green down there. I'm going to use those to get this painting started with a punch of color and I would really appreciate it. If you would go ahead and like this video comment I'd love to hear what you have to say and subscribe. Also if you would like the longer version of this tutorial consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. It's only five dollars a month. You not only support this channel but you get extra content as well. I'm just blocking in a very general sketch and as you can see I'm taking a horizontal photo and turning it into a square composition. So I just got in a horizon line and some tree shapes and now I'm getting in some flower shapes. I could have done this in the other color I had. By the way this is a Prismacolor new pastel. They're harder pastels. They're kind of good for sketching. So I just want to create a pleasing composition that feels gestural and inviting and these are most likely all going to get covered up anyway but it just is a road map to get started. So now is the blocking in stage. I'm just going to block in these distant trees and a little bit of the roots of the foreground grasses. Those elements are typically the darker elements in a painting and I'm lately I've been not putting down my darkest value first. I kind of block in with a little bit of a middle value and then I go in and add my my darker values and then my lighter values. So now is where we're going to start having some fun with color. Typically when I was first starting to create with soft pastels I would have tried to create all of those colors I see in the reference photo and I've learned over the years that what usually causes your painting to sing and say hey look at me is some of those underneath colors and the pinks I find work great for underneath landscape paintings where you have a lot of greens. Sometimes I'll use oranges and reds but sometimes I'll use cooler reds like these example of these pinks as well. Here's where I'm going in and adding the dark darkening the trees and the roots of the grasses and now I'm just getting in some of these flower shapes. This is a Terry Ludwig pastel and it is very soft and it just layers so nice and buttery so I'm just using it to block in some shapes. Now this little pastel I believe is a Sennelier and would you ever think you would use a vibrant green like that to to block in flower shapes. Believe it or not it works. Now I've said earlier in this video this was the first time I had used this 320 grit paper so I was just fascinated with the layering capability. Normally I don't layer as much as I do in this painting but really you can even put down colors like this and just gradually add your layers on top and some of those underneath colors will just peek through. Here I'm adding a pretty blue in the sky to set the mood and I'm also going to add a little more warmth in those grasses just a little bit more of this pretty red color and the greens are going to be layered on top of this and now I'm going to blend this in with a piece of pipe foam insulation that you could get at any hardware store. I just cut it in little pieces and I found that this pastel premiere paper maybe just because it's so gritty a lot of the pastel falls off but what I'm trying to do is create a soft and moody look and now I'm going to have to reinforce some things because it did really soften a lot of the underpainting but again this is my beginning my roadmap so to speak I'm getting some color in look at this pretty coral color I just gently layered over some of that the green and violets and now I'm adding a little dark I even though these flowers in our brains we say they're white they're white there's a lot of value in there that's darker especially on the underneath sides of the flowers and if you don't get some of those darker values in you won't have any color contrast or value contrast and things won't stand out as a focal point so I'm still getting things a little rich with some of the warm colors adding a little more of this pretty blue I think it's the same blue that was in the distant trees but I already know I'm still going to darken these trees I knew that they were just blocked in and so now I'm getting in this is just a really dark green now we're starting to see some contrast happening just kind of reinforcing a little bit of color in the sky I really like that pretty blue and giving a little bit of a lighter value just above the tree line in the distance it's having a nice soft feel isn't it and I'll work a little bit and you're going to see me in just a minute start to finally add some of those greens in those grasses and obviously this is a bit of a speed version here on the Monet Cafe channel the free videos you can watch anytime here on Monet Cafe but like I said over on my Patreon page things are slowed down substantially often a lot of real-time content and I have like the whole video is commentary so if you're getting a little more serious about your painting or pastel painting career you can learn a whole lot for only five dollars a month and like I always say you support this channel for viewers that have no other means to learn to paint so I love that part about Monet Cafe that I get the most beautiful messages all the time and on that note let me do a subscriber spotlight this is Diane and she says I learned so much watching you paint I'm trying to teach myself the art of soft pastels and you pushed me forward with your example and comments thank you I'm now following you on Instagram where I've found many tips and hints oh and you can follow me on Instagram at Susan Jenkins Artist thank you Diane isn't she pretty I really love it when you guys leave me comments and like I said subscribe become a subscribers a lot of you guys watch these videos over and over and you haven't hit the subscribe button but I know I do that with other channels but I'd appreciate it if you would subscribe it helps the videos to get shared all over so more people see them all right you can see that I'm adding some beautiful purples in the shadowy areas underneath these flowers I've made the flowers larger um then I was seeing them in the reference image again just using my artistic license to interpret this now here's where the fun comes in I started adding some of those pretty purples because it had some warmth in the grasses I thought the complement of orange um is is like purple and lavenders so that's why I added some of that purple you'll see me add these really beautiful vibrant lavenders um towards the end as well and as you can see I'm finally lightening up these flowers um putting a little bit of a light pale yellow on this is still not my lightest light you'll see me add that later but with regards to turning drab into fab one of them is just what I mentioned is take a main color in the landscape this one had a lot of warmth and use the complement such as a purple or a magenta um to oranges and use that to make some color contrast and make your paintings just pop with drama and color um you can see I've added some stems now I'm adding those little wispy things um that come off of the flowers you know where the stem meets the flower um and now I'm starting to reinforce some of those purples here is finally the lightest light it looks like a white but it's actually a beautiful very pale like aqua color um now here's some of those fun magentas uh it's a pretty bright magenta and see how that just brought this painting to life now I did spray this with a little fixative it kind of dulled it a little bit but I wanted to be able to add these grasses on top and um and while this painting took a lot of layering and it would have taken even more layering sometimes when you spray a little fixative what it does is it causes the underneath part of the painting to not smudge when you add another pastel and by the way I never spray my final painting because it always darkens the image I just use it as a tool and only occasionally during the painting process when I want to add a few more grasses on top of things without smudging the the pastel underneath I've slowed this down to real time here you can see me adding in some of these little magenta colors I'll show you the final as well but as a recap if I had to pick two things to summarize this video it would be use some complimentary and perhaps fun color underneath your painting as an underpainting and make some final marks with a color that just pops often it's a color that's a compliment to the main color in the reference image so give me a comment if you learn something new and find the hundreds of free videos literally hundreds I have here on Monet Cafe also become a patron if you want a little more and to support this channel as always God bless and happy painting