 Welcome visitors to Monet Café and my wonderful patrons from my Patreon page. I am going to do a little lesson in an easy study in painting tall grasses. I know sometimes I have a lot more tutorials that are in-depth and a lot of information, so sometimes we just need to take a break and tackle something a bit more basic or simple. So this is going to be available for both my patrons and here on the Monet Café YouTube channel. I am going to be doing a another very detailed video coming up soon on my Patreon page and you can join that at the link above. Now this is just a piece of Sennelier LeCart pastel card. It's sanded. It's a pretty gritty sanded surface. I love the surface. So now I'm going to be quiet and I actually didn't have to do a voiceover for this one. Favorite general landscape formats or compositions? It's just probably because it's like trees in my backyard. It's just some some trees with a field that kind of goes off into the distance like this and then there's these super super tall grasses here. So you want to get your darkest dark on the tree line. Remember things that are vertical are dark and then I'm just going to get in some super tall grasses here. So this is like we were laying in the grass and looking up. So all these grasses and I'm going to make them kind of splaying out a little bit like this. Okay so that's kind of easy right? So get your darks in there and now let's just go ahead and get in some other kind of dark colors back here for the sky. I've got kind of a darker kind of a teal that I'm putting here. Usually things get lighter down at the horizon line but in this case behind trees sometimes colors are a little darker. You don't want to do your lightest lights as sky holes. I'm going to get some darks in here by these trees and now let me just get another blue. I'm literally just grabbing what I have. I'm kind of getting in my lightest lights and my darkest darks. All right I might have to reestablish. Actually I got another dark here. This is a that one was kind of a dark blue. This is more of a really dark purple. So just getting in some interesting shapes. Notice I'm just using the side of my pastel and just kind of scumbling along and I'm going to go ahead and get some of that darker down here in the deeper grass. It's usually the deepest grasses like if you were to lay down and take a photo it's going to be darkest like right where you are and then it's going to gradually get lighter as you go back. So okay so we've just got what four colors in there. Two darks and two teal colors. So now what we're going to do again I'm just literally grabbing colors as I'm talking here. I didn't pre-choose anything. I'm going to take and get me kind of a oh this is dirty. Get me kind of a nice green here. When things go back far into the distance they get horizontal okay not vertical like grasses because they're so far away you just literally cannot see those and because this I'm going to bring a little bit of that in here. This is Sennelier Lecart paper by the way I love that stuff. It's really gritty and the texture gives for a real painterly feel. Now because there's these trees here I want these greens where these trees are I might even add a little purple in here to be a little darker because there's kind of some shadows in here okay but we're still working with these horizontal shapes right there. All right we've got some now what we're going to do is we're going to start getting kind of chunky here. Oh my these all shaking. I want to give the impression of like some chunky grasses. I am literally just suggesting here. I don't want to over I don't want to be sloppy and I don't want to overwork my painting but at the same time I want that spontaneity. Okay so look at there it's already looking a little like something. Now let's get because I use some of these teals in the sky I want to get maybe a little darker. That's the one that I used this is a little more green. Let me see if I can go even darker with something that I have here. Let's see what this is more of a neutral. Oh yeah that's nice. Okay so we're down in these deep grasses they're kind of shadowy and cooler in temperature. They're not going to be as brilliant green. Our most brilliant greens are going to be right here on the tips of these grasses so let's just get in some of these again reaching up and I'm going to accentuate that reaching up soon with some of these that are really going up high. Again this is just a little teeny painting when you don't have time to do anything and you're feeling you want to get creative cut up lots of these little pieces of paper and paint small. It's it's a great way to get those creative juices flowing when you don't have time. Now this is the one that was a little brighter and again the suns gets here but won't get in those deep grasses so I'm gonna add some chunky marks. Look at that chunkiness. I like these. This is you know like just for that impressionistic feel. Okay so this light's coming in there. Alright let's see now. Let's get in. I feel like I need a little bit of a an orangey color in here somewhere like it's a bright day. That's probably too light. Let me get something a little bit darker here. Yeah like that. Okay like we've got some golden grasses coming up in here. Again I like the idea of them kind of spreading out. They're kind of peeking in here and there and obviously these grasses are going to the ones that are sticking up. They're gonna get a little bit smaller as they go back into the distance. I don't want to overdo that so now I'm gonna get to where they are turning a bit more golden in color. It's gonna be right back here the tips of these so we're gonna do a few little chunky marks where these are peeking up over everything. Some of those might be a little large but it's okay. Okay now it's gonna get even more golden as it goes back into the distance here. Let me find one this one right here. Okay so and now things are getting further away so they're not as there's not as much definition. I might do a little bit of this kind of glazing across here. Again these little grasses are getting smaller smaller smaller. I feel like I need some purple going on in here so let me grab this is this is really this is just I love these gorgeous purple colors so purples make a great shadow and they just I don't know they just add something special so I'm gonna add some of these purples in here again they just like the cooler greens that make a really nice shadowy color. I'm gonna reinforce some of these darks in here give our idea of tall grasses again kind of reaching up and out and let me get that purple again kind of a really rich deep purple and for contrast I'm gonna add a few of these in that are just really more defined so we get that feeling we're laying down in the grass again and this Sennelier Lecart paper is really takes a decent amount of layering and I'm gonna light these trees up again but I wanted to get that feeling of definition and contrast for the trees. Now I think I want to make this is a little dark I'm going with a really light touch here I think I want to make a tree line of some distant trees going back here so I'm gonna cool that off now by adding cooling things off makes things look like they're further away so I'm gonna cool it off by adding just a layer on top of this of this some teal color and see how that just pushed that back we might have a little bit more of this back here and I'll even grab a cooler blue or teal back here this one's too light I bet well maybe not look we got some other trees really going far back there alright so now let me get a little even cooler I think that this was the one that I used here yeah but I'm gonna kind of carve down in between some of these trees I kind of like a little bit of that Sennelier paper showing there sorry for my easel moving around and here's that that darker one now I'm gonna blend this a little bit more with another value to kind of connect the two there probably that was the high one in the sky that was the low one so I can actually just take this one and kind of glaze over it that's the beautiful thing about the sanded paper there's so much blending possibility and often you do not have to blend with your fingers or any any other blending tool because the pastels do it themselves now I'm loving this color in the sky I need a little bit more of that darker color down here in the grasses again we're representing that chunky tall grass feeling maybe a little more of that purple down in here might need a little bit of this yeah I like that little lighter purple kind of peeking down some of these places but I always feel like if I add it some here I gotta add it somewhere else let's just put a little bit of that purple right back there maybe a little bit like there's a tree real far away back there that's fun okay all right I feel like I need a little bit more of that since I added that gold in there I feel like I need a little bit more of a bring some of this down in here maybe just a little kind of peeking through the grasses all right now I need to brighten that I mean I'm dull out those trees a little bit they're a little too dark right now so let me see if I can find a green they look like black trees right now so I want to add I've got this some it's dirty but I've got this some kind of a darker green and all I'm doing is scumbling just kind of making some marks here and keeping that really loose impressionistic feel a little bit on those usually you keep the darks a little bit down by the base of the trees and I'm gonna kind of add some of this with thicker grasses down in here so this dark isn't so dark and we're almost done a little field going on here all right I think I'm gonna really accentuate some of that golden color this might be a little overkill but I'm gonna give it a try I like it actually it's like those beautiful golden grasses that the Sun just barely hits them some of them even over here and so again doing these tall grasses the majority of it is dark in the front and then it just has a very thin line of the horizontal bands because the grass is so tall all right I'm gonna blue out that sky a little bit I feel like it's a little bit too teal so I kind of like this blue yeah like that gives a little bit I love when you give a combination of colors that makes it really interesting instead of just one color family I think I'll add some tall grasses just kind of sticking up a way to do that is with these new pastels again I like the feeling of them kind of reaching out I don't want to bring them too far down here because again if you're down in the deep roots there's not gonna be a whole lot of that I need a little bit of a darker value probably going up across here so I'm gonna get a little bit darker new pastel I'm gonna get this right here these new pastels are just great at making lines and this gives you that feeling definitely of tall grasses when you just stick some up way high like that and I don't like how I have lines so even going right across there so I do like a little bit of this dark color in there so I'm gonna kind of break that up that I've got make it a little bit more random oh yeah like that that rich color I just added I'd add some umph to it look at that feel like a selling Bob Ross all right so there's a tall grass painting voila now one thing that would make this look a little bit probably more finished is to take and carve in some sky holes not a lot just a couple this is basically negative painting I'm hitting my camera with my glasses and that gives it a kind of it you as the artist can choose where you want the viewer to look and when you add those little marks like that you create interest and you can guide the viewer where you want them to go kind of like the idea of guiding a little bit of interest back here so that you play around in the grasses and then you you want to explore back in there where this is and I feel like I need to add a little bit more that blue I actually have a this purpley it's like I call this the like the periwinkle color oh yeah that's pretty interesting a little bit of that in here yeah that made that sky way more interesting with that you just feel it going back into the distance very energetic so there it is a tall grass painting and I actually for the final wanted to show that I added some more of that teal to reflect what was going on in the sky and kind of connect the painting all together as a whole I hope you enjoyed that give this a try you see it doesn't take really any longer than 15 minutes so have fun keep practicing and if you are one of my patrons please share your final result if you try this in our patreon group that I have on Facebook alright guys happy painting and get out there and paint some tall grasses