 Welcome friends and visitors to Monet Café. Today I'm going to be sharing a lesson on how to paint on black surfaces. I think this will be interesting and fun. I like painting on black surfaces and if you're new to the channel and you like it, go ahead and subscribe. I always forget to say that and hit the little bell icon if you'd like to be notified of upcoming videos. For today's painting I'm using a reference photo that I really love. It's from my own backyard and I've painted this photo multiple times and today I'm using a different color palette. That's the neat thing. You can get creative with your color palette. One that I did before was more of a bright, enhanced more of the greens and the blues but I wanted to focus more on a golden scheme this time. Oh and guess what? Little Kitty, she finally has a name. You guys gave me some amazing names and I loved all of them but today it just came to me. She loves walking on my pastel so her name is Dusty. Alright, let's get started. Now here's my standard setup. I use a piece of aluminum foil as a trough to catch the pastel dust. This is my little hinge system and I've got a piece of UART black paper and it is a, you can't see the number up there on the back, it says 500 grit. That's the coarseness of the pastel paper. This is the color palette that I have decided to use and I divided it up into two sections because how I'm going to approach this is the top colors that you see up there or values and colors are going to be a warm underpainting. Because it's black paper or the darker values, they're already there. The paper's black so I'm going to just establish some values with these warm colors that I have from the warm side of the color palette or the color wheel and the bottom colors are going to be the ones that go on later. Because it's a dark scene and I'm wanting to create that mood of what I named this painting the golden hour, I don't need bright and bold colors in this. I just need colors that are more subdued. So that's my plan and approach and I think it's going to be fun. I actually like drawing on dark surfaces so let's get started. Lately I've been including next to my painting just all of the different pastels that I'm using and I think you guys are liking that. I've actually been noticing many of you recreating from my videos the exact same painting from the I should say from the same reference image and oh it brings my heart such joy when I see you guys actually attempting these paintings. These reference images I'm now trying very hard to use images that are my own photography so there's no copyright on them. Feel free to use them. I have no problem with that and I'm trying to show you the actual colors and pastels. So whatever you have in your color palette that hopefully you can try to emulate that and recreate this painting. So these are on top. I have the warmer colors for that's going to be the underpainting and the bottom is going to be the colors I use later. Now I wanted to put the image up there for you to see it but because the paper is dark I have to use something lighter to get in a sketch. This is just a harder new pastel. This is spelled N-U-P-A-S-T-E-L new pastel. This is a great set to get of pastels because the harder pastels are also very great to have. Everybody's bragging on the softies all the time. The ones like the Centailleur, Unison, Terry Ludwig and lots of the other ones but I like a good set of hard pastels too. I happen to get the new pastels on sale. It was a 96 piece set and gosh I can't remember. I got it like for 50% off. It was awesome. So this is just good to kind of sketch in. I'm not getting much detail here. I just want to make sure my horizon line is right. I've had a tendency in the last few videos to get painting and eventually move my horizon line more towards the center instead of a third. So I want to get that right. Now I have that horizon line and the upper third which I like. Okay now it's time to get the underpainting in. An underpainting, if you're new to painting pastel painting or any painting, all it is is a way to get color down and cover your surface and those colors are going to peek through. The underpainting doesn't always have to be what's called complementary like I'm doing here. Complimentary just means it's the opposite of what colors you might typically use. Like in a landscape greens and blues, complementary colors. If you look at a color wheel the opposite side there's going to be reds, yellows, oranges. Now this scene is darker anyway and I'm probably going to let more of these complementary colors show through than I normally would in a daylight scene because like I said this is the golden hour and I'm sensitive to that right now because I have a dear artist friend of mine and mostly a photographer. She was more into photography than painting but she passed away recently of lung cancer and I took a lot of photography and shared some photos with her and she said oh that's the golden hour. I go and take pictures of my cows in the field behind me and I was like oh wow I didn't know that and it's that time right before the sun sets and everything just has this golden glow. And if you see the reference photo that's my backyard and I shouldn't say my backyard. My backyard is we only have about an acre where we are now but this is the field behind me that's a big wide open just vast fields and cows and everything and so I love it but that time of day I love walking outside and just seeing that precious few minutes of that last setting of the sun and it truly is golden and beautiful. So now what I'm doing is if you I'm making the values equal to the colors here so if you're new to this it might not make sense at first but if you were to take what I'm doing here and convert it to black and white I'm actually going to show you the painting in black and white at the end of this video you would see that the values are correct meaning that in life and in art the way value works that just means lightness or darkness the further things are away the less intensity and value they have they're going to be lighter in value in lightness and the closer the things are to the foreground or to you the darker they will be in value I'm not talking about color here so what you can do you can get really creative because color is something that is second to value so anyway there's I have a lot of lessons about that this is my handy dandy little makeup brush that I actually used to set that my son and daughter-in-law have this product they sell it as makeup brushes and I had this actually a dream one night of using these as blenders and I love it this is a small one when you need to get those little small areas so I'm just blending these in and I don't always blend the under painting but in this case I thought it would just soften it a little bit before I add the other colors and if you notice again you can see how if just the groupings of trees they are progressively getting lighter in value the further back they go and that just adds to the illusion of distance and you can see these blenders makeup brush blenders they do brush off a lot of the pastel but but that's okay in this under painting stage and again just getting a little softness there all right so now I'm going to start adding a little bit of the shadows I love purples for shadows I just think it adds a richness to your piece and I don't always use purples but it's one of my favorite shadow colors to use so if you notice in the right side of the photo there's going to be more shadowy areas because of that big mass of groupings of grouping of trees and the foreground is just naturally darker anyway so so those purples really add to to enhance that darkness and that mood and so I'll just paint a little oh wait let me share something here this is one of my pizzazz colors I typically add to my palette a little color that's going to be the pizzazz and that little pink that I added just a second ago I decided not to go ahead with it right now it's going to be something I use later it's distracting me right now you can see it kind of in the almost in the middle lower foreground there and but it's going to be a color that I think is going to add some punch at the end you don't want to add too much punch in color or your painting just becomes like a you ever hear music that sounds like noise and there's no harmony well that's what adding too much bold color everywhere can be you want that statement to happen just slightly and subtly so anyway good now I'm going to just paint a little while and the guys enjoy the music now at this stage you would think that I have my values pretty well established however I am never done with making sure I have my values right this is the type of painting or photograph that is intensified because of that golden hour I talked about in the sun setting like that you don't even have to squint your eyes in this case to see how bright that sunlight is behind that tree so I know that's going to be totally the lightest thing in the scene and so I gotta make sure I get that right I also am seeing some pink hues in the sky in the upper atmosphere of the sky up there that's gonna get blended in a little bit but I typically try to whatever is above the sky usually in late somewhere below normally you would think of course you would do that with water but you also do that with the landscape because the colors of the sky usually get reflected in the grasses and well there's that little punch of color I was talking about that's the color that I'm using for the pizzazz and and I thought I'd just sneak that in here in a few places and it it sort of just sets up an emotion for me when I do that and I don't know I'm just a color freak and I know a lot of people love paintings and I love them too that just try to recreate the local color which means the color that's already in the scene but I love getting exploratory with color and and I think that just is what makes us unique and I think how God created us he most certainly was creative in making this beautiful world for us and we are created in his image and I think that also means that we are created to create and of course we can create nothing new like him he created from nothing we're using his material and just creating our own version of things that we already see that are in our amazing amazing earth world so I love that about being an artist you know how we can interpret things much like a musician I use that analogy a lot because I play and sing but it is very equivalent to music but you know what there's all kinds of ways to create I have people I know that say I'm not artistic at all I'm like well yes you are I know people who are amazing with putting together recipes and foods and you know so creativity is not just in the world of art or music lots of ways now I'm just adding a few sky holes if you've watched my videos you know we don't make the leaves we carve out the tree wasn't super happy with all these usually I soften them a little bit by just touching it with my finger and it just kind of takes that harshness away but typically sky holes are darker than what's next to it like that bright yellow in the sky you would notice immediately if I put that bright yellow right behind that tree for the sky holes that would just show up like popcorn or something on top of it so we don't want to do that so again I actually am liking this underpainting I almost left it at this stage or a little bit past the stage because I just loved the beauty of these colors but I decided to keep going I might redo it again that's the neat thing and there is actually a wonderful growth you can experience as an artist if you recreate from the same reference photo over and over and over and make different color schemes or color palettes do one that's monochromatic and then do one that's analogous and then do a complementary color palette and if you're not familiar with these terms just watch a few more of my videos or some other artist videos and before you know it I didn't used to know all the stuff either I just knew I wanted to paint and I think that's probably like a lot of you guys here you just know you love it and I typically find if somebody loves it they usually have a gift and you know because it's like that little innate nature within us to be drawn to something that you know God has probably given you a gift for that and don't be discouraged if you don't get it right away because a lot of art and painting is just learning the rules like anything else when you learn to ride a bike you didn't get up and just start riding on it you had to get the lessons you had to have somebody help you you had to mess up scrape your knees and so that happens in art too I often wish I had saved some of my beginning pastel paintings because they were pretty bad I think it would be encouraging to other people all right now I'm getting to where I'm adding a little bit of the the greens and blues I decided that blue was a little too bold back there that was a little mid in the composition midway and I thought that's just too bold so I had to soften that up a little bit maybe just a tad of it but not much that's a better color to use in the darker areas of the foreground so I'll keep painting and then come back here I am re-establishing some of the values in that tree right there to on the left notice that the massive group of trees on the right hand side that's obviously first in the foreground second would be those that one almost singular tree right there that I am making a little bit darker the next would be those pinkish colored grouping of trees back to the right again and then the furthest are going to be those ones that appear like RNG right there the reddish RNG ones in the background now I do soften those with some of the warmer tone or not warmer should say cooler tones when I get closer to the final but for now the value works if the value works you're good now I'm adding a little bit of that more RNG yellow there because the Sun is so bright in the sky that those distant fields are getting some of that warm light cast upon it and and that just anchors in the congruency of the sky and the earth I wanted to apologize here if the music seems to get monotonous I get some comments sometimes and I love your comments by the way you are why the videos get better I need your input but I have gotten comments which I totally understand that sometimes the music I'm right now I'm pressing my hand just to soften up some of those grasses I don't like to blend with my fingers too much sometimes I need to soften some some things oh sorry I missed a bit of footage there but anyway about the music I am very limited in what YouTube allows so I can't just go grab a song from anywhere and put it in here there are certain copyright issues YouTube I do love how YouTube gives you so many resources gives you in their Creator Studio they give you songs that are free to use but they're all about two two minutes long the ones that I like are typically two minutes long sometimes I can get one that's four minutes long so that's why sometimes these songs I try to repeat them in a subtle way but anyway I apologize for that I if I can get a way to work around it or I can get to where I'm making enough money to buy some songs and pay for those that are actually for sale for these purposes hopefully I'll get there one day okay now I'm getting in some of those little cooler the greens and the blues and everything which is going to make this more of the complementary color palette like I said it's not just going to be an analogous color palette analogous would be I kept the whole painting reds and oranges and yellows that just means it's on one side of the color wheel now I'm adding those complements the blues and the greens and again because this is more of an evening scene the blues and the greens are going to be a little darker in value and a little more dull that blue in the foreground is going to be the boldest because it's closer and that see how pale that green that I'm using looks it actually looks brighter next to the yellows and stuff but it's a pretty dull green I think it was in some of my my neutrals that I have in my color palette from my pastels that was a really bright blue I can't remember if I decided to keep it yet just a hint that's another one of those little accent colors I like just a little bit here and there it was too light there so I kind of rubbed it out and you get better at where these values go value is everything if you get your values right you know your paintings just gonna sing I stepped away at this point or right after adding a few more touches and I decided to call this one done sometimes I look back I feel like I overworked my piece and I just wanted to get this one finished and here's the black and white I told you about you can see the values work in black and white and if you might want to try this convert your painting to black and white just to make sure you get your values right so color is secondary to value for sure but I hope you try painting on dark paper and please subscribe come back soon and I really enjoy bringing this videos to you bye guys