 Welcome to Monet Café! I'm artist Susan Jenkins and in today's lesson I'll be teaching you about painting the colors of autumn with two lovely little autumn studies. Fall colors are the focus of this month and I hope you learned lots from this lesson. Before diving in I would really love it if you would like this video. I think you really will like it. Comment! I'd love to hear what you have to say and please subscribe if you haven't already and click that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. I would also love it if you would consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. This is a place where you can get extra content for many of my lessons plus you support this channel to keep the free lessons coming. The surface I'll be using is made by Canson. It's called Canson Métants Pastel Paper. This is the earth tones pad. I will have a link in the description of this video and it's relatively affordable because it's an unsanded surface. I'll talk a lot more about the surface as I paint. Now I'm using reference images from unsplash.com. This is a great site to get copyright free reference images especially for artists like me who don't get to travel a lot and you need to find some really lovely images of places you don't get to go to. So I like to do studies that are smaller. I'll be doing two five by seven studies and it's very handy to use a mat. Like you mat your paintings or drawings with and I use the inside dimensions for five by seven and the outside of a five by seven mat happens to be eight by ten. Really convenient for standard sizes. So that was just a piece of vine charcoal to mark it off. I'll be using a variety of soft pastels. A lot of terry Ludwigs. Those are the big chunky rectangular ones and I'll talk more about those as I paint too. Lots of gorgeous fall colors. Now the first study I'm going to do rather quickly and the second one will be real time. So you're going to get kind of a learning in the first one and then you'll be able to put it into practice and really understand it more in the second one. That was a really crazy fast sketch right. So this isn't sped up so much that you can't follow but I'm actually using the backside of the Canson paper. Canson is an unsanded paper. It means it doesn't have that grit or that texture on it. So you can't get as many layers but you can still really get some nice pastel paintings with it and it's great for studies. I'm using the backside of the surface because it's not as textural. It doesn't have the pattern that the front side has. Some people don't like the front side. It leaves you with a little bit of a honeycomb pattern beneath it and the back side's a little more smooth. So you saw how basic that sketch was. I just took a Prismacolor New Pastel and got in some gestural marks for the trunks and some general shapes and now I'm using some of these chunky Terry Ludwig pastels just too lightly. I'm not pressing hard with these. Get in some of the big shapes of these trees and I am making shapes that have some rhyme and reason to it. It might look kind of willy-nilly right now but we've got something interesting here. We've got a yellow tree on top of a red tree and they both, if you squint your eyes, obviously the red one appears a little darker because of the color but why would I be given that giving that darker value to the yellow tree? Well those yellows are not gonna pop unless I have something darker to rest those brilliant yellow colors on. I often like to describe it as we are painting trees, elements but in this case trees from the inside out, usually in the depths of an item, it's going to be darker. It's where all the shadows are. So we paint the general form with darker values and we layer the values of lighter and brighter intensities on top. Now this is what's called the blocking end stage. I'm getting in the big shapes. Notice I got in the shapes of the trees. Now I'm getting the shape of the sky with the lighter pastel and the shape of the mountain, the furthest mountain with this pretty neutral blue pastel and resist the urge to over detail. Now I just lightened it up a little bit with another blue. Now this other mountain is not as far away as the first one so it's gonna be a little warmer. Colors get cooler as they recede but I'm even gonna cool off that that green that I put down in a minute. You can layer with pastels. Now I'm getting some of the darks. I know things are darker in the foreground. If you squint your eyes, the reference image has lots of darks in the foreground. It's those deep trees. I like the angle of this photograph. It's like someone standing on. I my whole family is from the mountains of North Carolina. The beautiful Appalachian Mountains and I've seen things just like this standing on the side of a road. So it's kind of that perspective. I just reinforced some of my trunks with a dark. I believe this is the Terry Ludwig eggplant color soft pastel. Reinforcing more of the darks. I know I'm gonna be layering some of those little bit of those green leaf colors and keeping your values correct is really I'd say numero uno with creating a painting that looks artistic believable and beautiful. Oh I had to just pop in a little bit of this magenta color. I love to go a little bit outside the bounds of color. You wouldn't think that magenta was in that tree but I know that it works. It works really good for some of the cooler areas of the tree. And this looks a little bit like a mess at this point, right? It always does at initial stages and don't get frustrated if you're a beginner artist. You actually really want it to be very loose and painterly at this point. Really like I said just blocking in the big shapes. And now that I had my big shapes in, again I'm working my colors from the inside out. I'm going to the next lightest value. In other words I'm going dark to light. Gradually getting lighter as I go. Now I grabbed a pastel there that's a little bit cooler. Notice it doesn't have the warmth. It's not as red. It leans a little bit more towards pink. And that's because some of those areas of the tree are more in shadow and they're a little cooler. And it creates a nice play on color as well. And I haven't even worked on the yellow tree because I know I can lay those yellow and golden colors on top. The red tree is behind the yellow tree. So there are little bits of red. You can see them kind of peeking through the branches of the yellow tree. And now I started with this little golden color and I realized, you know, I'm getting a little bit too light too soon. That yellow tree, if I want to go with the next in the from darkest to lightest levels, then it's got some oranges in it. If you can, I don't know what kind of screen you're looking on right now, but I could see there are little areas of this pretty orange, like a rusty orange color. And now you can see I've got bits of all those colors kind of peeking through. I'm not covering everything up. I'm just giving little marks. Notice I'm not painting any leaves. I'm just making little masses of leaves and little shapes and not covering up the underlying color totally so that it's kind of peeking through. Now we're starting to see that yellow tree come to life. And now I'm going to start adding some of these other yellowy values. And I want to resist the urge to put this yellow everywhere. If I squint my eyes, I can see there are some little areas of leaves that are a little brighter and a little bit more intense with color. But if I was to take this color and put it everywhere, you would lose that drama and all of a sudden everything would become very much the same. I added a few more of these dark rusty reds to some of the tree behind, making it reach out just a little bit more. And now notice I didn't do anything to the sky other than that first blocking in stage. Now I peeked in a little bit of the sky behind some of that red tree. I'm adding a little warmth at the horizon line. You can see in the reference image, it is a little warmer at the horizon line, typically where the sun is reflecting or setting. Now I'm sneaking in some of that blue mountain behind the trees. Why would I do that? Well, look in the reference image. You can see the mountain behind the trees in between the branches. These are what are called sky holes, in this case mountain holes. You want to consider what's behind those elements. And now I'm using a little bit of this lighter blue. I wanted to make that mountain feel further away. And I really, one of the reasons I chose this warm color paper, usually you'd be like autumn trees, why would you choose a warm paper? They're not even going to show up. But it was because I really wanted to accentuate. I love oranges and teals together. They're complementary colors. And I thought the teals would just pop on this kind of rusty or, I don't know, orangy kind of colored paper, which it did. So that really made those mountains that are teal colored. I'll even punch that up a little bit more in a minute. Made them really stand out with the orange and golden trees. And as you can see, I'm using another darker pastel to work in some of those little mountain holes. Purple is my friend in my favorite color. I love adding purples. It is a beautiful complement to the golden colors in that tree. And keep in mind this is just a study. I was doing these to kind of get warmed up for this month's theme. Once again, Hurricane Ian really did make things a little difficult this month. But I tell you what, I can't complain. Five years ago during Hurricane Irma, we lost our home due to a flood. We had to totally restore it. We lost so many things. I had to package up everything we could in one day and try to get out of there. And then the home that we went to to escape the hurricane, we stayed at a friend's house. The roof blew off the house and the roof literally landed on my son's travel trailer that he had just bought. So okay, there's my tangent. So I can't complain about Hurricane Ian, but it getting rid of my Wi-Fi did make these lessons a little more delayed. And you can see I worked in a little bit more of the tree branches that are the trunks and the branches continuing to add more of these beautiful reds. Just squinting my eyes and looking for areas where there might be some brighter pops of red. And like I said before, this is a study. I recommend doing studies for multiple reasons. For one thing, they're relaxing. And sometimes you end up creating something you're really happy with because you weren't so serious about it. You do have limited layering, like I said, using these unsanded papers. But I find Canson papers are great for beginner artists. It's affordable and it's great for advanced artists because often you learn to not rely on being able to just layer and layer and layer. So you're more purposeful, I think, with your marks and your strokes. And I'd like to reserve my final pops of color to the very end. Look at this gorgeous Terry Ludwig red. Again, I don't want to put this everywhere. If it's everywhere, it's nowhere. The artist I heard say that was Marla Baguetta. She's a fantastic pastel artist. So a little bit of these pops of red and then a little bit of this rusty color and then a few more of the golden colors. Another thing this did for me in doing two studies, it helped me determine which reference image I wanted to use for a larger, more serious piece. And I'll be sharing with you at the end of this which one I chose to do the larger painting. It's already done. I'll have the full tutorial, a more serious piece on a larger sanded surface. So this one was definitely a lot of fun. I love these little studies. And here's the final. So just a bright, happy little study, really loose and fun. And the next one I'll be doing, this one will be real time. Another lovely photo from unsplash.com. By the way, I did crop this image from the original. If you're a patron of mine, you will get all of my images that I have altered and cropped in Photoshop. So with this one, again, all real time, I am going to do a little bit of a different beginning. I wanted it to be a little bit softer. If you remember in the first one, I didn't do any blending. I just painted and painted and painted and let the pastels blend themselves. They will eventually do that. So sometimes you can resist that urge to always blend and fill up the whole paper so it's not the surface isn't showing through. The pastels do eventually blend themselves. And when you paint that way, I think it has that, I don't know, really stylized look, maybe a little abstract. I don't know, I like those chunky marks as well. But with this one, I decided to make it a little softer, perhaps a little more impressionistic. Notice I didn't even do a sketch with this one. I actually often don't prefer to do much of a sketch at all because I tend to see things more as masses rather than in linear form. So you can work either way or a combination of both. So as you can see, I just took that. The first one was a Prismacolor new pastel, not spelled any W spelled in U. They're, they're great. They're affordable. They're these long rectangular sticks that are harder than a lot of soft pastels. They're good for sketching and they're good for getting down your initial pastel layers, especially on an unsanded paper. They don't take up a lot of the tooth of the paper. And so now I'm using this darker Terry Ludwig eggplant. I squinted my eyes and I was looking at where the darkest darks were. And now I'm using this little pastel blender. This is a blender. It's usually kind of a cream colored, but it's just that dirty. They're made by Pan Pastels and it's like a little sponge. You can use makeup sponges for these things. I mean you can really improvise and get creative with lots of these painting tools. You can use a piece of pipe foam insulation. I like that for a cheap way to blend things. That works really great on sanded surfaces. And just like the other study, this is what's called the blocking in stage. I'm just working on the big mass of the trees, the shapes of the trees. I kind of have that one tree a little bit too in the center. I kind of develop that as I go. Now I'm working on the next area or shape. Think of it as a mass of those mountains that are a little darker behind the trees. These mountains were, look like more like somewhere in Colorado. These are not the type of mountains that I saw in my younger days when I lived in the mountains. I actually went to college, Cullowee, in western North Carolina. If anybody's been up there, there's an area in Maggie Valley. If you're familiar with it, there used to be a place called Ghost Town. It was like this fun place. You had to take a ski lift to the top of the mountain. It was an amusement park and they had all these country western shows. I was one of the singer dancers at that Ghost Town. Anyway, there's a little history for you. But anyway, the mountains there, the Appalachian Mountains, they're not as jagged. They're softer and you get more of those bluish purple mountains. That's what I was trying to create here. It made me feel more like home. I thought that purply blue behind the orange trees. Again, another beautiful compliment. Here is my blocking in. You see I've got the majority of the surface covered. I am going to blend in these other colors as well. It's going to make it nice and soft and then I'll layer on top of those. Before I blend those, however, I do go ahead and darken my tree masses. Okay, that first layer was kind of just to get in the shape. Get in a little bit of dark as a beginning stage or layer and now I'm reinforcing those areas. I'm squinting my eyes. I'm looking at where the dark areas are in the tree. None of these things has to be perfect. These are trees. Branches can be a little off, but you want to get the general form of the tree. Evergreen trees typically are a little zigzaggy. This one had these branches that almost were sweeping up, almost like a U-shape and sweeping up and it was really neat. I'm just getting in some values that suggest that. I don't have to totally spell it out. Now, I got in a little bit of this purple behind because I want the other trees to feel further away so they're not going to be as dark in value. Values just lightness to darkness, the scale of lightness to darkness. When things are far away, elements that are similar, like that big tree, if it's close to you, it's going to be darker. If it's further away, it's gradually going to get lighter and lighter and also it's gradually going to get cooler in color temperatures. Those two rules right there are just going to be huge for you if you're a beginner artist. Learn how value works in physics. This is called physics the way the earth works and learn how color temperature works. That's why mountains cool off in the distance. They're far away from you. It's the same trees on the mountain as the ones you see in the foreground. They're just far away so that's why they blue out or sometimes purple out and that's just a really simple little tip for learning to paint. Now you can see I used my little blender tool in a few places. I'm squinting my eyes again. Around the bases of the trees it's really dark and there's also this little road down to the lower left of the tree, I mean of the image, just kind of exiting and I decide later to add that. I thought it was an interesting compositional element and now I'm blending a little more. Notice when you blend it does lighten things especially on this surface and it's allowing the warmth of the paper to kind of mix with the color so everything kind of gets this harmonious mood because of the underlying color that connects the painting as a whole and by the way these little blenders I get a paper towel and I just wipe it off a lot if I move to another color. I'm not trying to keep the colors absolutely perfect at this stage but I didn't want to take like a really dark color into those mountains. Notice that almost made my purpley blue mountains disappear in the distance so I definitely did go back and reinforce that but it pushed them back because what also happens, another law of physics, is things get less detailed in the distance. There's a third rule okay we've got the rule of value, things get lighter in the distance, we've got the rule of color temperature, things get cooler in the distance and the rule of detail, things get less detailed in the distance and now I've got my general soft looking mountains in the background. Again I will re-establish some things but doesn't it feel soft and moody at this stage and now I'm taking in just this Terry Ludwig rusty kind of color and I'm just kind of scumbling little shapes not painting leaves. I don't think I paint a single leaf, I mean they're needles in this case but I usually just give little suggestive marks even at the end when I add my final little emphasis of color. I usually just make these little squiggly shapes. I'm not focusing on anything super detailed and that should be encouraging. I think often painting is a lot easier than when we first start trying it. We often try to create too much detail and it takes a long time, it comes out very tight looking and now I'm adding some of this rusty color on that tree that's a little further away. Notice how the purple base made it feel like it's further away and from here on out you're going to watch me do the same principle in real time that I did with the first study. I really like doing it this way where I give you a study or a painting first that's a little sped up so I can give you the generalities and then you can watch it again in real time and go oh yeah remember what she said. What's this phrase repetition is the mother of learning? It's so true. You do things over and over and over and before you know it you got it. You don't have to think about it anymore. So watch the rest of this real time study to music. It's not that much longer and you can just watch or paint along with me and then at the end I'll show you the final of this one and then I'll let you know which one of the two I decided to do for a larger more serious piece and by the way you'll be seeing that on Monet Cafe YouTube channel here next. That'll be the next tutorial that I upload and again if you're one of my patrons you are going to get extra content for this video and for the one where I do the more serious piece. For this video like I said if you're patron of mine you'll get the cropped reference image. You will also get my color notes. I'll give you a little page that shows you the all of the colors that I used for these studies and maybe something else I'm not even thinking of right now. So enjoy this process and I'll be back towards the end. Please watch to the duration. Leave a comment and because it really does help the video to get shared. YouTube will share this video more if you guys interact. Alright enjoy to music. I'll be back. Here I'm adding a little bit more of this pretty lavender to suggest a mountain that's even further away and then I'll lay a little bit more of a pretty blue teal onto some of the mountains that are closer. I decided to go ahead and keep that little trail. I'll develop it just a little bit in a minute. There's that pretty blue teal. You see how that just makes that orangy rusty colored pop. Those are great complimentary colors and you don't have to spell everything out especially when it's in the distance. Often it's good for it to be a little bit blurry and non detailed. So I loved how those colors were working together and I did make little marks around my paintings of all of the colors I used. If you're a patron of mine I'll I'll snap a photo of all of those colors for you to reference. Now I'm using a prismacolor new pastel. It's a harder pastel just to suggest some of those little needles on the evergreen trees. And by the way this is the one that I decided to do a more serious painting from. And I don't know there was just something about this one that I really liked. The composition of the trees and the feel of those mountains and the distance. And I was really quite surprised at all the layering I got on this Kansan unsanded paper. I typically work on sanded surfaces but it seems like every time I work on an unsanded surface like this I'm really pleased. And I think it's just one of the things I love about it is I usually just do studies on this paper. And I think I just have more fun because I'm just kind of relaxing and painting. I still have kind of a gap in that tree there that I'll develop in a minute. But the challenge I think for this one is I had that little RNG tree in the foreground in front of the green tree so I had to make sure it felt like one was in front of the other which I develop a little more in a minute. And on the final painting that I do it will be on a sanded surface. I'll be sharing that video very soon. And again I really just enjoy these fall colors. I mean aren't they just lovely? And I love to stretch color. Many of you if you've been on my channel or watched my videos much you know I don't stick with the what's called local color meaning just the colors you see. And this photo it really did have some vibrant and gorgeous color. But I love to bring in those teals and those purples and just some colors that make things pop. Now I'm developing that green tree a little more and getting some of those branches that are kind of curving upwards and sprinkling a little bit of it in behind those trees that are down on the lower left. And just giving some color harmony. And now I'm popping in a really rich gorgeous red on that foreground tree again to make it feel more close to the viewer. Warm colors are usually more seen in the foreground and colors cool as they reseed into the distance. So that really did give that feeling for that foreground tree. We're not going to have too much of this red in the distance again because it's a little bit too bright to be far away. Now the road had a little bit of a warm tone to it. It was not as warm as some of the leaves in the tree but it had kind of a little bit of a yellow rusty color. So I hope you enjoyed those two autumn tree studies. If you're a patron of mine, I can't wait to see what you do in the homework album. Here's a sneak peek of the final that I did from the second study on a sanded surface. You will be seeing a tutorial of that coming soon as well. I pray this was a blessing to you and you enjoyed this tutorial. I pray you come back, you'll subscribe, become a patron if you like, and as always, God bless and happy painting.