 Hello, artist and visitors, and welcome to Monet Cafe. I wanted to bring you a lesson today on another type of color palette that we can use, which is called Analogous Color. And I had this beautiful reference photo. It's kind of dark and moody, but I really, there's a lot about it that I like. I took this photo when I was in, I was actually coming back from Mississippi. I'm not quite sure where I was. It was after our hurricane experience with Hurricane Irma, and after it was all over, we took my son, my 23-year-old son, to Mississippi where he was moving. He was moving before the hurricane, but he was nice enough to stay and help us through that whole process, which resulted in the flooding of our home and my art studio. You guys are probably so tired of hearing that by now. But anyway, so we took him up to move to Mississippi. On the way back, we stopped at this beautiful state park, and you can see it's still moody and stormy looking after the hurricane. So it captures kind of that emotion, but we were just thankful that we were all alive. It was one day, maybe I'll make a video of the whole experience. We ended up in the eye of the storm. So anyway, now let me focus on painting here. So I wanted to point out a little bit about this particular photograph that I would change. We talk a lot about composition. So before we talk about the analogous color palette, let me show you real quick in Photoshop what I did to do what I think improved the composition, and I think you'll enjoy it. Now this is just the basic photo that I have in Photoshop, and I went ahead and did the grid lines to divide it into thirds. And you get to where you do this just mentally. You don't have to do this every time. And you can easily see that the horizon line is right in the center of that photograph. Not that that's horrible. You can have a center horizon line if you have a lot else going on right with the composition, but as a general rule, it's best to have it in an upper third or a lower third. Let me show you that example. Here's the example of the composition with the horizon line in the upper third. And this could work if you really focus on that water and some of those beautiful little, I don't know if those are lily pads, but I decided on the other one. Let me show you why. I really liked this one. I know a lot of times composition is just a matter of personal choice, but this one just spoke to my soul, so this is the one we're going with. Let's get started. Hey guys, so here I am ready to paint. I've got my UART paper taped up here, and I have other videos where I show the taping process. I've done it a little differently here because my UART paper was a little bit warped. Some of you might know of the flooding situation we had last year, and I was able to iron it out, but it still has a few bumps in it, but I think I can work around that. But if you notice in our reference photo that I have here, it is a horizontal format, not vertical like I've taped it, so all I'm going to do is turn this board around. But also notice it's very wide. What I have here is an 8x10, and I'm going to turn it horizontally. I have my board stuck here, so I'll just turn it around. I'm going to have to adjust that. Then what I've got to do here is this is not the same format as that. So I did go ahead and take some measurements and realized that this is 10 across. If that were 10 across relative to that photo, this would be about 5.5, or a little bit more than 5.5. So all I'm going to do is take a piece of blue tape and cut off the bottom with it. I can trim it later, but to have my little space to work in. Now I would like to go ahead and show you my decision making on choosing the color palette. And I'm using our handy dandy little pocket color wheel here. And I know I have other videos where I've talked about it, but this has so much information for artists that I didn't realize until years later after having it how much information is on this little teeny pocket color wheel. So I want to show you here on this side here where you see pocket color wheel. It even shows you a little value scale you have. Let me get closer here. This value scale is opposite of what you think. And I always mess this up. Value number one is the darkest black, and it goes down to value 10 down here to white. So you'd think white would be one in flip flop, but it's not. So you've got a neat little value scale that you can use if you are checking values in your reference image or anything, see how light or dark something is. It also has on here, the backside here, has different types of color palettes you can choose when you're attempting to get an idea of how you want your painting to look. Monochromatic is really just using any shade or tint of one color. So monochromatic blue would be like all of the different values or tints of blue in here, or maybe leaning over a little this way. But it's more one color family, okay? Another one that, and I'm not going to go through all of these, but one that I'm going to use today is analogous using any shades, tints, or tones of colors that lie adjacent to each other on the wheel. Now I have a very dark, moody scene, since it doesn't have a lot of light, we're not going to have a lot of these warmer values here. So I'm choosing to do an analogous color palette with colors that lie adjacent because of the coolness of that type of day, you know, the time of day that it is, the cloud cover that I have in the photo. So that's why I'm going to choose this. I might have to pop in another little, very minimally, another little color in there for intensity or just to give it interest at the end, but for the most part I'm sticking with an analogous color palette for this particular painting. So let me show you the colors that I've chosen. Here are the pastels that I've chosen to use for this particular painting. And as you can see, they are an analogous color palette like I spoke about. And I'm going to actually use some green because, you know, there is some green, even though it's cloudy and everything, the green is going to be more dull and muted. We don't have a lot of sun shining on it, so it's going to be more of a dead green versus, you know, like a really brilliant green. I hope I'm holding this up in the camera right. It's not going to be real bright and not have a lot of yellow in it. So that's why I've chosen these kind of neutral, dulled down greens like this, even this. In the distance, of course, we've got a little more light, so those greens are going to lighten up a little in the back, but still be very neutral. And I'm going to be careful about some of these, but I might use some of these in the distance, too, but again, it's still an analogous color family here that we're using in order to accomplish this mood to this painting. So it should be fun. Now here I'm just using a new pastel, Prismacolor New Pastel. I think that's what this one is. They're just harder little pastels that's good for sketching. And in the sketching process, we're not drawing trees. We're getting shapes down, OK? So this is just kind of a darker new pastel. I can tell I'm going to have to set my iPad to not shut off so quickly. This actually has a little bit of a green to it. I actually think I'm going to switch a little bit more of a blue. And the other would have worked, too. But this this works pretty good, OK? Because we've got that blue analogous color family going on. So all I'm really doing here is kind of marking out where things are and going to get my big shapes in here. All right, so I'm just blending in these trees here, keeping that moodiness. I only have to correct something that's early in the painting. But I walked away and I noticed, look what I did. I got my horizon line in the middle. I was focusing more on the water area here. So I need to move that sky down to here. It's going to the horizon line is going to be more here. That's going to be those last kind of look like distant, distant trees there. So this is going to be where the sky meets, OK? So no worries. We can just add, you know, sky here. I'm going to go ahead and put in some some kind of moody primrose-y color back in there to bring the sky down in here, OK? And then we've got that other pretty color going up into that light area that's going to be right in here. OK, so that's going to be even lighter than this. So I'm just moving the horizon line down. All right, so now we can start working. I like to get the sky in or something because it kind of establishes the mood. So that's why a lot of times I typically work on the sky, not always. So now I'm still just working on values in the sky, OK? And this is coming up from this area of the trees. It is darker. I may even add darker or not darker than that, but a duller value than that, because I do like the the dullness of this. It's really very interesting. It looks a little like a dark mess right now, but the trees aren't going to start taking shape, literally, until I start adding the sky holes in and carving them into a form that our brain sees as a tree. Again, I talk all the time. We don't draw the little leaves of the trees. We just give the impression of a tree and our brains figure the rest out. Isn't that amazing? So I'm going to start working a little bit more here and again, moving this horizon line down. Here's the halfway mark of the paper. And I had, of course, had that horizon line in the wrong spot. So I'm moving it down here, going to establish the sky a little bit more where that's where it meets to make the composition a little more strong. So all right, a little more work. Here we go.