 Well, hello there. My name is Sandy Allnach. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I am going to fill in these cat's eyes. I wanted to talk color theory and a bit about how to mix the perfect color for a cat's eye and do it in two different mediums. I can prove to you that color theory really applies to all mediums. Same ideas can be done in whatever medium you work in. So let's get started. A number of you have asked if I'm going to be teaching classes in pastel since I'm now working in it and not yet. My pastels are not labeled, so I don't even know what colors to tell you to use. But I'm starting a series on Patreon this weekend coming up, and I'm going to just talk about different aspects in very short videos about what I'm doing with pastels, how I'm thinking through things. So if you're interested in that, there's a link in the doobly-doo. Let's begin with the gouache painting. I've painted the whole thing, just left the eye for you to see here. The spring green is just a bright green that I chose, and this works with a lot of different ones. I've added hands-to-yellow deep to it. You could add a new gambouge, anything that has a reddishness to it. If you don't have anything like that, then you could add some yellow along with a reddish color, like a bit of burnt sienna or something. Because those colors are going to start to take a bright green and desaturated, and it's going to pull it more toward the olive side, which is where you'll find your desaturated or grayed-out kinds of greens. They're not bright and grass-looking. They're just much more olive, and on the background, on the left, you can see there's much more of a cool green. I'm going to paint over that with my olive green combination when I'm done with this. You can see that those two will match. I wanted the two of them to reflect each other, but I didn't mix that right color in the first place. I wanted you to see the difference between that cooler mix and a warmer mix. So to get deeper and deeper colors, I'm just throwing in some ultramarine. I don't add black to something until the very end, unless whatever it is that I'm mixing is just not getting me there. So I'm using ultramarine blue to deepen this. And then I added in some titanium white because now I want to start pulling that glow of the eye forward. And painting that on top is going to start brightening things just a little bit. But then I found I wanted to have more of a transition color going from that dark into that light. So I've taken the same color mix, mixed another puddle of them with a bit of the ultramarine so that I have a color in between the two and then paint in between them to blend. And eyes always have some kind of a texture. They don't have just a pure mix of one color into another. If you look closely at any eye, there's all kinds of little veins and things in there. Now, I left when I was painting this, I left the place where they slit in the eye is at so that I could remember where to put it. That's why I didn't paint right through it and also left the highlights white so that I would remember where they are, but you certainly could just paint the eye right through it first and then add that black over the top. Using my dark color, my black, I went around the outside edges and then mixed some green with the black to start having a color that will transition. Just soften where the black starts to go into the green. So I have some even darker green then wanted to brighten it up a little bit. So I added a little bit more of the lighter color around just until it starts feeling very rounded. You're going to have more shadow on the top side of the eye because that's where the shadow comes in from the eyelids. But anything in the corners of an eye, even though your brain may tell you, oh, that's white in there. I started with a lighter gray and realized I needed to go with a darker gray to make that just disappear. Otherwise, it becomes too important. Now here I wanted to add a little bit more bright back into the the center portion of the eye. So just kept adding that in mixed a really, really pale, pale, pale type of greenish color. So I could start softening the edges of that highlight that I left as the paper white and just to give a little bit around the corners of that and then added just a tiny extra dot of highlight. Now, this is where I was using the same palette, same colors, just mixed a bigger blob and painted over top of the colors that are here so that my background is going to be those desaturated kinds of warm greens instead of that kind of bright, crazy green. So right when they're next to each other, you can definitely tell the difference between the two of them. So if you ever need any kind of an olive green, just remember to add a really warm kind of yellow to it and that will desaturate it and and bring it down to where you need it to be to turn into that olive color. And now you knew that I was going to work on pastels, right? My soft pastels, which I am in my commission application season. I'm going to be doing a bunch of commissions in December. So thank you to those who have already sent in your application and your pictures, our discussions are underway. I'm very excited for December to get here so I can work on that stuff during my sabbatical. I'm using the same color theory kind of thing here, just a different technique. So with pastels, I don't have a like full selection of colors. I don't really know what some of these are. They're not labeled, so I can't really choose by the name of the color knowing what it is. So I just picked some cool greens to start with to put the base color into the eye, some dark around the top and the bottom and then lighter color in the middle and a mid tone that blended them, used my black pastel pencil to go around the outside edges and also to put in the slit in the eye. But I needed to mix that color, right? I need to make that more olive. So I just put some of the warm yellow on top and started mixing it because you can't mix pastel in a palette. Well, maybe there's some way, but I don't know how it is, if that is true. And I just blended them in with my finger. I love using my finger because it feels like I'm finger painting again like I did when I was a kid. Now, the corners of the eyes here, I used a light gray and I'm cutting them down using the pastel pencil so they're not as big, made too big of marks, but it's real easy to fix that with a pastel pencil. And then I'll just use my finger to tap on it and that's going to soften the color. Blend it in just a little bit with the black so that it knocks it back and doesn't become as important so that when I put the highlights on, the highlights are the thing that's going to pop as as bright whites on top of the eyeball. I grabbed another pastel that I was hoping was a different color. I think it was the same light color that I'd used in the first place, but another coat of it on here, putting it on top after all that undercoat was blended, left me with both texture, which I wanted for the eyes, but it also gave me a little more brightness and, you know, blended that with my finger and then grabbed my white pastel to create just a nice big blob of white highlight using my dirt devil to vacuum up the excess, which that thing is saving my bacon and keeping the studio clean. It's fantastic. So regardless of your medium, color theory always works. It's just a matter of the technique and how you apply the color. If you're working in a wet medium that mixes on a palette, you'll put that yellow color, that warm yellow into your green on your palette. If you're working in alcohol markers or colored pencils, you mix by layering. So you're going to go over top of, say, a green with a little bit of yellow. Be very gingerly with it. Test it out on scrap, but you can use the same color theory. If you like lessons like this or if you have colors that you want me to teach you how to mix, let me know in the comments. I would love to help you out with that. Subscribe if you have not yet already, because I put videos out every Tuesday and Saturday. And I hope to see you here for another one in the near future. And I will talk to you again soon. The links are in the doobly-doo for stuff I talked about and I'll see you next time.