 Color. It's everywhere. We experience its beauty every day. Have you ever imagined a world without color? It would be dark, gray, and lifeless. As artists, if we could just imagine not having any color, well, it would certainly take away a lot of the fun. We get our color from our source of light, which is the sun. What a blessing that we have such a gift. As artists, we're very familiar with the color wheel, but there's so much more to color when we can see and experience the way it dances and behaves in our world. It can take white lifeless snow and turn it into a virtual rainbow. And it's absolutely true that without light, there is no color. So I hope you'll join me in this lesson where I'll not only share how I take a somewhat dull and lifeless white scene of snow and turn it into a painting that brilliantly displays the magic of color. So before the painting lesson, I thought it would be fun to go over some color facts that will enhance your ability as an artist to use color. Plus, it's neat trivia information, so let's get started. And if you'd like to go ahead and skip to the painting process, please just see the time on the screen below. Now, as humans, we are very fortunate, and I think blessed, to be able to see a wide range or spectrum of colors. But did you know that there are certain insects, such as the hybe, that has receptors allowing them to see a far greater range of colors than we do? And it seems a rainbow always takes our breath away as we stand in awe at the beauty of the seven colors that combine to form pure white light. Color is actually divided into two categories, color in light and color in pigment. Color in pigment is called subtractive color. Even non-artists are familiar with school projects where we mixed all the colors together in pigment to make black. Additive color behaves differently. It is the color in light. As a child, I was always fascinated by color, and I remember doing an experiment where we took three different flashlights and put a colored filter over each one with the primary colors. When combined, I was fascinated to see that they formed pure white light. So what does all of this have to do with painting? Well, a lot. First of all, we need to become students of our world and constantly looking at our surroundings to see how light behaves. And second, we need to understand our tools, and that is whatever medium you may be working with, whether it be pastels, oil, acrylics or watercolor, and learn how that pigment behaves on your surfaces. And while the subject of color can be somewhat overwhelming as a beginner artist, I want to encourage you to just continue to paint every day, examine your world, explore your materials, and in time you will be using color confidently to create beautiful pieces of art. So I hope you will join me in this painting tutorial where I will continue to explain and expound upon color and how using it properly can bring beautiful life and color to our world. For this painting, I'll be working on a piece of UART sanded pastel paper. And these are the pastels I'm using. I want to specifically point out the warmer tones that I have here on the right. They are the complementary colors, and you can learn more about that in some of my other videos, that are going to bring some life to this more dull photograph. A lot of the shadows are going to have purples and blues, and then of course I'm going to have some more neutral colors that are on the left. And I'll explain a little bit more about some of my color choices as I progress in the painting. So without further ado, let's get started. Now you're going to notice how I'm using these warmer complementary colors to really get bold and big blocking in shapes. Now I've slowed this down to real time because I want to talk a little bit more about what I'm doing here. Color is really just the same as value. It's no different than a grayscale value study. If you notice the colors that I'm using right here, you can already see three different values. Lighter on the left, medium on the bottom right, and darker on the top right there. But if you look at my photograph, it's pretty much a grayscale photo. It's not very colorful at all. So the point of this is to show you how to add color when something looks like it's pretty dead. I'm showing my little palette again. This is before I had the video of my other colors. But I'm going to start adding in just a second. You'll see where I'm having a hard time keeping them up while I'm showing it. But I'm going to start adding some of the bluer tones here. Notice that that right side, if you look at the reference photo, is cooler. It's just darker and cooler. And the trees, the thick trees on the upper right are definitely darker in value and cooler. And so you just got to learn to see value and interpret the color according to the value. Notice how I just added that blue on the left? That's lighter in value than the blue or purple or perma-rosi color. Then the value on the right. Now, this is where I'm going to transition to use the light as the sun. We talked a little bit about our source of light as the sun. So you can interpret your painting any way you want according to what time of day it is, or the sunshine. And in my view, this is going to be a time of day, you know, when that sun sets or rises. But I'm thinking of a sunset here where it's that warm glow. They call it the golden hour. And yes, it will make snow not white. The light that is in our environment refracts and reflects upon everything. And everything becomes like a dance that's playing in color upon everything else. And when you can start, and I, you know what? I'm just going to talk right here. I think I talk a lot to the beginners because I don't really consider myself an expert artist. I've been painting a long time, but I know a lot of artists that have so much more talent than I do, or experience and just gifted more than I am. But enough of that. Now I'm going to show you how I am making this an underpainting with an alcohol wash. It's very cool, and it's very effective. So I know you guys know the expression less is more, and it's very hard to do that and start to understand that as an artist. But this is really just going to be an underpainting. And I know sometimes when I first got started, I thought, why do you have to do an underpainting? And I say it all the time. It sets a mood. It sets a tone. It creates that drama, if you will, that starts to set the tone for where you're going. And this underpainting, I have to say, really did that for me with this painting. So I'm just really, I want to explain a little bit more about what I'm doing with this. I'm rinsing my brush in water and kind of drying it off on a paper towel so I don't blend the colors too much. I want to preserve, see how I got a little blue or purple into that. I want to preserve that luminescence. Talking again about light. You can't get that light back again once you start applying pastel on top of this. There's something about the brilliance of the paper. That's one of the things I like about a watercolor underpainting and even doing these washes like I'm doing right now with pastels is keeping the light is so important. Because even if I took a white pastel and applied it over some of this right now, it's not going to be as translucent as the paper glowing behind it. So that's pretty important. And you don't figure that out. I don't think you can have people teach you and tell you or whatever until you do it and experiment and try it. So that's why I say paint a lot. That's your best teacher is yourself and doing a lot of painting. Do some studies and everything. So again, I'm playing around with this. I'm keeping that beautiful. Can't you see that glow? That like an afternoon sunset glow. And it's going to set the tone for this whole painting. And now I'm starting to use that blue that's in that middle section to just give a hint of the shadows. Shadows are almost always going to be cooler. I think they are always cooler in temperature because they're in the shadow. The temperature is cooler when the sun is not shining directly on it. So this is giving me a roadmap to where my painting is going to go. And I think it does take a lot of practice to get the confidence to do an underpainting to where you're just feeling it. You're just feeling the light and the energy. And again, I think I've kind of learned how to use the alcohol wash to paint. You know, as pastel artists, we're typically working with solid pigment. But if you can learn to use a brush to do... And this is all I've been using right here as pastel and alcohol. Okay. But learning to use a brush is only going to help you in accomplishing some of the looseness that, you know, a lot of us want to try to achieve. And I talk a lot about value and color and intensity and how things behave in the distance. And that's what I'm trying to achieve right here. There's some distant trees in the background there. Now I'm working on that tree that's coming up. Again, just a roadmap. But in the background, there's some really far distant trees. They're going to be much less intense in color. They're going to be less lighter in value. And they're going to be grayed down in color. So using this underpainting to get that established is awesome. Because then you don't have to go back and figure it out later. You're like, oh, I know where I'm going now. This is all set. And it helps me a lot when I finally start to establish the painting. Now, this is exciting. I like using this product. And I often forget about it. These are acrylic inks by Dayla Rowney. And this is, I believe this color is called Purple Lake. I really like this color. It's a nice dark. But this is the product I'm going to use now to get in my dark values. Now let me tell you something interesting about this product. You know, if I was to put a darker pastel down on the surface right now, it would fill up the tooth of the paper. Acrylic inks don't fill up the tooth of the paper. So you're kind of preserving your ability to lay down more pastels if you use acrylic inks to get in your values. Now I'm just showing you. This is a sponge that I'm using. I'm going to get some texture to this. And I just see a little piece that I need. I learned this technique from artist Bethany Fields. I think she might even use a piece of burlap or something to use this as a value study. But I didn't have any burlap and I've done the sponge technique before. So I'm just cutting off a little piece of sponge and I'm going to be dipping it. There it is, a little teeny piece of sponge. It's just got neat random variety to it. So I'm dipping it into the acrylic ink that I have in the little dish. And again, all this stuff is like finesse. You learn the more you do it. When I first tried this, it was horrible. So do some more practice pieces. But anyway, I've learned kind of how it goes on dark at first. So I'm kind of light handed at it. And I'm trying to avoid the Bob Ross technique of things looking so precise and you want to turn it a lot to keep it random. And so it's lessening in value. The more that I'm dabbing. And so I use that to my advantage when I need things lighter in value. Now I needed the bottom trees. Obviously, that's the darkest thing in this whole reference image. I'm brushing it off a little on my paper now. So I like that being dark. But you see how these acrylic inks work great because you can lessen the value with your pressure with how much obviously how much ink is on the sponge at the time. So I'm just working in, like I said, it takes a little finesse. But I'm looking carefully at my reference image not for specifics, but for value. Now I'm just getting a little more free and loose. Things in those upper branches are going to be lighter than things in the lower branches. Obviously, things underneath the tree. You're going to get some shadows. That middle blue section there you see kind of goes almost to the middle of the painting there. That's like a hill or a hump. There's a lighter value in that field in the background. And there's like a ditch that happens behind that tree. That's why it's darker in value. I don't know that for any other reason than I've just examined the photo. I took this photo, but I honestly can't even remember where I was when I took the photo. But you can just tell there's a darker ditch that goes down and then the light that is coming from everything else goes across that foreground plane of snow that's coming. So again, just working this acrylic ink and getting some values in. And notice the value, I mean, sorry, the color of this acrylic ink is very cohesive, if that's the right word, with the underpainting that I've used. It's in the same family of warm magenta, magenta-y, purple-y kind of colors. And you get more of those colors as the sun sets, warmer magenta. And I shared a lot in the beginning of this video about color and not to intimidate anybody, but the more that you learn about color and how it behaves, not as a school project, but as an exciting experiment about nature, it's just gonna make your art not just better, but more fun. It's like an adventure. It's really cool. I know I'm talking to some of my friends in Monet Café. You guys understand this stuff. And again, if you're a beginner, don't be intimidated. Get excited. This is fun. Now, I've switched to using a brush here and it's gonna give me more control. The sponge gave me looseness for those trees. This brush is giving me some control. I couldn't have done this with the sponge to get some of those trees. They're gonna be dark in value, so I'm putting a decent amount of acrylic ink on the brush. And you can see me pausing there, because I'm studying. You want to get the positioning of these things, right? Because I've got shadows that are dependent upon where the trees are. Your painting's gonna look amateurish if you don't have things in nature correct. We like in painting things to be loose and free, but you still have to follow the rules of nature. I can't wait to make some more videos on things like the Fibonacci sequence. There's some cool stuff. I like science. I just love how nature has an order to it, like a rhythm. I've used the word dance before. And yet, it has spontaneity and mysterious places that go sometimes that keeps things spicy and fun. So that's what I mean about kind of following the rules of nature in art. And it does help to learn these rules. That's why I mentioned the Fibonacci sequence. It's an amazing principle that happens in nature the way things grow, the order, the pattern. That's a good word to describe how things are in our world. There are patterns. And you know what's interesting is that, you know, you cannot really logically believe that all of this is random by chance because of the patterns and the order that we have in our world. I mean, things don't just happen from nothing. And I don't want to get too carried away on that because I have my beliefs. And you know, I'm very thankful that in our Monet Café art group on Facebook, we've got people from certainly all over the world that have different faiths, different beliefs. And it's awesome that we all get along so well. You don't find that in the rest of the world. But I think the reason for that is that a beautiful thing that we can do in life and I think we do it in our group is to find common ground. You know, we can pick apart at each other's differences all day long and usually you don't get anywhere with that. But we find a common ground. You know, we have a lot more in common than we do different. And I just love that we can love each other and still have some differences too. So I'm thankful for those who see things that way. And I know I get a few haters on my channel when I mention, you know, my beliefs. But it's who I am. And I hope you can appreciate it for that. Okay, so now I am going to speed this up a little bit now and get back to painting. I typically do a voiceover when I'm making these videos for multiple reasons. One is because my studio happens to be near a very noisy road. And I don't think it comes out too much, but sometimes it's just better if I do a voiceover. But sometimes I just want to stop and talk to you guys while I'm painting. And, you know, I just wanted to mention that, you know, with my reference photo, it's kind of like my last video I shared about simplifying things. You see, there's a lot of tree stuff going on. I mean, if I was trying to paint all of those trees and all of that, it's not letting me zoom around on it. All of the brush and everything that's growing up, I mean, it would be too tedious, too many lines and everything. So you just paint ideas or suggestions of it. And that's why you can do something so simple, like using the sponge and just dab, because our eyes don't pick up all the details and that stuff back there anyway. So you just kind of, like, if I was to try to figure out what's back there, that would be really hard. I think there's actually a building back there. There's another thing of snow behind it, or it could be a lake back there. I don't know. But you know what? It doesn't really matter. If you get your values right and you keep the painting interesting, that's what art is. It doesn't have to be exact. It's more of your interpretation of it. And again, when you get the values right and the colors right, and obviously notice, I am using a totally different color palette here than here. But, you know, part of the lesson of this video is snow is not white. And it's so cold here in Florida today. Maybe that's why I wanted to do a snow scene. This is actually a picture I took. I'm almost positive. But anyway, snow has so many colors. In our minds, we think of snow as white, but with the light that reflects all around, you know, you get blues, you get purples. I've seen beautiful snow paintings like what I'm doing here, this underpainting, I like keeping these warmer tones underneath it because a lot of times you get a snowy day and it's a sunny day, you know, and there's sun dancing around and you're getting some of the warmth of the sunshine. And I think it just really makes a snow scene that much more interesting. So I'm going to have a little play around with the warm and cool going on in this scene and keep it real loose and fun. And my UART paper is warping again. Some of you guys know that with the flooding of my home last year, a lot of my things that I stored upstairs, it was so much humidity in the house from the flooding that my UART paper warped and I do the little technique of ironing it out, but it still kind of warps up a little bit sometimes. So it makes it a little harder to paint on it, especially when I wet it as much as I just did. But I'm going to get started now and let's make a warm and cozy snow scene because I'm cold. Let's get going. Here's the final painting and I wanted to take a moment to share with you something quite interesting. Most of you may be too young to remember Paul Harvey and the rest of the story, but I have a bit more to share about this photograph. I actually posted the original painting on my art page and my cousin named Mark saw it and he remembered that this was he didn't even see the photograph, but he saw the painting and remembered that it was of this photograph that he had sent me. Oh gosh, seven years ago. And it's very special because it was a time, a very dark time in our lives when his son, Marky, passed away from a childhood terminal cancer. And, you know, I find it so poetically perfect that I added such color to this more drab scene because we do believe that there is a hope beyond this life and Mark and I both know we will see Marky again. So I'm dedicating this painting to Marky and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. And of course, as always, happy, happy painting.