 Good morning friends in Monet Cafe. It's morning here anyway at Tampa, Florida. And this is artist Susan Jenkins. And I have a neat little experiment that I'm going to do that I think will be an example that might help some of you. It doesn't matter what medium really, even though I'm using pastels. This will be a lesson that works across different mediums because it deals with value and color choices. What I've done here is I have four little pieces of UART paper that I have. It's just a little four by five in a portrait format. And I decided I was going to take different color families of different values. You notice in each one I've got blues and purples. I've got pinks and rich magentas. I've got greens and I focused on this one with warm greens versus cool greens. If you're not sure of the difference you can see my video on warm versus cool colors. And over here I've got oranges, yellows, and reds. And I thought this would be neat for me because you know sometimes we get stuck in a in a color choice pattern that we use. You know typically we do the sky as blue. We do the trees as green. And this way I'm going to focus with just a color family with different values. Different from light to dark, light medium to dark. And keep each of these within that color group. Okay so I thought that would be good to help others see value and to see how it works. And also I need to one day do what I've seen other artists do. It's like a hundred painting challenge. You take the same reference photo, which you just get a basic reference photo, which is one I'm working with today. I've converted mine to black and white because for this these purposes it just is going to work better for me to see value. But the hundred painting challenge is where you take the same reference photo and you literally do a hundred different paintings of it. And it causes you to really grow as an artist because you explore different ways of doing things instead of getting stuck into the same rut. I have not done it yet. Unfortunately I need to because that is where I really see people grow in their art. If my busy life can slow down one day I really want to do that. So this is not a hundred painting challenge. This is a four painting challenge. And so I think I may try to even hold my phone while I do this. I'm left-handed, but a lot of left-handed people end up being pretty ambidextrous. So I'm gonna try to hold it with my right hand and paint with my left hand. And let's get started. This should be really fun and I'm a little nervous. I think it's gonna come out good though. All right here we go. Okay so I decided not to hold my camera because I was getting a bad shadow when I put my hand holding the camera over here. So I'm simply going to paint this one and the first one is going to be with the blue and purple color family. Now my reference photo had a sky that was darker than most. I always talk about how the sky is almost always the lightest thing in the painting or the reference image. And in this case it was a sky that was very stormy and thunder. It looked like a storm was brewing and rolling in. So I'm not going to make it as dark as it shows in the reference photo for the purposes of this video. So anyway just keep that in mind that my sky is going to be a little lighter than what you see in the reference photo. All right so I'm gonna get started here and give a little commentary when I'm as I'm working maybe and when I'm done. All right so here is the first color palette experiment with only using blues and purples. I've got a couple of neutrals in there as well that I threw in a couple of these more neutral shades but for the most part this is all blues and purples and when I squint my eyes I can see the values that are representing the photo with the exception of the sky I made a little lighter like I mentioned. So you know you work fast sometimes and you follow the rules of value and when you set out your color palette and you have it correct with the right value choices you can often get it right so and sometimes for me working quickly is nice and then I have to get to a point where I just slow down and walk away so I don't overwork it. Okay so there was experiment one we're moving on to the pinks and magentas now. All right so now I'm going to be working on the pinks and magentas and keep in mind that I'm not doing any underpainting with these. I'm working strictly on the UART paper without any preparation to the paper at all and if you choose to do this pick a reference photo that is fairly simple. I love landscapes but pick something that has depth to it so that you are going to be able to utilize the point of this lesson which is to get your values correct and create that illusion of depth. So all right here we go. All right now we're moving on to the warm greens and I find it interesting that yes a sky can actually have green in it. I know this is just for the example of this value lesson with the different color families however skies can actually have green in them and I just love the different moods of the skies so here we go with this one. On to the reds, oranges and yellows and by the way I have borrowed a dark dark for a couple of these. It's the Terry Ludwig eggplant which is such a nice dark so even though it's more of a purple I've used it for some of the darks in these which I probably will with this one too. And I notice in my palette of pastels that I use oranges and reds the least because I have more of them left I'm not using them up in other words and so that's why this exercise is really great because it helps me to use colors I don't normally use when I'm working on art and so this is a good lesson for me as well. Here is the resulting mess with the pastels. The hurricane went through here with all of my little scratches on here which I actually used to clean the pastels off and here are the resulting paintings. We've got our blues and purples and magenta also greens these are warm greens reds oranges and yellows and it really does look neat when you pull back and do an experiment like this because you get to see the same painting in all of the different color families and I think that's pretty cool. Now of course I could go back into this painting let's take this one for example I already see where I could add some purples and some reds and oranges in this to really make it pop and in this one I see where I could add some cool greens and various other shades and colors so it's really just a neat thing to do so I hope this encouraged you to try this yourself but also that you just learned something from this experiment. It was fun for me and I'll try to come up with another experiment for the next lesson.