 Welcome, artist with inquiring minds. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and welcome to Monet Café. I think you'll find today's lesson very valuable, no pun intended. In this lesson I will be doing monochromatic painting. I have four different paintings that I've done with a single cue for the color palette, differing only by values. We talk about value all the time, how important it is. This is a great way to learn to see value better. Now, for your listening pleasure. Oh, just listen to this angelic voice by the beautiful Elida Sarducan. She is my daughter-in-law's sister and she's an amazing musician. So please find her on YouTube. She has her own channel and this is an original composition of hers. Now, this particular video is for my Monet Café YouTube channel, the one you're seeing right here. I do have extra content, more instruction on my Patreon page. So I'm giving a little extra something special for my patrons. If you'd like to become a patron, see that link up top. All right, in this lesson I will be creating four different paintings each with its own color family with a monochromatic palette. I'll have some intro content here explaining the value of painting with a monochromatic palette and I will have the demonstration of the painting sped up a bit. Again, for the more extended version that can be found on my Patreon page. Okay guys, let's get started. So here are the four different color palettes I've chosen of a monochromatic palette and here is the image of each painting and here is the finished painting. This one was more of teal blues for this particular painting. I'm showing each color palette at the beginning. These are the cooler blues. Now I'm showing the reference image and then after this in each example I'm showing the actual painting in black and white so you can see that it really is all about value. Now I convert it to the blue color palette. All right, here is the next one with more of pinks and some kind of warmer pinks in there. This was the beautiful reference image. Here it is in black and white and also in color. Again, if you just look at the black and white version you can't really tell that those aren't greens or something in the trees. Here is my, I didn't use all these pastels, I just pulled them out. Here's my warmer yellow with some kind of orangey colors in it with the reference image, the black and white, and the final painting. All right, time for the fun to begin. For this particular painting I used a sheet of LaCarte pastel card made by Sennelier. I love this stuff. It's pretty coarse but I really like it. This is one of the darker brown colors that's in there. I also provided on my Patreon page, in the Patreon group that I have on Facebook, a lot of different reference images. I kind of focused on evergreens. I know it's not a winter everywhere in the world because we have members from all over the world but I just kind of, I don't know, I was in an evergreen wintery kind of a mood. Not all the photos are wintery but anyway on our Patreon page I have about 30 something reference images. All right, so what I've done is I've divided off my Sennelier LaCarte card into four equal five by seven or seven by five sections and I'd like to encourage you to stay loose with this. Don't get overly fussy. I mean of course you you don't want to be sloppy or messy but give yourself a time limit and just try to have fun with these focusing mainly on the values that you see. Now what is the purpose of this lesson and how are we going to learn about value here? Well by limiting yourself to one color family and just having different values of those hues you don't bog your mind down with oh I got to go find a green or I've got to go find you know whatever color. The neat thing about this reference photo is it's already pretty monochromatic. I mean I didn't convert it to black and white. You'll see I do that later to some of the other reference images but it was pretty much already black and white. But I'm using a new pastel here. These are harder pastels spelt in you pastel and they're really great for kind of sketching things out. As a general rule of thumb it's better to use harder pastels at the beginning and softer at the end but that's not a hard and fast rule because sometimes you just don't have those colors. You kind of sometimes let your color choices lead you but in this case of course we're very limited with our color choices but these new pastels are great for sketching and if you notice I've already got some lighter values going in those background trees just by a lighter pressure. Alright I was pointing there to the teal family. I hadn't divided them up yet like you saw in the photos in the beginning. So I'm using more of the I would call them cooler greens or warmer blues. Okay I know that might be confusing but I do have some videos on that. By the way I do have in Monet Cafe YouTube channel I do have my videos divided up into playlists. If you go to my page and you look at videos you'll see another tab that says playlist. I'm trying to get better at putting them in groupings like that but there's one that has I think it's color theory or something like that if you want to know more about that. Alright now so I'm going ahead and getting in up there. I got one of my lighter teal colors in the sky now and I've already got some of the darker ones I put down with a new pastel. Now I'm getting some of those shadowy areas that are a little bit behind the trees. They're kind of shadow in the snow like on the ground underneath the trees and they're definitely a lighter value in some of those distant trees. Alright so now the way it usually works is value decreases in let me see how to word this the best because value can be tricky with the value scale. Value decreases in darkness or it gets lighter as you as it recedes into the distance. The reason for this is because atmosphere literally air is getting in the way. The more space between you and what you see far away the cooler it becomes and the lighter in value it becomes. You notice this a lot when you look at mountains and the distance have you ever noticed how mountains look kind of blue but things gray out they lose their color they decrease or they get lighter in value and and a lot of other little tips of course they get smaller when things are far away but for the value lesson of this definitely things get lighter in values they decrease. Now the reason I said it's confusing is the value scale is kind of opposite of what our brains or my crazy brain thinks. The value scale is from 1 to 10. 1 being the darkest and 10 being the lightest. Now that seems backwards to me it seems like you'd start with white and that would be 1 and you go up to 10 but it's not that way with the value scale. So that's why when you hear of a term called high-key painting the value each value is also called a key so the higher numbers are lighter. So a high-key painting is a painting that has a lot of lighter values it doesn't have really dark values so that's kind of flip-flop it's kind of like if you're into photography it's kind of like the aperture setting on a camera. The higher numbers are the smaller aperture the larger numbers and the smaller numbers are the bigger aperture. Anyway okay so I'm just kind of glazing in this is a I think that was a Terry Ludwig pastel that I'm using there just kind of glazing in that little path now this is the other neat thing I love about the Sennelier paper the pastels just go on so beautifully and it lends to an impressionistic style but you can see here I've gotten in really let me see one with the new pastel there's one value two three four or five values here's all I've got and look it already starts to look like something again I'm keeping these kind of loose and impressionistic maybe worked on it a little more than I should have I was missing painting you know during the holidays sometimes we don't get to paint as much but I know we all got some goodies I saw in our Monet cafe art group on Facebook Cheryl part thank you so much for sharing everybody share your goodies she posted and I marked it as an announcement a lot of people shared all their deliciously beautiful pastels that they got and papers and things like that that group is so awesome if you're watching this and you're new to pastels you will learn a lot from this Monet cafe YouTube channel but if you join our Monet cafe art group on Facebook that's how you would find at Monet cafe art group you will find just the most amazing helpful artistic people sharing growing learning it's awesome everybody's so friendly and encouraging you can get critiques if you want it but you can feel safe in that group because everybody is so helpful and generous alright so this is the end of the commentary for this particular video lesson tutorial on the Monet cafe channel in YouTube of course please keep watching because you will see the entire painting session of all four paintings so you will get to watch the whole thing sped up just a little bit not like some artists speed them up for the extended version again I give something special to my patrons on my patreon page patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins we got such a neat group of artists and I appreciate every single one of them they are the reason again why my channel is getting better because of their $5 a month contribution you know it all adds up as people join and I'm able to buy better equipment my I don't know if anybody's noticed but the video quality is so much better and I was able to get some new pastels you guys are going to be seeing some awesome product review videos coming up okay guys so thanks to my patrons again but I'll never forget about you guys in my Monet cafe art group I'll keep bringing you free content and answering your questions so if you haven't subscribed please do if you would like to get some questions answered leave comments please like this video feel free to share this video all right guys I love you all enjoy this to the beautiful music once again from Alida Sarduken and that just take a deep breath and enjoy the beauty of painting and art in your own life all right so there we have it for monochromatic paintings that you know you wouldn't know they were just one color family when you look at them black and white but I think this is a great lesson and if you want to try these I hope you'll share join our Monet cafe art group on Facebook please like this video if you liked it subscribe to my channel and come back often all right guys it was great spending time with you and happy painting