 Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're gonna have some fun today and if you're new here please subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. Today's lesson should be fun and I know it's a topic that many struggle with. We're going to tackle five steps to create believable sky holes. Here we go. Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today I'm covering a topic that I think can be kind of mystifying. If you've even heard of it before, if you're new in your art career, you may not have heard this term before. Sky holes. So what are they? They're not holes in the sky. Why do they happen? When do they happen? And what are the five easy steps to create more believable sky holes? We're gonna get into that right now. Here are some reference images of situations where you would probably want to tackle the technique of using sky holes. Basically they are the spaces, negative spaces between branches and leaves with trees and it can actually happen with clouds and also even with other types of trees. For example, like palm trees in between their individual fronds and anywhere that light is passing through an object that is somewhat silhouetted. And here is a tree from my own backyard, literally. So join me in this lesson and I hope you learn a lot. All right, so what are these five simple steps to create more believable sky holes? They are value, color, temperature, placement, and variety. So join me as I give some examples on just how we do that and it should be a lot of fun. All right, so why would we paint negatively rather than paint positively with this tree? I'm going to first, you know, basically give an indication of painting the tree positively. Here I'm doing a very fast, even though I'm speeding this up, I didn't do it quite this fast. Example of approaching this tree more with a positive mindset, meaning I'm thinking of painting the tree and the branches. I'm just getting a little background information before I start, but I will be painting more of the tree thinking about the positive shapes rather than the negative shapes. In other words, my brain is focused more on those branches and the groupings of the leaves. Even though I'm still kind of blocking it in, I'm thinking of it as a positive image. Now, if that doesn't make sense to you, I think it will by the time I get to the next example of painting negatively. Also, keep in mind that negative painting creates reality a little bit more accurately as to how we see things. We don't often see individual leaves and branches. We see more shapes and things that are in our peripheral vision often. So when we paint with this much detail, it's actually less believable and less painterly. And by the way, this has been sped up, but I am getting to the actual lesson where I have a lot of real time and instruction. Now, I apologize. I didn't have my camera on when I kind of blocked in my technique for doing a more painterly, sky-hole version. But here we go. I'll talk you through some of my steps before I get to the actual negative painting. I had done this on just brown craft paper. I've actually been working on it and it's great for doing lessons. It's a lot less expensive than some of the sanded papers, but often it doesn't get a lot of layering. So now I'm using my little homemade concoction. If you've been following my channel, you may have seen one of my recent videos where I made my own. I share a lot of homemade surfaces for making pastel surfaces where they have a little grit and pastels actually hold on to them. You can get some layering. But this is one in particular that I just worked on recently. So I'm just letting you see this process. But afterwards, we're going to get to the negative painting. I'm just getting like a block type of shape or form to the tree. And then I'm going to carve in the negative spaces between it. I continued with some pastel blocking it in so that I have some value actually behind the tree to know what I am to negatively paint. What's going to be the colors and the values in those negative spaces of the tree. All right, here we go. All right, now I have basic shapes in for me to be able to carve the sky holes into the tree branches and limbs. Also, they're not sky holes, but they're distant tree holes into the open spaces of this foreground tree here. So here we go. So here are our colors that we used for the sky right here. Okay. Now, when we do a sky hole, let's do, well, I'll just do it the wrong way first. There's a tendency to think. Let me make sure I get the right colors here. This one, this one. This is kind of a little minty lighter color. And this blue here. Whoops. No, that's darker. Okay, I'm gonna keep that one out though. I think it was this one. Yeah. Okay. So these are the colors that I used. So there's a tendency sometimes to make sky holes too light. The first one that I always talk about with multiple teaching strategies is value. So step number one with painting sky holes believably is to paint them just as shade darker in value. Now, what would be the reasoning for that? Well, first, let me show you an example of it not being done that way. Let's even take where the sky is a little lighter right in here. And let's get in some of these sky holes in here. Do you see instantly how I'm gonna zoom into that? Do you see instantly how that looks like popcorn or Christmas lights? It's just too light. Now, why, once again, if you've watched my videos, you know I'm a why person. Why would that be? Well, it's kind of the same way as if you look through an open window and you see light. It's pretty bright, right? Imagine there was a screen on that window when you look through one of the individual holes. The screen in general actually makes it darker even though there's little holes in it. So it's really like the light is being diffused and often there's other little branches and things in the way that just give that value one shade darker. So let's take the this is the one that I had here and this one's just a little shade darker than that one. It's a little bit darker than that one. But let's try this one first, okay? I might be too far zoomed in. Let me check. No, I'm good. Okay. So let's try this one instead. I'm gonna zoom in on this tree a little bit and let's go in here and change it up a little bit. That one even still looks kind of light, okay? Even though that's the color that's up here in the sky. Now let's try this darker one. All of a sudden that starts looking better, all right? So we would carve in more with the darker value versus the lighter one. I should have left a little bit of that in there so you could kind of see, okay? So use those sometimes you can just kind of knock them off a little bit so that they're not quite so stark. So always go a tad darker in value. So that's step number one. Now the next thing is color usually gets a little bit more dull or more neutral. Now I'm limited here in the pastels that I have, but let me see if I can find an even more neutral shade. These are already not so bright, but if we had a super bright sky here, really, really intense colors, we would go a little bit more neutral. Let me see if I can find a little bit more neutral. This one might be a tad more neutral than that. It's a little darker and it's perhaps a little bluer, but it's a little more gray blue, okay? So it would be better to go with something a little bit more neutral. Let me look up here in this part of the sky. I don't want to get too much done here. Yeah, this is a little bit more neutral. Now with regards to temperature, we want to go a bit. All of these are just little teeny fractions of differences. We want to go just a teeny bit cooler, all right? So our sky is already cool, but if we had a vibrant red or yellow sky and there were some sky holes behind there, you want to knock it down a little bit in neutrality and cool it off a little bit in color temperature. Just a little, all right? So it doesn't look like, like I said, Christmas lights in the tree or popcorn. So placement is important. We don't just want to go willy nilly into this tree and start going, I've had a tendency to do that in the past and they just never work, all right? And it does get better the more that you do it. I actually still need to get better at this, but one way to determine the placement is to squint your eyes. When I squint my eyes and look at this tree, I see there's quite a bit of shapes here. So I need to place a lot of my negative shapes in this area. That is, if you're, you know, if you like the shape of this tree, you have some artistic license to do what you like. But when we're first learning, it's a good idea to place them where they are or at least some of them. And then the next is variety. And I find that it looks amateurish very quickly. I'll do it on this one if it's showing in here. Now, I think you could probably quickly see by the time I finish this one, hopefully, why this looks more painterly and artistic than this. But poor placement or variety in this example, I'll use it just here, would be, if you don't have enough variety, it's going to end up looking like, let's just say all of your marks are kind of the same, even if you vary them. They're all, I'm doing all marks just like that. Okay. So if there's not enough variety, all of a sudden, it's just going to look weird. Okay. It doesn't even work. So we want enough variety of shapes and patterns. I notice in this area here, there's some shapes. Let me do a dark area first. Let's just say this this general part right in here. All right. There are some shapes in here that are carving in like this. And then in here, there's some different shapes. It's all kind of going along this branch. And then there's kind of a bigger area right in here. And then a shape comes out here. I know it doesn't make as much sense on here because I don't have enough dark on there. But if you start to see the shapes within these negative spaces and if you can recreate those more true to what they are, then it's going to look more believable. Now, I'm sure you can see here how unbelievable or unnatural these marks look here. So let's go ahead and I'll work on this tree a little bit and keep in mind the things that we talked about, which are you want to go a value shade, just a tad darker. You want to go a color that's just a tad more neutral. And you want to go a temperature if possible. You know, sometimes I don't think the temperature is that important in this one because the color is already cool. But typically, you can go a tad cooler and color temperature. You want to consider the placement. Where are these sky holes? Are they all over the tree or are they just in some areas? And you want to consider variety. I think of that as the shapes. You don't want all of the shapes to be consistent and the same. All right. So I'm just going to work on this a little bit. Have some fun and hopefully you'll learn something. I can't help but I got to play with color here. I love this purple. Now, even though the common name for this technique is called creating sky holes, we obviously need to keep in mind what it is that's behind the tree. It's not always a sky. In this case, it's those distant trees. It could be distant mountains. So we obviously use all of the same principles for that particular item. So I would go a little darker and a little duller in color. Unless, of course, I'm going like right next to the tree sometimes when it's not, like I said, deep within the tree is typically when the colors get darker. So, you know, obviously keep those things in mind and here I'm just adding a little bit more color. I was having fun and once again, this was just done on a piece of brown, like craft paper. And by the way, if you're one of my patrons, this is your homework over the weekend. I'll give you details in my Patreon post. Now, I wanted to also mention sky holes also come into play in other areas, not just your main tree if it's in the foreground. Now, what I tend to do when it's background trees, I try not to overdo sky holes because then all of a sudden they won't look so far away if they just have too much detail. When they're far away, you just don't get as much of that impact of a sky hole. So carve them in a little bit but don't overdo it. So I hope you learned a little bit about why creating sky holes is more preferable and artistically more beautiful than trying to draw in a tree positively. You know, trying to draw the individual leaves and branches. So here's the final and and not a super serious painting but here is the crazy scratchy first one that I did. So paint more sky holes and patrons. I look forward to seeing your homework assignments. Happy painting everyone.