 Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm bringing you a quick little video on making your own Neutrals with soft pastels. Yes, it can be done. And if you'd like to have more of these helpful tutorials coming your way I hope you'll subscribe. Now, this was part of a Patreon lesson from my Patreon page where I do something called story time We read from books and I give lessons based on some of the instruction and in this particular book the pastel workbook by Jackie Simmons. I highly recommend this book if you're a beginner. It's a little hard to come by now So hopefully you can find it. But in this book there was a great lesson on creating your own Neutrals and so I'm going to show you here on Monet Café a little sneak peek into some of the content that is over on my Patreon page. Here are some examples of neutral colors and they're just a little bit void of Chroma. They're not highly saturated. I always say they look a little dull in color And I know as artists often we want to go for those real bold punchy gorgeous colors But sometimes we forget or we never have learned that there's a power in Neutrals If you have all bold colors in your painting everything is shouting and nothing takes center stage. Often, especially for new pastel artists We don't really have all of the colors that we want and often we don't have enough Neutrals But not to worry right now. I'm going to show you how you can actually create your own neutral colors by mixing complementary colors Here is the color wheel to make a neutral again if you don't have any neutrals and you need to kind of Create one yourself. You combine complementary colors So what's a complementary color? We talk about this a lot. They are opposite colors on the color wheel. So blue and orange Purple and yellow Green and red So let's just do a blue and orange if I have some in here Let me grab these and set them up here so you can see them a little better. All right, let's see Here's a blue. That's a pretty vibrant blue. I'm gonna try to do this with bold colors So you can see that they do kind of neutralize each other. All right, so we've got a blue and an orange Let's neutralize them And I'm just gonna go lightly. This is just toned gray paper made by Strathmore and Here's the orange Let's do them by themselves first Here's the blue and the orange Okay, now let's neutralize it go real lightly Don't over saturate the paper And see how that neutralized it We can add a little more blue You see how all of a sudden we've got a much more neutral color if you blend it you get even more of the impact See how that neutralized it now if you need a lighter value of that You can add white or doesn't have to be white. It can just be a lighter value, but I've got one That's kind of white right here I'll do it on one half of it So whoops, that's kind of jagged on the side there So now we've just neutralized it with a little white and and you can vary that based on how much White you add or pressure you give so you see how we've got neutral colors from these two Incredibly bold bright colors. All right, let's try that with purple and yellow So here we go with our purple and our yellow. Let's do the same thing Again, these are great colors to use for clouds to neutralize them like this. We'll do We'll do one half Actually, we do this and then we'll add the white See how that just neutralized that out and let's do the same thing with that. I'll blend it so you can see a little better a Much more neutral version than those two and it's it's warmer because of the yellow So when you use that with clouds, it does give some warmth to the clouds So now we're gonna lighten up that neutral color by adding a little light and Then all of a sudden Use a different finger you guys ever do that I don't blend a lot with my fingers, but you can alternate fingers if one is dirty. All right You see the two neutrals we just created from that Now let's do the same thing With red and green and you know, you don't have to pick just those typical standard ones You can go more towards like red violet and a green yellow Let's see if I have that one instead of just your typical red and green I don't think I have a red but well, this is sort of a red violet It's kind of a lighter version of red violet and let's see do I have a limey kind of green? Sort of let's do this right here. Okay, so instead of your typical red and green with this We're gonna do a little bit different on the color wheel. All right. Here we go. Let's do this one Okay, nice colors and let's neutralize them neutralize the whole thing And then we'll do the white on one side I'm using it three times because they kind of blend a little better by themselves when I Do a few layers on them. All right, so we've got a nice neutral color here See if that neutralized that And then we'll add some white We're gonna put my white. Okay. Here's another white Let's light that up a little lighter version of that You see that how we created some neutral colors with bold More highly saturated or more chroma in the colors. So you don't have to have A big palette of neutrals in order to create a neutral Result, you know the end result will end up being more neutral I recommend as a follow-up to this lesson to create two small thumbnail sketches of a similar scene And make one painting with primarily bold colors And then do the next one with primarily a neutral palette Adding in perhaps a few areas of bold colors And I think you will see that when you use only bold colors There's really no clear focal point because everything is so busy with all of the bold Bright colors, but by using neutrals you actually set the stage For making your brighter bolder colors really pop and get the attention that they deserve I have two videos also on the mona and cafe channel here on creating a neutral palette part one and part two I'll try to put a link here so you can reference it So go ahead and experiment in making your own Neutrals without having to buy any additional pastels. I hope you enjoyed that Please subscribe if you haven't already like this video. Leave me a comment I'd love to hear from you and as always happy painting