 Hello my wonderful artistic friends and welcome to Monet Cafe. Today is a rainy day here and we're talking really rainy. I mean the storms were so bad. I was, I usually love painting in the rain but I was actually a little afraid. There was so much lightning but now it's calmed down and it's just a perfect day for me to be in my studio and I thought why not have you guys come along with me. I've got my coffee. I love these kind of days so I'm gonna have to do a little project that I thought might be fun for you guys. I recently shared on Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook two reference photos. They actually are two of my own photos that I took from my backyard which is right behind my studio here. My backyard is a big field. It's a house we moved in after my other house and studio flooded but you know what there's blessings in every storm or there's a rainbow after every storm because even though this house is not what my other house was, I have this beautiful field of cows in the backyard that have become my pets but anyway so that's a wonderful thing but the two reference photos are very similar composition and layout little differences so I presented it to our art group for them to say what they thought was a better composition and why or how they would crop it so I thought I'd go ahead and discuss this and pick one to choose and kind of go through my process of how I take a reference photo and create a composition to work from and I thought too if you haven't joined Monet Cafe Art Group you might want to go ahead and join and check out that post if you can find it and you can also feel free to use the same reference photo if you would like to create your own painting from it because it is my photo so anyway let's get started and we're gonna have fun. All right guys let's do it. Okay so I first just have I like to use this technique a lot I just have a piece of foam board and I've covered it with a piece of newsprint I use newsprint because it's cheap and I want to be able to use while I will put the my surface today is going to be UART paper it's 400 grit if you've been on my channel a lot you know I focus a lot on pastel painting and I don't know what that's where the sticker was but um you have to use with pastel you don't have to but it's a good idea with pastel painting to use a surface that has a grip to okay I love UART paper it's an awesome paper and my composition is going to be a landscape view so it's going to be horizontal in its format but this allows me to have all of this room around here I actually if a pastel is dirty let me find a dirty one here's one that's kind of dirty now I'm going to be using this for a sketch I don't want to use in here but um this see how it's dirty I will before I see how all that came off there I will clean it quickly sometimes and I'm checking colors okay so now I can check that color before I lay it down on the painting so it's just kind of a a neat way to clean and check your color okay to have your newsprint there newsprint is very cheap okay so but what I'm going to do now is go ahead and show you how I work from the reference photos if I'm making a choice as to what's a better composition how I go ahead and and sketch it out or or make a little thumbnail to see what might be a more interesting composition so let's do that right now okay now I have my two images here that I presented to our Monet cafe art group to get everybody's ideas there's not a real right and wrong to this there are some good compositional rules that I'll talk about but um this was the first photo and this was the second photo okay if you notice and I'll try to after I make this video and editing I'll put a better version so you can see it better than on my iPad but um this first photo here um I would not choose it as is because of the composition line I mean composition line the horizon line okay that's where the the sky meets the land okay horizon line is actually not at the top of the trees it's where the land is and actually there's some fields back there so it's right about it's just above that cow's back okay it's where the horizon line is and that's pretty much center of the photo the center right here on my iPad is this little button so I know that that is that's really not a good placement for the horizon line um we want the horizon line I have other videos on this it's a it's called the rule of thirds it should either be in the lower third or the upper third as a general rule of thumb okay um so that is why I would not use this as is however I love and people have already pointed this out on mona cafe art group I love the sky in this one the sky is more of the star of the show in this one than it is in this one okay but I like the horizon line in this one okay I like this field coming back also in this one for some reason this photo I can see I love little things hidden and tucked away that caught draw your eye into it and I see these distant trees back here I'm getting too much into this that I will uh I like and I think I would utilize that um but um but again this one here is a great let me see if it'll let me do this yeah if we um if we lowered see how I just lowered that horizon line just there look how much more interesting that sky is it's just more pleasing some of the people in mona cafe art group have mentioned how we would lose this building okay that's a distraction it's kind of like a just an ugly piece of metal building thing I don't even know what it is but um anyway that already makes a better composition when we pull it down okay or crop it like that okay so but I am um I love skies and a lot of times I love to focus on a sky image um but in this case I think I'm going to go with this one I like some of the movement and energy coming up in this field and I like this little um way I'm able to see these background trees so I'm going to go with this one right now um the cows placed pretty good but I might play around with that a little bit but that's what the sketch is for okay so right now I'm going to do a little sketch work on this one right here and see what would come up with okay so I've zoomed in here a little bit actually this is the size of the painting I just went ahead to the size of the painting but um just to do a general idea for composition you don't need to do it the exact size of the painting okay I just wanted to give you something for reference um so I've just put in a little idea here of kind of the general um proportions to this okay it doesn't have to be perfect as long as it's close okay um I am just using right now a piece of willow charcoal vine charcoal it's called viny charcoal and um it's just a nice little uh sketchy type of thing you can work with I often break my charcoal I've got a small one here and a large one here too okay there's various sizes you can get in this but um this one should suffice I don't know I might use that large one for those trees but anyway I know that my and I always get a little awkward here working around the camera um so forgive me if my big old face gets in here but I know right now I'm just going to kind of make some little marks of where things are I know that that um horizon line that's a little too high oh I think I have a love bug crawling on my arm oh my goodness here in Florida the love bugs have been crazy no I don't I thought I did okay so I know the horizon line is kind of in that upper third here would be about middle okay all right so I know it's going to be a little bit more up here I want to give enough room for those trees okay so um so we've got the horizon line kind of coming like right through here okay and then I know I've got these trees I can kind of judge see how much sky I've got here I do have some sky so I can't make these trees too awfully big okay so we're just going to quickly just sketch out these trees um you're just getting general ideas the more you do this the better it gets or the better you get and um so we've got an idea of the trees I want to kind of like in my last video I spoke about creating energy in your painting this would be really boring okay um so what I'm going to do I'm going to break this I'm always breaking my stuff here all right I'm squinting my eyes and I'm looking and I've got in the foreground here so I've just broken it the foreground here I have a a little bit more flow and I'm just feeling feeling some energy just kind of uh moving back here if I made this all just horizontal strokes like this very boring okay and I kind of like like I said I like it to peek back there that's too dark but um anyway we've got um some nice movement see how that's already more interesting than if I would just done grass all across the whole thing so I want to keep we're going to bump underneath my my uh board back there all right so we're getting an idea here energy coming back nice trees then we got these nice clouds with some um some shadows underneath them some of those uh clouds are like a kind of a medium to darker value underneath some of those clouds okay so general composition third here a little break in the trees to keep interest back here I'm going to lighten that up we've got our cow that's too big to get the idea um and create just some interest and energy and movement again I'm going to kind of pull the eye in with my my composition and my strokes okay so I can see that I'm I'm going to like that okay that's pretty good okay so now it's time to choose my color palette and the great thing about doing this is now I can see that I don't really like um the cow you know he's um kind of got his hip going up here and then this tree right here that's just too much um right there to me it feels too weighted there he needs to be more where there's a um a space in the tree so the good thing is um this is a little bit more narrow in composition or proportion to this one so I'm going to be able to maneuver the bigger tree here and maybe the cow a little bit more in the center of that valley of the trees there so that's why you do these though so that you can analyze those things before you start before you commit to something so it's a great idea to do an initial sketch all right so now to get started in choosing our color palette and I want to introduce you if you haven't already met a good friend of ours it's the pocket color wheel okay it's a great way for you to learn more about color learn it has so much information on it teaching you really about um how to organize your color palette um I have another video that goes into detail on that but um I also wanted to recommend um that you try doing the same little sketch kind of like I've done here uh like four times and just do it with a monochromatic um color scheme okay so for example uh this blue right here it already lays out three actually four if you count that color there values of blue values of violet red violet red so in other words you would just use these colors to paint this painting it's a really great lesson on value and it's just going to make your um painting stronger and um it'll make it more natural when you go to choose your own color palette so you know what I think I'll just do that right now with this one I'll do a monochromatic maybe blue um color palette on this to give you the idea now I've got these four different values of blue they're not exactly like the blues on here but this will be a perfect example of how value is king and not necessarily color but it's okay because these are going to be um four different values if you were to take a black and white picture of this you would easily see that this is light to dark okay well these are easy but sometimes these middle ones are a little trickier okay so um this one's actually kind of close to that one right now but for this purpose this is just fine all right so I'm going to get started and just use these four colors now I've got my color wheel all dirty to paint this painting okay I need to pull up my reference image again okay so it's pretty simple squint your eyes what is the lightest thing in this it is the sky okay so we're just going to quickly get in the sky the sky is typically lighter at the horizon line and darker up towards the heavens okay so we got our light sky this because it's a little bit darker than that one might be nice and this is newsprint okay so I'm not going to get a lot of layering effect here but you know in the painting I'll add a little bit more of those clouds but um and I'll probably keep them very impressionistic in this case I don't want the sky to compete with what I'm trying to do in the grasses okay so we've got a little bit of our lighter values in the sky now what is the darkest thing in this of course it's these trees here and so I've just got this darker blue actually I could go darker than that but this will work for now okay so we're getting this nice blue scheme going here scheme I don't like that word scheme sounds like a plot or planning something bad let's say a nice um palette you know that's better okay so now we've got our darker blue trees in there okay now these background trees the ones I was talking about before are going to be the ones that are in the distance again it's hard for me to work around this camera so I'm going to come over here so we're going to have these distant trees that's a little big um back here kind of pulling the eye back there like oh what's back there okay and again I had talked about maybe punching in or dotting in a few of these that maybe are peeking through right there of distant field okay so now that is going to be the um kind of middle value there all right now I like to always lay down almost always lay down the darker layers first and I know this foreground values get darker in the foreground and lighter in the background so I'm going to go ahead and lay down some dark it looks too dark right now which it is too dark but I know that I'm going to lay down more on top of it and again I don't have a lot of value I mean a lot of layering ability with this because it's this newsprint sanded paper would allow you to get a lot more in there okay so now I know that cow is dark but I'm going to lay down a dark again this is hard for me um I'm going to lay down a dark and then I'll lighten them up a little bit I got them too big again but that's okay for this okay so we've got our cow and um now his back's got a little bit of up this is the medium one a little bit of a highlight on it okay I've just got a cramp in my foot oh man the joys of painting all right so and he's got a little bit of a highlight on his head coming down here like that we add a little bit more to his head these chunky pastels sometimes are a challenge you know so he's not the perfect cow but um all right now we've got back here we've got this field that's going to lighten up as it gets back in here and it meanders back and you always want to consider where's that sun now from the reference photo you can see the sun is coming this way okay so the highlights of the trees are going to be on this side of the trees and you may get yeah the the field is a little light back there so it is kind of on top of it not behind it but um this right here this little lighter value here is what's going to give you that illusion that things are further away now the grasses are lighter than the cow okay so we'll work that around him and um there's a little bit of light kind of coming down on this here and again in the painting I'm going to create a try to create a sense of energy and leading the eye back there okay um now if I was to add more colors in this what I'm going to plan on doing in the um actual painting is um making some of these background things in the distance if you add a little bit of a oh I don't know like a punch of a color back here you're going to really create an interest back here to draw the eye this one's going to be a little dark but I'm going to lighten it up now I'm going out of my monochromatic um color palette right here but this is enough different to where it's going to create that interest back there okay and um also purples are good sometimes for distant things because colors um kind of cool out in the background but in this case I just thought that little bit of uh green teal color would look good okay all right and then always you want to kind of introduce a color in to make the painting more consistent so now you're seeing how we get a little bit of a a fun idea of how the painting is going to look with a monochromatic scheme then I would probably add some of this color in the cow you know and get that kind of going and um there are going to be some highlights on that tree as well or these trees here so you could use I've already lost all my colors here you could use um maybe like some uh well these would be good for the shadows of the trees down towards the bases when there's little shadowy areas purples are good for that and introduce some in here to create that sense of mood and depth probably a little bit of this purple in the cow these are way too big to be drawing that cow um and then just to get that little field back there even a little bit lighter maybe right back in here to pull your eye back there a little bit all right so you see we're already getting a little bit of something going there so you get an idea of how um value is going to really create the interest in your painting now this like I said was more of a monochromatic or actually when you have them right next to each other like that it's called an analogous color scheme or color palette um when you have colors that are closer next to each other on the color wheel so this would be more of an analogous instead of just monochromatic okay I did throw in a little bit of that teal green okay so um so it's close to that but anyway you get an idea of uh actually I could make these purple back there that I think would probably be better than that green but this is not about this little sketch it's going to be about the big painting all right so we got a good idea of how color works but I now I'm going to work more on local color for this instead of um coming up with my own color palette just for the purposes of this example so local color means what's natural to the scene what is in the scene already that doesn't mean I'm not going to put down some other colors on top to be darker or give more impact but the general feel of the painting will be a little bit more of that sunny day with a green field and um a little bit more like what it already is all right let's get started here is my chosen color palette and I went ahead and kept the same monochromatic blues that I used um for the example and a couple of the purples here um but I have actually added well these are you know more of the local colors that are in the scene there's the green grasses I have varying values and just so you know I have the values from dark to light bottom to top okay in each um family color family this green right here is kind of a in between these two um also notice that I'm I'm learning the um the value not not I don't mean light or darkness but the benefit of using neutral colors in your work instead of just all bold colors because what it does is if you use all bold colors nothing stands out it's all kind of everything shouting at the same time but if you use neutrals um and then you use the bold colors more for accents and things it's going to make your painting more exciting some of the neutrals in this case is this is a neutral just means it's it's not high chroma or intensity um in this case this one's going to be more of a neutral here this is kind of a neutral in here okay these are these are intense okay like um like these here all right um more intense in color this one's more of a neutral here even this one a little bit you know this one's kind of like grayed down or whatever but they don't have the the intense color you know this one is not a neutral all right I'm sorry for the focus um so you get the idea now the reason for these oranges okay without these it's kind of bland isn't it plus um we know that complementary colors or from some of my other videos I've shared complementary colors um are just going to really make these greens show up and I like the way Karen Margulis puts it is to lay down some dirt I may even need a value darker than this so in that field we need to lay down some dirt before we put the greens on top of it okay so um so that's my reasoning for these I'm going to try to stay pretty close to these just to keep this simple I want this to be more of a lesson than you know just about I hope it turns out to be great painting but it's more of a lesson okay so let's get started all right I'm going to put my ur paper up here and just so you know my little system I just use blue painters tape some people say it distracts them but the color but it doesn't bother me at all but I just take two pieces along the back of my painting this makes it I used to take all the way around the painting in the front of it but I saw artist Rita Kirkman do this and I was like man that is just such a a nice little art hack I used to didn't know what the word hack meant like that my kids told me that little little tips and tricks that make life easier is what a hack is so anyway I'm going to get this up here now it doesn't have to be perfect and my my ur paper is a little warped um you don't have to turn these down but I just didn't want them sticking up um but uh I have a actually another little video where I share how to unwork your ur paper if you have high humidity I might take these sides down too that's going to bother me if you have high humidity sometimes this paper can warp up and um you can basically just use an iron and iron it out so check that video out too now I'm just doing a sketch right here and I'm doing a voiceover because I decided to speed it up because you kind of just saw that in the little sketch so again I'm using the vine charcoal and this is to be just very basic you don't want to get super super detailed in this the vine charcoal is great because I can just again lay it on its side and again I'm just establishing values right here uh this isn't going to be anything too um specific uh but it's just to kind of get an idea in a game plan of where uh things are going to be that's all I really needed for that vine charcoal was just kind of get where that horizon line is and where the uh the trees are now this is what I was talking about with the complementary underpainting I you know sometimes I have people ask me what makes you decide on whether you do an alcohol wash whether you do a complementary underpainting whether you work on one solid color sometimes it's just based on how I feel the scene should look or how I want it to come out and that just comes with I still can get better at all these things too but that look at the back of my head that still comes with uh I mean that just comes with lots of practice I need more practice too oh and just so you know I'll give you a little uh a little um what do you call it foreshadowing here uh that cow I end up losing it in the end I felt and he kept progressively getting larger the size there's pretty good he actually could be a little smaller there but um as I went on and went on he kept getting bigger and bigger and and then I was like let me just erase them out and start over and when I erased him my eye just went into the painting so much better so sorry cow you had to go but at least I have them in my field to look at now I was just pointing out there how that uh the back tree line there I had it yellow that was way too light in value those trees in the back even though they're going to be lighter in value than the foreground trees the yellow was too light it was too much of a shade too light here you'll see I have my handy dandy pipe foam insulation that can be purchased at any hardware store and I just have a little piece that I cut off I didn't even have to buy it my husband had some in the garage but I've had it for years it lasts forever but um I I work on the sky first because it's light and then I start working on the darker values and you might not be able to see it here but I actually I clean it on that news print that's beside my painting after using darker colors so I don't you know contaminate it into the lighter colors unless I want to blend it as in that case I'm kind of blending those gradation of values into the background so uh it works real good for blending and you kind of want to blend your underneath layers um if you want it to be more of an impressionistic look underneath I'm getting more values down with pastels now in those trees I know they look really dark almost black there it's actually not black these are really dark greens and dark purples and they do appear as black though um because the scene it's the darkest value in the scene so just you know kind of getting those in shaping those trees up notice I have some variety in the trees I don't have them like a roller coaster um they have a little bit of different shapes and and heights and sizes that's real important um to getting it uh just more artistic I obviously need to darken up those background um trees a little bit more you see how that helped they were still too light so you know you spend a lot of time early on in the painting just getting your values right now I need to pull up that reference photo now so that you can kind of compare it uh to what I'm doing as you can see from the reference image there is still a lot of value in the sky if you squint your eye uh the underneath clouds um way back at that distant horizon that's all still pretty dark the lightest part is up at the top um a lot of times I speak of typically you've got your lighter clouds uh just over the horizon or the tree line and but sometimes with storms that's not the case which it's not in this case I still end up keeping it a little lighter um but not as light as I normally would down by the uh horizon or the tree line now I'm going to keep painting here for a bit and uh actually um just play some music for you to enjoy I have a lot of people ask um about doing most of the video real time and while I would love that there's a couple of reasons I don't do that one is it takes um a lot of time a lot of space on my computer um I end up erasing the files when I'm done but just to upload the uh videos on the youtube channel takes a long time and where I'm living right now uh since our home in my studio flooded we're out a little bit more in the country you know hence the cows in the field so we don't get we have very bad wi-fi um our internet service oh you don't want to hear that saga getting a dish system some people who lied to us and now we're stuck in a contract and that's a whole another video and I'm not going to even share that but anyway so that's why sometimes you know I am a little limited in um in how long I can make these videos they would take forever to upload but um you kind of see I'm getting down some of the the hue now not just the values I'm still working with value but just adding color to it uh and uh trying to still make it very um colorful and bright but again I'm learning to focus more on some of the neutral colors than just all bright and bold notice how I'm still keeping my strokes really loose almost scribbly um but to keep that energy like I talked about in my last video and movement and looseness to it you want to keep it very loose you don't want to tighten things up right now oh hi hair I gotta keep my head out of there anyway so um did I say I was gonna put on some music and let you guys watch let me do that now bye I'll be back soon here is where I actually add some Blair low odor fixative I need to pull it back more when I hold things up there so they're in focus but I add it often to the front of the or the foreground of the painting just to kind of darken it up and give it an extra layer I still had more layering ability here but I kind of wanted to get that impressionistic look I only use fixative for the working process of a painting see how it darken to the foreground and it gave me those little splotches kind of gives an impressionistic look but also notice how I covered up the painting when I sprayed it so I let that dry and then I've got a little bit more of a gridded gritty surface on the front there to add more grasses it's looking really dark right now but I'm just establishing those darks again and you'll see later I start adding the lighter colors on top or values and colors on top of that here is the point where I realized this darn cow keeps getting bigger and bigger he looks like a buffalo at this point and it just doesn't work right with the perspective of the painting I actually tried to do a quick sketch of him that's actually a good idea to do if you have a little teeny image you're doing I just blew it up on my iPad I did a sketch to get his gesture the gestural quality and you know once I brush it out I was determined to get that cow the right size and if I thought it was worth it I would have kept working at it but once I got him erased and I stepped back again by the way step back a lot when you're working on your painting I looked at it and I was to see those I exed him out bye bye cow it just I don't know that feel just said so much without the cow he was a distraction to me so that's why I decided to lose him but I think it worked out to the advantage of the painting