 Welcome to Monet Café Studio and oh do I have some color fun for you. I'm once again going to use the color cube, which is an amazing tool of these little color prompts on these cards that are filled with various color palette combinations. And I'll be showing you how you can take a simple reference image, reproduce it multiple times and share with you the benefits of why you should try this. Come on in the studio and let's get started. Welcome to Monet Café Studio. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. And have you ever felt like you're just kind of in a rut with your paintings? You're choosing the same colors. Your style is not really changing and your paintings maybe feel too tight. Well I have an exercise that I love to do myself and I call it variations on a scene. Basically what it is is choosing a simplified landscape, something kind of easy and reproducing it over and over again. And I like to use certain tools to do this. One tool that I really love is called the color cube. It looks kind of like a giant Rubik's cube for anybody who's as old as me and remembers what those are. And it really is just like a giant box full of color prompts for you to explore and experiment with colors. This can really take your art to new levels. It'll loosen you up too. You'll have a lot of fun. Alright, let's get started. I think you really will like this video so please go ahead and click that like button, subscribe of course, and leave me a comment. I love to hear from you. I recommend working from a reference image that you really love and that's very simple. This is just a study that I did on some newspaper paper actually. And it's a pretty simple scene. So what I did is I converted it to black and white. This exercise I really think working from black and white is best. If you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page, I will give you access to this image for you to use. Also, I created six of them for you to play around with different color palettes, maybe as a warm-up before you get started. And my patrons on my Patreon page are actually receiving this full tutorial where they will see me paint all six of these with extra commentary and more. I even gave them a little behind the scenes tour of my studio. If you would like to get the extra content, join my Patreon family. It's real easy, patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins, and it's only $5 a month to unlock hundreds of full lessons. All right, let's talk about these products. The surface I'm using is one I love. It's called Pastel Matte. I'm using a color called San. I typically buy this in pads, but they do sell it in individual sheets as well. And it seems like it's expensive, but it's so great. It's actually water-friendly. You can literally wash your paintings off if you're not happy with them, so it's a very durable surface. But again, use whatever you have. But if you want to buy individual sheets, you can. It's a lot more affordable that way. I'll have links to these products in the description of this video. Now, let's talk about this color cube. It's a wonderful product to use for getting creative with color. It's invented by artist Sarah Renee Clark. She's just lovely. I enjoyed just browsing through her site that advertises the color cube. She gives more explanation as how to use it. There's even a video where she features the color cube. There are actually two of them, but I find one is plenty. Also, if you decide to purchase one, you can click the link in the description of my video. I do get a little kickback from that. It costs nothing extra for you, so I'd really appreciate that. If you're a patron of mine, you don't even need to buy the color cube. I'm going to give you copies of all of the cards that I used for this lesson. I recommend prepping for this prior to getting started. You want to just get into the groove of painting and not have to worry about measuring a surface over and over again. So what I did is I made six little rectangles of five inches by four inch painting areas. And this page was barely big enough to fit all six of them. Here I'm just showing how I measured them. And I decided I wanted a nice, crisp edge. So I used some of this masking tape, also called Washi Tape. My sweet daughter-in-law got me this little set, and it had varying thickness widths to them. So I just went ahead and marked off each of my painting areas so that it would look nice and fresh. So be sure to watch to the end. I always love that part. I'll be using an assortment of pastel colors, obviously, to match the color cube cards. But I always like to show this little box. It's a repurposed box from some Sennelier pastels. And I like to loosely arrange my pastels. I did a circle there. It kind of emulates the color wheel. I use this little box to quickly tidy up and put my pastels away from paintings I've been working on. And I find it's a handy little palette to keep nearby. Now let's talk about this color cube by Sarah Renee Clark. I've already used the color cube for multiple tutorials. But real quickly, let me give you a little recap. This is volume one. I really think there's plenty in one. I don't even see you needing both unless you just want them. But on one side you have the main colors, along with little values. You have dark, medium, and light values of each color. And on the back, they have an image that corresponds with those colors. And now my big task here was finding which ones I want to use. My goal for this was to find some color palettes that were different. I didn't want the paintings to kind of look the same. So I was trying to get a little bit of a variety with the color palettes. These were the ones that I first chose. I did tweak some of the ones at the bottom before I finished. So I'm excited to get started. This is really fun. Each of the six paintings has the same basic steps. And I am going to use this little Prismacolor new pastel. It's kind of a brownish color. They're normally long and rectangular, but I break them in half. And I'm just using this to get a sketch and a little bit of a value study. Now what is awesome about this type of exercise variations on a scene is not only experimenting, playing, learning new things, but the fact that you're doing the same scene over and over and over again. Listen to me. You're going to get good. Repetition is the mother of learning. So I'm just going to be doing the same sketch for all six of them. As you can see, I turn it on its side to kind of block in where my dark values are. And once I have my little sketch done, I'm ready to get started with pastels. Oh, and I wanted to show you how I used a little piece of chamois cloth. You know what you use to dry your cars with. I bought a big old sheet of it at the dollar store and I cut it into these little squares. And I use it just to blend things in. And these are washable so you can reuse these little claws over and over again. And I forgot to do this blending step on the other paintings, but it doesn't matter. But it really does help to kind of spread some of the values around. And I did like the effect and the mood that it gave. And now I'm actually going to show you me choosing the colors for this first color prompt. I'm working from the left side of the color card first. And I'm picking mostly darks that are in kind of the purple family. And I also want to share that if you don't have colors that are exactly the same, don't worry about it. Just do your best. Here are my initial color choices, sort of corresponding with the colors on the card. And notice with some of them, and I continue to do this, I have different values of each color. Kind of a dark, a medium, and a lighter version of those colors. This first pastel that I'm using, it is the infamous Terry Ludwig egg plant color. It's the brand is Terry Ludwig. They are wonderful pastels made in the United States. And they're normally a little bit bigger than the one I'm using. I break them in half. They're rectangular. And this color, it appears as black, but it's really this gorgeous dark purple. And I just love the Terry Ludwig company. They're great people. So as you can see, I got in my darkest dark first. Now I'm going with my next purple. It's not quite as dark, also a Terry Ludwig pastel. And I'm just lengthening some of the grasses, the marsh grasses, and adding a little bit of this purple. Oh, I pointed there because I'm imagining my light is kind of coming from the upper left side, kind of like behind those trees. And now I'm pulling down my shadows. Reflections in the water, usually you want to make strokes where you pull down on your reflections. And then later you'll see me, a technique for water you glaze across at the end. But now I'm just still using this little purple to get in anywhere I see where there may be some values that are a little darker. And pretty quickly I could see, I wanted a pink with some pizzazz. I don't even know the brand of this little pastel, but boy, is it bright. And so I decided to use this color in the distance to kind of give some warm highlights to these faraway trees. Even though I put the dark down first, I lightened it up with this pretty pink color. And now I'm just sneaking in anywhere that I might see this kind of middle value pink. So I'm getting it in some of the water. And the reason is because I know I'm going to use this in the sky. And I'm kind of working backwards here, but I know that the sky is going to reflect into the water. You'll see me in a minute put some of these pinks in the sky. And this is a nice little middle value to lay in some of that middle ground, those grasses that are receding into the distance. And here you can see how I am putting some of this pink in the sky. I typically put a little hint of a darker value in the upper part of the sky and gradually lighten it as it gets closer to the horizon. Now isn't this red gorgeous? I decided to put this red near the shadowy areas of the marshy grasses. And this does so many things. I could just talk on and on and on about the benefits of doing this. But one thing this is also going to help you with is learning to paint by value over color. You're forced by just having this limited palette to choose pastels or whatever medium you're using based on the correct value versus the color. I probably wouldn't have normally picked this pretty bright orange to use for some of the tops of the grasses. But look how great it works. So I just, I know I'm going on and on and on about this but I can't stress enough how beneficial these exercises not necessarily using the color cube but these principles of using a limited palette and finding some kind of random way to choose color palettes. And now I'm putting a little bit of this pretty bright reddish. It's just such a super warm red orange color into the sky. And I'm reserving a little area down there just above that distant tree line where that's where my lightest lights are gonna be. Have you noticed something? I've been working dark to light. I started with my darkest value then I gradually went on the value scale from dark to medium dark to medium and finally get to my lightest values. And once again, the lightest values are gonna be right in the distance where the sun, I'm imagining the sunset back there. It's gonna cast some of its sunlight and light values onto the water and onto the tops of the grasses. This is also called color echoing where you use similar colors throughout your scene and really connects your painting. This is my brightest yellow. Isn't that a pretty yellow? And it's just really gonna add some pizzazz and life to this painting. I'm just getting some horizontal strokes of the shallow on the water. I felt like I needed some more coolness in the sky. You know, I used that pretty brilliant pink before. So I thought, you know what? Let me use a lighter value of pink and I really think it helped the color composition of this. And there was some pink on the color cube. That last far right color is a pretty pink. So now I'm just reinforcing a little bit of the darks, pulling it down into the water. Reflections, you wanna pull them down vertically. Then once you've done that, you can glaze horizontally over the top of the water. That's gonna create that very believable effect of reflections and flat water. Now I got a little carried away with this one. I hadn't painted in a while when I did this. I think I painted this right after the Thanksgiving holidays and I'd had a break from painting. And another great thing about this exercise is the more you do, the better they get and the more fun you have. So this was kind of my warmup. And also too, the more your painting will have that feeling of freshness. I think you'll see, even though this Monet Cafe version won't show me painting all six, I'll show an image of all of them at the end. And I really felt they got looser, more impressionistic and just had a feeling of freshness to them the more that I painted. All right, getting a little bit more of this pink in the water. Here's where I was kinda like, okay, I'm starting to overwork this a little bit. But I did wanna add some of those kind of ripples in the water. Oh, my pastel wasn't very smooth on one edge there. So I'm trying to blend it in. And this is just a study. That's the other great thing. It forces you to move on and paint more. So now I'm moving on to my second color palette. Oh, did I love these colors? Loved all those cool, beautiful blues. Some of them are a little warmer. A warm blue is really like a teal or a turquoise. And I thought they looked so great with that little hint of that very earthy, yellowy green. So here I go again and I'm really gonna speed this one up because I'm doing the same sketch six times. It could get a little boring. And for this second painting, I'm going to speed it up more than the first one you just saw and add a little music for you. And then at the end, I'm going to show you all six paintings and taking off this masking tape. It's so fun. So again, if you wanna see all six paintings in process with all of my commentary and many extra goodies that go along with this tutorial, you might consider becoming a patron of mine. But I'm trying something new with this lesson. If you are just one of those people you don't like subscriptions even though the Patreon is only $5 a month, you can purchase this lesson individually for only $10. I'm making it available on my coffee shop. I have a site where I can offer individual lessons, products and more. And you will receive the full lesson, all of the goodies that I talk about for only $10. You can find a link to that in the description of this video. So check that out. All right, enjoy the rest of this painting process. I really loved the colors in this one. And stay tuned, I'll be taking this masking tape off soon. Gosh, I just loved the colors in this one. I actually go over some of my pastel brands that I use in my Patreon version. So here I am finishing up painting number six. Oh, this is another one that I really loved. The color card from the Color Cube had these very cool and a lot of neutral colors to them. It felt like a winter scene. I almost wanted to add some snow to this one. And now it's time for taking off the masking tape. I don't know why this feels so satisfying. I think it's just seeing those crisp edges. By the way, there was a little residue of pastel that got outside of the tape area that you can actually just erase off with a kneaded eraser, kneaded spelt K-N-E-A-D-E-D. And you can clean it right up. And if you really end up liking your results, you could frame this as a single painting or you could cut them up to have little small individual paintings. I love little paintings like this. I will have more tutorials coming this month for what I call variations on a scene. So be sure to subscribe so you won't miss them. Check out the description of this video for all of the product links, including the Color Cube. Also a link to become a patron on my Patreon page if you like, or to purchase the individual full lesson on my coffee shop. All right, God bless and happy painting.