Four Seasons: Creating Temperature and Mood With a Limited Palette

1. Introduction: Are you ready to streamline your color palette, learn how to mix virtually any color possible, and use color temperature to convey moods and feelings and watercolor landscapes? Hi, I'm Ariane and welcome to my class on painting the Four Seasons, creating temperature and mood through a limited palette. In this class, you will learn how to discern between warm and cool colors and build a split primary palette. A split primary palette consisting of six carefully chosen warm and cool hues of red, blue, and yellow is your best bet at being able to create the most true and vibrant mixes with as few colors possible. If you're beginning your art journey and are overwhelmed at the idea of investing in the right supplies. This class will give you the confidence to select the minimum colors necessary to give you the most versatility. Well, if you're like me and own a multitude of colors and brands, this will help you narrow down your palette for travel, plein air painting, or urban sketching. Our final project will consist of four small sky and tree scenes, which are basic in uniform as far as composition goes, but each convey completely different moods depending on their warm or cool color palette. Basic watercolor techniques are learned throughout the class. No previous experiences is necessary. Seeing how easy it is to convey a crisp, cool autumn day or a warm summer afternoon by just being mindful of the temperatures of the paints used will open up so many possibilities in your landscape painting. Even if you are a seasoned artist, this class is sure to give you tips on streamlining your color palette or setting the mood for your landscapes through color. I can't wait to see what landscapes you come up with and interact with you in the project gallery. I hope you enjoy this class. 2. Supplies: These are the supply, you'll need for today's lesson. You obviously need some watercolor paper. In the first part of the class, we're going to be swatching and testing color mixes, so feel free to use some inexpensive paper for those exercises. You will want to switch to better quality paper. However, once we narrow down our color choices and start mixing hues for our limited palette, because paint reacts differently on synthetic paper as opposed to 100 percent natural cotton paper. You'll find that your final results are superior, the better paper you use. For our final project, we're going to be painting four simple landscapes. So you want to have four sections taped off. I'm going to be taping my arches 100 percent cotton paper to a board. I have taped off the four sections with painter's tape, or you can use masking tape. Feel free to paint these on separate pieces of paper if you want or you can always paint them in a sketch book like I did to practice. You will need some watercolor brushes. I'm going to be using a round number six and a round number 10, and I may use a liner brush for when we do our final project later. You probably won't need any bigger brushes than these. Water jars, I use two because I clean my brush off with one and then I use one jar just for clean clear water if I need to do any wet and white washes. A paper towel or clothes to clean and dry your brush. The paint palette or mixing tray. The color wheel will be useful when we're learning color temperature. Don't worry if you don't have one, you can always Google image search for color wheels or just follow along and everything should make sense in due time. Then lastly, whatever watercolors you have. This is my paint collection and it's about 75 percent handmade watercolors from the sprout creative. I also have some handmade paint from Blue Pine Arts and some Daniel Smith colors in there as well. Now the main purpose of this class is to be able to knowledgeably select the minimum number of colors needed that will produce the largest variety of hues we've mixed. Whether you're like me and have a lot of colors to choose from and are looking to make it smaller travel palette, or I need to watercolors and are wondering what colors should invest in, this lesson should give you some color confidence. Ultimately we're going to be building a split primary palette, which consists of both warm and cool version of each primary color and they're are red, blue, and yellow if you weren't aware yet. You can also buy premerge sets of split primary palette. This is the Daniel Smith essentials set. It comes with both a warm and cool version of yellow, red, and blue like we had just discussed, or you can mix and match from your own collection. If you're intimidated by any of this, don't worry, I'm going to go through my process in the hows and whys of the colors I chose for my palette. 3. Warm and Cool Colors: The first step to selecting our colors is to figure out which primary colors in our collection are warm or cool. What really makes a color warm or cool? We probably already know that warm colors are the reds, oranges and yellows, and cool colors are greens, blues and purples. But within these designated warm and cool categories, we can find that certain colors can both be warm and cool. Now when I first began to watercolor, the concept of having both warm and cool blues really confused me, and I was left scratching my head when certain mixes of greens and purples turned to mud. It turns out for what I was trying to mix at the time, I was combining the wrong temperatures of colors with each other. Knowing that yellow mixed with blue creates green was no longer enough information for me when faced with a multitude of blue and yellow shades that I had. I'm going to break down how I came to understand temperature and hopefully it'll help you if you find yourself stuck. If we look at a color wheel and we line up the red and blue at the bottom and have yellow at the top, that makes our triad of primaries because it's arranged in a triangle; even though we're looking at a wheel configuration. So we're going to label red, warm, and blue as cool. Now when we swatch our primary colors, we're going to be comparing them to each other but we're also going to be comparing them to where they lie on the color wheel in relation to each other. Say we have a swatch of blue. If we compare it to the wheel, the closer it is to red or the more red that's in the blue swatch, the warmer the blue is because we are traveling towards warm red on the color wheel. We have a different swatch of blue and it leans more towards the green. We're going to be cooling the blue because we're traveling away from red on the color wheel. Now, I know this is a wheel and eventually we are going to make it to red. Which means technically, we are traveling into the direction of red but we have to pass through yellow to warm up again, and that's why we didn't label yellow as anything. We're going to keep it in limbo for a minute and you'll see why. Let's talk about red first. If we have a swatch of red that leans closer to blue, meaning it's closer to blue than it is to orange on the color wheel, it's going to be a cooler red. Because we're traveling on the color wheel and we're going to hit blue, which is cool, before we loop around and get warm again. Similarly, if we have a shade of red that leans closer to orange, it's going to be a warmer orange because we're moving away from the cool. Although we are going to be reaching cool, eventually, we have to pass through yellow to get there. So we're warming up as we have red traveling up the color wheel, and we are cooling down a blue as we travel up the color wheel as well. Let's look at yellow. Say we have a yellow that leans more towards orange, that's obviously going to be a warmer yellow because we're traveling on this way on the color wheel and we're going to hit red warm before we hit cool blue. Same thing would be, if we had a yellow that had more green in it, that yellow this cooler than a warmer yellow because we're traveling this way on the color wheel, we're going to eventually make it to cool. Then we can look at the secondary colors, which are colors that are created when primaries mix. Meaning, yellow and blue create green, red and yellow create orange, and red and blue create purple. Let's look at green for a second, if we trying to swatch a green and figure out its temperature. If it leans more towards the yellow, we are warming the green up because we're going away from the cool and we're going to hit warm before we hit cool, because we're traveling this way on the color wheel. The opposite would be true if we had a green that had a little bit of blue in it. We're going to be traveling this way on the color wheel. We're going to hit cool before we hit warm. So hopefully that gives you a little bit more understanding about how a color wheel works in relation to temperature. This is all great information and such, but, for it to really benefit us, we have to apply it to the paint we have in our collection. Also at the end of the day, color temperature really does come down to the perception of the viewer in comparison to other colors that you have. What may be a warmer blue on your palette, may be on the cooler side on my palette according to what other blues I have to compare it to. The best way to understand this is to swatch out what you have and begin to compare the hues with each other, and then where they lay on the color wheel in relation to each other. 4. Swatching and Choosing Colors: Let's look at our paint. What we're going to do is select our primary colors. Meaning, we're going to select our reds, yellows, and blues. We don't have to get all of our reds, yellows, and blues out. Basically, what we're looking for when we're going to start testing swatches is tonal range. Basically, the ability of a paint to be as dark as it can be, or as light and transparent it can be whether it's concentrated or diluted with water. For example, this blue. This is called Tennessee Blue from the Sprout Creative. It is a delightful color, I love it so much. However, if I'm only going to be choosing six colors for my travel palette, this probably isn't going to make it in there. Because it's beautiful, but it can really only get that dark. It can get a lot lighter but if we're trying to mix a really dark green or anything, this isn't going to cut it. I probably will have more than six slots in my travel palette, so I'll probably include this blue anyways. But for the purpose of today's lesson, we're only going to be looking at the primaries that have the most tonal value. I'm just going to select my blues, reds, and yellows. You can use a mixing palette to get your paint out of the pans. But usually when I sludge colors, I just dab a little water to activate the pigments and swish my brush around so that there's a decent amount of concentrated paint on the end of the brush and just go. Wiggle the brush back and forth about in half an inch, inch, or so. Clean your brush and then with a slightly damped brush that has little bit of clean water on it, we're just going to bring some of the pigment down. This is a nice way that you can see what you're tonal range is. You can see how dark the pigment can be, and you can see how it can lighten up. I'm going to continue swatching out these blues, and then we're going to discuss what makes them warm or cool. I've finished swatching my blues, and now we can compare them and figure out which ones would be cool or warm. This is a really pretty blue called Antwerp by the Sprout Creative. It's one of my favorite blues. Right now, if we're just comparing it to the wheel it looks pretty neutral. I'm not sure if you can see with the lighting but at least for my lighting, it looks more neutral. So I can't really determine whether that would be cool or warm blue in my palette yet. Compared to this blue, which is Sprout Blue. This blue is clearly warmer than Sprout Blue because this is closer to the green and yellow on the color wheel, meaning it's cooler. This one, in relation to this blue is warmer because it would be closer to red on the color wheel. You see how temperature really does come down to perception in comparison. If we look at this blue, this is a gorgeous Ultramarine Blue from the Sprout Creative. If we're looking at these three, this is clearly the warmest because it would be closer to red on the color wheel. This would be our coolest and this would be the mid-tone to have warm cool and pretty neutral, but this is definitely cooler than that color. We have another really pretty Ultramarine Blue, and this is from Daniel Smith. That would be a little bit warmer. This blue is Mayan Royal Blue from the Sprout Creative, and it's obviously cooler. I knew that when I was swatching it, but it is a gorgeous color and I just want to show it off. Then we have a Phthalo Blue which is a cooler blue because if we're comparing all of these, this would lay closer to the green than some of them. So I'm going to consider this Phthalo Blue a cooler blue as well. From these six blues, I'm now going to select one cool and one warm shade. Me selecting them right now doesn't mean my travel palette is set in stone, feel free to swatch out any colors in your palette as you go along. But just looking at the swatch, I'm leaning towards this Phthalo Blue from Daniel Smith as my cool blue because there's a lot of tonal variety in there. It can get really, really dark, and really, really nice, and transparent, and it's very vibrant. Then, I'm leaning more towards the Sprout Creative Ultramarine Blue. I just think it has a little bit more warmth and there's a little bit more texture in it compared to this Daniel Smith Ultramarine Blue, so I'm going to go with Sprout Creative Ultramarine for my warm. You can see how easy it was for me to select my blue colors just by swatching them and comparing them to each other, and their relation to each other on the color wheel. I've swatched a selection of yellows and reds, so let's compare them. We're going to start with red. This is a really pretty warmer red called Sprout Red from the Sprout Creative. If we're just looking at the color on its own, right away we can see it's closer to yellow meaning it is warmer than cooler. This is a really pretty red. Probably, I don't want to use it for my travel palette, just because it is a little bit on the muted side. But I did want to show that it is really gorgeous color. This is Mayan Red from the Sprout Creative, and here we have a Quinacridone Rose by Daniel Smith. Definitely, compared with the other top three, the Quinacridone Rose is definitely a cooler red than the Sprout Red and the Mayan Red. If we're looking at red, it's going to be leaning towards the blue more than it leans towards the warms. So it's going to be a cooler red. I don't remember what color this is called, but it's from the Art Philosophy tropical's palette. It's really a nice, cooler red. We have really pretty warm red, which is Pyrrol Scarlet from Daniel Smith and a Quinacridone from Blue Pine Arts. From these six, I'm going to be going with the Daniel Smith Quinacridone Rose. I'm going to pick this over the other cooler reds just because I feel like it has a little bit more coolness than the other ones, and I do like how light and dark it can get. As far as my warm reds are concerned, it's a toss up between the Sprout Red or the Pyrrol Scarlet. I think I'm going to be going with the Pyrrol Scarlet. They both look really similar. You probably can't tell in this light, they both look pretty similar. This does look a little bit darker in this light but in-person, they're pretty similar. The only reason I'm going to be going with the Pyrrol Scarlet, is because it's a little bit less opaque than the Sprout Red. Meaning, it's a little bit more transparent and I can get some lighter mixes out of it than I can probably get with the Sprout Red. So I'm going to pick Pyrrol Scarlet for the warm red. Like I said earlier, I'm going to be going with this Quinacridone Rose from Daniel Smith for my cooler red. We have our reds figured out. Let's go over to yellows. From these yellows I swatched out, we have Mayan Yellow, which is a really cooler yellow. We have this Sprout Yellow. Which if we're looking at the color wheel, it almost matches up to this yellow. Again, you probably can't see in this lighting. But for my eyes, I can see that is right close to this true yellow that's on the color wheel. Until I compare it with another color, I'm not really going to be able to determine if it's cool or warm yet. It's definitely cooler compared to this yellow, which is Alphonso Yellow from Blue Pine Arts. This Alphonso Yellow is definitely warmer, because you can see it's leaning more towards the orange. If we're looking at these two, Sprout Yellow is warmer than Mayan Yellow. But if we're just looking at these two yellows, Sprout Yellow is going to be cooler than Alphonso Yellow. I hope this is starting to make sense, how a certain color can both be warm or cool depending on the other colors you have to compare it to. For our second row, we can see a really pretty warmer yellow. We don't really even have to talk about why this is a warmer yellow because it's pretty obvious. We have this pale yellow which is gorgeous and it's definitely not something that I would keep in my travel palette, because like I said, I'm only going to be picking six and the pale yellow from Sprout Creative is gorgeous. However, it doesn't give me the most tonal range that some of these other yellows can give. Then, the last yellow we have is a really pretty sunny yellow. It's called Hansa Yellow Light from the Daniel Smith collection. Just to review, if you were just looking at it by itself, it can look pretty neutral. But if we're comparing it to that yellow; Alphonso Yellow, it's definitely on the cooler spectrum than it is on the warmer spectrum. Now, I'm going to have my six yellows. I'm going to choose two: a warm and a cool version. Right now my warm yellow is really a toss up between Blue Pine Arts Alphonso Yellow and Daniel Smith New Gamboge, but I think I'm going to be going with Alphonso Yellow. I really like how vibrant it is. At least compared to the New Gamboge on this swatch, it made a little bit more of tonal variety than a New Gamboge. Meaning, it can make darker darks and lighter lights. I think I'm going to be going with the Daniel Smith Hansa Yellow Light for my cool yellow. The reason I'm going with the Hansa Yellow Light, because again I really like the variety of tones that it's able to produce. Hopefully, you can see that I chose these because of their vibrancy, transparency, and range of tonal value. Because of those qualities, these are going to create the brightest mix as possible which is really desirable in a travel palette, because you can always tone down or neutralize a palette but you can't brighten a dull or a muddy color. I'm going to teach you how to mix virtually any hue possible with these six colors. You're more than welcome to add black to your palette. However, I don't. That's just my preference. I don't really use black a lot in my paintings. If I need to show depth or shadows, usually I'll just tone down a color. I'm going to teach you how to mix all those neutral browns and grays. Adding black to your palette is really up to you. Now that we've picked our colors, let's now experiment with some color mixes. 5. Building a Split Primary Palette: A good way to start experimenting with our color mixes is to create two color wheels. One using our warm triad and one using our cool triad. When separated this way, the three triads create either the RGB spectrum or the CYM spectrum. You may have heard these terms before. Now is the time that you've also may want to upgrade your paper. If you are using some more inexpensive paper to start swatching out our colors. The vibrancy of a mix depends a lot, more than people think, on the quality of the paper that the paint is on. I used a little washi tape roll to create my template and to trace inside for my little circles that we are going to be painting and mixing. Feel free to freehand these circles or really paint these little mixing swatches in any shape you want. I'm going to start with the RGB. I already have my red, blue, and yellow labeled out in a triangle formation. I'm going to make not a super concentrated mixture of each but enough that's really going to show you the true color of each primary. I'm going to dip my brush into some water, wet the paint to activate the pigments and bring some warm red over to my palette. You can always test your tonal value out on scrap paper. I want a nice vibrant red that's not too diluted, but not super opaque. Once I have my brush loaded, just going to start filling in my warm red circle. Clean your brush really well, and then continue with the other two primary colors. Now that we have our warm triad circles filled in, what we're going to do now is make 50/50 mixes of up our primaries. We're going to mix a 50/50 mixture of yellow and red. On my palette, I'm just going to scoop some of this red over, or you can grab some new red depending on your palette and how much space you have. Then I'm going to add some of this yellow. Just mix until you think it's about 50/50, neither leaning towards red or yellow, as in the middle as you can make it. That looks about good. We're going to fill in the secondary circle. Because after I drew three circles in a triangle, I did three circles in a triangle the opposite way for our secondary colors. Now that I have my orange filled in for my secondary color, I'm going to freehand some little tertiary colors. A tertiary color is when a secondary color and a primary color mix. Our tertiary color that's going to be in between red and orange is going to be about 75 percent red and 25 percent yellow. Try not to do what I just did, dip a dirty brush into your pan because I know you just got it, then you have to clean it off. I'm just going to free hand a little tertiary blob here. Then I'm going to free hand a little circle here that's going to be the tertiary color between orange and yellow. It's going to be about 75 percent yellow and 25 percent red. I have this little part of yellow, I'm just going to add a little bit of red to it, that looks good. We have a third of our color wheel finished. Now we're going to do pretty much the same steps for secondary and tertiary colors, green and purple. I already have my blue down here, and this yellow on my pallets tainted with red, so I'm not going to use that, I'm going to go and get some clean yellow and make a new little section for it on my palette. I think I got a good 50/50 mix on my green, and I'm just going to fill in my green circle. Let's look a little bit at our RGB color wheel that we just made. The orange is so bright and vibrant because we were mixing a warm color with a warm color to get a warm color, and warm plus warm is going to make a warmer color. In this case, we mix a warm yellow and a warm blue, and green is a cool color. What happen in this case is we mix two warm colors, expecting to get a cool color, and that's why this green isn't super bright and vibrant. Same thing with the warm red and warm blue. We're mixing them and expecting to get a nice cool purple but because our shades leaned more towards warm, we lost a lot of that cool purple quality. Let's do the same thing on the CYM and we can compare these two and then we'll be able to see the pros and cons at using an either an RGB or a CYM spectrum. I'm also going to clean my palette before moving to the CYM, I do want to make it easier for you to see what colors I'm using. We've completed our CYM color wheel and we can start comparing it to the RGB. Now, with the CYM, look at this gorgeous green that we made. It's super bright and vibrant, and that's because we mixed cool yellow and cool blue. Since green is generally a cool color, the two cool yellows and blues combined to make the most vibrant green that we can make. This orange over here is really pretty, however, it's a lot more subdued than this orange and hopefully you can see with the lighting, its really evident that both are great oranges, but this one's a little bit more muted down and subdued compared to this bright vibrant orange. That's because we use a cool color and a cool color, meaning cool red and cool yellow, and we were trying to make a warm color because orange is generally warm on the color wheel. But it fell flat and we lost a lot of fire because we are using cool colors to mix that warm color. The purple is a big upgrade from this purple, not meaning that this is a bad purple, but if we're trying to make a purple, let's make it really purple. This one came out really nice, especially this one that leans more towards the cool red, is a really pretty color. Now that we did the RGB and CYM, we have six more mixes that we can make by mixing both the RGB and CYM spectrum together. Let's go do that. We finished washing out our mixtures of cool and warm colors, and I already have labeled these, so I mix a cool yellow and a warm blue and got this really pretty green. However, it's lot more muted than this green from the CYM palette, because remember how I said, green is a cool color generally, and we mix two cool colors to create that green. Over here, we add a warm blue to the mixture. So even though the yellow is cool, it's still neutralized and muted down a bit because we're mixing both warm and cool colors to make a cool color. The opposite, we use a warm yellow and a cool blue, and made a really pretty green as well. However, it's not the brightest green mix that we could make. These oranges are really pretty oranges, but they are a lot more subdued than this fiery orange that we made with the warm yellow and warm red. Because if you remember, orange is generally a warm color, so mixing two warm colors is going to amplify that fire in the warm color. These were mixed with mixtures of warm and cool colors, so they fell a little flat as far as warmth goes. Not to say that these are bad orange mixes. Here we see the most difference. With the cool blue and a warm red, we made this really toned down brownish color, and this is actually one of my favorite combinations, a cool red, cool blue and a warm red, because I didn't really show the variety of byproducts that these two colors mix can make. If this color leans a little bit more towards red and just a little bit, and you add just a little bit of cool blue, it turns into a really pretty warm brown color. If you bump up the cool blue, it passes through an umber stage and you can make a really pretty warm [inaudible] gray looking color with this combination. This cool blue and warm red, you'll find make a really big variety mixes right here. It looks just like a brownish blob, but it can be a really pretty mixture. Here, we have a warm blue and a cool red. Just at a quick glance, this is the most vibrant true purple that we've made, and it's even brighter than the CYM purple, which we thought was really good compared to this purple from the RGB. So during this exercise, we were able to see that we can make the brightest orange color with the RGB palette, we can make the brightest and most vibrant green from the CYM palette, and we can make the most vibrant purple with a mixture of the two pallets. We can merge all the information that we have on the sheet and combine it to create a split primary pallet. So I have already painted this up, but this just shows you how warm yellow and warm red mix to create the most vibrant orange. Cool yellow, cool blue mix to create the most vibrant green, and then warm blue and cool red mix to create the most vibrant purple. This is just a really fun way of visualizing our brightest mixes in a color wheel configuration. Although we just practiced mixing some primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, I'll be going into how we can tone down vibrant colors, make browns and grays and neutral colors and also use our new knowledge of color temperature to evoke mood in our landscapes when we paint our final project. But first, let's set up our travel palette with our selected colors. This is how I arranged the paint in my palate. I have my warm red and warm yellow across from each other because we discussed that those make them as vibrant orange. We mix what's across from each other, we get the most vibrant orange. I have my cool yellow and my cool blue and together they make the most vibrant green. So mixing across on the palate makes the most vibrant green, and then I have my cool red and my warm blue, because we know that those make the most vibrant purples. Now, you don't have to arrange your paint in this manner, you can do all RGB across the top and all CYM across the bottom, this just makes it easier for me to remember what colors mix to make the truest secondary colors. Like I said earlier, you can add black to your palate if you want, I'm not going to be doing that today. 6. Using Temperature in Skies: Now that we have our split primary palette setup, we can start thinking about how our perception of color temperature can affect how landscapes can look or feel. Notice now a really easy thing to teach, since it is really subjective. But generally speaking, a landscape with warm blues will spark warmer feelings in a landscape with stark, cool blues, and grays. That's not to say that there can't be bright warm blue skies in the winter, or ice cool blue skies in the summer. Sometimes color temperature relating to mood isn't that literal. But it can give us something to think about when we're doing our landscapes, and I hope that you can understand what I mean by the end of the project. Like I said earlier, we're going to be doing four main landscapes that consists of just a sky in a tree, and we're going to be doing the four seasons, so we have the spring, summer, fall, and winter season. We're going to start our skies, we're going to paint all the skies at one time, let it dry, and then paint our trees. We're going to do a wet on wet wash for the skies, and that means I'm going to take my larger brush now, this has a size 10, fill it with some nice clear water, and I'm just going to wet my whole section that's going to be dedicated to the spring landscape. You want it nice and wet, but not so wet that the water starts to pull into puddles, we just want a nice even sheen on the paper. If you look at your paper at an angle, you should be able to see a nice even sheen, if you have any puddles, just soft them up with a brush that's been dried. That creates a thirsty brush, and the thirsty brush will be able to suck up some of the remaining water that's left behind on your paper. When I think of a spring day, I still think of a lot of coldness in the air. That might be because I live in western Pennsylvania, and we still have another month or two left of winter. But to start out, I'm just going to show you how we can make a nice, crisp, cool sky using the cool blue that I have in my palette. I just color a little bit of that cool blue out, dilute it with water, so it's pigmented but not super pigmented. I'm just going to start mixing the pigment with a wet paper, and I'm going to drop the majority of the paint on the top edge of the paper. Typically skies are lighter at the horizon, so the sky is going to be darker near the top and fade to a nice lighting color. I just want a nice smooth even gradient for the sky. I might do some wispy skies for the other ones, but for spring I just want a nice clean gradient. I'm also not going to show you how you do the clouds or anything like that, the purpose of this class isn't to teach you how to create a sky. There are a lot of great school show classes out about skies, so I definitely would recommend to take Vanessa Lesniak class on skies, and also Ashley Prejoles class on skies. Between these two classes, those are the only classes you'll really need to learn a sky. I'm pretty happy with that gradient, it is really light at the bottom, meaning I mostly just have water at the bottom. There's no much really light blue pigment left. I'm okay with that. I'm going to keep it like that. While this dries, I'm going to move to our summer landscape. Obviously when I think of summer, I think of a nice warm day, so I'm going to be using a warmer blue. Like I said earlier, that's not to say that we can't have a beautiful cool blue skies like this in the summer cause mood isn't that literal sometimes, but I am going to warm the sky up just slightly by using this warm blue, and maybe just a tiny dab of coolness to it. I now wet the brush. The same technique that we did the sky, the wet and wet, we're going to do the same for our summer sky. Again, just dropping the paint in near the top of the sky. I'm going to make the sky a little wispy, we're going to have some wispy clouds coming through, not too many though. Basically, I'm just running my brush through the paint instead of doing a smooth gradient like this, which is going to break it up. I'm pretty happy with this looks, I don't want to mess with it too much cause then I'll lose all these really nice little wispies going on there. Cleaning the brush, we're going to move on to fall. When I think of fall, I definitely think of crisp, cool skies with a little bit of color to it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use my cool blue, but I'm going to tone it down slightly. I'm going to tone it down with some warm red just a little bit. I'm just going to bring over here, make some warm red with my cool blue, a little water. You can always test your mixes on scrap paper, and that's pretty much what I was going to work for. I might add a little bit of warm red again just to warm it up just a little bit. That's a bit too much now. In the back up, add a little bit more blue. I'm pretty happy with that color mixture, but we'll see when we put it on the paper. I think I may make this sky a little bit wispier too. You can see that we have this nice cool blue, but it is a little bit more muted than this cool blue, and we achieve that muted look by adding a little bit of warm red. We can pause here for a second, and let's just look at the color wheel. Our cool blue was probably right around the middle in between this blue and blue green on the color wheel. What's opposite of bluish green on the color wheel is reddish orange. Whenever we're trying to tone down a color or neutralize it, you take a little bit of what's opposite of it on the color wheel and mix that in, so to get this more muted tone of blue, since we were over here, we just added a little bit of warm red. I'm really happy with this sky as well, I'm going to keep some of the variation in my brushstrokes there, looks like a wispy sky, and you can definitely see how it looks differently than the others. Right now, we can't really settle mood for it per se, because there's nothing else, but right off the bat, you can see that it is a cooler sky, but it is a little bit more neutral than this cool sky. Moving on, let's do the winter sky. When I think of winter skies, again, it might be because I'm from western Pennsylvania, and we have a really long winter to get through, basically imagine a day where the sky looks like a big giant cloud. That's what I'm going to be thinking when I'm painting my winter sky. To do that, what I'm going to start with is a mixture of warm blue, and I know it's warm, but I just want you to see how we can make some subtle variations. I'm going to go back and get some of this cool blue that was toned down, and then further out a little bit more warm red to it. It makes this really beautiful still blue color that has a slight warmth to it, but it's overall cool. This just reminds me of a cloudy day. I'm not going to add a lot of pigment to this sky, I'm just going to drop it in, try to make as smooth as a gradient as I can, and let it go. I'm actually going to cool it down just slightly. I'm really happy with this sky as well. I'm going to let these dry, and when I come back, we can start talking about mixing warm and cool greens for our trees. 7. Painting Trees: While my skies are finishing drying, just going to go over a little bit what we already talked about today, but I'm going to clarify it a little bit. Earlier, I made a note when we made this winter sky that we did the role of opposites to tone down and neutralize a color, because we had a cool blue and we toned it down with a warm red. Basically, if you look at a color wheel, the same rule applies to any color that you're trying to tone down. If you have a purple, you can tone it down by adding green. If you have an orange, you can tone it down by adding a little bit of blue. Really depending on whether your orange is cooler or warmer, you can decide whether to use a warmer or a cooler blue to tone it down. So if it's a cooler orange, meaning leaning more towards yellow than red, you're going to want to use a warmer blue to tone it down, because that's going to be opposite on the color wheel. All those toned down a neutral colors definitely add a lot of variety to your palate. Hopefully you can see the benefits to making a split primary palate, as to starting with our brightest brights and then we can tone them down. Because like I said earlier, you can't really brighten a dull color. If you start with the brightest of the brights that you can make, the possibilities with color mixing are endless. Before we start our skies, I'm just going to show my favorite way of making a brown. Like I said before, we used a nice warm red and add some cool blue, just a little bit of blue at first. We can see we make this really nice, pretty rusty, reddish brown color, which we can then either cool down with more yellow or warm-up with more red, or even add some orange to it to create some variety. Then the more of this cool blue you add, it'll continue to tone down the red. So now we've got this pretty sepia tone. Then we can add more blue. It creates a nice warmer Payne's gray color. Then the variety in between these three colors is just phenomenal with these two shades. You can really make any neutral color with these two. But you can also make any neutral color, as long as you're working with a rule of opposites that we had discussed before. I'm just going to show you. If we make some orange, remember how we made orange, we made it with our warm red and our warm yellow. It's going to mix up a nice little orange there to the side. According to this, if we have a true orange, the opposite would be a true blue. So I'm just going to take some of the warmer blue because the orange that I made actually leans more towards the yellow. I'm going to use my warm blue, tone that a little bit and you can see the different browns and grays that this combination is going to make. This makes more of a warmer brown as opposed to these cooler brown tones. You can even make a really orangey brown. Then the more warm blue you add to this orange mixture, the more it'll tone down. We could even get up to a really nice dark grayish black color. That's one of the main reasons why I don't put black in my palette, because in nature there really aren't a lot of natural blacks and I find that I have a lot more variety, and I can create a lot of softer colors by mixing my own darks. I really encourage you to play around with different mixtures with these six colors. I start getting a feel of the types of neutral colors that you can make with these six really bright colors. It looks like our skies with dry, so we're going to start the trees. We're going to switch to my smaller brush, the number 6. If we start at spring, I'm thinking of more cooler greens. They're still cool crispiness to the air. I'm going to mix up some brighter green using my cool yellow and cool blue to start out with. I have a nice bright green, which is gorgeous. However, in nature, greenery is rarely ever green. There's always a little bit of yellow or red to tone it down, if you look closely. What I'm going to do, so if we look at our color wheel, the opposite of green on our color wheel is red. Right off the bat, I'm going to use a little bit of warm red. Feel free to add other temperatures as well. But if we add a little bit of the warm red, we can see, turns it down just a little bit. I like that. I am going to use a little bit more of a yellow version of this, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to get some yellow. This is going to be the color for my new spring leaves, a nice yellowish green that's still a little tone down, so it's not like the green is screaming in your face. I like to think of painting trees as adding in layers of leaves. We're going to start by just dabbing in some leaves. We don't have a trunk yet, but that's okay. As long as our layers of leaves are there, we can imagine where the trunk is going to be. Also keep in mind where your sun is going to be coming from. If the sun is coming from the center or above, you're going to want the top layer of leaves to be a little bit more sun kissed, transparent, or warm. I'm going to add a little bit more yellow just to evoke some sunshine hitting the top. We're just going to continue dabbing some leaves in. I'm going to wait for this to dry just lightly. I don't want it to dry completely before I start going to the darker leaves in the trunk. But I'm going to let it dry completely, and while I do that, I'm going to move up here to this warm, sunny summer day and start doing some foliage over here. How I'm going to do that? I'm going to start with mixing a green that has a little bit more warmth to it. Adding some warm blue. I'm still going to stick with a cooler yellow, and then tone it down slightly with the warm red. That's a lot darker than I wanted. I'm going to backtrack a bit, by upping the blue and yellow in this mixture, toned it down a little bit too much. This is more what I was looking for, in a swarm forest green just like these leaves, just dab in some leaves. I'm going to let that go. Instead of moving on to my fall scene, I'm going to go back to my spring scene because my leaves are almost 100 percent dry. I can start coming in with some darker leaves to create some shadow and depth. The same kind of color mixing, I made a really bright green with my cool yellow and cool blue and toned it down with a little bit of warm red. I'm going to dab some of this darker green on the bottom of the leaf layers. Before our second layer of leaves dry, I'm going to pop in a trunk. You can make whatever brown that you want. I'm going to be making the brown that leans more towards this orange brown than this brown, for these two scenes at least. We made this mixture by mixing orange and blue and to get that orange, we mix warm red and warm yellow. I'm happy with this brown. I'm just going to start by making a trunk at the base of the tree, and then drawing up branches, and connecting layers of leaves with little branches. You can see where my leaves weren't super dry yet, the brown is blending into the leaves. That's okay. I think it just adds nice shadow, and it adds just a little bit more dimension. I'm going to make the least one side of the trunk a little bit lighter than the other, so I just took a dried off brush that was clean or a thirsty brush and soaked up some of this pigment on the side of this trunk. I'm going to add a little bit more brown to the other, just so you can see a little bit of dimension. Trees aren't perfect, so don't really worry about your tree looking weird or having too many branches or not enough leaves. It really doesn't matter. All trees look different. Who's to say that your tree doesn't exist in nature? I'm going to let this go, while I move on and add my dark leaves and trunk to my summer picture. I think what I'm missing with this tree is a little bit of sunlight. You probably know that you can't lighten colors once they're down. But I'm going to go in with some yellow just dab where I already have some leaves. I'm just going to add a little bit more variety to my leaf color. I'm going to go back in here and add a little bit more darks. So with that brown that I made with the orange and warm blue, I just put a little bit more blue and made more of a dark grayish black color. Just going to define some of these branches and dark parts. Same thing with over here. I'm going to add a little bit of ground. I'm going to add a little bit of ground to this one as well. Don't worry about separate blades of grass or anything crazy like that. These are more just loose representational landscapes. Feel free to be as loose-handed or as detailed as you want them to be. This is going to be your style and basically, all I want you to do is focus on color, temperature, and mood. I'm going to move on to my fall landscape. We're going to get some of this darker green, and dabbing on the bottom layer of leaves, a nice green. But the further I go up the tree, the more I'm going to turn it into a fall looking tree. Meaning some nice oranges and reds for the leaves. Also some brown too, but I don't want to do too much brown. I don't want it to turn muddy. I'm going to let that dry slightly, and I'm going to move on to the winter scene. For the winter scene, we're not going to do any leaves, we're going to make a bare tree, and add snow to it. Just start your tree trunk, which is basically just a line, straight, but squiggly depending on how squiggle your tree is going to be, and then squiggly lines coming from it. You may find that using a liner brush is easier for you to make branches like this. Do whatever you're comfortable with as far as making your trees. They can have as few or little branches as you want. When you are painting trees, however, make sure that, whatever branches or hanging off of a branch, make sure they're thinner than the ones that are supporting it. You don't want your trees to look like they're about to topple over. I'm going to leave it at that before I get carried away. I'm going to move back up here to my fall picture, and dab in some darker blues and some brighter oranges. Our winter branches here, they're mostly dry, they might have a little bit of a shin to them, and that's okay, because what I'm going to do, I'm going to get some cool blue really diluted down. It's a really light, maybe neutralize it slightly with some warm red. I really like this color for the snow. I'm just going to go, and then drop some on some of the branches that are going to stick out. It looks like the snow is being held in the branches. Maybe even some in these crevices. Then I'm going to clean off my brush, and with a clean brush, slightly damp with water, I'm just going to drop it in over these blue sections that I put in. I'll just to lighten them in a little bit, and spread the snow out. Then take that same snow color, just make some ground with it. For this fall one, I did put a little bit more branches sticking out than I did on the other ones just to show that this tree is in the process of losing its branches. I can just throw in some ground there whenever mixtures are on your brush or palate. These are basically done. What we can do is go in and pop in some more shadows. Before we take the tape off, I'm going to add a couple of little birds, because why not? I have a smaller brush, I did mix up with fairly darker color. I did that with the orange mixture and the warm blue, and I'm just going to make little V-shapes for birds. Since this is spring, I'm going to put a little bird's nest in there, happy little bird nest. I'm just going to put a few here because some of them already started flying south for winter. I'm going to leave the winter one on its own without a bird. Now we're ready to take the tape off. 8. Final Project Overview: Here's our final project and I'm really really happy with it. I hope you can see the four distinct moods that we set using six colors. I hope you learned something today, whether it was about color temperature, working in a limited palette, or even how to paint a tree differently. I can't wait to see what color mixes and moods you set for your main landscapes in the project gallery. If you follow me on Instagram, tag me in your projects. I love to share Skillshare projects with my followers in my stories, so you just might get a shout out. If you enjoyed this class or have any constructive suggestions, please leave a review and feel free to reach out with any questions you may have in the comments section. Thanks for taking this class, and I'll see you next time.