 Hello artist welcome to Monet cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm bringing you a video that I hope will help you just to Have some fun. Do you ever want to just paint like a kid again? Well? That's what I did with these metallic watercolors. Oh, there's so much fun I'd also really appreciate it if you would take a moment right now to like Subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos And I'm able to keep these free lessons coming because of the support from my patrons on my patreon page if you would like to consider becoming a patron It's only five dollars a month and you get extra goodies and extra content So I saw these van Gogh metallic and interface watercolors in a painting demonstration, and I can't help it I'm just a color addict. I had to get them and play with them. That's what this video is about Playing a little bit. We often get too serious as artists So I'm gonna be talking about these in this lesson and doing a little painting demonstration Now I found them on Dick Blick site and they're $50. Okay, so this is maybe like you say hey I got a birthday coming up. Maybe somebody special in your life can get these for you So as I usually do I like to create a color guide I just got a piece of watercolor paper and a black marker and I marked off all the names and numbers of the colors then I used a white plate just to squeeze out a little sample of each color and Boy, they are sparkly But I'm gonna show you something that is to me just the coolest you see how they look on this white watercolor paper The magic happens to me anyway when you add these to black So let me speed up through this a little bit and show you where the magic happens Thus far these have all just been shimmery bronze gold and just some gorgeous iridescence going on But this I want you to pay attention to this bottom row this bottom row is what's going to really be Crazy awesome when I put it on black paper You might can see here that the color names from left to right are red blue violet and green Does that look like those colors on this white watercolor paper? I don't think so and to demonstrate on the black surface I'll be using our Teza. It's a six inch by six inch water-friendly black paper. I love this stuff Oh and for the white surface I used a piece of arches Watercolor paper. This is a great 100% cotton watercolor paper you can see where I cut out the little six inch by six inch Square to make my color guides the same size I also just used a white plate to apply all of the watercolor colors and Of course, you'll need some water. These are watercolors and a brush This set does come with its own little brush and a nice little sponge to dampen So I liked this brush fine But I always kind of go back to my favorite brushes for watercolor Which are made by the Princeton brush company lots of these products can be found on my Amazon shop and I always have a link to that in the video now to do white on this. I didn't want to use a charcoal pencil I decided to use my Posca acrylic white marker, you know, this has got to show up on the black surface so I did the same thing where I marked off all of the color names and Numbers and because that's rather boring to watch Let me jump forward and show you the magic of these metallic watercolors again paying attention to this bottom row so as you can see putting these on black paper just really creates such a brilliant and Metallic color and also too when it dries It's a little bit different when it dries and the neat thing is when you move it it literally is The reflections and the light changes the color. So it's really kind of fun. That's why I said this Demonstration is about just having some fun. I do know that we can get very uptight as artists So alright here this one especially look at this blue now when I did this on the white surface It didn't look blue at all and those little areas that are still kind of wet looking in white They will dry to not show the white. It'll be just the blue or the purple. Look at the purple It's like a magenta purple and oh my gosh, purple is my favorite color. Is that not? Fantastic and fun and the green you can see now it really now it's green So these colors make sense when you put them on a black surface. Oh my goodness They're still a little damp right here, but wow so shimmery and gorgeous and you know I might veer away from some of the traditional painting Professional painting, but Monet cafe is about having fun and getting creative. All right So now you can obviously see how the ones on the white card don't look like especially those bottom colors at all But they still have their function in certain types of paintings. You may want to create. Alright, so now I decided to have a little fun Using my Princeton brush company two different brushes here one of them has a really nice point to it And of course some water. I often like to use two containers of water and also some paper towels And I am going to use in this case the white charcoal pencil So as you saw at the beginning I thought dragonflies would be really fun to create some iridescent Shimmery colors and I decided to do this from imagination and just play When's the last time you just got out some drawing paper or a surface to paint on and you just said you know what? I'm just gonna play today I know I can tell that you guys do this because I do it and in all my different art groups I can see it happening all the time where artists get a little stagnant or You know just feeling a little down that their work is Not loose enough and I think the reason for that is because we're not playing and I like to say to paint with the thought that you know what? I might just throw this away and Also, I think of it too like I'm just gonna talk to you guys while I create these Oh real quick. Let me say I took a kneaded eraser. I didn't want the white lines quite so dark I wasn't sure if they would show up still When I added the watercolor so I decided just to kind of knock down the white a little bit and I actually ended up not using the white plate for this one. I decided to use this little watercolor Plastic palette. These are so cheap. You can get them at the dollar store But anyway back to what I was saying I find that often as beginning artists We have a goal in mind That we want to have a beautiful painting when we're done and so we Kind of get too serious And we also judge ourselves too harshly when the painting is complete And so that's why I think starting with an attitude of just going, you know what? I'm going to be like a kid again You know when you got a box of crayons and a coloring book when you were a kid You didn't think oh, I'm going to create a masterpiece You thought I'm just going to have some fun And so that's part of the point about this and you know, like I said, I might I might veer off the professional artist type of videos But Monet cafe is not really about that It's about learning to paint of course And hopefully giving you guys a lot of good content and information with the real core art principles But we don't want to lose that childlike passion of art and I really believe it's I'd say more than 50 percent in the joy of the creation You know, of course, there's some value in the final product You know, I'm not going to say it's not because of course we all do Hope to get to where we're creating some beautiful art that we can share But I think more of it is about the experience than we usually realize or that we usually embrace So that's kind of my little My little mama artist talk to you guys right now And I'm saying this from experience because I am a super competitive person any of you guys out there like that And when I was starting in art, I was comparing myself to so many other artists And I I didn't have the skills under my belt yet. So it was kind of ridiculous for me to compare myself to other artists So I think of it like Other genres of creativity like music When you're learning to be a musician, you don't just jump right in there and play a song You got to do the hard work first, but you can do it through having fun. So all right now, let's get to some Instruction, that's enough talking So as you can see, I had already applied kind of a shimmery silvery color I didn't give you guys all the names to these colors, but this one is the what's called the red I believe and I'm just glazing it over the wings in different areas I'm trying trying not to apply it too awfully thick But part of this was experimentation for me because I had never used these types of watercolors either So that's where all the the fun comes in So I added just a few Of the wings of the dragonflies having a little bit of the red And then I thought I'd mix it up and try a few other colors on some of the different wings And this one I believe is the blue which is really crazy. That doesn't look blue, right? But once again, here comes the magic You start putting this down and it's like voila. There it is I talk about magic a lot when I'm painting because I've shared this story before I think in the last video My dad bought me some kind of cheap magic sets when I was a kid I like to use the word illusion rather than magic and I actually took Magic or illusion lessons. He saw I really liked I liked the Um aspect of making people go. Wow, how'd you do that? And that's kind of what art is like too We're taking a three-dimensional world and putting it on a two-dimensional surface In kind of a way that fools the eye or tricks the eye So yeah, I took magic lessons. Oh, here's the green. Look how fun that is Um, and I actually I was like, I think I was probably like seven or eight when I really got into it then when I was in sixth grade. How old are you 11? I started doing um Magic shows I would do birthday parties and um things that at my school I did a presentation even with the the fire and stuff like that. So I really got into it I wanted to mention too. This is the one that's kind of a pretty gold color and um, I Wanted to point out that see you can see in the upper right hand corner there Some of them some particular colors are very liquidy And I wasn't sure what to do about that But I just squeezed it out Some of them had a lot of liquid at the front of the tube And they seemed to work fine as long as you squeezed out enough to kind of mix it up with some of the part That's a little bit more solid. So just dabbing in some color and and once again my dragonflies. They're they're nothing special I just thought let me go out of my head and think what do dragonflies look like I probably could have done some better dragonflies if I had pulled up some reference images Um, but I did have fun. This was a saturday when I did this and saturday is my favorite day of the week I just love um, just being able to do something for me and to relax and And uh, just take a a little break for the day and I say a break. It's not really a break I still always work, but I do it for the fun of it So I hope you guys take some time to do things like that for yourself as well And I had realized all of my dragonflies were from a kind of looking down on them position So I decided to make this little guy turned a little bit so his wings were in a different position All right, all of that was real time. So let me speed up a little bit. I gave him some little eyes I later add some red to the eyes and um, then I decided to This was just, you know, not fun enough. So I decided to add some splashes of white gouache And just to make it look like there was maybe stars or fireflies or anything like that And I just embraced the fun and creativity of this And again, I do believe this is going to make you a better artist when you try to do something professionally You'll loosen up. You're hopefully your marks will be more gestural I added a little bit more color to the wings a little bit more of the gold. Isn't that fun? Oh, and I wanted to mention I know a lot of you guys Um are like I was and I still am very I have to be very frugal And some of you are not in the financial position to go out and buy $50 Watercolor set so use whatever you have you don't have to do this with metallic watercolors you can get out a piece of watercolor paper and just do it with Regular watercolors on white watercolor paper or if you have black paper use acrylic You can do this in pastel, but the goal is to loosen up be a kid again and have some fun So I decided to add some little swirly cues. I'm just totally going like what can I do here and just letting my brain go weird Which it does kind of naturally So anyway, so I had a little bit more fun with this. I did like it with just the black and The little gouache splashes and my swirly cues. Is that a is that a term swirly cue? But I decided to do something else that was a little fun Maybe I experiment too much on my channel. I don't know But I thought hmm. What would happen if I decided to add some of this pretty blue in the negative spaces So I just kind of worked around the dragonflies leaving a little bit of a black Edge, uh, I didn't go all the way to the wing in other words. I left a little Edge of black around the dragonfly and around the wings And I liked it. Like I said, I liked it before But I thought this added a little bit more pizzazz. I'm like, why not embrace this? Let me get as much metallic watercolor down as I can Okay, so you get the idea of my technique here. So let me speed this up a little bit Look at these colors though. Wasn't this fun? Now, let me show you the final here and something else. That's really neat It really does change color when you lift it up and hold it and actually turn the painting it adds Different shimmer Effects to it and also it reacts differently in different lighting. This is it laying down on my My surface my table and then I picked it up and took it into a little area Sorry for the vertical footage here, but I took it to an area in my house. I call it my baby gallery It's really just a hallway with some neat lighting and you could really see the shimmery effect So I hope you guys enjoyed this and I hope you tolerate my Random acts of creativity. So just have some fun. That's the point of this video I am so grateful if you're a subscriber I'm so grateful if you're a patron of mine if you would consider becoming a patron I'd really appreciate that and you guys get out there and play have some fun and happy painting