 Welcome friends and artists to Monet Cafe. We're gonna have some fun today. I came up with an idea that I hope you'll like It's actually repurposing greeting cards. I call it refreshing color and Have you ever gotten a greeting card that was special to you or you know? It just you wanted to save it and I got a special greeting card from a friend of mine Just the other day and she sent me a sweet little gift and I thought what a beautiful card And I don't know why I have these crazy ideas But I thought how neat would it be to kind of repurpose the card this card happened to be of a famous painting anyway And I added more pastels to it And I'm gonna show you how to do that just to make it something special that I can save now the artist is Frederick Karl Frazeke and I hope I'm saying that right and he is an amazing artist So I thought I'd be a neat opportunity to learn a little bit more about him He was actually born in America, but he had most of his art career in France I believe he was born in 1874 and he was an impressionistic painter that Specialized kind of or his thing was working with dappled sunlight look at some of his work He did a lot of portraits of women And I have so enjoyed just browsing through some of his paintings. They're absolutely fantastic So I felt kind of bad about painting over his painting But I thought it would be neat and it's often good to try to recreate or emulate another artist just for an exercise You learn a whole lot about value and color and good rules of art. So this is gonna be kind of neat So here's my approach. I'm gonna take this card that my friend gave me and I'm going to put it up on my easel and Attempt to put pastels on top of this now We know if you've looked at my channel very much pastel soft pastels don't adhere to Flat surfaces like regular drawing paper and especially not this slick paper here So what I'm gonna do is apply the liquid text professional clear gesso clear gesso is pretty inexpensive This is a neat way to make your own homemade pastel surfaces All I do is take a foam brush and apply it now The reason I use clear gesso versus regular gesso is whenever you're doing a painting And you have an underpainting or in this case a painting underneath it you want it to show through so regular gesso Won't allow you to do that this clear will now you saw it warped there all I'm doing Typically know to do this at the beginning, but I forgot it will warp So you just add a little bit of a my little system of my tape to hold it down and it holds it down great It actually didn't even warp when I was done with this. It's it's pretty flat now I went ahead and applied a second coat because I really wanted enough of a gritty surface for the pastels to hold on to and And it ended up working great actually now. I don't often use soft pastel pencils but I thought because this is a smaller piece it might be good to use some of them and This set has lasted me. It's Geaconda soft pastels has lasted me for years because I don't use them very often Just for detail work. This is what I typically use my softies various pastels I've chosen for this project. So use whatever you have pardon my messy easel there from my last project, but now all I'm doing here is kind of enhancing this and having a little fun with color but I'm using the colors that are already there as a guide and just kind of brightening them and Notice her skin is very pale I wonder about the original painting if her skin was that pale and Actually, I think you know it used to be considered More beautiful to have pale skin and boy do I wish I had not laid out on the beach as much as I did when I was a youngster growing up in Florida on the beaches That that's not so good for your skin, but yeah, this I actually love that pale Soft pretty skin like that, but I do later. I go ahead and give her a little bit more color Then just the the pale white skin. I think I give her some peachy tones, but as you can see I'm not veering away from the natural color that's in the scene. I'm just kind of I use the term always punching it up and enhancing it a little bit and also to notice that She is the thing that's the closest to the viewer other than maybe that little chair at the bottom right there But and she's obviously the main focus So that's why I give her a little bit more like even enhancing the back of her hair there And you'll see as I go on I give a little shimmer and highlight to her hair It looks like she probably has an Auburn tone to her hair and there I am giving a little bit of the fleshy tones and Just again making this brighter and bolder Making the flowers stand out a little bit more now I wish I could go to the museum where this painting is and actually see the original wouldn't that be fun? Have any of you been to art museums? I know we have on this channel a lot of artists that have a lot of experiences artists And I would guarantee you've probably been to some art Galleries and and seen some beautiful original work, but I know on my channel, too We have a lot of newbie artists and that's what I really lean towards Encouraging artists that are just starting out because if you look at our welcome video or my welcome video on this channel I cater a lot towards people who have a busy life and perhaps not the financial means to go out and take all these art lessons And and go to all these workshops and I encourage it if you are able to do that That that's only going to help you grow as an artist But a lot of times you have these especially, you know, we've got a lot of men in our channel, too I was happy to see the Statistics of our channel, you know, you think it would be really heavily weighted in with women But we have a lot of men on our channel, too But I know a lot of times when our lives are busy as men and women when we've got a career and we're You know, we've got our families and we rightly so put our own needs and desires on the back burner for the sake of our wonderful children But it's neat sometimes. I love YouTube for the fact that we can learn so much We can sneak in a little bit of our own time and learn so many things including art. I didn't have YouTube I think it was just kind of starting up when I first started Re-exploring my own artistic desires. I always loved to draw and paint was a I was a child I've talked a little bit about how I've I majored in graphic design. I actually started out majoring in computer science I loved, you know, computer programming and but it wasn't quite creative enough for me with some of my artistic leaning So graphic design was the perfect mix for me a little bit of the computer and a little bit of the Design and graphics and art and and I think that's why I like making these videos so much, too It's been it's been really fun to take my art and be able to create In video Means as well. So that's been a really really neat thing for me to do but again, I I love that I can bring Lessons to you and to people that are maybe just sneaking in some artistic time for themselves and But again back to the painting if you've been to art museums You will probably know that you could just or I could anyway a certain paintings I could just get lost in them and stare and look at how the artist has Their techniques and how they've used color and value and it's just fascinating for me So you can see this kind of coming to life, right? I'll try at the end of this to compare the original to what I've done to it But it's definitely brighter. One thing I wanted to try to Keep was I noticed this artist has this like again that the sense of light But also the translucence especially of her blouse there I pastels have a wonderful way of Keeping that soft look to them and that's why I love pastel art so much most of his work Was oil I believe I'll have to research to see if he did any pastel work, but again, I'm keeping even with these pastel pencils I'm keeping it still really soft and and Just kind of having fun. This was really neat. You should really do this give it a try Find it a cool greeting card. My husband has this way of he's he's probably more of a I Don't want to say a hoarder because he might watch this video He's more sentimental than I am about saving things and I think it's because my life over the years I've had to move a lot and now with our recent flooding. I've definitely learned to only keep the most important things But he has kept so many greeting cards and now I'm very thankful for that because I can go back and do this with Fun little projects for myself and and maybe for lessons, too So here's back to the original and boy, can you see the difference in color? It's such a big difference So I hope this was fun and I hope you'll try it and thanks for bearing with all of my crazy ideas that I have I think this is definitely a summer of Exploration please subscribe if you haven't already and I'm so glad you joined me today in Monet cafe. Happy painting