 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm happy you're here today and I'm gonna tackle a question I get a lot about using green as an underpainting. You know often I use warmer tones but I'm gonna explain when you can use those weird greens you often get in pastel sets. So join me today. Please subscribe if you haven't and join the family. Alright, here we go. So I don't know about you guys but when I get my pastels and my greens I always go for the earthy warmer greens and I sort of avoid these artificial ones. They kind of look like artificial flowers and they fall in a range between green or yellow green and blue green. They're that middle green. It's a little cooler for a green and like I said it just kind of looks artificial. So I had this idea for a while to actually, I could call this two titles for this video, I'm gonna use these greens, yes, believe it or not, as an underpainting. You know I always say I like to do an underpainting that's not green but in this case we're gonna use these weird greens as an underpainting and I'm gonna be using this product. I don't think I've actually created a video doing this yet but I love this Liquitex Matte Medium for blending pastels as an underpainting. I will be using this little scrubby. I bought a whole pack of these scrubbies at the dollar store. You know like I do with my shaming claws. I cut them all up into little pieces and it's going to work great on this watercolor paper, just plain old watercolor paper. The reference photo I'll be using is from a new site that I have discovered with tons of copyright free reference images and I'm gonna be sharing more about that later. First let's talk about why we normally don't choose green as an underpainting color for a landscape painting. Well what do landscapes have a lot of green, lots of grasses, lots of trees, so often as you can see on this pocket color wheel we choose the complement to green which would be warmer tones such as reds, oranges, magentas because those underpainting colors give a wonderful base for the greens to interact with and it usually creates a beautiful result. And here I've taken a few clips from some of my videos to show this concept. In this particular video I did two paintings at once and I explained how an underpainting does affect the final results. In one painting I used the color gold or orangey gold and yellows. In the other painting I used a bright vibrant pink and indeed both of these are warmer colors unlike the video we're going to do today. And the results are a bit different and it's usually so fun to play around with these underpainting choices. And in this particular painting and tutorial of some koi fish, I really liked this painting, I used a cool blue, almost like a teal blue color. Oh and this is when my little cat Dusty was just a little girl, she was so sweet I miss her so much. But you can see in this painting how those cool blues really affected the base color of that water. And here is an example of believe it or not a snow scene with some of those vibrant almost fluorescent colors that you sometimes get in a set like oranges and pinks. And I thought it would make a neat warm undertone to this particular painting. So there are no real hard and fast rules to underpainting color choices but we typically don't choose green because the scene in a landscape is usually so green. Now let me talk about why we would and could use green. As stated before if you notice on the color wheel the opposite of greens now the one at the very top there's kind of a yellow green but if you go a little bit to the right there there's kind of that middle green there. It's the one that sometimes can look a little bit artificial like I said artificial flowers kind of have this green color. So this may be a neat way for you to use some of those weird greens as an underpainting because often the greens we put on top or the final color choices for grasses are usually a little warmer. But my thought process was if I'm going to lay down a green underpainting I need my subject matter to be a bit more of its compliment not just a lot of green grasses. It's going to look really boring. Have no color play interaction going on. So I chose a reference photo that had a lot of compliments to green which would be more red or red violet. I chose kind of a magenta. I wanted to find a field of flowers that was blanketed in magenta. You could also use red. Now let me talk about this reference image and this new discovery I made of a website where you can find copyright-free reference images. It's also an app. It's called unsplash.com. I'm going to start uploading some of my own photos which you see here and keep them in a private collection just for my patrons to use. But you can also find so many other photos you yourself can put them in your own little collections. I've made one called field. So far I've just got started with this. But in the field section I have so many different fields with flowers and I found this one particular photo. I want to give credit to the photographer Elizabeth Arnold for this lovely field of magenta flowers. I love these types of flowers that blanket fields and I thought this would be perfect as a main subject color to put on top of a green underpainting. Oh and check out this collection of dragonfly images I created. I've got a dragonfly tutorial coming soon. I can't wait to share with you guys using some iridescent pastels. Okay I digress. Let's get to this lesson. And now I will be applying these sort of unusual greens as an underpainting using a gradation of light to dark. Light in the sky working my way down to the darker colors. And believe it or not there is going to be an underpainting of green for the sky. Yes this can work. And I actually recently had a comment from someone saying could you use just pastels as an underpainting because often I will use acrylic ink. I'll use watercolor and various products to do an underpainting before starting a pastel painting. And of course you can just use pastels and blend them. However there's so many ways that we can do these things. So I'm just using pastels with these unusual greens going from light to dark as I work my way down. And then I could have just blended them with a piece of pipe foam insulation, a paper towel, a chamois cloth. Or I could wet them with either water or alcohol or this product you'll be seeing me use now. I really love using this matte medium to blend it just is so painterly and fun. And for the bottom section I did get a little bit of a darker green. Kind of a cooler green because value goes from dark to light typically. Foreground to background. Okay here we go. It's a good thing I don't care about my nails, right? And before we get started we first must begin with the traditional cup of coffee. This is Monet Café. I do have these cups available in one of those links in the about section. I'm not sure where. All right guys let's do it. Now this Liquitex matte medium doesn't have any grit to it. Sometimes you guys might hear me talk about clear gesso which is what I'm going to be using later to get a little grit to the surface. But this is just a medium that's very fluid. It will dry clear. It's not very opaque. It looks a little opaque when you first put it on. But I'm putting it on the actual little scrubby itself instead of a dish. And this works fine for smaller paintings. If I was doing something larger I'd probably put it in a dish. And you could even use a paintbrush if you want for something like this. The sky's the limit with the versatility of these combinations. And I always like for you guys to use what you have. You could do this exact same thing if you don't want to use watercolor paper. If you have pastel paper you could do this on pastel matte. I'm actually going to do this again on some pastel matte. Pastel matte receives water. Any water-friendly pastel paper you could do the same thing. Now I don't know about the scrubby technique with UART paper. UART paper is a little bit grittier. It's a little more coarse. So you might use a paintbrush with that. But again you've got just so many different ways we can do these things. Now what I think is neat about this matte medium is it seems to dry like in sections. And you can actually kind of get a little painting effect going. I like to use directional strokes and create some energy. After all this is the underpainting. And all in underpainting is it's like a little guide of color and energy and motion just to get your painting going and have a little painterly effect. And the color also does influence the final painting. Now back to my point about I don't think I've ever done a green underpainting. At least I don't think I have. I've done a lot of videos and paintings. But you know typically when we do an underpainting we can do local color. You can use green but you usually use some of the other colors that are in the scene rather than all green. And often we'll do a complementary underpainting because it has a nice effect with all of the green that's in a landscape like grasses and trees and things like that. So it's just not really common that we would use green as an underpainting. But I thought why not let's try it and let's use those more unusual greens. Some of the greens I chose at the top are a little bit more of that yellowy green. But I'm zooming in here so you can see kind of the effect. And it really does make for a nice painterly, loose and carefree underpainting to begin your painting with. And here is the actual little scrubby with the matte medium and the green residue on it. And I actually just wash these out. You can reuse them even though I have a ton of it from the dollar store. So I'm just resourceful like that. Now this is dry and I've got to do something to get the pastel to stick to it. So I'm using my little recipe of clear gesso and marble dust. You see on here two to one I used a feta cheese container to keep the extra in from a previous painting. And just so you know you do not have to use the combination of clear gesso. Not regular gesso. Clear gesso. I'll talk about that in a minute. And marble dust. You can use just the clear gesso. Again I'll explain why in a minute. But I have to do something to get the pastel to stick to this. This is watercolor paper, pastel and matte medium so far. And pastel will not layer on this very well. I mean you could get a few colors down but you would not be able to layer colors. And that is what is the beauty of pastels. And here is the clear gesso that I often use to coat my surfaces that are not sanded with. Because it has a little bit of grit in it. It's also clear. It will dry clear even though it goes on a little bit opaque. And here is the marble dust that I've recently started using this recipe. Like I said two parts clear gesso to one part marble dust. You can get this on dickblick.com. Four pounds of it. I think it's under ten dollars. So a little bit definitely goes a long way. But again I'm still not even sure which one I like better. The combination with the marble dust or the clear gesso by itself. They both work fine. Now I'm using a foam brush. And sometimes I'll use a paint brush. And I'll do like I did in the under painting. I'll get some energetic strokes. But for this I just wanted to get a kind of a smooth application. I'm actually just using the part that is on the lid for me shaking it up. And I'm just going to be stroking it down. And it looks a little bit opaque right now. It looks like man what are you doing? You're coming up all of your your lovely artificial green that you've added. And it will I'm going to apply it a little bit more smoothly. But it also will dry quite a bit more clear than you see here. So once again this is going to allow the pastels to stick. And also too when you do any kind of wet technique on watercolor paper or even some of the other papers you may choose to use. It will buckle a little bit. And I've got a little trick I'll show you in a minute that will flatten it right out again. I think I got a little bit of a chunk there from somewhere on my my little lid I was using. So again just a nice smooth application. And then we're going to let that dry and get started. Here's a photo after it's dried. And you can see it dried quite clearly. It's not as opaque as when I first applied it. All right now a little bit of buckling. It's not too bad. Usually if you just let it sit it usually kind of flattens itself out. But what I'm going to do is basically just I use a little hinge system when attaching my papers to a board with some artist tape. That way I can move it or lift it pretty easily. Now I'm using the foam brush that I've washed out with just some water. Regular water. And I'm just doing a nice light coat of water on the back. I know you can't quite see what I'm doing here. But when that dries it will actually reverse the buckle and it flattens it out quite nicely. So here we go. Now this was early morning when I was painting this. I just love getting up early in the mornings. I've got my coffee and I've also got my evening piece, a little lavender candle. Oh it just relaxes me so much. I love painting. In this version of the Monet Cafe lesson here on YouTube I am speeding up the painting portion. This lesson was really about using greens as an underpainting and using those weird greens in a way that you might not have ever tried. I'll definitely do this again. I I've always wondered how I could do a landscape painting with a green underpainting. And I think when I try this again I'll choose some red flowers that just blanket the whole field of green. And now I'll show you some of the different blending options. We want to blend in what we've put down often when we do these homemade surfaces especially. It looks a little disjointed until you blend it. One choice is pipe foam insulation. You can get at a hardware store. It works great for blending. I've recently been using these little pieces of chamois cloth. I cut them in little squares. You could also use a paper towel to blend. Now I'm going to use the chamois cloth and it does work really well on surfaces that aren't too gritty already. My homemade surface is using the Clear Gesso. It usually works great and it also works really great when you're blending on the already pre-made pastel surface called Pastel Matte. I love using these chamois cloths to blend. But you see how this kind of smooths things out so it doesn't look so textured? And it's really just a neat way to get a soft look. I usually don't blend at the end of a painting usually just at the beginning. And now I'll be adding some music while you watch me paint for this Monet Café version of this video. My patrons will get the real time for the majority of this footage here. And once again, Monet Café, you know my heart is just always wanting to give you guys free video content. I hope and I pray that the content thus far has been very helpful for you. Maybe in doing some experimenting yourself with trying a green underpainting, you know maybe with a field of flowers that are red or pink or orangey colors. I will apologize to the Monet Café audience and to my patrons that this was in the morning when I got up to paint. And I had my camera a little bit at an angle later that my shoulder gets in the way. Some of the footage is a little blurry. I got called away. We have a hospice here coming to help my mother-in-law who has terminal cancer and one of the hospice nurses showed up. And so my painting process got a little out of whack and I think my camera was in a bad spot. So enjoy what you can. Oh, this is the little Sennelier 40 half-stick set. I used some of the magentas from that set for some of these flowers. I really love Sennelier pastels. See, I can't quit talking and giving you guys information. But Sennelier pastels are just a wonderful brand of pastels. Pastels can get a little pricey when you get the good ones. And I recommend don't scrimp on pastels. I do want to do another video on what I think are some good starter sets for beginning pastel artists. But I always recommend getting half-sticks when you're first starting out because you get more pastels for your money. You get more color selections rather than the full stick. Plus, I break my pastels anyway. I actually cut them to be smaller pieces because they're more manageable for a painting. All right, here's some music and some more of these yummy beautiful pinks and magentas for these flowers. Enjoy Monet Cafe. I'll be back at the end. This is a stage where I really liked the freshness of this painting. And like I said before, I got pulled away to deal with some things with the hospice aid and my mother-in-law. And when I came back, I sort of overworked my painting. Hey, on this channel you get warts and all. Even when I, you know, have things that I'm not super pleased with. I do have a tendency to overwork my art. And I share this a lot that I have the advantage of... I advise you film yourself because you too will have the advantage of looking back and seeing where you might need to step away. And I liked the freshness here of this painting. So this part right here is real time while I'm talking here. But I thought I'd share that before I show the final. And you'll see the difference. This had that freshness. And I liked how the flowers in the front. Oh, there I am getting in the way. The flowers in the front had that sense of depth before I added too many grasses. But back to the point of this video, it was to share how you could use greens as an underpainting and perhaps use some of those weird greens that sometimes come in sets that you never use. And the reason I think they worked better than just some of my typical really warm greens is because it gave a better base to put the warmer greens on. You see how I have some warmer greens? I've sprinkled down in the bases of some of those flowers. So I think that's why the strange greens worked a little better than warm greens as a green underpainting. All right. So I hope you enjoyed this. Here's the final that I've overworked a bit, but I was still happy with it. And most of all, like I share, it's about the experience as much as the final piece. Sometimes maybe more when you're going through a lot in life. So thanks for joining me, Monet Cafe and patrons. I look forward to bringing your Patreon content with more real time footage. And as always, happy and blessed painting.