 Welcome artistic friends to Monet Cafe. Today's lesson is going to be a fun one. It's a technique I love combining painting with watercolor and pastel. It makes for a really neat impressionistic feel, the texture I like of actually using watercolor paper. So stay tuned and learn more about this lesson. Also please subscribe if you like this channel. Click the little bell icon if you want to get more of these learning artistic videos coming your way. Let's get started. Now I'm just getting started with a basic sketch on a piece of regular watercolor paper, nothing expensive or fancy, and it's a five by seven piece of watercolor paper. You want to anatomically get things in correctly. I also want to give photo credit to Debra Underworth, the photographer from PMP-art.com. It's a great website to be able to get free reference images to create your own paintings from. So check it out. I've turned on a lot of people to that website. It's really great. Now again I'm just... Most of this is going to get erased, but I still want to get in a basic idea of where things are to get it correct. Nothing's worse than, you know, you might have beautiful color and value and all these things correct, but if your figure, whether it's animal or people, is not correct. It's already getting off with a weak foundation. So and here I am just erasing it because I just want it as a guide. Now here's the watercolors that I like and I use. I'm going slowly over them in case you want to pause it or slow down and look at the colors. I love the Da Vinci, which I have more of at the bottom, and I love Mgram watercolors too. So you can kind of see my arrangement of colors and then in a minute I'm going to show you my little travel palette. It's nothing expensive and these are, you know, some of the hues that I have in the Da Vinci. I love the Quinacridone Gold, that orange one there that's about to go off the screen. That's a gorgeous color. So and I do a lot of mixing with these colors too. Notice there's no purples in there. I make my own purples. I even make my own blacks. So there's my messy palette that I actually showed after I painted this. So I'm sorry I can't show the watercolor palette at the same time while I'm painting. I'm not really set up for that. But I've actually mixed my own brown here out of like an ultramarine blue and I believe a little bit of a Sienna color. And I keep changing the consistency of it to get it lighter or darker. And this is basically like a little value sketch I'm getting in with watercolor. If you haven't used watercolor a lot, start with just some simple things. Play around. There's tons of videos on YouTube to get better at watercolor. I didn't used to love watercolor. I was primarily a pastel artist but I started seeing other artists do watercolor under paintings and I struggled with watercolor for a while because watercolors in some ways it's got some things different than pastels. Typically you work light to dark and in pastels you typically work dark to light. It's not always that way. But you know it's just like with any other medium. You just play, have fun, and don't get so serious at the beginning. And then eventually it just all comes together. And the thing that I like about watercolor under painting is the looseness. You can really get that painterly feel quite early in a painting. And watercolor just has that as a real asset to that particular medium. So I'm just gonna play some music, keep sketching here. All I'm doing is sketching, getting it in. I'm gonna get the background in in a little while and then I'll show you my technique soon of how to apply pastels and a product you can use. If you've seen my videos before you probably already know what it is that will actually make your watercolor paper a little more gritty to hold the pastels. Because pastels don't adhere really well to watercolor paper but there's some tips and some tricks to make that work. So enjoy the sketch process here with the watercolor and stay tuned for the pastel application. At this point I pretty much have the bird, you know, the basic idea of the bird in. And now I'm going to be adding some background colors, keeping it really loose and impressionistic. And so notice I just, I'm actually wetting the back of the watercolor paper there. You notice I wet all of the front around the bird. It's going to be a wet application of watercolor. And then I just wet the back so that the paper doesn't warp as bad. It kind of straightens the paper out by wetting the back of it like that. So what I'm doing is just adding just some colors to give me a mood and a feel. I really liked these pale blues and these yellowy greens. So I'm just getting a feeling going right now. And the neat thing about watercolor is I'm applying what may look like tree trunks. And because I had the paper already wet, that's just going to soak into the paper and you're not going to have any real distinct lines. It's going to be really loose and moody. So that's just kind of a neat thing about watercolor. So if you do a wet on wet application like that, you're already going to get that impressionistic feel. I love it when you can push the background back into the distance. And keeping it loose without a lot of lines or detail is what's really going to help accomplish that illusion. Now I've zoomed in a little bit here. I wanted you to be able to see more just kind of how I'm working the background. Still the paper is still wet in the background. But I wanted to add some more color, even though that little chickadee is a little dull in color. That's a chickadee by the way. I love those birds. I'm adding this, I think that's a phthalo blue. And it's just giving a little bit more life to it. I wanted to keep kind of the area around his head light, almost like the trees were kind of up around him. But there's a little opening in the trees behind his head there. That kind of draws the eye in to make his head the focus, his or her. I'm not sure what this bird is. But even though the bird at this point, I'm mostly using local color, which means the color that's actually in the bird. You'll see when I add the pastel, if you've watched many of my videos, you know I just love color. And you can take artistic license and add all kinds of interesting colors, particularly in the shadows. And so you'll see how I get fun and creative with color later. I will let you know that my camera did cut off before I finished all of the pastel in this. But you should see, I know you'll see enough of it to see how to do this yourself. So there's plenty of video for that. But anyway, I'm just having fun with the watercolor. I've really gotten to where I enjoy watercolor now. But I do believe the pastel is just like the icing on the cake with this. So a little bit more of this watercolor and then we'll get started on the pastel. And now before I get too carried away with the sketch, I decided I better stop. And here's where I'm going to apply the product, which is the Clear Gesso that's going to help the pastel stay to that watercolor paper. If you've watched many of my videos, you know, I use this product a lot. It's great if you're working on a budget. And oh, here's a flat brush that I'm going to be using to apply it with. I also will use a round brush too. And just a cup of water, that's all you need. But again, I use the Gesso is a great product where you can take cheap watercolor paper and the Clear Gesso. And really if you're on a budget and can't afford the expensive pastel papers, a lot of them are quite expensive. This is a neat way, affordable way to be able to make your own pastel surface in a pinch like this. Now I'm just using the flat brush to brush around the bird mostly. And my main reasoning for that was I literally just painted some of that darker. Actually, that wasn't a black. That was a black I created with some of the watercolor. And I know it's still a little wet. You see, it kind of came off there. So I'm just going around him for that reason. That part I know was kind of dry. And it's okay if it blends a little like that did. It kind of adds to that soft painterly feel. But now I'm going to take that little round brush and get more into the detail. And a lot of times I'll put the Clear Gesso in a little bowl or something. But in this case, you saw I just I'm applying it directly to the brush just to, you know, for ease and because I didn't feel like getting up and getting a bowl. So again, this is just a little bit of a more of a detail work to make sure that doesn't get all muddy in the background. Now, if you notice the eye, I had it white it out for a while just to remember where the eye was. But the eye is really black in the original photograph. But what's going to make it stand out is when I add that little bit of reflection to the eye, I'm going to add that with a little piece of white pastel later. So here's the pastels I'm going to be using. The long skinnier ones are new pastels. They're harder pastels. And those are great for working on surfaces that aren't real gritty. Now, I've got now obviously, I'll let this dry. The clear gesso is dry at this point. But I've got the gesso on it now. So this, this pastel is going to adhere a little more to the watercolor paper. It will a little bit without the clear gesso, but the gesso just helps that to stay more. And I'm playing around with some values here. I know that in the tree areas, there's going to be some darker values where there's, you know, branches and leaves and things. So just to create a little bit more interest instead of having the background totally pale in value. I just wanted to give it a little bit of freedom and flowing branches and create some interest there. So the bird isn't the only dark thing in this. And I soften all that up too. Now notice the texture that you're seeing. I'm using this is the rough side of the watercolor paper. And some people don't like the texture. I, in certain times that I'm painting, happen to really like texture in it. I think it, it just gives that impressionistic feel to a piece. I think I ended up moving the branch down a little bit at the end here. I noticed some things was a little bit off. But for the most part, I'm just kind of lightly a light touch here getting still in the values. This is kind of a brownish colored. The underside of that branch he's sitting on is pretty dark. There's a lot of shadow under that branch. So I'm flipping the pastel around here too. Sometimes you got to work with a little finesse to work with these edges. Pardon my hair sticking out. It makes the camera focus on my crazy hair there. I don't know why I haven't learned to get consistent about pulling my hair back. I don't know. But anyway, enjoy a little bit more of this process while I'm just kind of lightly applying pastels and still keeping this very impressionistic. I'm not looking to get a lot of detail in this. And that's what's great about the watercolor paper. It really helps with that point where I start to add a little color to the bird rather than what is just in the photograph. Blues and purples are often great for shadow areas. You know, usually in the shadows, colors are cooler. And I also, I don't know what it is. I can look at something like this bird and sometimes see colors that they just feel right. You know, like I was seeing some mauve magentas in him. And I don't know, I just think it's really going to make it a lot more fun. And that's what art's all about. We don't have to necessarily paint exactly what we see. That's the beauty of creation. So, um, getting close to wrapping this up, again, I apologize. I did not get most of the rest of this painting done before you see the final. But you get the idea. You can see kind of in general how to apply the watercolor to regular watercolor paper, then the clear gesso, and then pastels. And I just think pastels and watercolor work so well together. So, I hope you will try this if you haven't already. I do have a few other videos on combining watercolor and pastels. And, um, you know, you can go back through my videos and find those if you'd like. I would like to eventually create some playlist where if you're looking for a particular type of lesson, I can have them in a playlist, um, trying to get some things back together in a little more, um, organization in my life. So, I appreciate all of you subscribers who have hung in there. I am not going anywhere. I'm going to keep making videos. And if you haven't already joined Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook, I think you would love that. It's a great group. So, here's the final. You can see the color and how brilliant and bold I got with it. And this was a fun little painting. So, I hope you try. Please subscribe. Come back soon. And happy painting.