 Welcome friends and visitors to Monet Cafe. I am happy to bring you this very peaceful, relaxing, and colorful tutorial where I will be playing with color and I'm going to be using a product I haven't used really with soft pastels before. It's gouache and it was very fun to use similar to watercolor but there are some differences that I'll describe in this video. So sit back, relax, enjoy, and then get out your pastels and let's learn about color. I'll be using two products in this video by the Arteza company. First you'll see this watercolor book that I'm using. I really like this. It's just a neat little book and presentation for your art. The two-pack as you saw before there is about $29. It's cold pressed watercolor paper. I did like the way it behaved while I was working on it. I like this little neat strap. You can keep the notebook closed if you want and it also has inside once you take that wrapper off. It's got a neat place where you can put your name and information. It's a good idea to put your contact info on your art supplies just in case you lost it. Another neat thing in the back it has this little plastic holder that you can put artwork in, maybe brushes, you know whatever you find practical for using in your art endeavors. So I was very pleased with this book. I've already used it. I have another one that I've already used quite a bit. Now another product from Arteza. Now these are not artist grade. These are student grade gouache paints and this it's premium. I mean they were good. I didn't feel they were inferior or anything but they're not considered artist grade. They are though archival which means they're acid free but the price is right on these okay and that comes look at all these colors. You don't have to buy the 60 set. They sent these products to me to review. So I really loved them and I hadn't worked with gouache that much before but you'll see how I use them in this video and it was really a lot of fun. And for the price you know you can just play with these. You don't have to be so serious. These would even be fun you know if you've got kids or grandkids and you just want to have a fun art project. It's a really inexpensive and fun way just to do like the video says to play with color. You know sometimes we just have to play as artists. We don't need to be so serious. Sometimes you need to paint with the intention of I'm just gonna throw this away when I'm done because it's just for practice. Often we don't do enough of that and we want to create a masterpiece. Now check this out. This is a really neat way to divide your paper in such a way where you can get four equal sized paintings. All I'm using is artist tape here. I'm just marking it out. You can measure according to the size of your book or whatever paper you're using and these are the gouache colors that I'm using. This is saffron orange. I love this color and I'm using these just to fill in the squares for underpainting a mood I'm setting by using the different colors. I'm speeding this part up but I want to make mention stay tuned because by the time I get to the pastel part I'm gonna do some real-time painting. I know a lot of you guys like that. So you noticed I put water down before I added the gouache and it just makes a more of a translucent look. Gouache is opaque for the most part. It's not translucent as watercolor and this is rose the color that I'm using in the next square but you can make gouache. You can thin it down by adding more water and especially this technique that I'm using right now by putting water down first. Again it just makes for a smoother application. Aren't these colors just beautiful? So again gouache is similar to watercolor that you can you use water with it and you can work on water color paper but it is more opaque meaning that you can actually put down lighter colors afterwards. Alright this color here is pale green. Oh just this is just a nice in-between green. I really like this color. But anyway so gouache can be more like a watercolor with more water added or more like an acrylic with less water added. So it's really just has a neat consistency I am good. I'm gonna do another gouache painting alone a bigger painting and apply pastels after I upload this video because I had so much fun with it. Again this product oh my water is dirty there. I'm just pointing out you want to use clean water and doing this. I had already changed it there but I had so much fun with it. I'm gonna do another painting and I really was I like this product. It was really neat. Arteza makes some good gouache. Now this is a pearl aqua blue. It's got a little pearlescent sheen to it. It's really neat. That was the neat thing. You don't have to get a set of 60 if you want to play around with these but it sure was fun and again it was only I mean I think it's like $50 for 50 I mean for 60 colors that's a lot. But again we got to have fun and oh look at that. I just slowed that down because sometimes I just enjoy playing with this beautiful color. Isn't that neat? It's my little tea cup I'm using. Now what I'm doing now is I am taking the color that I used and then I'm going across the color wheel to get its complement. The complement to that golden yellow color are those purples. Alright so I'm going to use purples to lay down my basic underpainting of sorts and these are the colors that I'm using here. I need a dark dark. Now that violet there is a really good dark dark. That's one neat thing about gouache also. Lilac and mauve you see that. So I have a dark a middle value and a light value but one neat thing about gouache is they go on darker and they don't they don't dry as light as watercolors. If you've done a watercolor underpainting before you usually get this rich gorgeous color and then after it dries it really pales out and becomes lighter which is neat too. So there's just advantages to each one and disadvantages to each one so you just kind of you know play around with it. Now again I've got my three different values here and as I typically describe in my on my tutorials we want to use our darkest darks for things that are vertical like trees okay and the closer things are the darker they are. The further things are the lighter they are in value their lightness or darkness okay. Also things that are dark are things that are in the foreground such as grasses and things and especially down deep in the roots of grasses but right now what I'm doing is I'm using and I'm still just playing here. I'm using some of those middle values there that pretty purple and I'm see how did it kind of in the middle and I'm making some directional strokes here. I'm using a decent amount of water because I do like that runny feel. I'm not trying to create anything specifically but I am going ahead and making a visual trail a value trail going through the painting that will lead the eye back through and it's already kind of setting my my root system down for how I'm going to lay those flowers all right. So you see I just kind of that created a neat little composition in itself. So I'm I continue to play around with these colors. I could have left this just like that and started painting but I just thought I'd go ahead and and play around and kind of see what these colors do and how they behave. Alright now I'm going to the next one which is kind of the rose and the complement to that is going to be one of those cooler greens, teal-y cool greens. Now I've got Viridian Green, Emerald Green and Pearl Eucalyptus I think that's called another pearl color. So I have a dark, a middle, and a light value. Now again that that dark green that I'm using there, it's pretty dark but you'll see in a little while how that purple that I did in the previous example. Oh look at that pearlescent color. It was so pretty. The purple is a good dark to kind of mix my other darks with. You'll see me do that. So these paintings as you could see from the beginning of this video, they're all going to be kind of similar in composition. I'm doing this out of my head because this is kind of a theme that I like and I actually have some trees in my yard that are shaped almost just like this. I have pictures of it and I've done paintings like this so I'm just kind of painting out of my head now. So you just create your basic tree line in the back and your trail and that's really getting your value set and that's really all you need for your underpainting. But here I'm playing with it. See that pearl sheen to that and this one how I think both of those have a little sheen to it. This one was a little too light. I'm just kind of seeing what it does but it was a little too light. But notice how this is a good example of showing how you couldn't have done that with watercolor. You can't put a lighter color on top of anything in watercolor. You have to preserve the white of the paper for your your brightest brights and your whitest whites. But with gouache you've got again it's like acrylic. You can paint. It's kind of like pastels. You can you can put layer colors and have it have it work well like that. You can put your lights down at the end sort of like we do with pastels often. Not always. All right this next one is that pretty green and if you go down to the bottom of that the complement to green is reds orangey reds. It can go even more into the magenta side but I'm picking here. Oh let me see did I write them down. Oh a crimson red, a vermillion red and a oh they're there. A pearl scarlet. And I don't often do a green underpainting like that. But I actually really liked this one. So again I've got my darkest red. Then I'll have my middle red and my lightest red. And again I use that purple for making the dark darker. All right so you just enjoy this next bit and then I'll get to the part where we have to add some grit to this to make these pastels stick to the paper. So I'll be back when we get to that part. By the way enjoy this lovely music. I was very blessed to have one of our members in Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook contact me about her daughter plays the piano and sings beautifully. And she has some original music and she offered to let me use the music in my videos which was so great. You hear this peaceful music. Now here's my dilemma. Just follow me on the video as I talk. My dilemma making YouTube videos is YouTube doesn't allow me to share any music that has a copyright. And so that really limits me to only like the little sound clips that YouTube provides. They're usually only like three or four minutes long. I mean they got some neat little things. You've heard my videos. It works. But I don't want to... I like to listen to music while I paint. So this is why I often do voiceovers. It's because if I'm listening to music while I paint and it's music that has a copyright, most likely it is, I can't share that on YouTube. I have to remove the sound and add one of their sound clips. But what was so neat about this is Hannah's music. It's her original music. So I can play the music and work and record the sound. So that's what I'm actually doing. Not here. But when I get to the pastel part, I actually put on Hannah's music and I painted to it. And it was just such a beautiful experience. And I loved it. It was wonderful music to paint to. So you're going to hear not only her music but my little pastels scratching on the on the surface that I prepare. So it's just kind of neat that I could actually play music while I'm working and let you guys hear the real sound while I'm working. So that's coming after all of these under paintings are done. So stay tuned and pretty soon we'll be adding the product that will make this take pastel. I think a lot of you guys probably already know what that is. But it's coming up. I mentioned that, you know, I often forget that some people may be watching this that I have never seen under paintings. It is really messy at this stage and that's kind of the point. That's kind of what starts the looseness about it. All right, so now it is time to take our little creation and make it able to be able to receive pastels. And the product is Clear Gesso. If you've seen my videos, you know this is a great and inexpensive way to kind of create your own pastel surface. Pastel papers can get expensive, but you can use Clear Gesso on watercolor paper. Usually watercolor paper is relatively inexpensive and make a grit or a sanded surface for yourself because Clear Gesso has grit in it, little flecks of sand or something that creates that abrasion to it that'll allow your pastels to stay in place and not fall off the paper. So I, you know, with my Gesso, I kind of paint similar to the strokes that are in the painting. Instead of just a wash all the way across vertically or horizontally, I feel like it adds the texture, a textural element to it that enhances the painting when you go to apply the pastels. So that's pretty much all there is to it and then you just let it dry and it's ready for pastels. Here are the pastels I've chosen for the first painting that has kind of that golden underpainting. I wanted to have some orangy yellowy flowers, reddish orange flowers and some cooler greens for the grasses and some purples too. So I got a combination of pastels here, but this is the part where you're going to get to see real-time pastels and you're going to actually get to hear the music I'm listening to, which is Hannah's music in the background, and get to hear those neat little scratchy sounds. I love that when my pastels are being applied because of the clear gesso and the grit that it's added. So enjoy this. This is just going to be real-time and no commentary and I think sometimes the best way to learn is just to watch and these slower real-time segments really do help, especially beginners, to see what I'm actually doing. So enjoy this process. I'll I'm sure I'll pop back in later. All right. I'm about to finish this first little one up and I wanted to point out. Notice how I'm adding that blue. I had the background trees. I had lightened them in value and cooled them off with the purple, but this blue is going to cool them off even more to make those distant trees, really push them back into the distance. And you may have noticed I used a really beautiful blue that was my spicy color. You know, I love to pick a color that's just going to add some pizzazz to the painting and it was that blue that you kind of see under the the distant trees back there. It's kind of underneath the shadow bottom part of the tree. Now I'm incorporating a little bit of this kind of a teal blue in here. So this one I'm just having fun with color and and I liked it. I thought this one was really enjoyable and fun, but as with anything in life, practice obviously makes you better and I really feel by the time I got to the last one, I was just really getting in my groove. Okay, here's the pastels for the next one and the underpainting of that one was that pretty pink color and so now my pastel selections. I'm choosing teal blues kind of like for the trees and for that trail that meanders back through there and I'm going to be using the golden colors, the yellows and goldens for the field and the flowers in this one are going to be purple. So and you know I I've talked a lot about the color that I put down in the compliments for the the value kind of underpainting study, but these colors that I'm choosing also will compliment what I've already put down and I'm kind of going just on some gut instinct if you want to call it or just from all the many paintings I've done before and making color choices and the same will happen for you, especially beginners. I want to encourage you don't get overwhelmed or frustrated with all of this. None of this made sense to me when I got started too. I do think I have my leaning. If I have an artistic gift, I think it is more in the color realm, but it was not natural to me at first. It just it grew and got better the more that I practiced and so one of the best things that you can do as a beginner is just to emulate other artists and don't worry about doing that. It's like you're not copying another artist. You're just learning. Your own style will develop in time. So there's nothing wrong with doing that until you start to get some of these things. You don't have to think about them as much anymore. So and now you see how I'm putting down the darkest color of the flowers first. They're going to be purple and I thought that would make a nice color for this, the pinks that are under the undertones of the pinks, even though I'm going to cover it up with gold. But anyway then I add on like the lighter colors on top of this, but I'm not you probably notice these are somewhat abstract. The point of this was to play with color and not to create picture perfect flowers. I'm just kind of you know putting them in there just for color's sake and and also still just trying to have fun and not get too fussy with all of this. So do the same. Just have fun. Don't worry about whether it's going to be a masterpiece. These little Jack Richardson's notice sometimes when I put them down and I don't have a flat surface. They're kind of not symmetrically rolled sometimes so I have to kind of smooth them out. But anyway just play and have fun and don't worry about things coming out looking professional because they're not going to at first. And like I said before don't be afraid to throw artwork away. Goodness knows I have thrown so much away. It wasn't that long ago I throw away. Oh my gosh probably 30 paintings that were earlier I had done and I was just like nope that's just that's not me anymore. You know I've grown since then so and the same thing will happen to you. So all right I'm gonna you saw that one in the real time. I'm reaching my max with my YouTube upload ability here. I've got real slow Wi-Fi so it takes me forever to upload these if I get them too long. So I think I am going to speed this one up and the other ones but not so much. I know some artists speed them up so fast you can't see anything. So I'll maybe speed them up just a little bit so you can still see what's going on. All right guys enjoy. All right so I am wrapping this last painting up and wow I enjoyed this so much because I really did just put on some music and I mean other than setting up everything and doing the under paintings well it was all fun really to tell you the truth. I just had a nice time. But now here comes the really fun part. If you've never done this before when you put down a little tape border like this I mean look how messy the edges are right now. But the very fun reveal is when you pull the tape off and you've got this nice clean edge and it makes for a very neat and tidy presentation. I mean it's just kind of a cool effect you should try. Now I use the white artist tape here. It is it's good tape. It's more expensive than like blue painter's tape. You can't see it as good in this video but it works great. And you know if you can't afford to get this I mean use whatever you can right now. But I like this because it usually doesn't pull up your paper. It pulled up a little bit of the watercolor paper but not too bad. Now here comes the last one and you're just going to get this nice clean edge. Doesn't that look neat when it's all done? I just love it. So this was such a blessing for me to paint, relax, listen to beautiful music. And I hope it blessed you as well. And I hope you learned something about color. And if you haven't subscribed already please do so. And we are always learning and growing here in Monet Café. So happy painting!