 Welcome to Monet Café. We're gonna get a little magical with this lesson. Painting some iridescent dragonfly wings. This was so fun. So let's dive right in. Oh, and if you haven't subscribed yet, I hope you will and become part of the Monet Café family. After uploading the footage for this video, I walked outside and was greeted by golden dragonflies glistening in the air. They were magical. Was that a coincidence? I think not. Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm really excited about this lesson. I actually allowed my patrons from my Patreon page to vote on my next tutorial that I would edit and upload. It was based on three paintings I've completed and they chose the dragonfly. It was a close race between an adorable little ducky. All of these will be uploaded, but this one they voted on to be the first one that I work on. So get ready to learn about how to paint dragonfly wings with iridescent pastels. These are iridescent pastels made by Mt. Vision and it was so fun and exciting. So I'm going to give my tips and techniques on how to paint dragonfly wings with iridescent pastels. It's a lot of fun. Now I apologize for the real format. If you've been on Instagram, you know they have these little reels and they are, you can only do them vertically, but I showed a little video where I cleaned my pastels from Mt. Vision. I bought the whole kit and caboodle, the whole set, and I hadn't used them seriously until now and I decided to clean them and cut them with a cigar cutter and get ready to paint. Now different companies make iridescent pastels and different retailers market them, but here on the DickBlick.com website they have the two sets of Mt. Vision iridescent pastels. One set is the set of 15 and it's a great set, but I really don't think you need, it's about $57, but I don't think you need all of these colors to do the dragonfly effect or the iridescent wing effect with these dragonflies. So if anything I use the turquoise color the most, maybe turquoise and that blue above it. But there is also a set of five dark iridescents and I actually used these. They look darker in this video footage than they really do when you apply them and I actually used the darker ones a little bit more than the lighter ones. So I, and this is $20, you know, around $20. So I'd recommend this set if you wanted to get some additional ones for this type of lesson. Then I would recommend maybe the turquoise. I mean you might want to get some of those other colors too, so, but you don't have to get them all. That's my point. I also wanted to mention that you don't really have to have iridescent pastels at all to follow along with this lesson. I'm here now on my Patreon homework assignments. These are paintings shared by my patrons from my Patreon page in our album that are from the lessons that are either here on YouTube or once exclusive to my Patreon page. Now I want to point out these bees. I hope they don't mind me sharing their work. It's so awesome. Artist of every level. We've got beginners, intermediate, advanced, but check out this painting. I loved it so much from one of my bee tutorials. Take a look at the bees wings. These are not iridescent pastels, but you could use a similar technique just using a little glaze of a lighter pastel for the dragonfly wings. So you don't have to have the iridescent pastels. So use what you have and have fun. Now before we began the actual painting, I wanted to point out a few things about dragonflies and their wings that I observed when tackling this endeavor. I wanted to explore a lot of different dragonflies and I found a really great resource for all kinds of different copyright-free reference images of different subject matter. It's a site called unsplash.com and it's a recent discovery of mine, but I've just started making my own collection so that I can just find things very easily. And one of the collections I started to make was on dragonflies. So in my dragonfly file here, I have all kinds of different dragonflies and you can find me on unsplash. Like I said, I'm fairly new on there, but you can find my collection here if you'd like to access some of these dragonfly photos. So I wanted to examine the dragonfly wings and how am I going to approach painting these? So here was my strategy. I noticed, like in this one in particular, we don't want to go about just painting the wings and all of the little intricacies in the wings. Actually, if you notice the transparency of the wings, we can see the background behind the wings. So I thought, hmm, I need to lay the background in first and layer the wings on top, rather than trying to paint the wings first. So that was what one thing that I noticed too. Let's go look at some other ones here, like here for example. Also, things like vines and branches and things that are behind it also is somewhat transparent. Oh and look at all these lovely colors that are in here. Also too, we don't need to paint every single little bit of the pattern within their wings. It would become just very, I don't know, tight I think and not free and I think the dragonfly wings need to look expressive and energetic. So those were a couple of things and I also noticed, I really like this one, I also noticed just how delicate the wings were, how delicate the dragonflies are in general. So like this one right here. So I could get lost obviously looking at all of these lovely dragonfly images. But first let's talk a little bit about the anatomy of the dragonfly, which should help in painting them. I recommend that you do a few quick sketches of some dragonflies, whether you use the unsplash.com website or your own reference images and notice how their bodies are segmented into three parts. We've got the head which is kind of small. The middle section is almost a bit triangular and the little tail which is often tapered off at the end. And one of the key things about dragonflies is their gestural quality. So that's something I, I'm trying always to get better at. But their wings actually come off, you're going to see me do it better here. Their wings come off of the middle section. So here's the head, here's the middle kind of bulbous triangular section and the tail that tapers off. And here's where the wings go. The front two wings come from the front part of the middle section. And the back two wings come off of the lower part of that middle section. And here is one more. I apologize for speeding this up but I didn't want the lesson to be so long. Now head, middle section of the body. And now I want you to notice the placement of the wings again. The front two wings again come out of the front portion of that center. Is that called the thorax? I can't remember my animal anatomy. But these come in and they taper in a little bit more tightly when they meet the body section. Now notice the lower wings, they're a little bit longer. And notice how they come out almost squared off and then cut back into the body. Notice I'll do it again on this one here. So the front two wings taper in a bit more than the back two wings. So and their legs are just so delicate. I had a hard time even portraying that with my willow charcoal that I'm using here. I did a little sample dragonfly. I'm going to apologize in advance for my head and body getting in the way. This was just kind of for fun. But this is a piece of Sennelier paper and I've just blended in. This is the concept I was talking about getting the background in first. Some pastels using my little piece of chamois cloth. I found out, yes, you can use my chamois cloth technique on Sennelier paper. My head got in the way so much there was no sense in sharing the rest of the footage. But I want to show you real quickly what it looks like in a photograph versus a video. And in real life it's actually even more impressive. This is a photo. You can see a little bit of the glistening. And in the video when I turn it you can see the different angles. And truly in real life it's even more impressive. Now for the painting I will be using a piece of Fisher 400. This is literally almost just like UART sanded paper. I get it from pro art panels. I'll try to remember to put a link in the description of this video where you can get it. But the difference is, look how flat it is. UART paper, if you're familiar with it, it curls. I used to think it was because of humid climates but people say it curls everywhere. I'm using some acrylic inks to do the underpainting unlike the little example you saw before where I used pastel. So I'll be using Indian yellow fluorescent pink and this purple lake. Just to get a neat background color I wanted a little warmth for the background. And I'm just using a bristly kind of stiff brush. I'm putting some water down first. I want the acrylic inks to just flow and dance along the paper and have some fun. And the Fisher paper receives water so beautifully and it doesn't buckle or anything. It's really really a great surface. So I'm going to speed up this portion and a little bit of this video because this dragonfly did take a little bit of time. So there will be some speed sections to this but you should still be able to follow along and recreate this. I noticed in the reference image the background which was primarily green and that really fuzzy out-of-focus effect that really helps the subject matter to stand out. I don't often do techniques like this but I noticed that around the dragonfly area kind of in the middle it was darker. There were darker values so that's why I put that purple lake kind of in the middle. So the same as you saw in my little preliminary example I'm just sketching in the dragonfly wings with some charcoal. And also too you will notice that I'm going to pretty much cover this up. I sort of am able to see where I have the sketch by the time I'm done. But what do I have to get in first? Now this is just a warm color I've put down with the acrylic ink. I want to get all those greens in first and I don't want to paint them around the dragonfly so I'm going to just layer them in and blend them in all over this dragonfly but I'll still have a little ghost image of the willow charcoal for me to be able to follow in trying to get this accurate. And I had to work around with this body a little bit and getting it right. Like I said I haven't done many dragonflies so this was really kind of a new experience for me. Now I'm blending in some of the darker pastels. I had to reestablish some of those darks. The acrylic inks got in a neat undertone color painting but I need to get in some of my values. And I'm going to use a similar technique where I will blend all of this in and this time I'll be using a paper towel. This surface and uR paper does not work very well using the chamois cloth technique the one that I used in that little preliminary painting. And I didn't even know before I started that little painting that the chamois cloth would work on Sennelier paper but it does. So I'm just using a paper towel. You could use a piece of pipe foam insulation or you could do the technique like I did. If I did this again I'd probably do the technique like I did in the in the first little example painting. But hey we're always learning right? I'm learning all the time. So you can see how I'm sort of covering up the dragonfly but I still have a general idea of where he is. And now I'm going to add some of the other colors to the background. This is a Diane Townsend pastel. Notice how big and chunky it's kind of flat. This is from her set of greens. I love these greens. They've got some bright vibrant greens but they also have a couple of these neutral greens which is really great if you want a background to appear like it's a little further away. Things in the distance typically get a little less punchy in color. They're a bit more doled out neutral. And so I thought this worked well for that. So again I'm just establishing the background which back to my point at the beginning of this lesson is really what we need to do in order to lay the wings on top because the wings are transparent and that background is going to show through the wings. So I'm kind of having fun with color here. Blending, playing, and I end up, I kind of wish I had left a little bit more of the the fresh color in the background but I played around with this a lot when I was almost done with the dragonfly and I thought about adding more leaves and trees. I even thought about adding and sort of attempted to add a few more little dragonflies in the distance and I realized it was just too busy. Too much going on. I went back to my original thought of or the concept of the reference photo which it was all about that one dragonfly just sort of gently resting on that one little branch of little kind of evergreen like leaves. So it gets a little bit more blended by the end of this but I was still happy with the final. So I always share these things so you can keep that in mind while you're painting. And it does appear that I'm working around the dragonfly. I'm actually trying to establish the background before I lose my little charcoal drawing but you'll see in a little while where I actually blend these colors into the dragonfly wings so that it does appear that the background when I'm finished is behind the dragonfly and the wings. So aren't these greens just lovely? This is more of a mossy earthy green. I noticed in the reference image that as I stated before the middle section and a few little areas were darker that they appeared like maybe the deep forest further away than some of the tree branches. While it's all fuzzy you know you still have the general concept or idea but I thought that dark area around the dragonfly's head area was a good focal point strategy because focal point is more obvious when you have contrast. So I thought the darker behind the head would be a good way to approach this. Now here's some of the lighter greens. I do end up blending these in a bit. I didn't want them to be too distracting from the dragonfly so I'm just kind of playing around with some different greens. So play with this. If you decide to use the same reference photo I do. You have multiple ways you can approach this too and or you may want to do a whole different dragonfly but I hope the way that I give these lessons gives you the flexibility to be able to not just copy what I do but to take the concepts and to do something that's totally your own from another dragonfly reference image. So and I think it's fine to go ahead and copy what I do because goodness knows that's how we learn. There's nothing wrong with copying another artist but it should be a learning technique and not something you want to do permanently. Goodness knows I want you guys to spread your wings like this dragonfly and head out on new adventures artistically of your own. And now is where I'll do a little more blending with the paper towel and you'll see me blend in the areas actually in the dragonfly. Once again we want these wings to appear that they're on top of the background. I was preserving the drawing a bit before I did this so I could still remember where the dragonfly is in general. You could do the background and then do the sketch on top. So you know it's however you decide to approach it. So here's kind of the green that's going to be behind the dragonfly wings so that when I glaze the pastels on top they will appear as transparent. Now in this next portion you're going to see me develop the body of the dragonfly. I wanted to get the body in before the wings because the same principle applies. Some of these wings are on top of the body so they need to be transparent showing the body slightly behind it. So this portion because this was a little tedious this did take a little longer. I've run into make him have personality so I probably gave him a little more detail in his face and body area except for the tail. I left that a little subdued so it did take a little longer. That's why I'm speeding up this section but not to worry when I get to the dragonfly wings that portion will all be real time. I try to keep my videos under 40 minutes and it literally has to do with the fact that my Wi-Fi speed I live out in the country and it takes forever to upload a video. I mean you guys would never get the videos if I had two and three hour videos but just so you know the next lesson that I have coming up is going to be the little ducky tutorial or one of the next lessons. That was another one where I took my time. Often I'm painting fast because my life is fast but I took my time and I worked a bit more detailed than I normally do. I wanted to prove that you can get results on Canson unsanded paper so that one most likely will be a real time for my patrons on my Patreon page. I'll probably do a speed version for Monet Cafe but my patrons get a little perk sometimes or some perk sometimes. It's only five dollars a month. You get extra content. We have some great communication. I get to see your work and you just support this channel. It really helps me to keep these videos coming and to get the equipment and the supplies that I need to do these. So thank you to my patrons. All right now for these wings. Once again this is real time. I want you to notice this is one of the darker, believe it or not remember how I mentioned in the beginning of the video, they look really dark on the Dick Blick website but they're not quite as dark when you apply them. Now I am, like I said, it's kind of the first time I've done this with iridescent pastel so you're going to see me kind of working through these things but by the last two wings I think I've got it down pat. So I was kind of establishing the shape of the wings. I'd lost a little bit of my charcoal drawing. I also knew I didn't want any hard edges. These wings don't have hard edges first of all because they just don't. They're light and airy but also because the dragonfly, this one is a little bit stationary on his little branch but often they're moving and they're flying so we don't want, we want soft painterly edges and a really light touch. So now this is the purple that is the dark purple. Once again part of the five set, five colors that are in the dark iridescent set and I'm still sort of getting the shape of the dragonfly wing but in a minute you'll see me kind of glazing it over very lightly because I want to keep a little bit of the background showing through. I'll also share too that often these edges are a little bit, you can't get a smooth application so that's why I make marks on the side also so you can see the color to get it to be flat. And here I go applying very, very lightly. Notice this is the darker still in the dark set, those three colors. I put a little green down you can see over there but it was just too much the same as the background color. So also too with these in, there's that turquoise I mentioned before, with these in filming and photographing they're going to look a bit more opaque or non-transparent in the footage here. That's why I did a little video footage trying to turn it in different lighting so you can see it. And when I have it by the way this is currently as I'm making this video I just put it in my Etsy shop so the original is still available but it's it's in my little gallery, I have a little baby gallery where I have all of my Etsy paintings ready to go. It is so transparent in in real life when you look at it with your eyes but it's really hard to capture that in the photograph or even in the video. So I am working with how much detail I need to put in this dragonfly wing and I realized later I don't need a lot and whenever I do something new to me you guys get to learn watching my process so you you don't have to go through these stages like I'm going through. Like I said on the on the second or the third and fourth wings I realized the best approach is to just do a light glazing and then add little teeny hints of glistening areas and not too much detail. You're going to see me in a minute actually start to give some detail like some of the structure of the wing they have these little ribs that go through the wing and I started to fiddle around with that. You'll see me do that in a minute and I realized you know this is really competing with the delicacy of the wing. Now it may seem strange that I added that's a pretty dark color there. I think it's the Terry Ludwig egg plant a little teeny sliver but in the reference image and by the way I mentioned or put a little banner up or title up earlier that I'm not putting the reference image up here because it is someone else's photograph even though it's copyright free. I like you to go to the link and see the photographer so the link to the photograph the reference image is in the about section of this video. Now I noticed this is one of the lighter pastels. See how light it was it was just too light so I I did away with that. Now I'm actually just here using I think yes this is also one of the lighter pastels it might even be one of the ones from the dark set. I can't remember like I said they are not as dark as they appear on the on the website and now I'm using that darker blue that's also from the darker set and I'm joining it to the body. There were little glistening areas right down where the wing met the body so I just wanted to get a little bit of that not much and not a hard line anywhere so I'm fiddling around with this wing and right now I'm going to add some music while I am working laboriously on this wing and then I'm going to come back for some commentary when I get to one of the wings after I had done one where I think I do them more effectively and also faster. I realized I didn't need to add all of this so you're going to benefit from that. These wings actually go a lot faster than I did on this first one. All right here's some music. All right wasn't that music fun? It seemed dragonfly-ish. I don't know why but here I am doing the second wing on the upper portion of his body there and I am just lightly glazing once again these appear more opaque in the video than they do with my eyes. It just happens to be the angle and how these little flecks of sparkle glisten with the angle you know of the footage when I'm filming it or photographing it. Now I notice I did add a little that's not an iridescent pastel. I wanted to establish the transparency back again so sometimes I add a little bit of the green and then I'll layer some of the iridescent on top just to make them appear transparent. Now there's that pretty turquoise I talked about at the beginning. I did use some of that just for those little areas where the wing was kind of glistening. I mentioned too at the beginning when I did some of the sketches that the front wing comes to more of a taper as it joins the body. The back wing is a bit more squared off at the back side then it jets in. Okay notice here did you see how lightly I did that? The body has to show through this because the wing is transparent so if you're doing a wing well you will be doing a wing over the body. This is why you you do the wings last is because you can lightly layer and give that illusion of the body showing through the transparent wing. And notice I've used quite a bit of these different colors here. I'm trying to identify some of these colors but I didn't use a lot of the really light ones even though I have both sets the 15 set of iridescence and the five darks. I believe this is probably one of the darks. They're just duller. They're not quite as bright so you know maybe the the purple and the turquoise from the other set may have been the ones that I used but I think you could get away with just getting a few colors and not so many of them. And I am definitely going to do more of these dragon flies. I'd actually like to do a little series of them because I found so many beautiful dragon fly reference images. And you know as artists we are color freaks. I mean I'm sure you are. And dragon flies come in such an amazing assortment of color. I just love the the sparkle to them and the vibrancy. Now try and notice as I'm establishing this wing here I'm keeping such a light touch. I'm just trying to remember where the wing ends. And such a soft edge that it's barely there. And when I do these again I'm definitely going to have more lost edges where some of it's just invisible. Our minds or our brains have something called closure where they can put things together and figure things out with without a lot of information. Often we need less information in our paintings than more information. So we can suggest things and our brains will figure it out and put it together. Alright watch me paint a little more until I get to the final wing and I'll be back with more commentary. Here's some of that lovely music again. Right here we go with the fourth wing. Notice the pastel I'm using again. This is the dark almost charcoal looking color from the iridescent dark set. And I found as I worked on this that this was a nice technique to be able to glaze in so gently the shape of the wing. Thus keeping the translucent see-through quality while kind of getting an idea of the shape of the wing. And notice I'm just lightly suggesting maybe where the edges are. Trying to keep that gestural style or feel of the wing and just kind of establishing the general shape. So I think this will definitely be the approach that I use when I do more of these dragonflies. I can't wait to do more of them they're so fun. Now before I work on this fourth wing a little bit more I did go back. I'm speeding this section up again just to keep the video size smaller. I wanted to freshen up the dragonfly. I did want him to be vibrant. I wanted him to have a little bit more personality and detail. Maybe then I will in future dragonflies but I was having fun with this one. So he did have like some kind of rng colors to him. And I wanted the focal point to be his head and the wings. And then even though the tail is not finished here you'll notice later as I work that I want to keep the tail even a little bit out of focus. A little fuzzy not too awfully detailed. Or if I had too much detail in that tail it would draw the viewer's eye right out of the painting. Okay so we don't want to do that. We don't want to point outside of the painting with a lot of detail. All right here I go glazing again with that. Once again I think this is one of the darks even though it doesn't look that dark here. I hope I'm right on that and telling you guys that. But I definitely didn't use a lot of the really light colors on these wings once again except for maybe the turquoise a little bit of the purple maybe. Now let's talk about these legs. I got my legs really too thick to begin with. I knew I was going to add a little highlight. They had a very suggestive highlight kind of like for some sunlight that was reflecting off of them. But I couldn't find enough of a point on a pastel that was small enough. So when you do the legs and definitely the next time I do the legs I'm going to try to keep them more gestural just little very delicate gentle marks. It's tricky you know to really get that little suggestion of how they turn and how really very frail that they are. Notice too that I drew the leg right on top of that wing. Now why would you think I did that? Well it was because in all of my working sorry for my shaky easel with all of my working I ended up covering up the leg that I had drawn before. So it wouldn't show through the wings. So later you're going to see me just glaze a little bit of that iridescent pastel right over top of it and all of a sudden it looks like the legs are behind the wing. You'll see that in a minute. Now I'm using this really ochre. Man what was I doing with my camera? It's shaking so much here. That ochre color I added and now I'm adding a little bit of the golden color. Not too much. Once again I don't want that tail to steal the show. It's just suggestive. All right let's move on and hopefully my camera won't be shaking as much. Now let's talk about these little grasses or it looked to me like a evergreen type of a little branch or twig sticking up. So these marks I got a little bit more gestural than the legs. But I got my darks in first. This is just a little I think it's called spruce blue. That one might be the same but it's a Prismacolor new pastel. So I did my typical strategy is kind of got my darks in and then I'm going to layer some of the lights on top. Now there was a highlight on the very top parts of that branch or that the needles but they weren't quite as light as the original pastel I put down. So I toned them down a bit. There were some more cool greens and a bit more neutral color that I tried to establish in the inner parts and then gradually just making that subtly kind of go out of focus. Once again a focal point strategy. I want it to be where those feet are touching the little needles and not down out of the painting. You can very easily lead your viewer right out of your painting by putting too much detail around the edges. That's why it's usually a good idea to have a kind of blurry out of focus halo around the edges and now you can probably see how I made that leg appear behind the wing because I glazed a little bit more on top. Now here's an example of how opaque it looks in a photograph and how transparent it looks well even not as much as the human eye. It's you can see all the sparkle but it's really way more transparent when you see it with your own eyes versus in a video or a photo. So wasn't that fun and as I said as of the making of this video the original is available in my Etsy shop. I hope you guys will try this and if you're a patron of mine and you try it I know I'm going to get to see it. I can't wait. All right family happy painting.