 Well, hello my wonderful friends in Monet cafe I'm so excited because I got to paint this morning and it was just such a beautiful time I decided to do a long format as you can see here And I always like these either very long vertical or horizontal formats But join me today because I'm gonna show you how you can create this painting with using water color and Soft pastel. This is a beautiful little watercolor set that a precious friend sent me her names Marisa She is on our Facebook group and Mogan and a cafe art group. She's so precious to send me I love this set so get started with me and let's do it Oh, and I had to have my cup of coffee in my Monet cafe coffee cup You can get yours if you would like it you can find it on my website Susan Jenkins fine art comm or I'll also provide a link in this video now I'm just doing a sketch here on a piece of you art paper. That's the letter you a RT paper It's a sanded paper. It feels like sandpaper and that's the type of paper you need for pastel painting I mean you can use pastels on regular paper, but it's just not going to have the same effect You're not going to get the results. So you are papers when I love this is a 400 grit paper now This is a set of watercolors that I love I mentioned that a dear friend got me and I'm going to show you how you can use Watercolor combined with pastel on this you are paper. It works great now I've slowed this down to real-time. I had it just a little bit faster before just to get through that initial phase But this is real-time because I want to share with you how I'm doing this technique I've sketched in the flowers that I know you can't see very good and what I had to do is obviously the photo that's from Pmp-art.com. It's a great website where you can find copyright-free photos to work from and I really like their their site for you know when I don't have a field of poppies to go and take pictures of so I was basically having to take a more of a regular type of portrait composition as in the photo there and rearrange it for this long vertical format and I decided to kind of cascade the poppies and Really emphasize the long stems that they had so what I've done here is I've put water You saw me brushing water around the poppies. Okay, so now I'm just getting a little bit of a background color And I'm decided against having the field go way back like you see in the photo I decided to have it a sky behind it. That's the neat thing about being an artist You you have your artistic license and once you've done enough painting you start to get a little more confidence of I'd rather that be a sky then you know Fading out into the dark like the photo does and the photo is beautiful, too You could have painted it just like that, but all I'm doing now You'll see the water that I already put down you can kind of see it dripping it acts like a channel the Watercolor paint that you put on now is going to follow that water that you already laid down So I often use this technique. It's called wet on wet in watercolor But I like the using the Advantage of gravity because that's how things grow if you notice flowers and trees everything reaches up to the heavens And so when you have your paint dripping down vertically like that, it's going to beautifully emulate That fact of nature So I like to do that now as you can see I've I put in the purple up top to you know kind of represent the sky Because I didn't want to put blue down. I wanted the color to have some pizzazz So when I add the blue with pastels, it's going to create some interest in color not just blue everywhere So now I'm continuing to work and I'm noticing in the photo There's some areas that are darker, but if you see kind of that in the photo the main poppy I would say is kind of to the upper right Behind it looks a little lighter green. It's more like where the sun is shining so I decided to use more of a yellowy green here and Make that be a little bit brighter in that section. And so as you can see I'm just gradually working around the poppies here To create the background one of the things I like to point out what I love about this technique And what I love about watercolor in general is it has this beautiful way of being so luminous and so the color is just light and Beautiful and it's not it's a Translucent rather than opaque and when you add pastels no matter how much you try to make it look translucent. They are opaque I mean you can create the illusion of Luminessence but watercolor has that as its natural ability so often when I use watercolor and pastels I try to remember that there's something rather than just creating an underpainting There's something I want to preserve about that beautiful luminosity now. I'm adding these cooler greens They're more of a bluish green down in the bottom because that's where like the roots are it's getting down deeper If you look in the photo, you can see where there's the dark areas down where the stems are going down to the ground So I know that's gonna be cooler. I know it's gonna be more in shadow later I'm gonna add with pastel and make this darker But for now, you know, that's a nice way to get that color temperature correct with the water color All right now notice that water is dirty. I talked about preserving preserving the luminosity Oh, I've sped this up again I'm what I cleaned off my little palette tray and now I'm gonna use these colors for the poppies So I needed the clean water to do that. I didn't want to put that muddy water down there So I'm speeding it up now, but again, you see that drip just drip down It's really not a big deal. I don't need to wipe it off. You kind of want your your flowers to Break outside of their edges sometimes. Otherwise your painting looks very tight and stiff and fussy So now I'm getting my lightest light because I want to get that that beautiful Orangey yellow color that's in the poppies And I want to keep that in mind while I'm painting. I don't want to lose that right there because that flower is gonna be the star of the show and But I'm getting in some of the others now because it was wet because I already put the water down Notice how it's running and dripping and it actually see how that just made it look so much more artistic than if I had just laborious laboriously painted watercolor on the dry paper and Try to get it so detailed. It wouldn't have that that looseness and that freshness It just looks so much more painterly and artistic when you put the water down first So I love that. I love that of just kind of letting the water Do the painting, you know, it's pretty cool. So anyway, again putting more of the yellow down. I want to keep that freshness there and adding a little bit more of the oranges and the reds and I am Making I like to call these like color notes I'm putting down colors where I know how the shapes of the flowers are how they're Positioned and so that's gonna help me later another interesting thing. Oh, yeah, those drips It's it's no big deal really when you get to painting and again, I kind of like it another thing to remember with watercolor is that they Dry lighter than they go on so you can already notice that poppy at the top. It's already lighter The colors aren't as bold as they were when I originally put them down So you can be a little bold when you put them down at first and know that they're gonna tone down But you can always go back over watercolor and enhance the color if you were just doing a watercolor painting You see how those nice drips again, like I mentioned how nature just seems to Have the everything reaching up. So the the gravity is helping those poppies kind of do that But anyway, you can always go back over if you were just doing a watercolor painting Intensify the color and everything but this is just an under painting It's giving me just a little guide to how I'm gonna lay my pastels down and also Again, trying to just keep a little bit of that beauty of watercolor. Alright, so Enjoy this rest of this watercolor process and I will pop back in when we add the pastel so I'm about to wrap up the watercolor portion and I want to just Stress that this is not to get fussy with the watercolors. It's just to get a loose interpretation Have some fun and get a groundwork for your pastels. Now, here are the pastels I chose look how out of order they are That's because I guess you could say I cheated or I just did what was easy these were just the pastels I had used on some previous paintings and Again, I did this painting that this particular morning and I just wanted to paint I didn't want to put them away or anything so a little random and sporadic But now the watercolor paper is dry and it still has that nice sanded surface That's another neat thing about using watercolor on this paper It doesn't take up any of the tooth of the pastel and if you've been using pastels for a while You know, that's something we want to preserve now I just added the other piece of paper next to it Some of you have commented in previous videos you'd like to see me do mark making with these pastels to kind of see what color it is and Also, sometimes I'm cleaning my pastel off and checking color and sometimes getting a smooth surface some of these pastels Particularly that one right there like the Jack Richardson's They have little bumps on them sometimes on the edges. I break my pastels. That's why they look smaller And I have to kind of smooth them out So here I'm using a combination of blues warm and cool blues And I'm choosing these of a similar value Meaning the lightness or the darkness notice how I'm doing it real light touch here I kind of want to preserve that little bit of lavender behind it But when by using this combination of blues, that's like the the cooler blue. I'm sorry That's the warmer blue. That's got more green in it. It's teal I'm pulling it down into the grasses a little bit But that play on color when you have similar values, but different colors It's going to create a much more energetic Appearance and so I love that. So that's why I chose those three colors there to Work for the sky. It just see how the color is just kind of more dynamic Now these are the colors that I've chosen for the poppies. I Basically have the darkest dark. I might I actually end up getting one a little bit dark See how that it I'm actually let me show you I'm going to do a trick right here That one needed to be broken. It was a little too wide for my application. So that's a cigar cutter No, I don't smoke cigars, but someone told me this is an excellent way Ta-da to break pastels. It gives a clean cut. So what I did is now It's a little bit smaller for me to kind of lay that down And I had to kind of smooth off that little edge that was on there They've got little ridges on them and I'm again even right here It's not really smooth for me to work with but anyway, I'm putting down my darkest shadowy era areas If you look in the photo, you see that on the back sides more on our side of the flowers is where you see that Darker area these I guess you would say are kind of backlit the sunshine is on the opposite side So again same as with the sky you want to play on colors here So I put down these are different values though unlike the sky So I put down the darkest dark for the shadowy area and then I'm putting down more of a orangey red a little bit more orangey red to Go on top of that darker color And then I just continue to work. But one of the things I wanted to mention is I'm trying to preserve that Really bright area. I talked about that the watercolor is so beautiful at doing keeping that lightness And I want to keep that lightness there. I do end up adding a pastel that is More gold and yellow, but that is reminding me that that's what I want to preserve That's what I want to Really show up is that beautiful light that's shining through that poppy pedal So I'm just continuing to work and now I am a little more focused on getting Shapes of the poppies. I don't want to get too fussy, especially with the ones I don't want the main focus to be on like the ones that are going to be buried in the grasses They're just going to have like I mean they can almost just be a A little rectangular shape sometimes they don't even have to be a Distinct flower because you have control as the artist as to where your viewer's eye goes and you want it to Comfortably just follow the path that you want it to go and you control that by where you put the detail So obviously this flower here is going to be the most detailed now. I'm making some pedals that are kind of reaching out And shaping it like I said and I realize later you'll notice later I've got that one. I think it's because I got the watercolor too close the the one right underneath that main one is It's too close later. I separate it more with some sky Because it was a little too jumbled up there and it was taking the interest away from that main flower All right, so I'm going to continue to work on these. I'm going to zoom in a little bit so you can see what I'm doing and enjoy the music Enforcing or actually enforcing because there weren't many darks down there to begin with but Making it darker down by the roots on the ground. The ground is typically Darker, especially down at the roots of the flowers like that. So I'm just kind of getting in a variety of Dark values with different colors. I've got one that was a little bit more Burgundy brownish I've got one that's a little more blue and it's going to look kind of dark right now But it'll eventually lighten up when I add more greens and layers on top of it Um, and now I'm getting in some of those cooler colors That are kind of in the shadows a little bit And then I'll add the warmer greens on top of those colors I do end up blending Some of these roots a little bit on the darkest part there You'll see in a minute where I do that. I decided later that little one there I was going to have a few little flowers popping up, but I thought you if you saw the beginning Painting, um, I decided later to make it a bee I thought that would be a lot more interesting and I realized the top area of the sky needed a little something up there So I added another bee up on top of that one poppy Here is where I'm using a piece of pipe foam insulation that you can buy at any hardware store or most hardware stores And I wanted to kind of get away from that really, um high texture Darker values down towards the roots of the flowers So I'm kind of blending around the flowers and even kind of blending Into the lower flowers. I want those flowers to be a little more hidden In appearance and appearance. So not every flower is appearing as floating on the surface By the way, I've heard you can also use a pool noodle as a blending tool. There's various things you can use to blend I, uh, encourage you to limit your blending Use it purposefully In certain areas now this is a technique I learned from artist Karen Margolis. She uses this Low odor workable fixative. This is by Blair Blair low odor fixative And I love how she uses it and it it darkens where you want it to darken And it adds another little layer like a sheen over your painting so that you can glaze Grasses on top of it. So it will bury those flowers. So that's a great thing about using fixative In that way I get asked this question all the time. How do you fix your paintings? Or how do you get your final paintings to where, you know, um, They can be sold or you can frame them and I advise you to do nothing to them Don't spray them when you're done with any fixative I use clear bags to store my paintings in. I have a method that I use Uh, before I get them in a bag, um, I just put them in between sheets of glass scene In a big, uh sketchbook If I if you have a big sketchbook, you can put your paintings and just put a piece of glass scene It looks like wax paper But glass scene is a good way to protect your paper until you get it into a clear bag. Um Now i'm adding purple here Because that's just going to be so much more interesting than just all those greens. Let me zoom in a little bit Can you see how that purple just added? I don't know. It just looks magical So sometimes if you add a color that is Not what you would commonly think of in a bunch of grasses Like a purple or a teal Um, you just kind of make it pop a little bit, you know, that's my my go-to word make your colors pop But um, again, I just added a little bit of a teal there. So it generates a lot more interest And um and beauty in your painting. I'm now I am reinforcing the darks. I'm adding just a little bit more Um, where some of those roots would be sometimes I do this more at the beginning But occasionally I will um add it in carefully, you know towards the end when I've already established much of the painting Here is where I mentioned about putting in the bee replacing that little flower pod With a bee I basically just use a stiff bristle brush And I just brush off the majority of the pastel that's kind of on the surface of the sanded paper I put a little bit of the blue over it So that I can later add the bee I kind of have that little fractionated color there So I add a little bit of of the other colors as well Now I wanted to show you this often we can repurpose things This is a case that I had a screen protector for my phone in my husband happened to actually say that would make a nice little Pastel storage case and I knew it wouldn't work for most pastels, but it works great for these new pastels in you pastels They're harder pastels that are great for doing stems for doing grasses and uh sometimes little detail work So I just keep a little selection of pastels in this case right now And it works great for me now this poppy i'm doing a kind of a a broken Line a little fragmented line. Uh, you don't want anything being so straight and um stiff looking So I'm doing it darker And um, then I'll add a little highlight on one side of it Because those stems if you notice in the photo they have a little glow around them again They're kind of backlit So um you get and my edges to my pastels are always a little odd So I have to be a little careful about making sure I get it right now Again, I think that main poppy that's up at the highest point is in the front and I decide in a minute I'll go ahead and hop to that right now to um, yep. There I am right there To separate it a little bit and make that one petal smaller On the big flower. I just feel like they're too bunched up there. I wanted a little room between it So I'm doing kind of the same technique. I did before where I use a stiff brush brush it out I still have plenty of layering capability here So I'm just very easily able to layer some of that blue over it and kind of give a little separation for those flowers And now I'm using some more of the new pastels the harder pastels to add a few more grasses I've kind of successfully gotten the flowers a little more buried by adding some of those More warm greens on top after I had applied that uh, Workable fixative. So you want to be random with your grasses You don't want them all just straight lines sticking up. Sometimes you want to add a little variety like here I'm adding like some little uh Flower pods the little uh blossoms before they open And then I'll just add a little highlight, you know, wherever the sun may be hitting them Here I am using a new pastel to kind of reinforce some of the texture of the flower and Make it a little bit more believable as to where some of the little ripples or ridges are In the flower and the new pastel works great for that because it's small enough to kind of see what you're doing for one And they're a bit more Have a more ability to make more of a fine mark Detailed mark than your chunkier soft pastels do. Okay. Here's where I'm going to add the little bees and Really with bees the less detail the better for one when we're watching bees. They're so fast They don't have a lot of detail to our eyes. They're moving around you want to capture that movement Also, they're so small you can't see their detail a lot And uh, you want your eye to focus on the flowers and the bees are like the accent. Sorry for my head there I can't see what I'm doing sometimes. I'm going to zoom in so you can see a little bit more detail I'm sorry. I thought my camera was going when it didn't I basically just make three little black marks One's the head one's the thorax is that what it's called and then one's the back part of the bee I add a little combination of a darker Orange and then a lighter orange on top of that then I just use a blue or almost a white To make a couple little wings and again, you just want them Very impressionistic and no big deal now. I get a new pastel to make a little I don't always do this but a little indication of maybe their feet and out feet their legs, I don't think bees have feet and perhaps their little antenna and Again, you don't want to overdo this because you're not trying to draw too much attention for the to the bee They're just nice little accents So this was fun bees and poppies and just a beautiful Celebration of God's world. Thank you so much for watching. Please subscribe if you want more videos And lessons in the convenience of your own home. So thanks guys as always happy painting