 Welcome to Monet Café. Artistic friends and visitors. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm excited to bring you this tutorial. That's a watercolor painting of a fox and lots more. Please subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and click that little bell icon for more videos. Here is my fox painting and this is 100% watercolor on watercolor paper and I thought he looked watchful so I added a scripture verse about being watchful to it. So in this video I am not only going to be painting a watercolor painting and giving some instruction but I'm also going to be sharing with you a neat app for transferring or creating your image prior to painting. I'm going to have a follow-up video to this with more details but I wanted to give you an introduction because I thought this was pretty cool. The app is called DaVinci Eye and it's something that can be used on your phone or your iPad and it's just such a neat way to take your images and transfer them to your drawing surface. I was just fascinated. I had to give it a try. I always recommend however here's a disclaimer freehand drawing when possible as much as possible. I really think that's how you build your core drawing skills and not by using methods like this but it is pretty neat so I wanted to give it a try and share with you. It's available on the App Store and on Google Play. It's only $4.99 so you might want to give it a try. It's also interactive allowing you to create a profile and see the profiles of others where people share their own reference images that you can paint from and that's where I got the sweet little fox reference image so I thought it'd be fun to give it a try. Now in this video I am starting from the sketch already completed but the app does give lots of tutorials on how to use it. Now let's talk about my supplies. I mentioned I'm working on regular watercolor paper 140 pound and I'm using this Arteza 36 set of watercolors. It's just become a handy set for me to use. It has a lot of colors that I like but the great thing about watercolors is that they're mixable. You really can get away with not having the largest selection of colors. Now mine's really dirty. I apologize. I did use the cleaner side. I use paper towels quite a bit or all the time when I'm doing watercolor and here are some of my brushes. I like to have a larger flat brush for washes and I'm using these Princeton. The logo's kind of worn off but they're Princeton Art and Brush Company. This is a 40-50 round brush and I have two different sizes of these round brushes some for the larger areas and then for more detailed area. Now this is a liner brush and it's great for making thinner lines like for branches and trees and the last brush is just a small brush kind of a cheap brush but I I knew I had some smaller more detailed areas like the eyes. Also some clean water make sure you change your water often. I did erase a little bit of the pencil lines but I decided they didn't really bother me. Now what I'm going to be doing first of all is creating a value study and I'm using some purples that you saw and a little bit of that sepia. I think it's a sepia color and what it's doing is giving me some cooler colors. I know I've got a lot of snow and I add once again that that blue and then that purple that's right above it and then the sepia is just going to warm it up a bit. So I kind of use a combination of these three colors to once again create a value study. Now let me talk a little bit about this. I realized I didn't have the snow line back there. I am just wetting areas that I'm going to be. I see where there are shadowy or darker areas. I'm speeding this up because I didn't want the video to be so long but I sometimes give it a little tone so I can kind of see where I'm adding the water. That's why a little bit of it you see purple and what I'm doing is I'm using that darker purpley color. Look at the reference image. You see the darkest part of that background real far away, kind of the upper third. I know that's dark. I also know that hill, kind of like the middle ground in the background there, is darker than you think and so I give it a little bit of value. Now the snow in the foreground is getting lighter and he has a shadow by his leg there and I'm using these colors to, see I'm using this big brush the entire time, just to get in a value study and getting in very loosely the values that are in the fox. Now here's something I had to learn with watercolor. I began probably like a lot of people do and I kind of painted in sections. Oh you got to have some tea. It is Monet Cafe after all. I would paint color in sections almost like a paint by number and my paintings would feel very disjointed and not very painterly. So I learned that while with watercolor you definitely want to work light to dark unlike soft pastels where you kind of work dark to light. You still want to keep things light but if I kept this fox like before I would have just kept his fur under his neck very white because my brain would tell me oh the fur is white and the snow is white. But when you really learn to see value you learn that you can interpret what is really there versus what our brains often misinterpret. So if I was to convert this fox image as a black and white photo I do recommend doing that. It's a really a great way to see value. I would see that the fur under his neck especially the fur down closer to his legs is not white at all. It's really a darker value and I have found that learning this technique not only in watercolor but every medium is such a great foundation to your painting. It not only helps create your effective values and I think that's core for any painting but for me when I do a value study especially like this with a similar color all over the whole painting I feel it gives a base and a harmony to the painting as a whole rather than working individual elements so segmentedly is that a word? So you can kind of see how I've worked here and keep in mind that I know this fox is red or orangey color but I've learned over the years that in nature in life colors are all having an interplay with each other. Usually if the scene is cooler and in this example a snow scene I'm going to get a lot of those cooler temperatures interacting with each other and again this is not medium specific. I do the same techniques with my pastel artwork where I love to create a value study often using different strategies with color palettes but basically the same concept with getting your values accurate early on and also too I feel it's more fun. You're not getting tedious tied down in any one certain little area and often like for example like just working on the face of this fox and getting it all completed prior to working on anything else. I find I've seen some artists who are able to do that very effectively but I find for me and typically it's best to work the painting as a whole and it definitely comes out as more harmonious believable and accurate. I will be adding some music for you to watch the rest of this painting but I thought I'd go ahead and share some things with you. Just in general I'm excited about 2021. I have some great things I'm excited about in the works for the Monet Cafe channel and for my patrons on my Patreon page and so I will be sharing kind of a behind-the- scenes information on that with my patrons but I wanted to give you guys some a little bit of info too. I am going to be doing more real-time videos and with a type of format that's going to be more step-by-step so you guys can follow along and I'm going to try to be as organized as possible so that you can just join me during the live streams and we can have some painting fun and you can create a finished painting and learn a lot. I hope that's the goal. Also too I mentioned at the beginning I would be sharing a little bit more about this app but it's going to be included in a video I'm going to make on I think it's going to be called for different ways to transfer your images. When I do the step-by-step real-time tutorials I'll often be starting from a little bit of a sketch to begin with. I will have provided you the reference image for you to get started but I wanted to give you guys some of my ways and interesting ways that you can transfer your image. I say all the time freehand is best but there are some neat ways that you can transfer your images just to get started especially if you're a beginner and you just want to learn a little bit more about painting and some of them I'll give some non-tech options and for those of you who are a little more technically savvy some technical options like this DaVinci app as well. So that's just some neat things that are coming down the pike that I'm excited about and I thought I'd share with you guys. Now here you see I am actually adding some of the warmer tones that are in the Fox but because I put down some of the cooler values it's going to have that cohesiveness with the actual scene rather than just having you know the Fox being red with no cooler shadows within him and so I was happy with the final painting. I felt he looked a bit more whimsical than I had intended. I'd like to try this actually in soft pastel. I've come to really love watercolor over the years. I never considered myself a watercolor artist. I primarily used watercolor as under paintings for soft pastel paintings but over the years as I've worked with them I've come to really enjoy them. One thing that's a wonderful about watercolor is their luminescence or their luminosity and that quality that they have. It's kind of neat to me that it's kind of opposite of soft pastels but I really love the aspects of both mediums and I think I've actually gotten some great feedback from you guys that some of you really like you know me mixing in some of the watercolor as well. Now I wanted to share who. Notice how I'm getting an interesting color there. I got kind of a pink. He does have some he or she. He does have some deeper richer kind of orangy colors and instead of going with just the orange I chose that kind of magenta color for the darker areas a little bit more of the shadowy areas or the darker colors in his fur rather than just going with a brown. Another question I get all the time is how do you kind of reinterpret color and often I don't think I'm really reinterpreting it. I'm just really thinking about how color works. Sometimes things aren't just brown. Our brains will tell us let's go dark but sometimes you can go brighter and get a little bit like that and get a little bit more of a dynamic effect rather than your colors just looking dead. We I like I don't know if you do but I like to punch up the color a bit and have the painting dynamic and fun. Another thing I'll throw in here too is something I've learned over the years that I think is strengthening my artwork is learning the the value not talking about light or dark value of focal point and how to use the focal point strategies to your advantage in your painting. Now what do I how would I use that in this painting? What's going to be the focal point of this painting? I believe it is the fox's face and I'll get to that more later but I'm purposely keeping detail of course I want to have some bright color it's the fox himself in general but I am going to use more detail in the face than in other places now I'm starting to work on the eyes but with focal point in mind my least focal point area is going to be those background trees. Now the value that I'm giving them I know they're darker there's some trees in the background but they're cooler because they're far away we know that color temperatures get cooler as they recede but as far as focal point because it's far away we're not going to see a lot of detail now later I do add a little bit more suggestions of trees I add a little bit darker value in places in the background but that is going to keep the eye not going back there and staying more on the fox's face. I give some suggested focal points in areas with some of the trees that you'll see later they're really twigs because it's like a cold wintery scene and I keep them very suggested suggestive and I don't give really dark values to anything other than the fox there's very limited dark values now where focal point is the most obvious where you want your your viewer to go to is how you control that I should say is by high contrast you want your darkest darks and your lightest lights in the area where you want the viewer to look and once again this is going to be in this case the fox's face by the end of the painting you will see the darkest darks are going to be his eyes his nose and the lightest lights are going to be that white around his face there are some areas that I chose to keep whiter now again look at the fur under his neck our brains read it as white but I knew it was a lot of shadow but I do keep where I want the focal point that white is white around his face so therefore the focal point should stay right in there and then you want to gently lead the viewer's eye around the painting with other suggestions all right I always do this I say I'm going to add music and then I don't these are micron markers I love these little markers I was hesitant about using them sometimes I don't this is probably what gave him more the whimsical look that I I said I kind of would have preferred not having but it was such a little small area there I decided to use them to get some of the darker areas of his eyes and and I think it worked pretty good but I might have gotten them a little bit too dark so these are neat little markers I'm also going to share another marker for adding white now that's one of the challenges with watercolor that I found as a pastel artist primarily is that with pastel or acrylic or oil you can add your lights later you can add a white flower on top of something as long as you have an overlaid and but with watercolor you really can't get that white back but and I still suggest really preserving that white of the paper I think that is just the whitest white you're going to get is the white of the paper but there is a some neat tricks you can use and one of these markers I'll share later that it's called a Posca marker might as well share it now and it's that marker you see up there it's kind of black at the top right there and it's an acrylic marker that is really neat for getting finer lines like whiskers and I mean you could even get little snowflakes that things like that if you want to get some white back to your watercolor painting and I'm starting to add more of the local color that is the color that you know is natural to the scene that's in the fox trying to not overwork this color that's where you're going to get your freshest color is if you don't just add more and add more and I loved the colors of those oranges and a little bit of that magenta color and also notice how suggestive the tail is I have used my a little flat brush that I had to just suggest some of those darker values in the in the deep areas of that fluffy tail and not overwork it and also once again with regard to focal point I didn't want the tail to really draw you in with so many little dark values I mean I could have gotten carried away the tail really did have a lot of deeper darker values down in those deep parts of the fur but I knew that if I got too dark with those your eyes going to go there and not to the area I wanted as a focal point which is his face so I try to keep the tail very suggestive and and I think it ended up working out so okay really gonna add some music now enjoy I hope you like this I hope everyone is looking forward to 2021 I know I am I'm excited about all of the art I'm gonna bring your way and I just love all of you oh my goodness my Monet cafe family and my patrons you just bless me more than words can say all right enjoy I will be back at the end at this stage I was somewhat questioning whether or not I wanted to add that tree in the background and in hindsight I kind of liked it with just the fox in the snow and the sparse branches but I I did add some I'm wearing my robe there it was really cold here in Florida but what I'm doing here is I'm cutting out a paper towel around the fox and I'm gonna add some little splatters to the foreground kind of to suggest some little elements of sprigs and things you know on the ground and usually things do get a little bit darker in the foreground so I used a combination of a little bit of a darker watercolor this is me mixing some colors together to get a dark I don't really like using black and I was testing I don't do this a lot so I was testing it to make sure I could get my splatters right so I just added a few down to the foreground I did kind of like those but again I covered up the fox oops I splattered too much there I covered up the fox so as it wouldn't get on him and so I was happy with the final but I'm always learning myself you know and so I love that I can bring you guys along with me on this artistic journey and once again looking forward to 2021 and all the fun things we're gonna do together all right guys happy painting