 Hello my creative friends and welcome to my home studio that I call Monet Cafe. This is my little place in my home that I love to create and share via YouTube with you guys or wherever else you may be seeing this and I am excited about our Facebook group. It's called Monet Cafe Art, Monet Cafe Art Group. It is a private group so you would have to ask to join but we welcome any art level. You can be someone who's never even tried pastels but we do ask that you are actively seeking to learn more about pastels. You can even come from another medium. It doesn't matter if you've never tried pastels before so we welcome you and again I love seeing your art and everybody is growing and learning. But anyway back to Monet Cafe YouTube. Today I'm going to be standing at my easel which is what I prefer. I've gotten away from standing a little bit because it's easier to make the videos sitting down with my camera the way it is. But I prefer to stand because I can step back and I can see values and it's so much easier to see what you've done from far away. So I will be standing and I don't think today I'm going to give us much commentary as I've been doing the last couple of videos. I know a lot of you have requested the commentary. I totally get that. I actually love talking to everybody while I'm painting. I feel like I'm right there with you. But in this particular case I want to enjoy the process. Sorry is that selfish. I miss sometimes just the experience because it's as much about the experience as the finished product and I often put on praise and worship music and paint and it's just a place like an escape that I go to in my mind and I love it and most of you probably know what I'm talking about. If you don't you should try it. It's awesome. So anyway I'm going to get started and today I'm going to be using a reference photo from a gentleman named Martin who is on our Facebook group and he has generously added some of his photography to our member reference album. We have an album on the Facebook group where members are uploading their photographs allowing other artists to use them to paint and the neat thing is artists or people interested in art are usually really good at photography and they already crop things out right and have good compositions. So there's some beautiful photography there for you to use as reference photos or upload your photographs for other people to use. So that's what I'm going to be using today. It's just a beautiful photo that inspired me of some beautiful flowers. So I'm going to get started and I hope and pray that you enjoy this and that you'll come back and subscribe to our channel. All right thanks guys. I can't wait to get started. All right this is the initial sketch with this is just a Geoconda pastel pencil. This is sepia light is the shade but you could use really anything that's like a harder pastel. You can even use a pencil pencil but I like keeping it you know in the pastel family for the sketch. All right so now I'm just going to sketch this in and enjoy the process. All right I don't always get this detailed with an undersketch but in this case the photo was already so beautiful and I love the placement of everything that I just really wanted to get it down as accurately as possible. Some of these things may change as I go but at least I have a base to work from to feel confident about where things are to begin with. Now what I'm going to do is because this is UART paper you can hear it's sanded and it will receive water. So this is a 10 by 8 inch. I work in standard sizes typically just so that they're easy to frame. If a client doesn't want to have to go get a custom frame there are a lot of pre-made frames that are really great right now but um but anyway so that's just my reasoning for that. Now I'm going to I thought about doing an underpainting with my wax pastels which you may have seen in another video but I think first what I'm going to do is do an underpainting with um watercolor. This is a just a little travel set that I have. This is actually kind of a neat little travel watercolor set. I've added too much paint down in here um but it's made so that you can hold it like a palette. I'm left-handed so I would hold it this way and you you use your little wells here to paint with and I think the watercolor behind it will sort of set the mood. That's usually what I'm doing um with my art um with an underpainting is just setting a mood to work from. So here I go with a watercolor underpainting um a little bit of my thinking behind the underpainting with the watercolor. First of all you may notice that if you see my other videos I like drips. I think it adds to the painterly feel so I purposely mix up my watercolor with a lot of water. I didn't used to do this. I remember when I was first trying to discover how to do watercolor and under paintings with watercolor or just applying watercolor painting. I wasn't confident enough to let the water explore and to get creative with color. Now there's a fine line with it. You don't want to get too dark too quickly with watercolor but one good thing about this is it's an underpainting and it is going to dry lighter than it typically goes on at first. But what I'm doing with this is I'm giving this is not a complimentary underpainting. This would be what's called more of a local color. I'm using pretty much the colors that are in the scene already. I'm punching them up quite a bit because I like color um and I like that bold statement of beautiful color um but if you notice I um I am working mostly with values in this. I noticed that in the photograph this area here behind these flowers is some of the lightest values like the sun is shining behind them. If you notice the flowers are really kind of in the shade and so that's why I went ahead and gave them um you know some shadowy color bluish bluish purplish um petals here because um there's no sense in just leaving them white and then having to go do the value in pastel. So that already gets an idea of the fact that they're in the shadows and so that helps me a lot. There's a tendency sometimes when with painting that you see the flowers and you want to leave them blank because you're going to go in and do pastels but I've found that it's good to go ahead and just let things flow over it as long as I can still recognize where things are which I can for the most part and if I can't it's okay I'll just improvise and that kind of adds to the uh um spontaneity of it all. So anyway I think I like this underpainting so far I like the color I like the drips and I'm going to take it slow and easy with the pastels because I want to keep this painterly loose style and not lose what I have going on here so now on to pastels. Here we go. Alright so I know this looks like a lot of pastels in my little box that I use but I got lazy like I do sometimes and I didn't put my pastels away from my other paintings so I just added a few to this and um I should have enough selection out of this numerous amount of pastels so we'll see what we come up with here but I might also use my handy dandy little pipe foam insulation blender that fortunately I learned from Karen Margolis um it's just a little piece of pipe foam that works really well for blending um some of these background I'm going to try to leave the luminosity of the paper um but I think I will have to add some pastels to get a darker value back in here again these watercolors dried pretty light um so I'll just keep squinting my eyes and blending and try to get it uh correct but I am going to try to keep this loose and carefree so here we go I'm going to turn on my music and take a sip of my coffee the creation um creations that you're making and um others are sharing about their um things that they have a little