 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I hope you will enjoy this tutorial of a painting I'm calling Joyful Morning. It will be an alcohol wash with soft pastel. So I hope you will enjoy and I hope you will subscribe if you haven't already. A few months ago I created this video using the same technique with an alcohol wash and you guys obviously loved it because it got nearly 90,000 views so far. So I decided to do another tutorial using the same technique and also share with you a tip on how I often take my own paintings, ones that I like, and I convert them. I create a new color palette arrangement and often I will flip-flop or mirror the image. For this painting I used a majority of Terry Ludwig pastels and this is the Maggie Price Basic Values 60 Soft Pastels. This set is lovely. These are the pastels I'll be using for the underpainting. I don't believe these were from the Maggie Price set but I chose to do a warm underpainting using some pinks, orange, and some purples. And this is the alcohol that I use, just regular alcohol, and some brushes that I love. They're very textured and I think they give a neat outcome for the underpainting. We want it loose and painterly to begin with. And here I am ready to start. It was a joyful morning. I often like painting in the mornings. The sketch portion will be sped up a bit but the remaining portion of the painting will be just a tad sped up in order to keep it small enough to upload basically. I'm using here a piece of willow charcoal or vine charcoal to get in something very basic. I don't want to overwork anything at this point. And now I'm applying the pastels that will serve as the underpainting colors. I'm using this purple. It's not the darkest value I'll use in the painting but it's the darkest value for the underpainting. I talk about underpaintings a lot and the value of using them in your paintings. They really do create a good impressionistic base for beginnings. Now I'm using a, it's kind of a wine color. I get my darkest values in first and vertical things like trees are almost always darker but background trees get a little bit lighter in value. Now normally I wouldn't choose a warm color for background trees but I know this is just the underpainting. And here comes the alcohol. I'm going to be using my stiff bristle brush. I always use some paper towels to control the amount of alcohol. Like if I have too much of my brush I just dab it onto the paper towel. And then I just start working. And if you try this it takes some finesse to figure out how much alcohol to use. You don't want too much and you don't want too little but lean more on the side of too much because these drips are what make the lovely impressionistic feel of the underpainting. Often I'll use some of the residue of the color that's on the brush like I'm doing here to paint a lighter value in areas that I know won't be quite as dark. So I'm really painting using the pastels as a painting medium. And I often work in sections going either from light to dark or dark to light. And I rinse my brush out in between so as not to contaminate areas too much. It's okay if some things drip into other areas. Again that really makes that nice impressionistic feel. But if you're trying to keep an area light such as the sky you know I didn't want to get too much of that dark into the sky. That's why I'm kind of working in sections here. So now you can see I'm just using my brush in a really loose manner letting it be fun and free and have some drips. And here's another example of me using some of the pastel on my brush. Notice the directional strokes. I wanted it to feel like this was almost like a valley and there's a river cutting through it. So I'm kind of it all kind of blends in anyway but I'm giving the idea of that motion of the hills in the background. Alright and now I'm using a little bit of a rust color, some more wine. I know I want a nice warm underpainting for the green grasses. That's one of the reasons uh oh that pastel had a little bit of a ridge on it. Sometimes you have to turn around a little bit. But I wanted a nice warm tone for some of the cooler grass colors. Now this pink, oh here let me go ahead and put this river in. I'm using my vine charcoal again to put in the stream that's kind of cutting through the little valley. And I'm just going to keep this really basic and I think it's just a compositional element really. I don't want to give too much detail to it into the painting because I already knew I wanted yellow flowers in this. I rarely paint with yellow flowers and I just had a feeling I wanted to do something happy and joyful. Now for those of you here on Monet Cafe, I am actually going to be adding some music pretty soon at this point and let you guys just follow along with some subtitles. I'll be adding with more information and instruction to the video. The remaining part of this video will have full commentary for my patrons on my Patreon page. They're so awesome to support this channel. If you don't know what it is, it's patreon.com slash susanjinkans and it's just a way people can support my channel to keep free videos coming on Monet Cafe and get a little extra instruction. So that's what I often try to do is give them some extra and so they will get the full commentary for this but you will still learn a lot by watching this process. It will not be sped up this much when I finish the underpainting. But very quickly before I move on to the pastel, I wanted to let you know I'm adding the music that's the same song for the previous alcohol wash video I mentioned because so many people loved this song. It was just so peaceful and relaxing. So I hope you'll enjoy this. It's from the YouTube audio library. I can get my music there copyright free. The songs aren't very long but this one is called Frolick by E. Jammy Jams. And keep an eye out for the subtitles which will have some additional instructional information. All right, relax and enjoy. Now I zoomed in here a little bit so that you can see this is going to be the lightest value yellow. Once again all of the yellows were from the Maggie Price basic 60 set of Terry Ludwig pastels because these are such a wonderful quality of pastel. Very buttery. They just really layer well on those final stages. And here's the final. I loved how the one flower was like reaching up into the heavens and it definitely felt like a joyful morning. So another point of this video was not just the alcohol underpainting alcohol wash I should say but also how you can take your own paintings and play around with them. I popped this one in Photoshop. I really like this. I might try to do a painting similar with this color palette. Isn't that cool? I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new. If you do recreate this painting from the tutorial I hope you'll tag me on Instagram or Facebook so I can see what you've created. All right artist happy painting!