 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. Have you ever wanted to just paint with some dramatic glowing color? Well, I'm gonna give you a great tip on how to do that with this interesting and Brilliant underpainting. If you would go ahead and like this video Go ahead and subscribe if you haven't already and if you hit the little bell next to the subscribe button You'll be notified of any future videos I post. This free video tutorial is brought to you because of the faithful support from My patrons on my patreon page for $5 a month. You can support this channel and you get extra content Let's first talk about these products. I love these two colors of acrylic inks This one is fluorescent pink and I typically buy Daylor Rowney, which is that yellow one That's Indian yellow and there's just something magical that happens when I combine those two colors Now I have a black piece of foam core board with you art paper It's a sanded pastel paper taped around with black artist tape I find it keeps it nice and flat first what I do is I add a little bit of pink and I kind of guess this Proportion here. It's About half and half. I think I added more fluorescent pink with it. No, maybe not It's about maybe a little bit more Indian yellow, but I just kind of guess at it now This is not a body spray. It's water in a little mister bottle I like to mist my surface before adding this and I like now I'm just kind of like putting drops with the dropper on the surface It's going to blend so smoothly because of the water application And I just literally get a brush and start brushing it in I do often people ask how long does it take to dry? Well, I get anxious and I blow it dry often now I discovered this technique in a recent video and I literally just wipe off some of the sky To create a little bit of a value study, so I've got land and sky there with just two values And now as I typically do I like to get my darks in I was using a reference image from pixabay.com Of some lovely blue flowers and I'll have a clickable link in the description of this video But I was working rather intuitively. I'm not showing my pastels in this, but I was using I think I used quite a bit from the Sennelier 40 half-stick set. I love Sennelier pastels. Now, let me talk a little bit about this UART paper It's a sanded pastel surface, and I love it I have loved it for years, but I noticed that it has a tendency to curl and some people say it's in humid climates Which I'm in in Tampa, Florida area, but I switched to a surface I use now mostly called Fisher 400. It's almost identical to UART 400, but it doesn't curl for some magical reason. It doesn't curl So I have been getting that from pro art panels calm But I had a lot of UART left so I thought I got to keep this flat So this is my new method of how I showed you it's a piece of black foam core board I just cut my painting. This is almost a perfect square. It's probably about an 8 by 8 or 9 by 9 And I just taped it around the edges with black artist tape I think it's a quarter inch quarter inch artist tape, and it worked great. The other thing that worked great for me I'm just using a piece of vine charcoal here to just get in some of the flower shapes But another reason taping it to the board works well for me is because you guys have made some great comments that you really like my overhead filming Method and I think it's because I can have the camera literally right over the painting instead of off to my side And you can see better the challenge with that is I prefer working with my my surface on an easel And the reason is because the pastel dust will fall when I'm working flat like this the pastel dust just kind of lays there So every so often I take my painting and I just go outside and tap it off to get the dust off Well having it on this board makes it totally easy. I just take the board outside and tap it off So I thought some of you guys might Maybe even like to do this little board technique yourself, especially if you have you art paper I also just used a paper towel to do some blending. There's a neat way You can use it by just folding it using a corner of it And then you can fold it over itself to switch colors So you don't let your colors contaminate each other But you can see there's quite a bit of pastel dust all over the place So this is when I have to take it out and actually tap it off and I'm just re-establishing my darks here I got in a nice muted little bit of a value of some of those darks when I blended the paper towel and This reference image has a very simple composition. This should be a good little lesson for beginners And if you just have a few colors, okay, you're gonna I'm gonna show all of my I'm praising the Lord right there I'm listening to some praise and worship music. I can't help it, but at the very end of this video I'm gonna show all of my pastel colors that I use for this. I do obviously use a lot of greens and blues and I use some Lavenders in the sky as well and you'll and I'm using my finger to blend a little bit there I'll do that sometimes in initial stages But I actually try not to do a lot of blending towards the end of the painting middle to end of the painting because they start to blend themselves So you can have a kind of limited palette of colors to give this a try Also, as I said, the composition was quite simple But at the end of it I feel like it was weighted a little heavy on the left side because of that bank of trees Now if I had some of those flowers reaching up higher to the left I could have balanced it out that way, but I end up actually kind of removing some of those I don't know why but I at the end I add another Distant bank of trees on the left side and I felt like it balanced it out a little better So I'm actually just gonna add some music and let you guys watch me paint But the point of this lesson is that Even if you have limited colors You can make those colors just pop by putting down an underpainting that really complements your painting and Or the pastel selections that you use and one way to do this one of my favorite Techniques is a color similar to this which is a golden glowing color I love the combination of these acrylic inks with the fluorescent pink and the Indian yellow It's very similar to another underpainting product that I use. I use golden fluid acrylics and their color called quinoa quadone nickel azo gold is Probably a little more yellow than this that I put down I really like this orange though as well and it also is a great way for you just to lay down a color and Start painting and it's really gonna make your painting pop Especially if you're leaving some of the underpainting showing through in other words Don't cover the whole thing up it still has an influence on your painting believe it or not even if you cover the majority of it up but The beauty in it is keeping it really impressionistic and loose and And letting some of that underpainting peek through also another reason I think colors like this work so well is Landscapes are primarily or primarily have a lot of green and blue. We've got a lot of greens and grasses and trees Not that every scene has to be green grass or green trees and we have a lot of blue in the skies So what is the complement to that color if you get a color wheel a Compliment to a color is just opposite on the color wheel. So the complementary color to greens And blues kind of that cool side of the color wheel is going to be warmer tones It's going to be orangey colors red colors I often sometimes will do an underpainting that is more like that fluorescent pink alone I love pink under paintings and another thing I like is to have an underpainting That kind of glows through it's not it's very transparent Notice that the surface of the u.r. Paper was kind of it was light It's kind of creamy colored But I chose a product this acrylic ink combined with spritzing it with water kept it very Seethrough and you're still seeing kind of the glowing of the paper showing through and that's one of the reasons I prefer acrylic inks and The gold and fluid acrylic that quinacridone nickel azo gold color because it's very transparent I also for the same reason like to do watercolor under paintings You could do something similar like this with watercolor because you are paper and also the Fisher 400 paper that I talked about before They are water-friendly surfaces. So is pastel matte often. I'll do pastel I just did a video of some sheep in the sunshine on white pastel matte and I did a watercolor under painting on that so you could you could really probably just get some cadmium orange maybe even some quinacridone violet mix those two together with watercolor and That will probably create a color very similar I also like to mix them together on the palette and on the surface not mix them in a dish necessarily like I did Sometimes it's fun to spritz your surface with water Then say you're using watercolors get some quinacridone violet brush it in and Then get some of your cadmium orange and brush it in and let them Kind of blend and bleed together. It creates some interesting color movement So you don't even you don't always have to do it solid like I did But this is probably the easiest way to do an under painting is just tone your surface one nice solid color. All right Have I just totally warn you guys out with that point? But I do I really love it now. I am choosing did I say we're gonna add some music I always do that I'm choosing some greens that I just found so interesting and I realized I don't use them a lot This reference image had some of these ochre looking greens often The way that color works Color illusions I call them rather than color theory is colors usually get cooler as they recede into the distance because of something called Atmospheric perspective there's literally a lot of air between you and things in the distance. That's why mountains look cooler They look bluer. They look more purple and Things in the foreground are usually warmer So typically grasses even in the distant fields will cool off, but sometimes they don't so that's why I always give a little disclaimer when I say Things cool off in the distance. I say typically you've got to keep your subject matter and the lighting the time of day Things like that in mind. There was something happening in this reference image to where I don't know if it was a glow of the sun But it was making those greens to me in my mind. It looks so interesting So this big old pastel here is a Terry Ludwig Terry Ludwig makes some gorgeous blues, and I also really loved the blue Contrast with the orange under painting. Those are nice complementary colors, too So that just really made it pop so again the point of this video is to make your colors pop and Get away from using just dull colors and also there I am praising the Lord again and also Keeping your strokes loose. I know because I have so many of you on the Monet cafe art group I mean okay Monet cafe YouTube channel and thank you guys subscribers. We're at 67 close to 68,000 subscribers now. I hope to get to a hundred thousand before the end of the year I'm not sure if we'll make it but so subscribe if you haven't now I'm kind of dancing with my fingers, but also with my Monet cafe art group of on Facebook of 15,000 members I hear a lot of your questions is my point and a common one I get is I'm sorry for shaking my camera there a common question. I get is how do I get more loose and using more color that is not necessarily exactly what I see in the scene and Getting this bold underpainting is one way to punch up your color and really get dramatic color and using just general Color illusion rules like I say not color theory color theory sounds like school, right? So I say color illusions using those general rules Will help you to be able to bend the colors away from the scene and use some that are I'd had another video Just like two three videos ago where I showed you in Photoshop exactly how it works If you keep your value close, you can add Brightness or boldness to your color often. I'll go in and edit out all those little Parts where there's a little blank space like like, you know right now when I'm dancing with my hands and I have Usually praise and worship music on when I'm playing. I've been loving this one musician his name is Zach Williams and Zach Williams and His work is a little bit. Hmm. What would I say? It's a little rock. It's Christian, but it's a little rock It's a little maybe southern rock is a better way to describe it a little leans towards gospel southern rock and cool He's just really awesome. He's a cool dude. So I'm often listening to music while I paint and that's just part of my You know how we say art is like therapy. It's very therapeutic One of my favorite things to do is to paint and praise the Lord and when I can do them at the same time That's really awesome. So I apologize for not editing out a lot of the blank space But I literally have to take my computer in my precious macbook pro computer where I create everything To get it checked out at the genius bar at apple. Um, I had a what's called if any of you are familiar with apple products I had apple care Fortunately, so everything's covered but my battery wasn't lasting at all and so I got the I got them to fix that They put a new battery in I hate it to be away from my computer to be away from me for like three days But supposedly they fixed it. Well, I got it back and it's not fixed so I have to take it back in again And I'm creating this video editing it right before a memorial day weekend So I'm gonna take it in in just a few hours So I'm uh, that's why I'm not getting a lot of editing done to this video And you're just getting more of the raw footage and let me know if you if you like just the raw footage with even the little blank Spaces of me dancing with my fingers. Uh, let me know it would save me a lot of time. Uh, but anyway, all right Look at this blue again. I'm not adding music. Um, look at this blue next to this orange sky Oh my god, I kind of liked it without adding any color to the sky just having an orange sky But uh, typically the way skies work is a lot of times There's a little lighter value down at the horizon and sometimes I'll make the lighter area just in a section that I want it to have more focal Influence or impact and so I'm gonna keep the lighter values near that bank of trees there So you can see these beautiful purpley colors. I'm not worried about smoothing all of this in That's another way to keep your painting looking really loose. I'm just kind of scumbling in colors And uh, eventually they all kind of start to work together. Um, so it was a lot of fun I love the color. It's almost like you create a new color. Do I sound excited when I'm creating this? I am color excites me. Um, it's almost like you're creating a new color When you are lightly layering these colors over a beautiful underpainting like this Okay, I need to take a breath and I'm actually going to add some music But this painting didn't didn't take all that long. So if you Enjoy this video. Please like it. There I go shaking my camera my My uh, actually it's my iphone that records. Um, if you enjoy this video, give it a thumbs up It really does help this video to get seen by more people YouTube will share it their algorithm. Um, we'll make it more visible to other people Make do a comment leave me a comment. 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My husband and I lost our jobs in 2020 due to covet and um So I had to start doing art as my full-time job And it's because of the patreon support that I'm able to keep bringing the free videos to mona cafe I used to just do it kind of as a side thing So that's because of the gracious and wonderful support of my patrons plus if you become a patron on my patreon page Uh, and I have a link for my patreon page at the end of every video and in the description of the video But if you become a patron you become part of the family and we have such a neat community You get to share your work with me. I have a homework album You get extra assignments. You get extra content extra footage Often you get my reference photos and a color guide of my pastels used all kinds of stuff like that So too much to mention here. Um, but anyway, so that would be great if you would like to support support in that way So all right, I'm gone now. Here's some music and I will be back at the end of the video I'm just about finished at this point and as you can see I added some Whispy grasses and I kept it super loose. I didn't want to overdo anything I give it my signature with a little prismacolor new pastel and as I said, I'm going to show you my pastels I I do this often while I'm painting. I'll just kind of rearrange my palette Just to see where all my colors are and the different values I apologize that I I have it up towards the top of the screen But I think you can see almost all of the colors that I used lots of greens I divide them by color temperature as well and here is the final I really did love the vibrancy of this painting. I will have this available in my etsy shop So check that out. I'll have a clickable link in the description of this video once again Become a patron if you'd like to support this channel Leave a tip for this video if you like just click that. Thanks Button underneath the video subscribe and just become part of the family. All right everyone. God bless and happy painting