 Your in-for-treat today in Monet Cafe Studio. Get ready to watch the magical color happen as I combine acrylic ink and soft pastel. In this lesson you'll learn my easy technique for gorgeous color. Since soft pastels is an opaque medium I've learned that luminous beginnings is truly the key. I believe you really will witness the color exploding as I combine the mediums of acrylic ink with soft pastel. So come on into the studio and let's make some magical color. Welcome beautiful artistic friends to Monet Cafe Studio. Today you will witness me create a floral painting with soft pastels using some fun styles and creative products. You guys know I love to experiment and I just love to create paintings that are full of energy and life and aren't static and still. So watch these flowers come to life and bloom before your eyes in this tutorial. It's going to be fun and I think you're going to learn a lot. All right here we go. Let's first go over the products used in this lesson. My first tip for creating a pastel painting that has luminous color is beginning with a white surface. Yes white I know I often don't use white but I believe it's the key for this technique to get soft pastels to glow almost like watercolor. Pastel matte is a water friendly surface which is also very important for this technique. You can use other surfaces but make sure it's water friendly. It comes in pads of different colors and the pad that I used happens to have some white within it but they do sell pads of white only and I use pastel matte often for pastel painting. I also like all of the other colors that they offer but to me it's almost like a magical product in that it's not sanded like typical sanded pastel papers and yet it receives so many pastel layers and again it's water friendly. The pastel set that I primarily used for this entire painting along with some Terry Ludwig dark pastels that I'll show while I paint is the Paris Collection made by Sennelier. Now I love these pastels for multiple reasons. One is their absolutely gorgeous brilliant color. Also their application is outstanding and they're quite affordable. Here I'm showing on Amazon they're now $174. They used to be as low as like I think it was like $130 so this is a really great set for beginner pastel artists. Now here is the secret sauce for luminous pastel painting color. It's acrylic inks that I'll be using to make an application prior to the pastel painting. I use various colors that I'll show you but I wanted to share you could use watercolor but you don't quite get the intensity in color that you do with these acrylic inks and the reason I'm using them or would use watercolor is they're translucent. These are going to allow the brilliance of that white paper to show underneath. For my initial sketch I'm going to be using some markers. These are acrylic markers made by Tombow. If you saw my last video I give a whole video on how to use these and why. I'll talk about that as I sketch. Why I like to use markers especially when using any water-based mediums. Now I'm going to be using the brush tip to these markers. They have a fine tip as well and here's the video if you want to check out more about how to use these and here we go with the sketch. Now the reference image you see to my left there is one that I originally got from unsplash.com a site I use often for reference images but I tweaked it and altered it quite a bit in Photoshop and if you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page you will get a downloadable copy of that image. I've started to sketch but I want to point out something that I often do that's very helpful is if you have your painting surface the same as your reference image proportionally which mine is you can mark a halfway point on your surface on both vertically and horizontally. I've made some little marks there and you can do the same thing on your reference image and you can really get a nice gauge of where things are and where they fall. For example I was just able to identify the center of my reference image and sketch in some of those elements on the center of my surface. Now I'm not trying to sketch things exactly. I want this to be very impressionistic but I do want to get the elements pretty much where they are because I really did like my my tweaked version of this image. Notice how I made the mark for the bottom of my vase and I'm getting the general shape of the vase in and the reason I go ahead and jump to that area is because I don't want my drawing or sketch to go outside of my surface area. Have you ever done that? You start sketching on something and you get so detailed into it working from one point to another and you realize later that it was way bigger than you planned. So setting those little guide marks when you paint is a good idea. That's why I kind of started on the top right and then I kind of moved over a little then I went to the bottom. This way I'll ensure my sketch fits within my painting surface. And then I just go about comparing and contrasting shapes and positive and negative spaces and again keeping it loose. I want this to be super impressionistic and free feeling full of life. Not only do I want it to have that brilliant luminous color that is the point of this video I want even this underneath sketch to exhibit that freedom and life with strokes. I'm going to speed this up but you get the idea of really loose and gestural mark making. Also too I'll reinforce the reason I'm using this marker is if I had used pencil or charcoal and I went to apply my wet medium, my acrylic ink, it's probably going to smear. It almost always does and so I discovered using markers is a great way to prevent that issue from happening. I'm going to create an underpainting with these acrylic inks using what's called local color. The colors that are kind of in my reference image already and these are the colors I chose but keep in mind I can mix new colors with these colors as well. So I'm going to tell you the names of all of these colors but first let me show you my little system that I use. These are just little dishes that I got from Walmart. I think they're part of the Pioneer Woman collection. This first ink is Burnt Umber by Dayla Rowney. This second ink is called Dark Green although I don't know why it's called Dark Green. It's really kind of a turquoise color. This next one is by Amsterdam the company and it's called Turquoise Green and another one from Amsterdam is called Azo Orange. This was great for those sunflowers. This one is actually a watercolor ink. Yes you can mix them together and it is by Dayla Rowney as well and it's called Quinacridone Magenta. This is another Dayla Rowney acrylic ink. It's called Purple Lake. It's really a great color for under paintings. You can get nice darks with this color. Now all of these colors are mixable and they can be applied with varying degrees of strength based on how much water you use. I purposely like to use kind of a rough and tattered brush. This is just a cheap brush I got on Amazon and it's kind of textural and these are my little palettes for my colors. Yes they're just yogurt tops. You're going to see how I use those to put in the acrylic ink and add water. So here is my setup. It looks like I'm going to create Easter eggs or something with all these little dishes of color and now it's time to let the acrylic ink painting begin. I'm putting a little image of my completed painting off to the side to use that as a color reference and again if you're a patron of mine you will get my actual reference that I use. Now I like to have a decent amount of paper towels near me so I can control the water and what I'm going to be doing is just dipping a little bit of the color that I want to use. This is that pretty turquoise green. It was called dark green and I just put a little bit of it in my little yogurt top and then I add a little bit of water so I have a little varying degree of water to paint ratio and I'm using my little yogurt lids to also mix color. I wanted to mix some color that was a little darker for the inner parts of that background when they're kind of in between the spaces of the flowers. Things typically get a little darker in value because of shadow and things just being more tightly knit together and so I'm gradually working this throughout the background kind of changing some of the the value or again the water to paint ratio. I had added a little bit of the burnt umber actually to the turquoise color which gave it a little bit of warmth and will also kind of knock down that just pure highly saturated color. It makes it feel a little bit warmer and more natural so you can see here I am not trying to follow exactly this reference image. I'm having fun and it is fine if the color goes within a certain area. You don't have to follow the line so to speak. It's not like we're coloring in a coloring book or a paint by number. We're having some fun and freedom with this and at the same time you don't want to just paint willy nilly crazy. I have a method to my madness but again the first goal was just to get in this nice very loose background and even letting some of the white show through. I'm not even trying to cover up all the white but let me talk real quickly while I'm painting here about why this technique is going to allow your pastels to be more brilliant but first I want to share I'm going to be painting this vase soon. I added a little bit of the purple lake to some of that the green and the other burnt umber that I had it made a very nice dark but again the reason this is going to allow your pastels which are an opaque medium that just means they're not see-through. If you make a mark with pastel on this white surface you're not going to see the white surface anymore okay it's going to cover it up no matter how light you go with a pastel can't really get that luminosity like you can with a transparent medium. So this is my trick is to use the acrylic ink which are transparent or translucent to let that luminosity of the paper show through that's the brilliance of like watercolor and even these acrylic inks use this way is that they really do allow the light of the paper to stay very light and luminous and so what I do my little technique or trick is to go ahead and make an under painting with acrylic ink or as I mentioned watercolor and when we go to add the pastels you'll see that I don't cover it all up I use the pastels to accent the under painting but still allow that under painting to show through especially for some of the most vibrant and highly saturated flower colors you'll see me do that when I get to the soft pastel portion. I really wanted to compliment that gorgeous turquoise background by creating the tabletop or whatever it is in a beautiful rich red orange color now the colors that you saw me mix I used a little bit of the fluorescent or quinacridone magenta it's very similar to fluorescent pink and a little bit of the burnt umber and a little bit of the azo orange now another thing I want to mention is when I mix these colors when you see me mixing them on my yogurt tops I'm not mixing them to death I'm not blending them to make one consistent color but I'm allowing them to have a gradation of those colors and even mix on the surface see here how I kind of have a gradation of color and I'm pointing here the the light source is obviously coming from the left side because that vase has a sheen on the left side there so I'm just creating a little bit of darker color over to the right behind the vase area and these colors will dry a little bit lighter so I grabbed a little bit of the purple lake to add to the vase and again I'm putting it mostly on the right side because it's more in shadow and now I'm continuing to work the background a little bit I kind of wanted to soften that transition and give a little bit more warmth to the lower part of that turquoise background and I'm just kind of using this brush to soften those edges a bit and now I'm going to switch brushes this brush is pretty neat it's called a bamboo brush and it's kind of weird it first looks like it's a nice sharp point but when you add water it kind of is strange I heard another artist describe it as painting with a puppy dog's tail and you normally wouldn't want to do that but for some reason it will help you to keep things very impressionistic and I'm going to slow it up a bit here to describe what I'm doing these are the sunflowers now I've mixed up a little bit of the quinacridone magenta with the azo orange it just made a nice orange kind of a dark orange color and I'm putting it you know the centers of the sunflower are going to be the the where it's white it's going to be kind of black there so I put that darker orange a little closer to the centers and now I'm using the azo orange to kind of go out radiate out where the petals of the sunflower will be and this is the reason that I left some of this white do you see how golden that color looks if I had put everything down as turquoise there's no way it would have shown up that brilliant and luminous luminous is the word I want you to remember here so I'm speeding up the rest of this but hopefully you'll get the idea of this is why I like to use the white paper with a medium like acrylic ink or watercolor on the white surface because I really believe there's no way you're going to get that luminous brilliance like you can get on the white surface with these mediums now you see I'm adding some of the magenta this is that beautiful quinacridone magenta and I added a little bit of the purple lake to it to get a little bit more of a purple color and I'm just letting it flow now keep in mind that the pastel matte will behave similar to watercolor paper in creating what's called a bloom it's sometimes when you have some watercolor down and you add more on top of it at a certain stage of dryness it will um it will just kind of expand out like this bloom and that will happen with this so um just be careful not to add just huge amounts of water to it now you can see I'm adding some of the green and even though I didn't have a green acrylic ink I mixed some of the colors that I had to get the greens that you're seeing here so that's a neat thing about acrylic ink is you know you don't have to have every color in the rainbow you can have a few colors and really mix them and get a whole variety of colors so I was making sure to get some of my darker colors down in the centers where those stems are gathered together but notice how I left the white of the paper showing through in so many areas specifically those sunflowers and some of those beautiful pinks and purples now it's time for pastel as I mentioned it does dry a little bit lighter but that's fine with me I still have those nice beautiful luminous colors showing through I'm going to begin with some darks since the vase in the reference image was actually black and I love these terry luddwig darks they had this little 14 set available for a limited time but they have larger dark sets available too and this is the terry luddwig eggplant color it looks black it's actually a really dark purple the remainder of the pastel painting portion is sped up substantially here on the Monet cafe channel if you're a patron of mine you've actually already gotten the full version of this lesson with all of my commentary and not fast like this so if you would like the full lesson and you'd like to become a patron it's really easy you just go to patreon.com slash susan jinkins and subscribe it's only five dollars a month and cancel at any time and also you're going to unlock hundreds of lessons that I have included full content for also I often forget to say this plus there's no commercials on YouTube when you're a patron of mine your lessons are commercial free and we are really just this nice community of artists that all just love pastel painting and I get to see your work we have contests it's just a wonderful community of artists and I often say it's my family I truly believe that all right back to this painting I'm almost done at this point and I want you to notice how specifically those pinks in the upper right corner and those sunflowers and certain elements are really popping with color and I have to credit that to that luminous background that you can still see some of the white of the paper showing through and it has such an impressionistic and painterly feel and style to it and I just love the color and the energy here's the aftermath of my pastels mostly that Sennelier Paris Collection set oh and I forgot to mention if you're a patron of mine you also get my edited reference image that I used from unsplash.com all right everyone I hope this blessed you and if you've made it this far please click that like button subscribe to this channel leave me a comment as always god bless and happy painting