 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I am very excited to bring some beginner lessons on winter landscapes. I'm also going to be featuring Derwent Ink Tense Blocks. It's a really great way to create an underpainting, and in this lesson I'm going to be using them unlike I've ever used before. So it should be interesting, educational, but you don't have to have these products to participate in this lesson. I'll be talking all about that throughout the video. So I wanted to bring some lessons for beginners. My beginners are always so appreciative, and I'm going to be creating four winter landscapes. These are going to be simplified, nothing too difficult, and on some surfaces and using some products that you probably already have. So I'm going to explain that right now. So let's get ready for some winter fun. It's not winter or doesn't feel like winter here in Tampa, Florida. But I'm going to imagine it in my mind. Maybe I can create some snow here. All right, guys, let's do this. The supplies we'll be using will be watercolor paper. I happen to be using an Arches watercolor block. It's really needed. The pages are glued together, so it keeps the paper from warping. But use what you have. I've blocked mine off into four six by six squares. The images we'll be using will be a square format. You could do it whatever size you want. I've already cropped my images to be six by six. I'll go over the images and we're going to need something to do what's called an underpainting. Now snow has a lot of white, right? A lot of white. This image is really rather dull, but it's a real simple composition. And so we want to spice this up a little bit and liven it up. And what we're going to do is we're going to create an underpainting. I can't tell you how many questions I get about under paintings. And one of the questions is, how do you know what color to paint it? Well, it depends kind of on what you're trying to create. And I'd like to create something more vibrant than this gray scene, obviously. So I think what I'm going to do, I'll go over the products you can use to do the underpainting. But I think I'm going to create a warm underpainting. I want some warmth under all this snow. Now snow, of course, we can use whites, grays, of course. But often in snow, I like to use a lot of blues and a lot of purples and a nice compliment to that. You see on the opposite side here, it's kind of like the color wheel here. It's a nice compliment would be some of these warmer tones. All right. So now you can use for that. Actually, you could use watercolor. We're going to paint right on the watercolor paper. I'm sorry for the big truck driving by my house. That's why I do voiceovers a lot, by the way. And so you can use watercolor. You can use pastel. You could get some warm tones of pastel. Often I talk about how we apply pastel and we can use water to liquefy it and turn it into paint and give it a wash. Or we could use alcohol to do that. And I'm going to be using this product. It's called Ink Tense Blocks. It's actually ink and it is vibrant and gorgeous. I'm trying to get the bottom of the lid out here so you can see the top of it. Ink Tense, I got the whole kit and caboodle, the Ink Tense 72. They make small sets of these and I really like them for their vibrancy. And I'm going to be using these warm tones to get my underpainting. Then we are going to do something after it dries to allow this watercolor paper to receive pastel. Now we could use soft pastels right on the underpainting. But you can't get a lot of layers. Pastels do better when it has a little bit of a textured surface. And so to create that grit, we're going to use this clear gesso. Hi, Bob. Bob Ross is hanging out and that's Leonardo. We're going to use this clear gesso. Now this is not regular gesso that's white. For some reason, the clear gesso has a little bit of grit in it and it creates a really nice sanded surface. It's one of my favorite ways to do a homemade pastel surface. And obviously it's clear, which means that our underpainting is going to show through. It dries really pretty clear. So that's another reason you don't want to use the white gesso. So those are our products and you don't have to have big sets of pastel. I'm going to keep this real simple and break down the colors for you. So I'll be doing this image and I hope to do four. I'm going to do these more quickly than normal and hopefully I'll get to all four of these. All right, let's get started. Oh, and a cup of tea is nice. I am drinking some chai tea right here. Tejo, I always seem like I'm advertising their company, but some nice chai tea and I'm going to put on some music. Maybe some Zach Williams. I've been enjoying his music lately. So all right, now I'm ready to get started. I'm speeding up the sketch just to show you how simplified this is. Just a basic sketch. I'm really just getting big shapes and proportions. Nothing has to be set in stone. I get my hill, a few trees and some background trees. Now, I think you're going to like the fact that I have used my second camera in this case. You see where you can see my hands and I've zoomed in here. Sorry if it looks a little fuzzy to show you this new way. I'm using them. I saw another artist do this technique where they literally just took water on a brush and applied it directly to the ink tense stick. And these little wells in the ink tense container are just for that to create a paint basically. So watch this. Wow. Can you see how vibrant that is? Now my typical technique is to lay down the block, the intense blocks. They're called blocks. I mean, they're sticks, but I don't know why they're called blocks. But anyway, I typically just sketch it out and then I add the water on the surface, whether it's a water friendly pastel surface or watercolor paper in this particular example. But I had never tried it this way and just look how vibrant they are. All right. Now let me talk a little bit about why I'm doing this and my technique. I'm using a pretty large flat brush. I like when I'm doing an underpainting to use a larger brush. The point is to keep it loose to really just get in some vibrant color, keep it really loose painterly and to get in your big shapes and values. So you can probably see that I grabbed kind of that orangy red that I used first and now I'm using a deep kind of dark purple. By the way, ink tense is just what it says. It's ink. It's compressed ink. It's not watercolor. It's compressed ink and it is intense. The colors are very intense when you add water to them. But just like with watercolor, its intensity depends on how much water you put down. So you can kind of control how dark the value, how dark or light something is. And so I also like to just work general shapes with this. That's why my sketch was so simplified. I'm just getting the gesture of the trees also with my large brush. I can kind of sketch in almost with a brush the shape of them in a zigzaggy pattern. Pine trees, evergreen trees typically have more zigzags. So I'm not getting over complicated with where everything is. I'm kind of squinting my eyes and blurring things out and looking at generally where things are. And if I had to succinctly define or describe what an underpainting is, it's just that. It's just kind of getting these large shapes, your values. Now you see right there what I did is I grabbed a little bit of a darker. I think I grabbed a darker. I may have added less water of the ink tense to create darker values more at the base of the trees and where some of those tree trunks are. You'll see me do that more in a little bit too. So again, to the underpainting, you're kind of zoning out, blurring everything out and focusing on the big shapes and the energy, the movement of things without getting so caught up in every little detail. And I think to me, that's why or how a painting can become frigid or static very quickly is when we early on start focusing on all the little things. I believe that when we create a painting, we should be expressing ourselves and what we loved about that image in the first place. I know if you've been even if you're just a brand new beginner, you look at images and there's something you go, Oh, I love that. I would love to paint that. And if you can ask yourself, what was it that initially caused me to think that? And then that is going to be your focal point and the energy of your painting. So this underpainting technique is a way to capture that and remember that as you paint. And now I am adding one more color here. I can see now that I I've only done two colors thus far. Now, this is more of a pinkish tone and it's a little bit lighter than that dark purple that I had. And if you've watched the videos, my videos on Monet Café for a while, I talk about value all the time. Value is a way that you can create that illusion of depth in your painting. And as things recede as they get further away in the distance, your value is going to get lighter. Now, often color confuses us. It gets in our brains and gets in the way. But this pink tone is a lighter value than the dark purple. So that's why I decided with these trees that are kind of on a bank or a hillside a little further away. And by choosing this lighter on the intense stick was literally lighter, this lighter value, it's going to give that feeling of depth. And so you can see here in my footage, it's my actually an SLR camera, Canon camera that I'm using, that I am literally just painting on the stick with water, which allows that ink to stay on my brush where I can paint with it just like paint. And one thing I wanted to remember to mention that if you are someone who is familiar with watercolor and you've never used ink or in this case compressed ink in these sticks, ink behaves differently than watercolor. It when it dries, you can't move it around. If you're rewet it, it's not going to do like watercolor. Often with watercolor, we can add water and even after it's dry, we can kind of dilute it, move it around. And that's not the case with this ink. I've found there's an advantage to that. I can actually add other colors and obviously water as the medium that I'm using to create the paint and it doesn't affect the color that I've already laid down if it's already dry. So I hope that makes sense. The best way to learn this is to play with both, play with some watercolor, play with ink, and then you'll find the things you like about both. Now I'm getting a wash in of sorts. A wash is kind of when you add more water. And you can see this is kind of that pink that I had added to some of those background trees. I controlled the value by how much water I added and I'm kind of doing the same thing here. And while the paper or the paint is fairly wet, you can still maneuver it. You can blend them together. Once it's dry, like I said before, it doesn't behave quite the same as watercolor. So keep that in mind and play. Like I said, that's the best teacher is just to play and experiment. Now I am choosing this warm color, this golden color, because I wanted to give an illusion or a feeling of warmth or sunset behind these trees. And so I thought the pink in the upper sky would be nice and the golden down behind the trees. And now you can see that I'm using that gold to kind of blend over top of the pink. I'm also going to take some of this golden color and put it in the foreground. Now my red area that I added in the foreground is already dry, but I can layer this yellow over it to make a nice golden feel. Also things in the sky always get reflected onto the land and onto these background trees like I'm adding. So that's why I'm putting in some of this golden color. It wouldn't be as much on the side of the evergreen trees that are, you know, on our side of the trees because it's that's more in shadow. So now I grabbed some of that pink again and can you say I just played with color? But I used that red and I'm blowing it dry here. Obviously I used that red in the foreground because warm colors are usually more in the foreground. And I know I'm going to be adding snow on the top of it. So I'll talk more about that in a minute. Now here's where we are going to get the texture is this clear gesso. Like I mentioned before, if we were just to start painting with pastels on top of the the ink or just the watercolor paper, really, I won't really be able to get more than just a layer or two. And part of the beauty of pastels is how colors interact when you layer them. And this texture to this clear gesso, it has a little bit of sand or grit. So when it's dry, it dries more clear than you're seeing it here. When it's dry, it allows you to lay down pastels. Now you can see it. It does have a little bit of opaqueness to it, not much, but you can still see your under painting quite well. Now this little set of pastels I'm using is a Sennelier. It's a French company with some gorgeous pastels. I love these pastels for their softness and their color intensity. And they have some really punchy, bold colors. I love it. But this little forty half half stick set is awesome. I like half sticks for two reasons. You get more color for your money than buying the full sticks and they're in the perfect little size. I often break my pastels anyway. So I'm going to use this set primarily. I do grab a few other pastels that I'll show you as I work. Now this is a piece of pipe foam insulation. Everybody always asks, what's that thing you use to blend? I use a few different blending tools, but this one is great when you're working on a sanded surface. It's what you literally use to insulate your pipes in cold climates. We don't need that here in Tampa, Florida, but they do sell it everywhere. Well, any hardware store will usually have pipe foam insulation. So I just cut off little pieces and use them. I've heard you can put them in your washer and wash them. I always just wipe them off with a paper towel that works pretty well. So why am I blending these trees? I wanted to soften them up a bit and just give a mood that's a little bit more impressionistic. And I often use the residue that's on my pipe foam insulation to paint with. And I'm doing, in this case, I'm grabbing some of it and getting a little bit on some of those distant trees. I still wanted them to look like the same family of trees. They've got that nice underpainting under it, but that already just gave that layering feeling of perspective. Darkest in the foreground, that's my middle ground trees. And then the distant trees are going to be even lighter. Now you'll hopefully be able to see me pick up the pastels in this set. But occasionally you'll notice I put them back in the wrong spots every so often. Whenever I'm done painting, I reorganize them, but sometimes I'm just zoning out, listening to the music. And I'm not really paying attention to my little set of pastels. But now you can see where I have added that pretty lavender color that's part of the set. Now what I'm doing here is I am just glazing it and sneaking it in behind some of the trees to give another feeling of depth. I don't want just flat snow in one straight line in front of these trees. Some of the trees were a little closer to me, the ones on the far right. I'm showing here how these Sennelier pastels, they have little tails on them sometimes. When you haven't used them a lot or a particular edge or corner to it. And that comes from how the machine cuts them. Sometimes it picks up part of the pastels. So often I'll just wear it down a little bit. Now this is a nice blue. Notice I added purple and blue on top of this red. That red is going to create that nice warmth underneath the snow. One of the questions I get all the time is why do you make an underpainting? If you just cover it up. But I have stressed this in so many underpainting tutorials where I talk about underpaintings. The goal is not to cover it all up. But even when it appears that it is, the underpainting still has an influence on your final piece. So now I'm just sneaking in some of this blue. I know my furthest away trees are going to be lighter. So they're far away, maybe looks like they have a little snow on them. Now look, I've grabbed a pink color and I thought this would make a nice interaction of color with the purple and the blue. So it's like I say often, if you get value right, that's your lightness or your darkness in a scene that I've been talking about how things closer are darker, things further away are lighter and things vertical are darker, things flat are usually lighter. If you get those things right, you can really play around with color. You don't want to get haphazard with it. But and the more you do this, the better you get at it also to with skies. Notice I went and put that pink kind of at the upper sky. And now I'm gradually getting lighter. That's kind of how it is how skies work in nature. Is there typically of a slight darker value in the heavens up high and they gradually get lighter and warmer down towards the horizon. And typically why they get warmer is because of the sun. Now you think of it, well, what if the sun's not setting at the horizon line? Well, it doesn't matter because a sky in general, our atmosphere is only so many miles high. I'll have to look that up and find out how high. So we're getting in our area of atmosphere. We're getting warmth as we get out of our atmosphere, the heavens cool off. So in general, things are cooler up high and a little darker up high and then just gradually get warmer down towards the horizon line and lighter. Now I'm adding a little bit of light colors. Remember how I talked about the color layering? I decided I wanted to add a little bit more of this blues and purples down here. A little darker value because foregrounds are typically a little darker. And I want to give that feeling of a hill kind of rolling up. So the the bank that's facing me is a little more in shadow than the part that's a little more flat up kind of towards the trees in that middle area. And up to this point, the video has been all real time. I want to speed up this last part so that I can show you one more of the paintings. And I did complete all four, but each of them had a little lesson in itself. So I decided to just give this one more of the real time and then the other ones, two more actually the last two. I'll give a separate lesson on in one of them. I will actually create a green underpainting for a snow scene. Yes, a green underpainting and it worked really well. So that's something to look forward to. Also, if you're a patron of mine, you will be getting my color notes. I think for two of these paintings, you'll also be getting my cropped reference images. I'll show them here, but my patrons usually get the extra goodies. And if you don't know what that is to become a patron of mine, it's on my Patreon page. Patreon is a great way where people can support artists or all kinds of other creators. And to be a patron of mine, it's only $5 a month. There's no long term commitment. And I love the fact because I get to see your work. I have some private groups and a homework album where you submit your work from my lessons. And that's always fun. We have contests and I give prizes, art supplies, give cards, and so we have a lot of fun. Now I'm sneaking in some of this golden kind of, this is such a beautiful Sennelier color here in the 40 half stick set. I'm sneaking it in behind some of the trees and it's serving two purposes to give that glow. And also to do a little negative painting. You notice how I kind of shaped up those trees often with trees instead of drawing branches or leaves. Positively, we carve in negatively and when you sneak in little colors like this, it just gives a little pop. Now wasn't that fun? All right, now I'm going to show you the second painting and I'm going to speed it up so this video is not so long. And I've decided to create them as separate videos so you'll get more real time with those lessons. This first part here is just a bit of real time and also just so you know, the set that I showed before, the Derwent Intense Blocks, there are two layers to it. Okay, I just want to make sure you knew it's 72. But as I mentioned before, there are smaller sets available if you just want to play around with these. And as I always say, I have links to most of the products I mentioned in the video in the description of the video. I have clickable links. I also have my Amazon shop where you can visit that and see all these categories of things that I've conveniently categorized for you to find. Some paper, pastel papers, sanded and unsanded that I use pastel, soft pastel products. I have a category called in the studio with a lot of the things you see me using in my studio. So it's a really neat way for you to find things even if you don't buy them on Amazon. A lot of times Amazon does have the best price, but not always. So be sure to check that out. So this is the same process. I am not showing the footage here of my hands with the the overhead footage that I did before because I wanted to plop in the reference photo for this one. Unfortunately, I can't with my editing software. I have I can't put two superimposed images at the same time. So I kind of have to pick or choose. Am I going to put the reference image or am I going to put my extra footage of actually my hands with my pastel choices and color choices? So as you can see here, I'm just still using the brush. I'm literally just putting water on it and painting it on the stick like I did before. Of course, I made some sketch marks like I did before, but this was really a fun way for me to paint. And as I say in this video and almost all my videos, use what you have. If you don't have these Derwent Inktense blocks, use some watercolor, use some pastel. I mean, you can even do my lessons with other mediums. And as you can see here, this is the same process that I did before the general sketch using the Inktense blocks or whatever medium you use to get an underpainting. And with this image, it was again a sun kind of behind the trees. And this one very, very much so, very dramatic. And that's what I wanted to capture was this drama and I loved those long shadows. So instead of going with a warm underpainting with this one, I wanted to show the difference of what if you use cooler colors as are kind of in the scene or inherent for a snow scene. So part of this process, again, for beginner focused lessons is to give you guys some information and ideas of how things behave when you try a different color palette. And I think often as beginners, we're kind of afraid to make bold color choices or different color choices. And like I've said continuously through this video, the best teacher is just to play, have some fun. And I think I probably have too much fun when I paint. I should probably get a little more serious, but I think that's just part of the joy of painting. It's not always your final product. It's the process and was it enjoyable? And I can't share the music I listen to while I'm painting because it's copy written music, but I like to paint and enjoy the experience. Often I listen to praise and worship music, classical music. And so do that yourself. Enjoy this process. But again, about color, a lot of it is just playing and you're even going to see on the third one of these. As I mentioned, I will be creating a green underpainting for a snow scene and it really works. So have some fun with these. But this proves here you can use cool colors for a snow scene. Even this is what's called local color. It's a little bit more inherent to the scene. You know, it's kind of a little bit more about what's there. I mean, even though I don't really see purples, they are cooler colors in this particular photograph with the exception. Of course, of that beautiful sun shining through. And I think that's kind of a no brainer as to the focal point. It's going to be those long shadows pulling you into that sun. And one strategy with focal point is to have contrast with color. And so the warmth against the coolness is really going to be a nice focal area. Now, blowing it dry once again, adding the clear gesso like I did before. So my pastels will stick and I'm using a combination of pastels here. This is these are obviously Terry Ludwigs. You can tell from the large rectangular shape and for the sun or basically any element that is glowing. It's best to put your darker values down first. So that's why you saw me put in that dark kind of peachy, melon color gradually getting lighter. Now I'm onto some golds and then right in the center is where I've got my source of light. Now I try to avoid it looking too much like a circle. It's going to look cliche or a little bit too fixed and not painterly. And often when we look at the sun, when you don't look right at the sun, it's usually not a fine edge to it. It's a little bit muted. And now you can see I'm just adding some of these warm colors. Once again, I apologize for speeding up this footage, but I'm trying to keep my lessons about 30 minutes. I find that often if the videos are too long, we all have short attention spans these days, you know, so but you are getting two paintings in one. The first one had almost all real time footage. And so I'm adding some of that warmth in between the bands. It's going to graduate out with going kind of from warm to cool the closer it gets to the viewer. In this case, it's a little opposite. Usually warmer tones are in the foreground and they gradually get cooler in the distance, but in this case, we've got that glowing sun that's creating warmth even way back there and gradually getting cooler as it comes to the viewer. Now I'm using my pipe foam insulation again. Look how impressionistic that makes it. I try not to over blend, but sometimes especially when working on a textured surface like this watercolor paper and the arches watercolor paper is pretty textured. Sometimes I like to soften it up a bit and notice how I'm not sticking right to the reference image. I think that's the fun part about being an artist. Sometimes I'm not even sure what my pain is going to look like because I'm just getting in the moment exploring color, having fun using the general rules of value and color, but getting creative. I think that's to me the point of being an artist is we're interpreting things in our own way. Now that's a dramatic snow scene and it was a lot of fun and it probably only took me about 20 minutes for this one and stay tuned. I've got to get busy. I've got not much of December left to upload two more tutorials. This one is on that green underpainting and really this was one of my favorites. I thought the color was so fun. So very soon another beginner lesson coming with the same technique and a lots of exploration with color and currently if you're watching this video in December of 2021 I am in the midst of my December promotion. I'm currently this graphic is wrong now. I'm currently at 594 patrons just six patrons shy of 600. That was my goal for 2021 and if you become a patron in the month of December, you will be entered in the drawing to win two of my original paintings. I have the drawing on January 1st. You still have to be a patron on January 1st and all of my patrons will be getting my free 2022 digital calendar and I can truly say Merry Christmas. It is Christmas Day that I'm editing this video. So God bless you all of my patrons, subscribers and followers and I'm excited for what 2022 has to offer and I just realized I never added any music and I talked this entire 30 minute video. No wonder you guys say I talk a lot. Alright guys, God bless and happy painting.