 Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm going to be bringing you a lesson today That is a technique I use often which is combining watercolor and soft pastel I love this technique because it helps me just keep a more Impressionistic feel which is kind of the focus of a lot of the artists who subscribe to this channel Oh, and please subscribe to my channel if you want more free art lessons like this I'm wanted to show you right now my technique that I use when I'm doing Pastel painting on watercolor paper water color paper paper will warp when you apply water to it So I want to keep it from warping as much as possible So what I do is I just take plain old blue painters tape that you get at any hardware store And I apply it to the back side. I like to work on the side of the watercolor paper. That's the bumpy side Again more impressionistic and it also takes the watercolor better and so this is the back side This is the smooth side and I'm just applying the tape all the way around and I'll have a little bit of a you know Quarter-inch edge off of it then I peel it up and I'm going to flip it over I put a piece of tape on the top to be able to adhere it to the board now What this is going to do it's going to see how I just apply this tape to the very top of it So a little bit is going to stick to my board now So what it's going to do is allow me to paint all the way to the edges now You can see I put that one piece up there to hold it I'm applying the blue tape. It's going to make all of these edges stay down Quite well so that when I do the watercolor painting. It's not going to warp as bad So these are my little hydrangeas I found from my yard Some of you know my saga and my story with our home flooding and how we had to move to another place And this place just had some treasures underneath a bunch of weeds like these hydrangeas This is just I didn't slow this down because this is just a sketch. I used vine charcoal I wanted to keep it loose and free, but at the same time it's very important to get your drawing accurate It is the good bones of any good artwork, but at the same time I don't want to be so fussy and detailed, but I want the basics good now I've got my little watercolor palette here. This is a nice little watercolor travel palette and All I'm going to be doing now Keeping it loose loose loose at this stage You don't want to get too fussy and detailed. It's almost better if you just have it kind of crazy and loose here Keeping your values right even with watercolor You know I talk about value the difference between the lights and the darks all the time in pastel painting Well, it works the same for watercolor in any medium so what I'm doing now is I'm just getting a general mood and You know, I I happen to like watercolor painting as well Even though I focus my channel mostly on pastel painting. That's my main medium I use but I use watercolor painting a lot for under paintings So you can just see me kind of going crazy here getting in the values keeping it loose One of the things when you if you start to play around with watercolor one of the tricks is to figure out the amount of water versus paint and to keep it flowing right and so that's a that's a whole another lesson But hopefully you'll just play around with this a little bit It's best to practice don't start a real serious piece if you've never done these techniques before Just get something small and play around and consider it a study Then you won't get too frustrated if it doesn't come out great most likely It's not gonna come out great the first few times you try this just like my things did not come out great the first few times I tried it so um practice practice practice and mostly have fun And don't be afraid to mess something up and throw it away You know work on some cheap supplies at first and and just have fun And if you haven't already done so check out our Monet cafe art group on Facebook. It's a great group We've got thousands of artists from all over the world Learning together that way you can just ask questions and it doesn't have to be just me that answers those questions You get advice from a lot of there's advanced artists Intermediate artists and a lot of beginners on there So if you're a beginner you'll love that group you get lots of advice so again just working through this Getting in the right values for the underpainting. This is called an underpainting if you're curious of what it is a lot of people are very Have a lot of questions about an underpainting just like I did when I got started I heard all these artists throwing these terms out underpainting underpainting. What is it? I mean, it's literally what it says. It's a painting underneath your painting or a Toning your paper underneath your painting and what it does is it establishes a mood It establishes your values and in the end I find it helps for your final piece to have a much more painterly and Impressionistic style so again, I'm just getting in my general foundation right now with the watercolor and Then I'm going to share with you the next thing that we do Which is to make right now This is this paper is not going to take pastel very well Even after I'm done with the watercolor. It's because it's a smooth It's got a little bit of a bumpiness to it because it's watercolor paper, but it will not hold pastel soft pastels to it they will you basically only be able to get like one layer and They just kind of start falling right off and getting muddy after you apply more So we're gonna do a lot of you guys know this already if you've been on this channel We're gonna do a little trick and It's a neat trick. It's inexpensive To make the pastel stick after this so let me get finished with this watercolor painting you can enjoy it I don't think it takes much longer, and then we'll get started with our little trick to be able to apply the pastels. I Thought I'd add a comment here because I get a lot of questions about How do I choose my colors a lot of times? I know my colors may not appear to be exactly what the reference photo is but as a general rule of thumb I basically I think we can train our eyes to see subtleties in color So even though the reference photo to the right doesn't appear to have a lot of yellow in it I had some of the sunlight coming in from my window And if you look if you start training your eyes you can kind of see those yellows in the lower right-hand side on the wall there and kind of up above it and Then of course always with shadows you can intensify them with color Instead of just doing grays you can do blues and purples and try to use things other than black or gray just use a darker value of something and Typically that will enhance your color and your paintings. So that's just a general rule of thumb Oh now for the magic trick. Well, it's not a magic trick, but it's a trick. It's liquid gesso clear liquid gesso That was fast, huh? It's just a product that you can use I use a foam brush and Basically, all I'm doing is you can see putting it on the foam brush I usually work top to bottom and I just give a Kind of a thin layer, but I'm not too skimpy with the application I put enough of it on the brush to really be able to get it on there good But you also might notice some people like oh, you're just blending your watercolor painting, but I like it I think it kind of blends it softens it and makes it an even better Underpainting for creating that mood that I like so then all I do after this is I usually get out my blow-dryer And I just dry it, but it's dry it dried a little darker here And that now it's time to get started applying pastel now as I typically do I start working with Values and getting my darks and I noticed underneath that one Hydrangea the top of the bottle there is some of the darkest dark So just going to go ahead and establish that Because you know value is relative to other values so and color is too In other words something dark will look darker next to something light It won't look as dark next to something of a medium value So I like to try to get some of the values and kind of all over the painting Before I get to set on one area, but I'm again. I'm trying to get some of the values in of this bottle notice I'm staying loose. I also like to go in the direction of how the object would be and That your strokes if you keep them directional They're going to be much more believable. So sometimes people ask me I talk a lot about how different Types of pastels based on their hardness or their softness are better to apply either as initial layers or final layers Basically harder pastels are better to apply at the beginning because they don't take up as much of the tooth or the grit In this case I don't have a lot of grit because all it is is a layer of clear gesso Unlike sanded pastel papers that give you a lot more layering. So I have to be careful of that But medium hardness pastels are good really kind of all over the place, but the softies Oh, I just jumped ahead. Sorry. I missed some video footage there But the real softies are best to use at the end because they will still Apply on top of other layers whereas your harder pastels will hardly show up at the very end of a painting However on that note, I have people ask me often, you know about when I use this pastel or that pastel with soft or hard and Basically, I don't have a gazillion pastels like some artists do so often I pick the pastel Oh, sorry for my head there I picked the pastel more based on the color than the hardness or the softness sometimes. That's all I have is the Something that it may not be the perfect Hardness or softness, but it's the right color. So I usually let color be the main Reason for me making the choice. But that's just a good general thing to keep in mind is that your real softies are Best to use at the end. Some of the softest pastels are the Terry Ludwig pastels. I believe great Americans I don't have any but they're pretty soft and then medium pastels would be more of your Rembrandt's and You know, I actually just recently toured the Mountain Vision pastel company because it's located near me in Tampa, Florida And it was wonderful. Wow. What a great tour There's a video of that tour here on my YouTube channel and go find it if you want to if you're interested in how pastels are made It's very interesting, but Mount Vision pastels. I love those pastels they are a great pastel for really all phases of your work and I Recommend if you're a beginner that's a that's a good beginner pastel to get and in the video of the tour The owner Carl Kelly gives a recommendation as to a good beginner set to get for the for somebody who's just starting out So there's a little tip on that, but you can just see I'm just working Establishing things, but not getting overly nitpicky. See I'm still trying to keep that loose feel I don't have those flowers so perfect. I actually I have the advantage in making these videos of being able to watch them When they're done and I see things that I would change or do differently sometimes I'm like, oh, I wish I had stopped right there and not done anymore but hey, we're all learning and the more you paint the better you get so anyway, enjoy some of this process and Please comment ask questions and feel free to ask me anything. I try very hard to respond To all of the questions that I get on here, but more importantly go find Monet cafe art group on Facebook and You'll get not just me answering questions, but lots of other artists helping you out. So anyway, let's keep painting here and having fun I thought I'd make a point here that as I'm painting this last uranium to take note that I Over the years, I think all artists learn to do this. I learned to paint more by shape and value Then I do what the item actually is or what the object is that I'm painting So you start to train your eye to where you're looking at lightnesses darknesses and shapes and you forget that it's a flower and That's probably one of the best things that I can recommend that you start to try to focus on I did one of my videos a little tip to help to get better at that is actually to turn your reference image upside down and Try to draw it upside down. So if you have a, you know, something Photograph or something on your iPad You can't flip your iPad over because it'll automatically turn right side up You have to literally get in and edit it and make it go upside down if you're on the iPad but try doing that because it's a way that you can make yourself train yourself to start looking at what the the shapes are and Kind of untrain your brain think about what it actually is often. That is a real Negative for us as artists when we start trying to paint what we think something is instead of what it actually Is represented? Because it that's just a real Handicap that we have because our brain tries to fill in things instead of Just numbing yourself to see only what the shapes are and what the values are so anyway Not to belabor that point, but it's in a very very important lesson as artists for us to do I'd like to make a point here on something I Sometimes do at the end of a painting or towards the end of a painting is I start to add little sketchy marks I think it creates energy and movement in the painting and it makes it lively Those pastels that I'm using there are harder pastels. They're called Prismacolor new pastels in you not any W new pastels and They actually typically like I said at the beginning sometimes they don't work when you've got too many layers down But I've actually still got enough grit here to be able to get some of these down But in a minute, I haven't quite done it a lot here yet But in a minute I start using them to kind of make these sketchy outlines I'm doing a little bit there with the darker one then I do it with some of the lighter ones towards the end of the painting what it does is it it kind of Expands the borders of the flowers and makes them not so fixed-looking again, it just adds a real loose and Movement to the painting, you know, so anyway, that's something that I've just kind of learned over the years and Play around with that. It's it's kind of fun and We'll give some life to your painting Well, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial I certainly enjoyed having some time to paint and it was indeed a treasure to find these beautiful hydrangeas in my backyard and Just enjoy this beautiful process of art. Please subscribe to my channel and come back and visit more often