 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today we're going on an intuitive watercolor painting journey. I call this painting from the soul. So sit back, relax, and I hope you learned something. While I share a lot of lessons using the medium of soft pastels, I happen to love watercolor. I use watercolor often for under paintings and often in this intuitive way where we literally get to play with color. I also find this method of painting is great for getting out of an artistic rut. Have you ever been in a place where you're feeling artistically dry? Or you just don't know what to paint? Well, this method of painting will spark your creativity along with having a lot of fun and hopefully some magical results. Also go ahead if you don't mind and click the like, subscribe, and the bell icon to get notified of future videos. Those simple things really do help the success of this video on YouTube and help ensure others get to see it as well. Also if you'd like to become a patron of mine you can do so on my Patreon page for only $5 a month. It helps support this channel and my patrons get extra content. My Patreon support has also helped to make this channel better by getting new equipment like my new camera that has a great creative filter and also this new microphone. Let me know if you notice a sound difference. I highly recommend putting on some soothing music when you create your intuitive watercolor environment. Now let's talk about the products that I used. Before going into all of the products that I will share I wanted to let you know that I just made a new category or new idea list it's called. In my Amazon shop I created a category called watercolor products and I have a lot of the products that I would recommend if you were wanting to do some watercolor and these are some products that I have used myself and all except for this one little set here. I thought this was a really nice watercolor set with 12 colors that are great for mixing and just a really nice little color palette. So if you're wanting to get into watercolor these are some quality products. I will share some of these products right now that I'll be using. All right here we go. The watercolor surface is Arches watercolor block. Now this is called a block because I'll show you in a minute it's bound on the edges but this is a 12 by 16 block. It comes in other sizes. 140 pound and 100% cotton. The surface is awesome it receives a lot of water and because it's on this watercolor block it doesn't buckle as much. It's glued on the edges with a little break for you to be able to take the first page off when you're finished. Now this watercolor palette I really love. I don't break it out that often but when I'm doing a larger painting I like to use this Mastersons Aqua Pro watercolor palette. It's great if you're working with a lot of water or you want to mix a lot of color. And because I will be using a lot of water for this painting I want to go with my larger brushes. By the way I love my little art bin container. That's also in my Amazon shop under watercolor products along with these Princeton brushes made by Princeton Brush Company. I think the size you see here is a 40 50 round number 12. I started with three watercolor brushes to begin with. I do add a fourth one later that's a liner brush I'll talk about. This is my probably one of my largest brushes that I chose just because it holds lots of water. The one on the bottom there is a Chinese watercolor brush. You'll see me use that. Oh I'm just praising the Lord there. I'm listening to some Christian music and I'll talk more about these brushes as I work. I recommend making you a little color guide for the water colors that you have even if it's just for a few. I literally just marked off my palette and divided the sections to show every color. By the way my patrons will receive this in your Patreon post of this video along with the colors that I use to create this painting. That's one of the perks of being a patron. Now what is intuitive watercolor painting? I certainly don't have a formal definition but I would say it's painting from the soul or painting from your heart and it's really loose, very energetic, gestural and colorful. These are some intuitive poppy watercolor paintings that I did and I just had fun. By the way I do have this video lesson on my YouTube channel Monet Cafe here. I'll try to put a little card in the upper right hand corner of the video where you can see it. I'll try to include it maybe at the end too with a clickable link. All right here we go. Oh and I want to mention I will have all of the products with clickable links in the description of this video. And my reference image is from unsplash.com. Sorry for my studio lights there. I will give a clickable link to this reference image. Now I've saved a little collection of images that inspire me to do this type of painting. Abstract, intuitive, very loose and free. So I'll see if I can try to remember to provide that link as well. Oh and you'll definitely need some paper towels because this type of painting uses a lot of water. I use paper towels quite often to control the water on my brushes. And I like to use a fairly large container when doing this type of painting. There's my Chinese watercolor brush. You see how when you wet it it goes to a nice point. You can get wide strokes or fine sort of fine line strokes with this. But again I use a lot of water so using a large container for your water keeps you from having to clean it quite as often. I do a combination in this painting of wet on wet technique and sometimes just applying the paint directly to the paper prior to wetting it. I find you can get similar results if you use a decent amount of water if you're working on a dry surface. So first I'm just getting me a nice blue. In the reference image there seemed to be just this bright pretty blue that was up at the top of the sky, the top left. And now because I've already applied a decent amount of water I'm just kind of layering it on. And I also recommend something I didn't do as a beginner watercolor artist is to remember you can use the sides of your brush rather than just the point. I often just lay my brush down and use the side to get some nice gestural strokes. And I'm doing a combination of applying more paint to water and sometimes less paint to water which will control the amount of color that gets laid down. I find it's good to vary this rather than just having one consistent value of that color throughout the whole sky. I also like leaving the white spaces. I felt like the sky was getting a little bit more warm as you're moving upward and to the right. So that's why I added a little of this purple. As I add water and more to this they will start to blend together. Now that purple that I added was an example of paint on a dry surface using really still having enough water but you can see that it gives those really loose impressionistic dry type of strokes which is fun. And I would say the greatest benefit to this type of painting is first the experience. If you just get your supplies all out that does help to keep you from being frustrated. Have your supplies ready, create a mood for yourself, light a candle, perhaps put on or you know use a diffuser for some essential oils, put you on some nice music and just have you your own little spiritual painting experience. The second benefit I find from this is it allows you to play. Often we get too serious too soon and we don't really learn that much about expression and our work ends up being very tight when we don't learn to play. And you can do this type of painting even if you're brand new never done watercolor before. Have you ever noticed how kids when you give them art supplies they don't get all weird and worried about what it looks like they just dive right in and have a good old time. And now you can see I've mixed up a nice warm color. I believe I was using a quinacridone gold and perhaps a quinacridone red. Once again I'll give more no that was a burnt sienna to it. And I'll give my patrons more of a list of some of the colors that I used. And if you notice in the reference image, I liked the play of those blues with the warm tones. It was a lot of warmth and some yellowy greens in there. But the blue flowers and the sky that was a little bit more of a cyan type of color. I just thought it was really fun. And I'm at this point just wanting to keep the energy. Now this is an azo green. I really like this green. It's so mossy colored. And I believe I just added a raw sienna to it. So another thing this does it allows you to play with your color. And you may not most likely if you haven't been painting long. You may not have or probably don't have this selection of colors. And trust me, I did not have this many colors when I first started. I probably just had a little basic set. And I gradually learned the colors that I like from watching other watercolor artists on YouTube. And I like to share Monet Café originated from my search and quest to learn more. And I didn't have any other resources. I didn't have the financial resources to take classes. For a period of my life, I was a mom just raising my three boys. And also I didn't have the time I was raising kids, you know, so I learned all I could and I just couldn't wait to share with others. So that's the birth of Monet Café. So a lot of you are probably like me, you're just searching for more information and lessons online to learn. And I am happy to help. And it's Monet Café has turned into what it is today, which is a real blessing. So okay, so I do kind of ramble on. You might have to deal with that every so often. But you can see I've mixed in some of these greens. I think it had a little more gold in the photo than I used. So I do I think add more of that later. But this is about playing. I think that was a sap green. I added to that you notice the bottom corner of the reference image is a little bit darker. And the foreground in the bottom is darker in general to the middle ground and the upper sky there. But kind of squint your eyes and you could see where there are dark areas. And there's really a dark area in the upper right. There must be like a tree or something back there. And I'm obviously painting this in a different format. The reference image was a square. And I just want to use the whole page. Once again, intuitive water color. I just want to be free. Let the water fly and have fun. And I'm not going to narrate this entire video. I will pop in when I see a technique or something I'd like to share. But I would like to share some relaxing music. So you can enjoy the experience with me. I wish I could play the music that I listen to while I'm painting. But typically I listen to music that has a copyright. The YouTube audio library has some nice songs. But they're not what I would normally listen to while painting. And those are the songs that don't have a copyright. So I'm free to share those here. And I try to find the best selection. So hopefully this will be relaxing. Now that technique I just used there was kind of like a little splatter technique. And that's a very fun technique where you get some paint on your brush. You have to have enough paint to water mixture for it to be able to come off the brush when you tap it. There's multiple ways you can do it. You can tap it on your hand. Some people even get like a toothbrush and splatter it to get more fine little splatters. And as I mentioned before I really like this Chinese water color brush. It allows me to make a variation of strokes from thinner to wider. Now what am I doing here? This is something called masking fluid. Now if you use this stuff make sure you use an old brush. Okay. Don't use a nice brush. It's literally like liquid glue. And it's a neat way that you can reserve the light or the white of an area. Now I didn't want my flowers necessarily to all be white. So that's why I went ahead and put on some thin color first. And some of the areas I am going in the white. But I'm just creating some flowers that are going to stand out a little bit more because the watercolor I lay in around them will be a little bit of a darker value. So I did wait for my paper to dry before I applied this masking fluid. And now enjoy this relaxing music while I work a bit more. And I'll be back when I remove the masking fluid. And now that I have some darker values in, it's time once it's everything's dry to rub off this masking fluid. And now you can see that I didn't do it with just the white of the paper. I think they would have been too stark white. I wanted them a little bit softer in color. And there's the little residue. Like I said it's literally like glue. Here it is at this point which I really did like the looseness. And it kind of would have liked to just leave it at this point. But I was having too much fun and just decided to keep enjoying the experience. And here is another product that I like to use with watercolor. It's called gouache. It sounds like squash. That's how I remembered it when I started. And I like to use white gouache because it's opaque. Now I mix it with a little bit of water. And what I mean by opaque is it's not as see-through as watercolor. Have you ever noticed in a watercolor palette there's no selection of the color white? It's because it wouldn't show up. It's transparent. So that's why this gouache allows you to get a little more white down. Or a little bit lighter value down. It's not really bright white. You know even if you apply it in its full strength it's still not as white as the white of the paper. But I enjoyed flicking some of this around to get some little energy of some little white specks and flecks of color. And I'm just having fun. And that's what I want to encourage with this type of painting is to make it more of an experience than more about something material. We have enough material things in our world. And I think we need more experiences that bring us joy and peace. Now I do recommend this if you're wanting to start a piece that's more serious. Do something like this just having fun where you don't care and you're just getting some ideas with color. And often you will find that it is a great way to break out of what your traditional painting methods are and try new things. You can see here I'm adding as I put in one of the little headings. Watercolor is usually best worked light to dark. So I'm not adding some of my darker values until the very end. And I loved how that reference photo had just a little gathering of some branches that were just reaching up gently in a whimsical sort of way. And this liner brush works great. It's really thin and it's got long bristles. So you're able to get some very fine lines. And you may have noticed a few times I've been holding my brush way up high and I am obviously working flat. You can work with watercolor various ways sometimes with your palette raised up a bit. It does allow the water to flow. You know gravity will let the water flow. But I don't mind working flat either. I added a little bit of blue to these flowers. I thought it was a little strong the color that I chose. So I softened it down a little bit. But now I have these notes. I just wanted to point that out on my little color palette that emulates my palette here. What a mess right. But this was so much fun on my little chart. I have notes and I've recently started doing this. But it's for me I think it's a really great idea because I remember some of my color mixtures. If I find a mixture that I like one is like a violet gray. I think that's the one I'm doing now. I think it's a quinacridone red and ultramarine blue. Oh it makes a nice purple. That's what that one was. And there's another combination that makes a nice violet gray. I think I show in a bit. But it's a neat way to remember some of your favorite color mixtures. And here's another technique of that's what this does. It allows you to play. I'm laying my brush down in different ways trying new things. I think one thing that makes paintings look very stale and amateurish is when we don't have expressive strokes or when our strokes are so monotonous. They're all the same and there's no variety. So play with your brush. Play with techniques. And that is definitely one of the advantages about this sort of intuitive approach to watercolor. And you can do this to intuitive approach with other mediums as well. It doesn't have to be watercolor. I just think watercolor is so beautiful to me and it's so exciting to see how colors mix. And the water is really your friend. I say that a lot. Let the water mix and blend and let the colors mix on the surface. Now there's that violet gray I was mentioning. Pardon my running shorts I had on and my sock feet. So I was totally in the moment. I didn't care about anything but relaxing at this point. I'm close to finishing at this point. I did want to add in a few more pops of color. I thought I had little hints of magenta peeking through that I had added originally. So I intensified it basically to intensify color and watercolor. You have less water to paint ratio. So I had some little splashes of that magenta and it really did feel alive and energetic. So I thoroughly enjoyed this. I encourage you to try it even if you have limited supplies. The great thing about watercolor is you can mix more color. You know you don't have to have a million colors. So this was fun. I'm going to do more of this. If you try this I always encourage you find me on Instagram if you're not a patron of mine and follow me at Susan Jenkins Artist and you can tag me if you recreate or create one of your own intuitive watercolors. And I love when you share what you do. This is a Posca marker. It's an acrylic marker and I love this white marker because you can use it on watercolor surfaces and it just really makes a nice white. And great for giving your signature at the end as well. I really hope you enjoyed this and I hope you will try it. Like I said it doesn't have to be any particular subject matter. You can go back and find the poppy tutorial I did as well. It was very loose and intuitive. Also leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear what you thought of this and I'd love to try to answer your questions as well. So here was the final. I pray this tutorial blessed you. Let me know if you'd like to see more watercolor tutorials and as always God bless and happy painting.