 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm very happy to bring you this tutorial on painting water and reflections. You will follow me and learn through the stages of concept sketch to underpainting to final painting with soft pastels. This month we're focusing on painting water and in this tutorial oh are you gonna learn a lot. Also if you would like this video subscribe and click that bell icon that'll let you get notified of future videos and just by liking this video it helps ensure the video gets seen by others. YouTube shares it more often. Also this tutorial that is free on Monet Café is brought to you by the faithful support of my patrons. Thanks to their $5 a month support I'm able to keep these free lessons coming on Monet Café. Thank you patrons. Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm happy to start off this month with some water tutorials. Learning how to paint water and we're gonna learn different things like painting still water, painting moving water, reflections and the first lesson I created a painting from a subject matter that was one of my own photographs and it was a beautiful place here in Florida. It's called Fort De Soto, Florida. It's a very popular place to go camping and I had snapped a shot that was just a really lovely scene and the water was moving and I decided to paint that one with a lot of drama and like a magnificent sunset like we get here in Florida and that one was done on pastel premier paper. My first time using it and I really liked it. It's a sanded surface and I decided after this one it was so dramatic that I thought let's do one with a little bit more of a neutral theme and also give an option for people who may not have sanded papers. So we're doing another one that is on unsanded paper. I'll be telling you a lot more about the products using more of a neutral palette. So you can take the same reference image and create it in different ways. So one's going to be moving water and one's going to be more still water. So I will be providing a bit more of these tutorials for my patrons on my Patreon page but you'll get plenty here on the Monet Cafe channel and we're going to have a lot of fun in the month of February learning how to paint water. I'm excited. Here we go. I find my paintings are always more successful when I do a value sketch. I like to use these Tombow dual brush markers and I keep a little case of my value sketches. I find that you can use them again to create a new painting. You don't even need your reference image. They give you really all that you need with value and you can get interpretive with the color. So these are a lot of fun. By the way, I have a video called Pastel 101. It's a four part course right here on YouTube that goes into detail about how to create these value studies and why they're important. So I'm just choosing three values. These are the three that I chose. You can sort of see the numbers here. And by the way, if you're a patron of mine, you will be getting all of the color notes and more product information. That's because you know, you're faithfully giving your support. So thank you patrons. Now, almost always in a landscape painting, darker elements are going to be vertical elements and things that are in the foreground. Trees are almost always darker and these trees in the distance are further away. So the value gets lighter and thus I used that lighter marker. And now I'm going to just get some of those horizontal marks on the water. By the way, I'll be talking about all of this much more slowly when we get to the painting part. But this just gives you an idea of how quickly and easily you can create a little value study. And trust me, it really does help you when you start painting. The surface that I'll be using for the pastel painting is a surface called pastel premiere. I buy mine from pro art panels. The color that I'm using is the Italian clay. And this is a water friendly surface. Although I've learned you've got to be a little bit careful. It doesn't take quite as much water as some other pastel surfaces. Now these are the ink tense blocks made by Derwent. I love using these for an underpainting. They get very vibrant when you add water, but you certainly don't have to have these. You can use soft pastels for your underpainting and simply add water to them just like I will be to the intense blocks. I'll be using a piece of willow charcoal. That's a big chunky piece, isn't it? And I like using charcoal to get it a basic sketch because it's a similar product to pastel. And I typically won't use like a lead pencil. It has kind of a sheen to it. And sometimes your pastels won't cover it. Now this is to be very, very basic. You're really just getting in super basic shapes at this point. And sometimes I'll say turn your brain off. And I don't mean all the way off, but just zone out in other words, so that you're not thinking I'm drawing a tree because often we have cliches in our minds of what trees look like. And sometimes often the trees will be a totally different shape from that cliche tree. So that's all we're doing here, getting in some basic shapes before the underpainting. Now this is where it gets exciting. Now I have that big 72 set of Derwent intense blocks, you certainly don't need that again, you could use a dark pastel for this. You could use a new pastel, they're kind of harder. So I often break mine. I don't think you can see the number there, but I held it up anyway. And I often break mine because I like using the shorter sections to paint with. Now I am going to speed this portion up. But basically all we're doing is kind of the same thing as in the little value sketch is to block in the darkest elements. And now I am using this same intense block for even the background trees in this one, but I'm using a lighter touch reflections sorry for the sunlight shining in there. Reflections almost always you pull them down. So now I'm using a lighter touch remember in the value study that was a light gray, I just simply didn't press as hard, but I used the same color. And now I decided to add a little bit more of a cooler temperature. This is still a pretty dark intense block, but it's a little bluer things tend to cool off in the distance. So I wanted to give a little coolness. And I do know that on all of this, I'm going to be able to layer my soft pastels. And I know that this under painting is going to serve not only as a roadmap, but I want to allow some of it to peek through some of the color will peek through the final painting. And it really gives it that painterly and artistic look. Now by the way, again, in that pastel one oh one course that I have free here on Monet cafe, it's four separate lessons. And it has I think the third section is called the under painting. And you will get so much detailed information about why we do an under painting. That's a question I get all the time. Why do you even do an under painting? You cover it up. And I answer all of those questions. So check that out if you're kind of new to painting with pastels. Now I'm pulling down. Notice my strokes. Now that this is much slower for the reflections. I'm not really going side to side. I'm pulling down more. Now I'm getting a little bit of that edge on that bank there. And I'll be talking more about the reflections. Once again, when I get to the pastel painting, see how I just measured there. Typically, reflections are typically a mirror image of what's above the surface. I had a real light touch there and dropped it. But often, you have to be careful not to just totally create a mirror image because often the movement in the water in this case and other things will cause the reflection to be a little bit different. In this case, the reflections were a little bit longer than the images or the values above the water line. Now here's the fun part. We're adding some water. I always like to use the largest brush possible. It helps to create large, you're blocking it in with large elements and it keeps it very painterly. And when you use a little brush, things to just seem to have that little fine edge or little dots or little details and we definitely don't want that at this point. Now that's a pretty dark blue in the background there. It was a little darker than I thought. But once again, that is going to be just fine when I layer with pastels. Now with this brush, I'm just kind of turning and moving the acrylic ink or it actually is acrylic ink. It's compressed acrylic ink. The Derwent Ink Tense Blocks in just a gestural kind of motion. I'm not painting leaves per se, but I am going ahead and giving it a little bit of energy and gesture and movement. And see this did come out really dark, which is fine. This is exactly what this is for is to be more of a value roadmap to get started prior to adding soft pastel. It's also going to be some drama and dramatic color that you're about to see. I decided to add my colors for the Derwent Ink Tense Blocks in layers. And right now I'm just getting in my darkest values. Now I'm using that brush. It's it's kind of splayed out a little bit and it's served to my advantage to create more wispy edges. That can also be done by using a fan brush, by the way. I always forget to grab that. Now I pulled down some of those reflections. What's above the surface line is going to be reflected below. Now I'm going horizontal because that's kind of like a river bank and this was actually like I mentioned before. This was Fort De Soto Park in Florida and it's absolutely such a beautiful place and this really was a dramatic type of a scene. So I got my little horizontal bands for the bank in there. You see how that already is starting to look like something? But now for the reflection, I'm going to let the water do what water does, which is the gravity is going to allow the water to just drip down. Again, reflections go down into the water. So your first part of drawing or painting water is going to be reflections being pulled down. We're going to layer this eventually adding water on top that will give that feeling of flat water. Now it's fine if it gets all drippy like this, it doesn't bother me at all. I let it drip. If it gets a little too drippy, I might just kind of knock it off with a paper towel. But to me that creates already just a kind of a painterly edge. So now you get the idea. I'm going to just speed up this dark portion before I get to some of this dramatic pretty color. Again, just pulling the reflections down the same thing with those distant trees and can you see it already is starting to look like something? Often too reflections will be a little bit lighter than what is above the surface. There's some little tips and tricks about painting water that I'll talk about later. Now I'm getting some yellows to go in the sky. This is actually a lighter yellow than the one I just broke off. So I'm putting a little bit lighter in the upper part of the sky and a little bit darker in the lower. Now this is a little bit flip flop from a lot of sky scenes. Typically it's a little bit lighter at the horizon or just above the tree line and it gradually gets darker. But this was an interesting sunset type of sky. Sometimes clouds and things can change that a little bit. So you want to make sure you learn some of these typical rules but you pay attention to how things are really behaving in nature. And now I'm getting some orange colors. I wanted to intensify that warm color behind the trees and often when things get behind trees when the light or the sky is behind trees it's called sky holes. It's typically just a shade darker like a value shade darker. And this is definitely creating some of that drama. Now what did we say about water? Whatever is above the horizon line is going to be reflected down into the water. Now this is the sky and I do know I'm going to be wetting this and it's going to be dripping and everything but I went ahead and I did notice this pastel premiere paper it didn't stay as flat when I added some water. It did receive the water fine but it created some little humps. Maybe I'm a little too heavy-handed with the water and that did make it a little bit harder later for me to get those very flat strokes across to get that very flat horizontal water. So that's just something I wanted to mention. Now I'm going to be adding some of that color that's in the sky. I went even a little bit darker added a little bit of it back behind the tree line there. And all I'm doing is replicating the mirror quality of this. Now if you have a hard time painting a mirror image like this I mean from the top to the bottom you can literally take your board turn it sideways. Sometimes it's a little easier to paint that mirror image when you have it sideways. So that's just a little a little trick. But these colors are just really still serving as my under painting. They're going to get blended and I'm going to add the pastel on the top. This was a lot of fun. And again you can use this same technique with pastels but I've found that the pastels when you do it in stages like this when you add the water the dark part is kind of kind of rewet and get diluted a little bit more than the ink does. The ink stays set a little bit more. And now I'm adding the water to the warm values I've put down and you'll be able to see what I'm talking about that it will layer over the darker color and it will kind of dilute it a bit but pastels will get more muddied with this particular technique. So that was drippy and fun and to me creates the perfect beginning very loose and painterly to start adding soft pastels. Now of course we need to let this dry first and I'm going to be using I think primarily other than one Terry Ludwig dark or a couple of of darks from another set. I'm pretty much exclusively going to be using the Sennelier pastels. I love Sennelier pastels. They just have such beautiful color and they performed beautifully on this pastel premiere surface. Now this is the Sennelier set. This is the Paris collection and it's got little cat hairs on it because our cat came in and got into my art studio without me knowing and laid on the set. Now she's a white cat so she had all these beautiful colors on her when I got her off but don't worry I did get the pastels off of her she didn't lick them or have any toxicity so I got to keep my art room closed though. All right now here is a Terry Ludwig darker color. This is a Terry Ludwig is an American made soft pastel company that makes fabulous soft pastels. They're in a rectangular format. I've used this one so much it's really gotten smaller and it's very dark. This particular color looks almost black. It's called egg plant. It's like a dark dark dark purple and this scene was very dramatic. The trees almost looked black in this scene but I do give them a little bit of greenery a deep kind of a green very hint and very neutral green before the end of the painting but I'm just re-establishing the darks notice I'm not pressing hard I've learned over the years trust me it's been hard to do to develop a really light touch sometimes so light I drop the pastels but what this is going to do is going to keep it very painterly. There's quite a few things a light touch does it it has soft edges things look painterly another thing is it allows your beautiful underpainting to peek through those little spaces another thing is it allows you to get more layers down if you start pressing firmly right away with soft pastels you're going to lose the ability to add more layers that's one of the beauty beautiful aspects about soft pastels is that capability of layering and especially on these sanded surface surfaces that give you that ability more so than unsanded surfaces now I'm going to start working on the reflections I'm really just trying to get the general shapes in once again I was struggling with the bumps that were caused on the surface because of the water added I might try to be a little easier with the water next time I do this and by the way I have the tutorial I mentioned at the beginning I'm not going to include it in this lesson but I mentioned that I was going to do there's those bumps I mentioned that I was going to do another painting of the same scene with a whole different color palette and a whole different surface I know a lot of you can't afford the sanded surfaces so the next painting of the same scene will be on unsanded paper with a primarily neutral palette I love neutral colors and I have love bright colors too and sometimes I just get carried away with color and I forget how much I often love painting with a really neutral palette and I've got a couple of sets of soft pastels I'll be sharing with you in that video that have some great neutrals in them and I'll talk about the power of neutrals and why it's important in your palette so now I've got the darks in here and I'm trying to keep a lot of this real time but there are parts I'll have to speed up this painting took a little over an hour so I don't want the video to be quite that long I just added a little bit of a rich kind of burgundy just a little bit to the trees now this is a piece of pipe foam insulation it is something you can buy at a hardware store and it happens to be a really great blending tool for sanded surfaces if you use anything that has cloth or fiber it seems to get stuck on the sanded surfaces and this pipe foam insulation does not notice I'm just pulling down the reflections and I'm also using it to kind of soften some of the edges to the treetops that are above the surface but the reflections in the water are going to be pulled down and eventually we will layer over top of this to make that water look flat this water is going to have some movement to it now I have the similar concept I'm using the warm colors similar to the ones that I used with the Derwent ink inktense blocks and I'm using a light touch and I'm just getting in glazing in some of the sky let me zoom in so you can see it a little better now can you see how beautiful that color is looking already I was later noticing that my one tree looked like a heart they both kind of did so I had to try to do something to change that you know it's funny how these little shapes show up after the fact and our brains don't see it while we're painting so doing the same thing pulling some of that same color down into the water once again just like a mirror image and this scene did have a lot of pink and magenta in it and so I'm just gently introducing a pink that will vibrate with the yellow if you press too hard you cause the pastels to lose that color mixing effect I often argue that some people say you can't mix pastels and you definitely can't like you can mix watercolor or acrylic or oil but they mix on the surface if you don't press too hard they start to interact with each other when little bits of the underpainting part or the background part is showing through now what did I say about what does color or what does value do when it gets behind trees it gets a little darker just a tad darker and sometimes if I know there's a lot of magenta going on back in that sky I'll punch up the color a little bit for some of the sky holes not all of them now sky holes if you're brand new they are the spaces of the sky showing through the tree and if you want your painting to look more painterly and artistic it's a good idea to paint them negatively don't paint all your branches and leaves paint a general shape of a tree and carve the sky into it your painting is going to look so much more impressionistic now I'm comparing some of the teal colors and the blue colors I wanted to do what I mentioned earlier I think I'm going to use that darker one there there's three teal colors in this set well there's more in this Paris collection set but I wanted it to be a little bit darker because this is kind of like an evening scene and as I said in the beginning when choosing the colors for the underpainting what typically happens with trees in the distance or things in the distance they cool off and that's because there's a lot of atmosphere there's literally a lot of air between you and things that are far away and it takes the warmth out of the color palette that you're seeing and so things just look cooler and see how that's already looking like those trees are further away just by cooling them off in temperature a little bit now I'm going to use this one that's a little bit lighter because that other row of trees I want to give the illusion that it's even further away there's like three levels there's the main dark trees there's the ones that are kind of in the middle they're a little closer and that bank is even further away so I'm just giving that illusion of distance I love creating paintings that aren't flat I like to have levels of things where the eye can play and go back into the distance now I did do the reflection of that a little bit darker now before I said reflections were a little bit lighter right well why did I do that one a little bit darker I'm going to zoom in here so you can see what I'm talking about so the trees above the horizon line are lighter and the reflection is a little bit darker well it's because reflections work in reverse typically on water so if your element is very dark it's going to be lighter in the water as the reflection if your element is light it's going to be a tad darker it's just really interesting how that works and there's some scientific principles behind it but I'm not going to go into that right now now I'm just glazing I wanted the front part of this painting to be so loose that it didn't stop your eye to go back into where the focal point is the focal point are those trees of course the reflections going to enhance everything but really the trees and that reflection kind of in the upper third of the painting so the reason I'm keeping the foreground and you'll see very loose is I don't want to create a barrier for the eye to get hung up on that's one of the things that I did early on with painting is I put a lot of detail in the foreground if there was grass in the foreground I give all this detail in the grasses and detail in the flowers and if you're wanting that painterly impressionistic look it's a good idea to keep the edges the perimeters of your painting especially the foreground not overly detailed that's a general rule of thumb and it will create a way for the viewer to go to your focal point more easily now aren't some of those blues pretty notice I put some of that pretty blue that's in the water in the background trees on the right hand side and that gave more color harmony to the painting often when I add a color in one place I look for other areas I might be able to replicate that color to give some connectivity to the painting I'm speeding this up right now ever so slightly you should still be able to follow along just fine I'm going to add some music but I'm not going anywhere I'm just going to paint a while just kind of pay attention to how I replicate things from the sky into the water well I'm not going anywhere yet here's where I wanted to tell you I added some of that deep green this is from the Terry Ludwig dark set Terry Ludwig pastels makes two sets of darks they're both wonderful but it has some really nice dark pastels and all various different colors and adding a little bit of the screen just kind of warmed it up made the trees look a little bit more like trees even though once again this was a very the trees were very dark because the sun was setting behind it and so it definitely did create more of a dark well you can see it in the photograph it's almost black so I wanted to give it a little more color now I did carry down some of that green into the water I'm just trying to keep my strokes vertical see how I'm trying to pull them down but I knew if I had green in the trees above the water I wanted to make sure it was consistent I'm adding a little bit of that green to the bank there I couldn't really see the bank in the reference image but I knew in my mind there had to be some sort of a bank there so I just kind of created it myself and with the bank I add a little bit of that green in the reflection too with a really light touch so now I'm going to continue to develop the sky with some other colors I got a little carried away with color with this one and as I often say I have the advantage of being able to go back and watch my painting process since I filmed myself so much and there were some stages I'd say about three quarters of the way through that I wish I had stopped but I just kept on going I still like the final very much but I really really love when things are super loose and impressionistic I guess I'm not going anywhere yet this is where I'm putting in some of those sky holes I'm carving in some of the spaces behind the trees now that's a little dark right there that I added just a second ago but I am going to lighten it up by blending some pastels now this was interesting the tree line and the distance it had a haze of blue behind it now I know this is Florida those are not distant mountains but I thought you know what I'm just going to go ahead and do it because it's kind of neat looking so I found some real pretty blue I added the little tad darker value blue first then I put a blue that's a little bit lighter on top of it that's often a good strategy is to layer something that's maybe a little darker than you intend just a tad and then you can lighten it up now what did I have to do if there's that blue in the sky I've got to bring a hint of that down into the water if you see me tapping and coming down I'm kind of measuring sometimes you'll see me use my fingers I'm literally making a little ruler with my fingers of how tall something is above the horizon line and then bringing it down to make it about the same distance below the horizon line now I am going to soften these colors that are in the water a little bit I want that I want it to look like water so I'm going to kind of blend those in a little bit actually my pastels kind of start to blend themselves when I start making the horizontal strokes over the water right now you see almost everything other than the underpainting has been just vertical kind of blended strokes in the water now what's going to make this water look like water is when I start adding horizontal strokes on top of the water so keep that in mind when painting water create your vertical reflections first pull them down let them look real watery blend them pull them down and then you can just lightly glaze horizontal strokes on top of the water and voila all of a sudden you look like you have flat water now you can see in this one the water was moving so I do create some bands in the water and like I mentioned before in the next one I'm going to make the water look more flat so okay so I am going to I'm going to play a little music right now but pay attention to how I'm working there I'm measuring and then I'll come back when I start adding the horizontal marks here's where I start to very gently put in some of my horizontal marks that are actually going to layer on top of the reflection I'm also adding a little thin broken line of water that sort of comes right up to the edge of the bank often you get a little light ripple of water and if it's far away like this you want to keep it thin and you kind of want to keep it broken you don't want a solid hard line there so that also gives that illusion of water kind of rippling up next to the bank and now I'm putting in some of my final little sky holes and sky holes they take a while to get the hang of and I feel like I'm always still fussing with them to make sure they look accurate but they can be the icing on the cake and the reasoning is because you usually have a lot of contrast where you have sky holes it's what's the darkest the contrast is dark next to light your darkest element next to your lightest element and because the tree is the darkest thing your sky holes behind them are going to give some nice contrast all right now here's where I'm starting to give some of those horizontal marks and often you know it's a good idea to use a lighter value when doing this but I thought I would use some of the colors that were in the sky already that's where I was fussing with the bumps on this paper I couldn't get a good horizontal mark it was it was pretty darn frustrating so beware of that and maybe don't be so heavy-handed with the water so I did kind of have to wrestle with that but because it was moving water I gave a little bit more of chunky bands you know and I wanted to keep this very loose and impressionistic so I didn't want to overdo it I wanted to keep it a little bit almost abstract with some of these marks and here's where I'm using a little bit of a lighter value on top again kind of reestablishing a little bit more of that little ripple next to the bank and still wrestling with that bumpy paper you kind of can't see it from this angle and I know some of the water typically horizontal lines you want them straight across okay but because this water was moving it did have a little bit of a an upward kind of a curve from the lower left to the right so I emulated that a little bit now I'm adding a little bit of a lighter green just to a few little certain areas in the tree I didn't want to lighten it too much because it wouldn't be realistic once again the sun is behind there things that are flat like land or fields is usually a little lighter value so I added a little bit of that light value there I just brought a tad of it down into the trees I'm measuring there into the reflection of the trees and the water to make it consistent and believable so now I'm really pretty darn close to being finished here and overall I was very happy with this painting and it definitely had dramatic color but that's why I decided I wanted to go ahead and do one that's very neutral so that one will be the very next tutorial I hope you guys learned a lot with this and if you're a patron of mine and you recreate from this video I can't wait to see what you do in the homework album and if you're not a patron of mine follow me on Instagram and tag me if you share your work on Instagram you can find me at Susan Jenkins Artist you can see it right there on that little screen up to the right so God bless everyone I hope you learned a lot like this video shoot me a comment and happy painting