 Hello artists! This is another tutorial focusing on this month's theme which is emulating a famous artist. Now it's Van Gogh and I gotta say Van Gogh and Monet they're both way up there for me. So in this lesson I'm gonna show you how I don't just copy a painting but often I will just get inspired by an artist work. And in this case I went through a Van Gogh book to embrace his very recognizable style with his expressive, mark-making, vivid colors and sense of movement. Before we get started if you've been enjoying my channel I would love it if you would like and subscribe and leave me a comment. Also if you would like the full version of this tutorial I would love for you to become a patron of mine on my Patreon page. For only $5 a month you can get all of the extra content, real-time footage, and become part of my Patreon family. Now let's talk about these products. The surface I'll be using is an acrylic pad made by Arteza. I forgot how much I love painting on these. It comes in a two-pack when you purchase it on Amazon and it's really just like a canvas sheet and it's really great for the next product that I'll be using to do the underpainting which is acrylic. I forget sometimes to use acrylic paint as an underpainting and it's really an effective and painterly way to get started. If you're doing it with this acrylic paint method you'll need some water, some brushes of course. I use three different sizes in this painting. I really could have just used the one large brush but some of the building details were a little bit intricate. I love this gray matters paper palette made by Jack Richardson. The back of it on the front cover has some very useful information but what it is is sheets of gray a really neutral color paper that's coated so that you can add your acrylic paint apply water and mix right there on the gray sheet. The reference image I'm using is from unsplash.com. However I did what I do a lot which is I did some photo altering to it and I had fun playing with some of my photo editing apps. If you are a patron of mine on my Patreon page you will receive all of the reference images including my edited ones. Now the acrylic paint I'm using is from Hippie Crafter once again. I got to say thank you to them for gifting me these products. Their acrylic paints are nice. I like the fact that they have traditional paint color names not all of them but most of them and they mix very well and I felt like this was a really pretty good acrylic product. I used some of the Hippie Crafter artist tape to mark off my painting surface to be a little bit more long and narrow. This is more like masking tape but it really does work well and appeals off great and I'm only using two colors to create what's called an underpainting before I get started with pastels. That one is burnt sienna. The first one I put down is raw umber. You'll need a paintbrush. Just use whatever you have. I switched to larger brushes as I moved to the foreground. Some paper towels, some water and now I'm getting started with just a really basic sketch of this house in my patreon version. I have a lot of commentary on this process more about how to paint structures and some tips there but I'm really just using these two acrylic paints to get a warm underpainting and this Arteza acrylic pad is really great. It's kind of textured almost like a canvas but it's a paper kind of sturdy paper and the acrylic paint applies beautifully and I wanted to use these warm colors because look at this painting. It's just really it has a feeling like a Tuscan feeling. I think before I edited the reference image it's kind of just a house. It doesn't look as Tuscan in the reference image but hey that's part of your artistic license. We can change things and interpret them and also in my full patreon tutorial I give lots of commentary on how I used my mark and stroke work whether I'm using acrylic paint or soft pastels to emulate that Van Gogh style and I really did embrace his style. It really helps to look through some books or get online look at his paintings to get inspiration. Now I'm going to show you something I did wrong here. I accidentally grabbed regular gesso which is white. I quickly realized it and you're going to learn why I always say use clear gesso. Here it is. Aha! Not regular gesso. First of all it's clear and it has a little bit of texture to it so that when I apply this the clearness is going to let my underpainting show through and when I apply the texture in it like little bits of sand and this will create a surface that receives soft pastels beautifully. Soft pastels need a little bit of texture to get the layering and I have found that clear gesso is such an easy and affordable way to turn many surfaces into pastel painting surfaces. This is my soft pastel palette which my patrons will receive a copy of that to use as a guide. Now you're going to be seeing the speed version here and I hope you find inspiration and get inspired to try emulating famous artists yourselves and I also have my previous video right before this one was painting in the style of Monet. So enjoy this pastel painting demonstration to some music and I will be back at the end with some commentary and the final and my thoughts on this painting process. I will definitely be using these techniques again. I'm getting in some of my final marks and you may have noticed that I have reserved my brightest colors my lightest and brightest colors until the final marks and I am trying to find pastels that are really soft and give me some brilliant color and I'm using the creating a composition that draws the in with a focal point like an S shaped curve that kind of cascades from the lower right corner up and towards the left curving around to the area I'm working in now and leading the viewer to the structure or the house and I really did feel this had a nice Tuscan feel to it again like I said before I'll definitely use this technique again using first of all this Arteza canvas pad I really like this and making my own surface with the clear Gesso but I also really love doing an acrylic underpainting here is the final I hope you can get a sense of a little bit of that van Gogh style those directional bold strokes and vibrant color if you try this yourself I hope you'll share it you can tag me and find me at all of the things you see on this end screen here become a patron if you'd like the full versions of these lessons or just to support this channel and I hope you enjoy the hundreds of free lessons here on Monet cafe as always God bless and happy painting