 Welcome to the 12 Days of Healing and this is day number three. I'm sharing this with my patrons for all 12 paintings but I think I'm going to share this one on Monet Café as well just so you can see what we're doing over on my Patreon page. I'm also loving how we are sharing our completed paintings all together as a group in the Google album that I started just for this exercise. And as my patrons know this 12 Days of Consecutive Painting is an effort to bring healing to our hearts and souls during this trying time in our world. So join me on this third lesson. Now it's appropriate day three, three pairs and also I have said that I will do a different technique or try to do something different on each painting so that you guys can learn more. And in this case I decided to do a watercolor underpainting. This is actually a separate watercolor I did of the same subject matter prior to the watercolor underpainting. But join me in this lesson where I describe how to use this wonderful technique. Hello patrons! Today I'm getting started on session number three of our 12 Days of Healing. Today is March 28th and so in this little five by five square on the UART sanded paper I'm going to be creating a painting of some pairs. I found this lovely little photo, reference photo on Paint My Photo of some pairs and I will provide the link to the image in the Patreon post so you can use that if you like. Or you can come up with your own idea or composition just trying to stay with the same theme. Now I wanted to show you the supplies but I also want to share with you that I went ahead and did a little watercolor painting because I'm gonna be doing a watercolor underpainting for today's painting session. Now you know I love watercolor. I know I'm always painting pastels but I've really come to love watercolor and it's a it's really a great way to learn more about color and it's also a great way to do an underpainting for pastels. So that's what we're going to be doing today and I don't need to apply any clear gesso in this case like I often do when I'm working on watercolor paper because UART paper is already sanded and it takes water. So I should be able to or I will be able to do a little watercolor painting right here on the sanded surface and then just go ahead and start applying the pastel. So here are my supplies. Of course we're gonna use pastels after we do the watercolor painting. The reference photo had of course those lovely colors that are found in pairs. These are happened to be green but they also have a lot of a yellowy-orange tints to them in places as well. There's a lot of shadows in this photo as well underneath the pairs in the background on the tabletop or whatever it is they're on and I just saw a hint of pink in the it's not really this guy. It's almost like it's a window but I'm gonna keep it a little bit abstract. Now also I'm gonna need something darker for stems. I gotta check these but these are new pastels. I know this one's a little dark it's almost a blue but something a little harder to make those stems look a little more prominent but in general I've just got some oranges and red colors some greens and yellows that are kind of bright not too dark in value. The blues leading down to this dark are almost like a purplish blue. This is my darkest dark right here it's kind of a purple and of course these these are a little more this one especially is more toned down these are kind of neutral here and you don't want I don't want everything so punchy and I want the pairs to really stand out so I didn't want the tabletop to compete with that with too many bright colors and again the pink so that's the general pastel color palette for this painting. Now because I'm doing a watercolor underpainting I've really been enjoying this is the set that I just used for that pair of watercolor painting. I've been enjoying this Arteza set again I mentioned they they're so nice to send me free art supplies if I use them in my videos and I've really come to love this little 36 piece Arteza watercolor set. I like that these these little pans of watercolor are removable but I happen to really like the colors that came with this set. It also comes with this nice little water pen water goes in the back so if you're traveling you know you can these work really well too that's kind of really nice fine point but if you're traveling and you don't have access to water you can fill up water in your pen and use your watercolor brush like that. So anyway that's a nice little a nice little travel set also too it has this little holder on the bottom to kind of hold it like a palette and also you'll need some water of course some paper towels and some brushes. I'm also using a really light pencil here that I will use to kind of sketch in the pairs before I do them with watercolor. So and you know with when you're doing an underpainting with watercolor and you're gonna put pastel on top you don't even need very expensive brushes. I have some expensive brushes but these are just some little brushes from Walmart and often I'll try to use the biggest brushes I can for the subject matter I'm working on because that lends towards more impressionism. Alright so it's time to get started with this lovely little reference photo of some pairs and starting with a watercolor underpainting. Here we go. I also want to mention that for this Monet Café version of the YouTube video I'll only have a small thumbnail of the reference image next to the painting but my patrons will have the image as an attachment so you can use it as you paint. So if you'd like to become a patron there's the link above only $5 a month you can cancel it anytime. First I'm gonna get started with just sketching in the basic shapes of these pairs and I do recommend I mean if you have time and a lot of us have more time now because we're quarantined in our homes if you have more time than you normally do to go ahead and do the watercolor you know just a quick little watercolor study before you even commit to the UART paper or whatever surface you're working on. Again I'm doing little five by fives so they I have to sometimes kind of change the composition a little bit based on what the reference photo is but you can choose whatever size you want. Now I've got my call it a horizon line or a table line or whatever I see that it is up in the upper third and I also I talk a lot about negative painting and I did recently provide a negative painting video on kind of how to see negative shapes and it really helps you in your drawing like for example I'm looking at the shapes of these pairs I'm looking not just at the I'm actually looking right now from my watercolor painting instead of the reference image that you'll be seeing because I kind of like the way I had laid that out so I'm working from that but I'm looking at the the net not just the shape and the size of this pair which is basically a circle this one I'm looking at this negative shape in here how close is it to the edge how far does it come down here and then I also as I start to draw the other ones I also start to look at the negative spaces between the pair so this one's basically a little circle and again here's a little negative shape in here and I see this little V in this little area that helps me to see kind of where to draw this pair and this one's kind of coming then there's a they're not quite touching one thing you don't want to do an artist you don't want them you either want them to overlap or not touch you don't want them just barely touching okay that's just really not a great composition and I see I didn't want them on the same equal plane so I realized I wanted this one kind of coming up a little higher I think it is in the photo again I'm not looking at the photo right now but I see I don't know where that line came from but I see how this pair kind of has a shape that kind of comes up it comes over if I divided my paper in half here the edge of the pair comes over almost almost to a third if I had divided it into thirds okay it comes over like right in here somewhere I might make it a little bigger and then I look at the negative shape of this pair with this edge here too of where it's meeting again it might not I'm not looking at the reference photo I'm looking at my watercolor that I already did so I'm not sure if all the shapes and spaces will be the same so we've got a little gestural quality to that pair and I know his little stem's gonna be coming up I like how they have little in other words don't make a stem straight up they have like a little nice gestural quality to that I'll kind of enhance that as I work alright so we've got kind of that nice shape of that pair I'll work on this one again in a minute now I'm gonna look again at the negative spacing here I'm gonna see kind of how close does it come well it comes right about that close again not touching this one's in the foreground also I'm looking at how far does this pair come over okay and in my watercolor it comes over about there how far does it come up it comes up a little bit from the bottom of the paper not a lot and that kind of helps you to get a general idea instead of just drawing blindly you know and I can kind of reshape some of these okay and I again I see the thing I want to bring this down a little more here some of this will kind of change a little bit as I'm as I'm sketching or painting and I see where does this end of this come it comes actually almost a little bit back here and then it kind of curves in here it looks very flat right now of course because it's just a drawing but when you start adding the shadows and things that really is going to help a lot okay so we've got this and now we've got another real gestural or kind of exciting little wing to the stem there now we can see in this one this pair because it's facing forward it's kind of got a circle in a circle that little section that that curves in and makes the smaller top or smaller part is facing us so we're not going to draw the circle or paint it you know so vividly like this but it does help to kind of get that idea of where it is now the stem of this isn't quite in the center it's a little bit higher than the center so we're going to have a little dark space there and again I really liked how these stems were this one it doesn't come up and over the yeah it does a little bit comes up and over the tabletop again kind of in my my drawing all right so we've got some three little basic pear shapes here we've got a general composition I don't worry about the pencil marks because I know I'm going to be adding pastel over this notice though that I didn't use charcoal a lot of times I'll use a charcoal pencil or a harder pastel but I really didn't want that to interfere with my watercolor I wanted to keep it a little cleaner so that's why I use the pencil all right so now I'm going to get started with the watercolor and I am going to use first I'm going to use this bigger brush once again I like to use the biggest brush that I can because it keeps you from getting fussy and also it makes broader smoother strokes if I used this is gonna be a real big exaggeration but if I use this brush first I was gonna take longer and it's gonna make little lines and you know it's just gonna look too fussy so a big broad brush is a good way to do it now I'm gonna do a little bit of a wash on this and again this UART paper is awesome because it takes water really nicely and it behaves kind of like watercolor paper because it doesn't soak in like watercolor paper but you still get a similar effect I had a little bit too much water on my brush but I'm not gonna worry so much about getting everything just so and with this to me it's okay I'm doing basically just wetting the background area here above the tabletop I'm not dipping my brush very good obviously but see that charcoal that's where I said I made a charcoal border and that blends into this so I'm gonna try to avoid that but anyway I'm not gonna care that much if this dripped a little bit down the tabletop or whatever because I kind of like that impressionistic look and it's okay if things kind of blend and bleed together so for right now but to keep things simple I'm gonna work just on this area to kind of help you out with maybe the color choices that I'm using the background here I'm not gonna try to recreate exactly just like in the watercolor paper or painting exactly what's in the photo it was like it was a background window light was coming and going and I'm just gonna kind of really impressionistically get that in so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick some of these blues the ones that I chose I'll try to hold it up so you can see here where I think it was a combination of blues this is almost like a cobalt blue here but it wasn't quite that bright it had a little bit more of I think it might have been this blue here okay you see how that made it just a little bit darker so I'm gonna add a little bit of that in this background sky and or window or whatever it is and I'm just gonna let it go let it drip and if it gets too runny and you have too much water on it you kind of blot your brush off before you apply it I'm just gonna let these little drips and things happen I don't really even care I think I want to get a little more color watercolor dries lighter so sometimes it's okay if you get it on a little more dark than you originally think it should be because it's just gonna really dry up and I like how when you do a wet on wet technique like I just did because I wet the paper first often I used to get so fussy about where certain colors were and making them blend just right they kind of blend themselves as they dry so that's really all you need to do for that now this tabletop was a little bit deeper blue it didn't have as much of the teal in it so I'm going to mix something up I think I used for that a combination of I don't know if you can see these colors it was this color over here and so I gotta kind of go for memory here it's this blue here almost like a Prussian blue this is kind of like an indigo I may add just a little bit of this like cobalt blue in there to kind of lighten it up just a bit see it's kind of a grayed-down blue there so let's do some of that and gradually this tabletop is going to get darker as you move forward now I didn't wet this part here I just realized so I'm gonna get a another brush really quickly this is going to be oh I have one here already actually I have this brush here I would normally like it to be a little bit larger but it's just what I have here I'm gonna take this again I don't care if that color drips into this color it's just fine and I'm going to wet just this area right here for now when I dry my brush out again or rinse it out again I will put more water at the bottom of the UART paper so right now I'm just using water and I'm just kind of notice the tabletop in between the pairs and at the upper part is lighter than the lower parts even other than the shadows under the pairs even areas like right in here it's lighter it's like the light from behind here is kind of peeking through and then it gradually gets a little darker under here but that should work for now because maybe a little more right here because I just want to get this top part of the table right now and then I'll add water to the bottom I really do like watercolor I like applying pastel on top of watercolor often you know you may have seen videos you can do it right on watercolor paper it's kind of an inexpensive way to combine watercolor and pastels and then you can do clear gesso you apply it after the watercolor dries you apply the clear gesso it adds a little grit to it and then you have a little bit of a sanded surface to work on so see I'm just kind of letting this water again this is just an under painting it's not like we're trying to create a fancy watercolor painting I'm letting it just kind of run do its watercolor thing I love just that characteristic of watercolor I actually I've decided I hope I can do this find time to do this is because so many people are home right now and there's a lot of people who I mean you you artists aren't really blessed because you we really don't have a problem staying home if we can find the time to paint because we've got something we can do we have a craft or a hobby or whatever you want to call it an artistic skill and a lot of people don't have that so because of that I thought a lot of people don't have pastels they you know they just don't have the supplies so I thought watercolor is really simple sometimes even if stores are closed or whatever people especially if they have kids they'll have the little basic kids watercolor little palette set you know the ones that you find or that you have like in kindergarten or whatever and so I thought I would do some real simplified watercolor tutorials showing about color mixing of the ways watercolor behaves on watercolor paper the techniques and then at the very end do a little very simple painting maybe you artists could give me your input on that if you think that people you know maybe people who don't have the time in their lives to even try art that that might be something that that they would like might be something you would like I mean sometimes pastel artists you haven't worked with watercolor a lot and you know you might want to learn a little bit more about the techniques so let me know what you think about that now I'm going a little darker with the bottom of the table again a lot of pastels gonna cover this up but hey I'm having fun with this too so let me add some of these colors in here and I already applied the clean water to this so now I'm just adding this darker color and a little bit more of a kind of a brighter blue in here to this tabletop down here a lot of times when I do like how I'm working around the pairs often it's better to kind of geometrically square things off with edges rather than curvy lines it gives it a little bit more of a artistic graphic feel when you do that this part of the table was pretty dark so let me get this in here just see how that blends so nicely isn't that nice and the wet-on-wet really helps it to to blend nicely now there is one thing about watercolor you want to realize is the timing of when you apply the water color to the paper is important right now is a really good safe time to apply it because the paper is wet it's freshly wet but there's a point where the paper gets almost dry and then if you were to go back I'm just adding a little bit of idea of some shadows here if you were to go back and put some watercolor your brush that's kind of wet down on the paper it creates something called blooms that I mean unless you're purposely trying to do that it's usually something you don't want I mean you want the surface to stay kind of smooth so don't wait too long if you're still working on something in other words to to add things see see this still wet so whatever I add is gonna blend right in but if I wait too long I'm gonna get one of those blooms and that's what I don't want so why on that note while it's still wet I'm gonna start adding some of these shadows underneath this is a little thicker paint I don't have quite as much water in this so because I don't want it to get all runny everywhere so I'm just adding some of these shadows again a lot of this is gonna get covered up with pastel but maybe not sometimes I add a limited amount of pastel when I do this got a little into that but that's okay you know watercolor is pretty forgiving if you rinse your brush out you can just kind of you know work things out and make it work for part of a shadow when it again it just adds to impressionism alright a little bit more this is a little shadow under here I didn't get enough of that dark little shadow under this guy here I think I got the paper pretty wet that's why it's not coming out very dark there but I added extra paint again embrace the drips it's okay this one comes down a little over here and then it gradually blends kind of in with the darkness that's going on down here at the bottom you're kind of in a way creating a value study with your underpainting which is usually a good idea that's a great way to begin a painting is with a value study again I'm not looking at the reference photo so hopefully I'm getting these little shadowy arrows areas right I know that this the bottom of this table is just dark period right because I got this little one darker let's go ahead and get this one okay and now we can let this dry and start working on kind of giving the pairs some value and some color so I'm gonna let this dry and then we'll get started okay so this is pretty much dry enough I don't think I'm gonna do a wet on wet for the pairs in other words apply water before I apply it because again this is just an underpainting and I don't need to get too fussy about it I do know that there are some shadows in these pairs so I'm gonna go ahead and add those shadows with kind of that that cooler blue that I had used that was in the sky here and let's see so again I'm working from my my painting and not the reference image but I do see that there were some shadows in here just in this little part right here obviously the Sun is coming from this way because you can see the highlights on the pairs there were some shadows in here kind of wrapped around I cut this pair off a little bit but I'll fix that with pastels some in here actually this whole bottom is pretty much shadows so it's a little highlight there somewhere okay let's get more shadows on this guy here this bottom part I'm gonna again round this guy out we have flexibility as we work we don't have to get so fussy about everything being just right obviously there's gonna be a shadow here it's kind of on the shadowy side wraps around a little bit more and let's get some more shadows on this guy this one down at the bottom is obviously a little more shadowy so I'm even gonna add a little bit of that richer blue to it so again these water color under paintings it's kind of a little roadmap and as I start to add the pastel I'll talk a little bit more about the differences between pastel and watercolor and sometimes the advantages that watercolor has over pastel there are some beautiful wonderful advantages of watercolor and if you can learn to combine the two in a way that accentuates their own beauty then you've done a great job of doing a mixed media type of painting all right so let's see if I go in that too much I'm gonna get one of those blooms I talked about before all right so now because the whole pair isn't so wet I can I'm just gonna go ahead and combine some of those greens in there and yellowy colors what I did I believe when I did the watercolor before is I used this kind of a bright almost lemon a yellow and combined it a little bit with this brightest green that I have I had more yellow than green though when I mixed it up so let's do that and I could have just done kind of a value study with the pairs and then apply it all my greens and everything on top with the pastel but I thought this might be fun for some of you guys to just go ahead and play and learn a little bit about watercolor I'm noticing my water is getting a little dirty too and if I was focused more on this just being a watercolor painting I'd probably go clean my water to keep the colors as fresh as possible probably should look back at the reference image too I noticed there were some interesting little places where there were highlights I think it was here with the tabletop maybe it was this one was something was reflecting back up on the pair I'll definitely look at the reference photo when I go back and do the the pastel painting okay here's where I was saying I want more yellow where I was saying I could reintroduce that pair a little bit and that's one of the things you know a lot of people want to know about impressionistic approaches and that's definitely a way to do it is by having soft edges or lost edges it's often called because when your edges are stark and well-defined that just takes away from that artistic painterly feel this up here was the brightest part of this pair at least that's how it is in my watercolor painting and the little bit more orangey now that does have even though I used a lemony yellow just now I'm gonna start introducing some more orangey yellows because it definitely had those colors as well see which color I feel here's one that's even more orangey for example like this little ochre kind of color and also down here this is definitely more of an orange I'm hoping my camera is showing these so I'm gonna I'm gonna give it some of these orangey colors now and just kind of dollop them on in places and notice I'm using this big brush for this whole time I haven't gone to some teeny brush and it really helps me to keep that painterly look with the big brush instead of a little I didn't even add any green back there this definitely had some more orangey color on this side of this pair and down in here grab some more of this and I'm blending it right over the blue the blue shadow which is fine I'm gonna get that green yellowy green in here first okay so more yellow than green this is that bright lemony yellow because it's up closer to where the source of light is just using this to kind of blend those together a little bit more getting a little bit of that bloom effect there because that one was kind of dry just to point it out so you understand what I'm saying now for down here because it's more in the shadow I'm choosing instead of this brighter orangey color I'm gonna go with something a little duller and darker in value because it is more in the shadow I'm actually gonna add a little of that blue to it too you can pick up on your watercolor palette other colors that are kind of sitting there from before and make more like a dull down more of a grayish rusty color and again this part should be fine to add because it didn't have any color on it or water on it before often I move the place the brush and move the brush to conform to the pair in other words if you were think of it as rubbing your hand across something like if I was rubbing my hand across this pair it would kind of go up right there so add a little bit of a richer green to that maybe with like a little blue in it I got too much water see there's a bloom that's exactly what it looks like it looks like they call it that because it looks like a little flower and it's because I had too much water on my brush so I'm about done with just getting some of the colors I want in these pairs but I could really just have fun doing a watercolor painting again it is definitely a lot of fun add a little bit more blue down here to the sky because he's in the shadow all right so we've got a little idea of a watercolor underpainting and we can start with pastel I might I don't mind that really bad but too much but I think I'm gonna go ahead get a little bit more around the edges of that white just soften it up a little bit there all right so now I can go ahead and start adding pastel to this once it dries and tell you a little bit more about how to do that once again I don't have to apply anything else no clear gesso in this painting because we're working on you art paper another paper you can do this with I can't remember if I've actually done this yet or not someone told me pastel matte works great for doing a watercolor underpainting as well and of course you can use watercolor paper but again you've got to put something down to give it a grit and but I you art paper is so great it's so versatile and great for multiple ways of underpainting all right so let me let this dry and we'll be back for pastel application all right it's pretty much dry this part's not quite as dry but it should be I'm gonna work a little at the top now one disadvantage about well especially how I have all of my sections sectioned off for the painting is that when you add water to your paper it can buckle a little bit and warp and I can't really fix that right now normally I would kind of take the tape off and kind of flatten it out but kind of stuck with that right now but that's okay I will work around it all right so now it's time to start applying the pastel and I'm going to try to describe to you one of the maybe you could call it a challenge of working with watercolor and pastel is that I mentioned I would describe the qualities of each that is advantageous and the quality of watercolor that I love so much is its luminosity it is by nature a luminous medium because it's transparent for the most part there are some watercolor colors that are more opaque than others but it's a transparent medium and pastel on the other hand is an opaque medium in other words you're not going to see a lot of the paper showing through when you apply pastel whereas you see a lot of the brightness of the paper when you apply watercolor so what naturally happens when you apply pastel to watercolor is that you're gonna it appears so much darker because of its opaqueness because it's not translucent so that's just something you kind of have to deal with and sometimes I try to be very sparing with my pastel application and sometimes I end up covering the majority of watercolor painting up it it was just like I said kind of as a roadmap so I'm gonna play around with that one right now I'm gonna get my darkest values in first to work with I know when I add something to this let's add this is one of the I probably need some more lighter colors this is one of the let's say this color is kind of similar to this background color here so let me I've been putting my little paper over here let me get up and see if you can see that in this family yeah you can see the edge so this is this particular it's kind of a pale prim periwinkle color so you see that it's in the same color family as this but let me apply it right next to here and if I put this on top of this I don't know if you can see that it already appears so much darker because it's not translucent the paper isn't showing through when I add this so you know what on that note before I get started I'm gonna grab a few other lighter colors really quickly all right these are some of the lightest pastels that I have in my pastel palette I know it's hard to tell but this one has more pink to it maybe maybe you can tell on the film it definitely has a pink bright hue to it this one has a little more blue to it might can tell that a little more gray down and this one a little bit I know I'm working around that dark when you can see how dark that is now compared to these light oh this one has even more blue in it you can kind of see so that bright pink one is my brightest one could choose one that has a little more yellow in it too so with that in mind let me show you how these apply on top of this I think I will try one of these colors here I'm gonna put this one down first the one I originally applied because it is it does have some darkness to it this is a pastel I broke it's a Terry Ludwig that I broke and it that's why it looks a little special bless its heart so I'm just coming in here and giving some strokes of this more of a lavender reblu down through this on top and I'm going really really soft now I'm gonna come back with this one that was a look right down see that one and I'm going to just glaze this one because we've got some light kind of shining through coming down on these pairs might have to darken up a little bit more add a little more layers of that's where that warping is right there it won't let me get that little area but that's all right well it'll add to the impressionistic feel and I'm keeping a super light touch right now you know what I think I might even I know this is gonna be really dark but I'm going to add just a little bit of this one it has a little bit more of that kind of pink color in it you see how the pastels start kind of blending themselves a little bit so often you don't even have to do the old standard pipe foam insulation blending that we sometimes do and then if it gets a little dark if it gets a little dark in areas we can just come back with that light and glaze over it again again super light touch this background is not what I want to be all that noticeable so we don't have to do very much to it but when you set your values it it affects or when you add a value or establish a value it affects everything else in the painting you have to make sure your values relate to each other correctly so that's often why we go ahead and we add what we consider to be our darkest dark and our lightest light now this is that dark again buckly paper I may have to do some blending with this just because the paper is so darn buckly maybe I can press it down a little bit that's a pain but whatever we're supposed to be relaxing right relax and enjoy this process yeah it's see it's not even letting me get a smooth application of this so I am going to resort to doing some blending down here okay that's that one now I've got this other purpley color that I can add in here maybe just by doing some fractured strokes it will make up for the worked paper see how that already helps a little bit I like this purple color wow so that's this is my darkest start I'm gonna put a little bit more of this purple up here underneath some of these shadows are the pairs for the shadow and this one does come down a little bit here but I'm gonna I'm gonna blend over top of this we typically put our darkest darks down first with pastel because you can blend lights on top of it I've got a shadow coming down here again I'm kind of looking at negative shapes I'm looking at those little negative shapes in between the pairs as much as the shapes of the pairs themselves all right maybe I won't have to blend too much with that all right so now what I wanted to do is get more of a little bit of a lighter value I've got this purple that's a little bit lighter in value than this purple so get a good edge to that so I'm gonna use that to kind of soften some of these edges and to start adding some lighter values and then I'll glaze over that with an even lighter value I guess probably the best way to describe this is this is like the blocking in stage where you're working on the biggest shapes you don't really need to get overly crazy about getting things too perfect now this is that one that I used in the sky and even though I kind of like this I might use this in combination no actually is this no this is darker value so I'm gonna use some of this and to lighten it up this color that I used in the sky okay that was deceiving it looked kind of like the sky color trying to find kind of a good edge because again I'm dealing with this buckle in here and you know what I'm gonna brighten it up a little bit with some brighter blue but this kind of gets it going here I'm gradually you'll probably notice I'm gradually getting lighter in value as I'm getting higher up this seems to have some of that almost pink shining through again from the window or whatever it is back there some sort of light source really light touch here and then I'll use a lighter pastel and you may notice I mean sometimes you see like the whole it's like she's holding that pastel on its side why isn't the why are gonna go on right over the pairs it's because you learn to turn your pastel like I'm turning it kind of on the corner here right now to kind of work in between that I really didn't want this edge of this pair remember I talked about edges joining I didn't want it to join that top of the table so I've got to make a decision either put the tabletop underneath it or over top of it I'm going to put it over top I think that's how it is in the reference image again I keep forgetting to even look at the reference image because I've done it once already and I have my watercolor painting next to me alright we've got a little bit of a you see how loose that is nothing's really crazy you're set in stone now this is a blue that I really like and I thought it would add some pizzazz to this so I'm just gonna kind of again you can call this maybe a fractured type of application fractured is where you put one color next to another color of the same value you're not really pressing hard or covering it up usually they're they're juxtaposed to each other and they create this illusion sometimes of another color which is neat you could also call this scumbling a kind of more scumbling right now which it's kind of just making little little marks of color next to each other and they they vibrate together and kind of make interesting visual a visual play on with the eyes for the eyes I should say and I'm trying to keep even the table top I want to keep that that soft edge I don't want it to be so prominent and I may even lighten that up a little more in value it's a little slanted but I can fix that got this little bit of a lighter lavender that I'm gonna use here oh I'm sorry I'm forgetting to put marks here but this has a little bit more pink in it again we've got the warmth of the Sun so or where again whatever that light source is kind of shining down and it's lavender this lavender anyway has more yellow in it believe it or not that's what gives it more of a pink look and a blue look to the lavender color some of that is coming down kind of in here and it's okay to make kind of directional linear strokes this might even be a Rembrandt you know I know a lot of artists don't talk about Rembrandt much or use it much but they have their place just like new pastels do Rembrandt's are a little bit harder than then I'm sorry they're a little harder than regular soft pastels but they're not quite as hard as new pastels but they're great for making linear strokes another pastel that is a harder pastel that I like a lot is Giro and it's a French pastel and you know I've got I haven't broken out my Giro's in a while I need to do that okay I think I might want to add a little bit more this purple in here to darken this up just a little bit around this pair and then I can start kind of working on hair shapes so we've got basically might want to add a little bit more of this color down here we've got basically a little bit of a underpainting value study going on here I kind of like them how this dark has a warmth to it it's kind of giving a little bit of interest to this dark that I have might add just a tad of that underneath some of these just right where the most or the darkest value would be under these pairs a little bit try not to create too much of an edge I can blend it more later with another value if I want but that's definitely where the darkest values are in this some reference images under the pairs and down at the bottom part yeah I'm gonna soften these up so you can put your dark value down and then you can kind of soften them with the next value like see this is the value that I was using in here I can just kind of glaze over to not too much just over some of the edges there and kind of soften it so it doesn't look quite I'm using a really light touch so it doesn't look quite so stark really light touch here softening that in all right and that's giving a little bit of that solidity it's a it's got more of a solid three-dimensional feel because of that I've got this is a this is a really dark blue and I feel like this one down here it's because it's down in the shadows and it's a little cooler down here in color temperature it could stand to have a little bit more of a dark shadow down here probably should look at the reference photo but if I know where the Sun is you can kind of get an idea of where the shadows gonna be and then I'm going with this value obviously I wouldn't use this value down there because it's up where it's lighter so I'm using this darker purple again to kind of scumble a little harder because I'm working with the little warpy paper and it's softened that warmth up down there that I just added okay so now we've got a nice little underpainting a value kind of steady in a way we've got pretty much our lightest lights going on we know that the other lightest lights are gonna be these pairs if you wanted to you know make a mental note I am gonna look at the reference picture now if you want to make a mental note of where they are I mean you could go ahead and make a little mark if you wanted this is where the lightest light is on this pair I'm gonna make it real light because I'm gonna add some greens to this this is where the lightest light is on this pair we've got a little like a little creaser crevice there and then there's another light light back there it's not gonna be that light and then we've got a little highlight on this pair right here let's see where is it yeah right here it's kind of like a little almost like a long rectangular shape there and let me squint that's a good way to get where your highlights are now we're gonna have some highlights to hitting here here oh there is a little one like right there this pastel so chunky it's hard to make a mark but these highlights that we're seeing some of these even over here are not gonna be as light these are like those little bright ones that I just added they're gonna be kind of like your your lightest more of a yellowy value but what I'm gonna do before I add those you know we typically work dark to light well I'm gonna do that in these pairs as well after I get a sip of coffee after getting up I thought you know maybe I will play around a little bit with the blending of this guy so the texture isn't competing as much with the pairs so I have this little piece of pipe foam insulation I'm trying to find a clean spot where I can just blend a little bit like that all I'm doing is I'm blending kind of down what I want to do is work with the upper part kind of first because it's all of the darker values and then just gradually work my way down yeah see that how it softens it and that way your attention isn't focused on it quite as much as it was before and I'm gonna even soften that little edge of the tape atop so I don't have such a stark line so I'm all I'm gonna do is make little just blend it together a little bit it's not such a division just gonna soften it up can even blend a little bit of the upper tablecloth tablecloth table whatever it is back there because often things will be a little bit out of focus further away like that back part of the table and then they start to get more in focus as they move forward so just a little bit of blending here creates that illusion of these pairs really being three-dimensional that's how our eyes work you know we don't photographs often represent things not like we see them with their eyes because our eyes because we only focus on a few things at a time and not the whole scene for example if you're looking at a pencil in front of you in your hand you're not you're not focusing on our scene maybe things in the background in your kitchen or whatever you know so we often need to recreate that an art with that illusion of how our eyes work rather than what the photograph really shows all right so that did help I do like that I'm going to now add some of the highlights that are in or the shadowy highlights the shadowy areas that are in the pairs I'm thinking this is a blue that I pulled out I apologize I haven't been real good at putting these down let me go ahead and do that let's see I'm going to go with my darkest darks here that was that dark maroon kind of color and then I had this purpley color remember if I added this blue but I'm probably going to add it is kind of a gray blue I like that color so those were like my darkest darks I did have this little new pastel that is a dark and it's pretty dark I'll put it up here it looks almost black but that's what I used underneath these pair shadows and then this is the blue that I might be adding I need a little bit lighter for these pairs that's gonna be a little dark so dark that was so I'm probably gonna grab a lighter blue I could use this blue and I may some of the pair shadows see here and shadows are usually cooler so that's why often I use blues and purples but because there's so much blue and purple in the tabletop I make it a little creative with some of the shadows this is a new pastel that I'm not sure if I'll use it's kind of a brown or a dark sepia something like that all right so now here are some of the let me go ahead and go down with these blues right here this is that one that I had in the sky this one was another one that I had on this tabletop back here with that lavender and then these were the the lighter highlights that I used this is more of the blue one this is a little bit brighter than that one still has some blue in it and this was the yellow one they don't even show up that much but you see how this one's definitely lighter you see it more on that paper okay so those were like my light lights and now I'll try to start sharing the other colors as I go along I don't think I got this purple this little purple and this little purple it's this is the pinkish purple one that I used okay so that's pretty much what I use so far I'm pretty sure in an effort to speed this video up a bit in order to speed up the uploading time some of you may know where I live I have really slow Wi-Fi and to upload a video more than an hour takes a while because I've done a lot of talking and instruction it's caused my painting time to take a lot longer than I normally would so I'm speeding the rest of this up because I think you guys probably got the the best information about how to do an underpainting or watercolor underpainting underneath pastel so enjoy the rest of this again sped up a bit but I am going to do a little bit of voice over here to explain what's happening I'm using cooler shadows like the blues and the teals in the side where the light is not shining and the reason I'm doing that as I know these pairs are greenish yellow and I didn't really want to use any dark purples or you know color or dark dark blues for the shadows I wanted to keep them alive with color this is kind of a colorist approach I guess you could say also to right there what I'm doing is I'm kind of changing the shape of a couple of the pairs that's the wonderful thing is that we really have more flexibility with pastels than a lot of people think I didn't like how the one pair up top was leaning a little bit more to the right I wanted it more to the left I liked that gestural quality better I also mentioned about not having things just too close it's better to have it overlapping or far farther apart than touching and later I decide that bottom pair there is almost touching that top pair the one on the left and I didn't feel that looked right compositionally so I decided to overlap it I make the bottom pair bigger which makes sense it would have been larger anyway in the foreground now I'm just using some different greens darker greens go more in the shadow and then gradually get them lighter I'm showing there how I also didn't really like how those were kind of lined up at the bottom so I I actually made that pair a little bit larger isn't it great that with pastel you really when you use a good paper like you are you have so much layering ability that you can correct things as you work and if you have by chance lost all your layering ability then you can also brush off pastel and kind of start over you know you just get a kind of a bristle brush and start over now in hindsight I I may have left more of that blue I actually got up and down a lot during this painting just you know life is just crazy there's a lot going on right now but anyway I didn't end up leaving a lot of the watercolor showing through but I think I'd like to try it again not with these pairs but with something else and leave a bit more of the watercolor showing through but I do I love watercolor under paintings because I feel like you can really just get a nice composition in to start with and kind of get an idea of your values and and I happen to love watercolor by the way I've been realizing that there are so many people right now that are a little bit bored at home you know we artists don't really have a problem with that if we've got some art supplies at home but there's a lot of people who don't have anything like that at home and now shops are closed or you can't leave and you're limited in what you can purchase so I decide you can see now there too I'm adding some of those pairs have some R&G tents to them as well but I decided that one of the best or easiest mediums to teach for someone who doesn't have a lot of art supplies is watercolor a lot of times people especially if you have you have kids you probably have one of the little basic palettes of watercolor at home hopefully and if not you know you can get them at places like Walmart and I thought for in an effort to help give people something to do and some art to learn a lot of people love art you know that's why those sketch and sit things are so popular people want to learn how to paint so I thought I would do some very simple watercolor lessons showing a little bit about color mixing and about watercolor techniques super basic super simple and hopefully just about anybody could participate in that thought that be a lot of fun and then into each little episode of learning with a very simple little watercolor painting that someone could feel like look what I did so you know I hope this thing doesn't go on much longer but in case it does I thought that would be a neat way to kind of give back to the community and provide something about you so you know you guys let me know if you think that would be good you guys might even like that I know a lot of people who are in Monet cafe and on my patreon page you may not have experience with watercolor and it really is a great way to combine pastels you know the the mixed media of watercolor and pastels by the way I am going to be doing a gouache under painting very soon I'm not sure if it'll be the next session of this 12 days of healing but it will be pretty soon maybe I will do that I don't know watercolor and gouache is a little similar but I'll explain the differences when I get to that I did want to describe I don't think I've finished I had been talking about the inherent advantages of watercolor is its luminosity how you just get that glow the paper showing through things seem bright because of the translucency inherent to watercolor and I was going to share in comparison to pastels which are opaque that don't have that natural luminosity with the paper in other words when you put pastel down I mean unless you have a super light approach the pastel in general makes a solid application rather than a transparent application I'm sorry for my shirt there and but what is I'm going to compare the two of these at the very end and I think you'll be able to easily see what is the quality that pastels has perhaps over watercolor and you know I don't think this goes on much longer so I'll go ahead and share notice when I get to the end and I show the watercolor and the watercolor painting that I did actually did it last night was real simple I actually did it kind of while cooking dinner if that sounds crazy you know it is kind of crazy but but anyway it's very simple and basic so I could I could have done more to give the watercolor more vibrancy but on that note that's what pastels has over watercolor the color vibrancy that bold brilliant I think that's what I love about pastel so much is that you can get such gorgeous saturation of color now I know that I've seen watercolor artists that really do an amazing job with that but it's not really something that is inherent about watercolors versus pastels so that's a little bit of the difference in some of the things that I see with watercolor and pastel I wanted to warm up that background a little bit I knew there was some light perhaps from the source of the Sun back there so that's why I gave it a little bit of that pink and then I added a little bit of that in the pairs as well so these are kind of a very colorful pairs definitely but I really enjoyed painting them even though I took a little longer than I had planned and you know I was gonna do these in about 15 minutes or less but you know what the point of this is art therapy so if you've got the time paint and who cares if it takes three hours you know if you've got the time and it's relaxing you're enjoying it alright guys I hope you enjoyed this I hope you learned something comment please share if you'd like I mean if you're on Monet Cafe I am providing this one gratis to Monet Cafe even though these are normally on my patreon page feel free to share these and join along and if you are one of my patrons also please if you do this session you can use your own fruit I would like it if you did something similar to the subject matter use whatever reference photo or the one I provided and please share it in the Google photo album you guys know if you're my patrons how to get to that and share it so anyway guys happy painting be blessed I pray everyone is safe stay protected and I'll be back with session for tomorrow