 Welcome to Monet Café and my Patreon page. Today's lesson will be on creating a glowing underpainting technique to make a beautiful glow underneath your work. Now there will be two versions of this tutorial. If you're seeing it here on Monet Café YouTube channel, there's lots of free content and instruction. But for something extra, I have a Patreon page and my patrons get the full version with all kinds of extra commentary and some real time. If you'd like to become a patron, it's only $5 a month and there's the link above and a clickable link at the end of this video. Okay, let's get started. I'll be giving information on my supplies, but I wanted to give credit for this beautiful reference photo from Charlie Buchanan. I believe he's in our Monet Café art group on Facebook, but I'm going to be talking to you about how you can take a reference image and interpret it in your own way. I used basically the energy and the color that inspired me from this reference photo. Now I'm going to give a little sneak peek information here about something that's coming soon. This is a little bracelet. I love little bracelets while I paint. I love the positive little comments on them. And a couple of years ago, I found some bracelets. I loved a lady who made them and sold them on Instagram. I didn't know she lived near me and I have linked up with her about creating a special Monet Café bracelet. It's going to be inspired by beautiful paintings of famous artists, the colors and the style. So they'll be like a Degas, Monet, Van Gogh. So it's going to be quite exciting. So stay tuned for that. This is a rather small painting. I already had some sheets of UART paper cut up to 5x7 inch format. And you can probably see the little color reference sheet that was over to my left. I'm using primarily a lot of the Terry Ludwig Shades of Nature set. You don't have to use these. You could use similar colors or come up with your own colors. But I was using this for a former painting, a previous painting. So I just kept using a lot of those. I wasn't quite sure how I was going to approach the underpainting. But then I remembered, I really love this technique I hadn't done in a while. I'm using these pastels that are called New Pastels by Prismacolor in U Pastels. They are harder pastels. And you know, they're not always the ones that get the glory, but they are like little workhorses in your studio. They really give you a lot of things that you can do with them under paintings. You can get finer lines with them. You can get a little bit more detail if you're trying to do that. But I love using them for under paintings. And I want to talk you through, this is going, I'm going to talk through the whole underpainting part for both my Monet Café YouTube channel, if you're seeing it on here, and of course my Patreon page for my patrons. But I'm going to give a little extra comment or commentary after the underpainting for my patrons. So you're going to hear the whole underpainting technique here if you're on Monet Café. So what I do often is I just kind of turn it. Sometimes I break my pastels. Sometimes I don't. But I'm getting in my dark values. Now you may notice I am veering quite a bit away from the reference photo. The reference photo was actually in a landscape format. I wanted to do it in a portrait format. I wanted to do it vertically. And so I changed that up. And you know, once you've been painting a while, you kind of know some little composition strategies that you can do to make it more interesting. So I created that little kind of like a path to lead the eye. It's going to get covered up, but it kind of gives a little subdued suggestion underneath what I'm doing here. Now what I'm doing now, notice I put down the dark, any darker color pastel that you have. Also another thing about new pastels, they don't fill up the tooth of the paper so quickly. So using them for an underpainting is great. You'll be able to get a lot more layers. But then I just started, you know, I took a deeper kind of violet purple, magenta purple to put down. And then as I'm moving back a little further, I'm getting a little lighter with my pinks. Now one of some richness colors do get a little warmer in the foreground. So I'm just kind of getting in. I like the way Karen Margulis puts it. She says, laying down the dirt. And that really is a great analogy. It's also, this is also called a complimentary underpainting. I'm putting in complimentary colors to greens and grasses and things on the color wheel that lean more over towards the green or the blue. Warmer tones are the compliments to that. Now I'm adding a little bit of this purple for interest into the tree colors or the trees and the tree values. Anything closer, those two trees in the middle are going to be more towards the foreground. The other trees I'm going to push back in the distance with some cooler colors and paler values. Now I really liked how this came out with the sky. What I did is I put in kind of a warm, beigey color and a little bit of this pink. And the whole painting at the end, I was really happy with it. And I was also very happy that it became a really popular painting. A lot of people liked it. I have a couple of Facebook groups I put it in and it got a lot more likes and comments and recognition than some of my other paintings. So I thought, well, this is a really great underpainting technique or it was just one of those times when things just kind of fall into place. But anyway, this video is about creating that glow. So that's what these warmer new pastels are doing here. Now what I'm going to do here is I'm really just going to scrub it in. I've got a piece of pipe foam insulation. Lots of things can work for this blending. All I'm trying to do is cover up all that white underneath and create a softer kind of a moon. Now you can see some of the pastel is actually kind of coming off. That's fine. It's just, you know, it's just kind of brushing off a little bit, but that's just fine. I'm wiping my pipe foam insulation to kind of clean it off, especially when I get up to that sky. I don't want to blend all those dark colors. I actually don't think I even blend the sky. I'm not sure I'll have to look. But anyway, you can use whatever to blend. Some people have talked about being able to use pool noodles. Some people have used the little packing peanuts. I've actually used just paper towels. I find some things take off the pastel a lot more than others. And that's why that pipe foam insulation helps. Okay, yeah, I didn't blend the sky. Now I'm going right into painting here, okay? Now what I'm doing here is I think the term for it is like a fractured sky. I'm using colors of the same value. They're not a lot lighter or darker than each other. They're kind of in the same value family of lightness and darkness. All kind of like that lighter, light to medium value. And I'm not over blending it. The sky, I let that pink show through. I think a lot of times we overwork our paintings. I'm speaking to myself too. And we lose that beautiful color of the underpainting underneath. Whereas if we just lightly glaze over it with some other colors, let it be a little bit more unfinished than too finished. Okay, now I'm kind of reestablishing this path. It had gotten a little paled out with marking it off. I mean with brushing it off or in with the pipe foam insulation. And so now I'm just trying to get a little bit more of those darks in there. Now I did have a problem with my UART paper kind of curling up on the edges. If you've watched my videos, you know, we've a lot of us have had that problem. I do have some solutions for that. Actually with an iron and a towel, you can straighten out and flatten out your UART paper. So I'm keeping this for my patrons. This is going to be in real time on my Patreon page, www.patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. It's $5 a month. I started it really just because a lot of people wanted to support the Monet Cafe YouTube channel. I mean, it's just, it's been my heart in Monet Cafe to provide free art lessons. And I just thought it was such a blessing that some of the subscribers were wanting to help me out for all the years and the time and the videos and that I put into this for for nothing. So I tell you what, it really has been a blessing. You guys, when you subscribe for $5 a month, I don't share this with everyone, but we're looking at making some changes in our lives. And me growing my Patreon page is really going to going to help us out a lot. So thank you always to my patrons, but I'm still going to keep bringing free lessons to Monet Cafe. It will have a bit more limited content, but still a lot for the beginner artists to grow and learn from. And of course, you can always go to our Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook, totally free. Go on Facebook, find the group Monet Cafe Art Group. It's a private group. So you can share your stuff in confidence. It's not all over the world, but there's over 9,000 members in that group and there's advanced artists, intermediate artists, beginner artists, everybody's helping each other. You can get just about any question you have answered in that group. That's like, what a resource, right? All right. Now here's where I am pushing those trees back. When you use a lighter value, lighter in it's, it's not as dark as foreground colors and a cooler color, cooler and color temperature, it gives the illusion that things are further away. So that's what's happening with these background trees. I'm going to reestablish the foreground trees to look a little bit closer. And again, I really loved this warm underpainting. I do, you saw the painting at the beginning probably, but I do cover it up with some of the greens, kind of some warm greens, but I try to purposely let that pink glow peek through. Again, that's the point of this video. Let's not overwork our paintings that have a nice underpainting to them. Let it shine through, let that be that warmth and that glow that comes through the final piece. And again, I think that's why I personally like this painting so much. And I think others, others did too, is it wasn't overworked and it was fresh. That's one of my personal goals for 2020 is keeping it fresh and something I call efficiency of stroke, where you don't waste strokes. They're all very purposeful. It doesn't mean you have to work slowly and tediously, but the more you paint, the better you get at that. Now you can start to see how I've established in the trees. The foreground trees are darker. It definitely pulls them forward with that illusion, with darker values. And now I'm carving out some of those trees in the background to look like they're further away. Alright, so at this point, if you are watching it on Monet Café, I am going to speed it up with some nice music. And again, I always stress this, I learned so much, the majority of what I know, by watching other artists, getting some information, you know, like I've given at this beginning of this video, but then just watching people's techniques and then trying it, playing. I really highly encourage playing. Don't get so serious, especially when you're a beginner. And guess what? You're going to have some paintings that just, you're like, what have I done? Trust me, I have a whole bunch of paintings like that. So just be prepared for that. That's what it's going to be. Just throw them away, play again, and know that every painting is getting better. I do wish I had saved more of my beginning pastel paintings because, but you know, I threw so many of them away because I was just like, oh, this is terrible. So don't get discouraged. All of this is learnable. Now I'm fixing my little problem with my curled up UART paper. I'm actually just putting a piece of tape behind it, with the sticky part forward to hold it. And now I put a piece of tape on top of that one, which holds that curved up edge to the UART paper down. All right, now's the time I'll speed it up for the Monet Cafe channel. Enjoy the music. And for my patrons, you'll be watching the same video with the extra content coming now. All right, this is that shades of nature set that I'm using. Okay, I'm really going to go now. Enjoy. So this was a fun painting. I hope you learned a lot and she believed she could, so she did. And I'm hoping to have that artistic Monet Cafe bracelet series coming soon. All right, my friends, give this a try. I think you're going to like this glowing underpainting technique. Be sure to share it in our Facebook group, Monet Cafe Art Group, if you do. And also feel free to become a patron, subscribe to this channel, and check out some more of the videos. Happy painting!