 Welcome beautiful friends to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and yes this is a watercolor painting tutorial. Join me in this lesson as we learn about new and very affordable watercolor painting products. I think this will be exciting for beginners and experienced watercolor artists alike. So we'll be learning lots in this, but specifically how to paint intuitively. This means very loose and free, and I find it's relaxing, therapeutic, and truly lots of fun. These would make neat little greeting cards or gift cards to give to friends. So let's dive right in and get started with this fun and relaxing lesson. But first I would really appreciate it if you would go ahead and like this video and subscribe to this channel for more free videos and click that bell icon to be notified of future videos. If you've been enjoying this channel with literally hundreds of free lessons and you'd like to support this channel for $5 a month, that would be so awesome. It helps keep these free videos coming, plus my patrons get extra content. As in this case, my patrons will get all of the commentary in real time. Now let's talk about the products used in this lesson. I was quite impressed with this watercolor set by my Lang. I hope I'm saying that right. It's a 48 set of watercolors, and I'm really overwhelmed at the vibrancy of these colors, and they are so affordable. I'll have all product links in the description of this video. I also love that they sent me a color chart to literally fill out all of the colors. I don't know why they sent me two of them, but that's cool. They also have this neat little film that goes over the watercolors that shows you all of the color numbers and names. This makes it really convenient for filling out the color chart. I'll be using some watercolor brushes, but it's nice that this set comes with one of these watercolor pens. They're great for travel. Now look at these beautiful colors. I'm going to fill out the color chart real quick and speed it up so you can see the vibrancy of the color, and they even come with metallic colors that work beautifully. I'm going to speed this up, but I wanted to mention some of the advantages to doing this. Watercolors in their dried state look a lot darker than when you wet them and apply them to watercolor paper. So if you try to paint with just the set alone, you're kind of working blind. You can't really see how luminous the colors are. And by the way, these are some luminous, gorgeous colors. I also love the fact that they keep the color names very consistent with traditional color names. Here's some of the metallic colors. And one neat thing about metallic colors is they also look great on black paper. And I think that's just really cool. The surface I'll be using, I'll also have a product link in the description of this video, is called Fluid 100 watercolor paper. Now I had never used, it's a six by eight size. I had never used 300 pound watercolor paper before. I love it. You can add lots of water. It doesn't buckle very much. Again, a very affordable product. This was my first experimental painting using this watercolor block. Because it's a block, it's glued on the sides. You don't get any buckling. And it's just really a neat way to work. The brushes I'll be using will be mostly this Princeton Brush Company. I really like these watercolor brushes. And I just have the round brushes. I'll be using probably a 12, a 10, and a 6. And I will, when I get to some of the final little wildflower stems and details, I'll probably use this Rigger Brush. This is by Windsor Newton. Or a liner brush. I have a liner brush as well. So I like to use, you might think that's kind of a big brush. But I like to use a bigger brush, especially with the beginning painting. And then go from there. I'll also be using some markers. These are nice little thin markers. I got these when Amazon had their Cyber Monday sale. They're called Mugain pigment liners. I can't say any of these names. And they come in various points. So if you need a thick point down to a really thin point, I want these wildflowers to be very delicate. But I'm going to be using probably this thinnest one. And probably use this to get some of the little leaves and stems. I want this to be really delicate and light. And I'll also be using right now this little 5 by 7. Well, I think it's a 4 by 6 on the inside, but it's 5 by 7 on the outside. What I'm going to do, I love marking off and having a little edge around my watercolor painting. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to line it up as good as I can. I'm just going to make a pencil mark here. As you could use this to make a gift card or a card you want to send a family member or a loved one. And I think this would be really fun to have some mailable watercolor card creations. Now I'm also going to be using a product that I recently purchased. And I think it's called Washi Tape. I think they use these for like crafts and scrapbooks and stuff like that. But I've just been a fan of seeing other people use them so much because they're just so darn cute and creative tapes. Now it didn't come with this wooden dowel thing. I actually was using it to hold some paintings. I think it's a dish dryer. Oh my goodness, I love this one. Aren't these fun? Alright, so here is my 5 by 7 marked off surface. I'm going to use my cute little tape to outline it. Again, it's just because it's cute. That's really the only reason. And it's kind of hard to find the edge here. Let's do it. Got it. I don't have any nails. I have never really had that desire or I don't want to take the time or money to do it. Alright, isn't this cute? Wow, I love it. I truly had so much fun with this whole painting process. So here we go. We're ready to get started. Now when painting intuitively, it means you don't have to really have everything all detailed and it kind of de-stresses you because you don't have to. What I did is I found some floral images on unsplash.com and you can follow along with my painting but there's not really any one reference image that you'll need to follow. Again, this is intuitive painting and you'll learn more about that as we go. Even though this watercolor palette has this nice little mixing tray, I love it and I use that often. I've recently started just using a white plate. This one I need to clean off or dry off. I have some water on it and it just gives me the freedom to put my colors. Sometimes I'll even do it in like a color wheel arrangement. When I'm mixing them up and I can add a lot of water to one if I need to. Another thing I like to have is paper towels. I just get about three or four paper towels. I fold them up like this and usually just keep them near me. The reason for this is you want to control the amount of water. If you want something to be really light and luminous so the white of the paper is showing through, you need to use a decent amount of water. Say you get a lot of water on your brush and you want something to be a little more rich in color then you don't want as much water so you dab some of the water off on your little paper towel. So that's for really the value and color control when you're using the paper towels like that. It really works well. I also like to have two containers of water. Recently I've been doing this. I saw some artists do it a long time ago and I'm like, you know, I need to do that. You can rinse out your brush in one and then you've got clean water to start fresh again. You don't have to change your water quite as often when you do that technique. All right, so here we go. I'm going to get inspired. I may even add some texture to this and have some fun just with paint. So I think what I'm going to do, I think I want to create kind of a yellowy cool background color and then add my flowers on top. Really light again, super, super light. So I'm going to create the background first. I'm going to use some colors. I think I'll use almost like a yellowy green and this palette has some nice colors. It also has some metallic colors. Look at that, or they're called interface. And I did a little sample of those, of course, on the watercolor guide that they gave me. You can see the shimmer, shimmer, shimmer. They're all on this side here. This whole side is that shimmery paint and it really applied so nicely. But I happen to remember from another set of metallic paint I bought, they work great on black paper too. Oh my gosh, isn't that fantastic? I love it. All right, so let's mix up some pretty yellowy green. I love this color, but I don't think I want to use the sparkly ones for this. So what I'm going to do, I liked this yellow green, but I want it super pale. I think I'm going to mix a little bit of yellow with this green and really get it super light. Really super light. And then I might, I want to warm it up a little bit. I might add a little bit of that olive green too. So let's give that a try. From this point on, I'm speeding things up a bit. Now, if you're a patron of mine, you have already gotten the early release of this tutorial in all real time and all live commentary. I talked literally while I was painting through this entire process, describing all of my colors and everything. But in this free version, you'll still get plenty. I included my palette and my plate right next to me so you can literally watch the colors that I choose. And that's very helpful. If you want to paint along with this, I mean you can buy the exact products that I have in everything. So again, if you're a patron, you get to hear my voice and everything as I was explaining all of my steps. But you get lots when you're just on Monet Cafe as well. No worries. But I am going to give you some voiceover commentary here. My goal was to create a very, very light and luminous background. I had envisioned yellows, earthy yellows, and teals. So I was kind of neutralizing the yellow that's the second one down from white on that far right. It's really intense. It was too lemony yellow. So I'm adding some of the little browns. There was one color that is kind of a golden color. I really liked it. It's not the yellow ochre one. The one that looks kind of like Dijon mustard there. That yellow ochre is always very opaque. It means it doesn't have a lot of ability to see through it. So I wanted this to be light and translucent. One of the beautiful things about watercolor paper is the ability for it to look light and bright. So we don't want to lose that too soon. Now I'm trying to find one of those pretty teal blues. Aha! That's it. It's actually called Turkey Blue. Now I mentioned that I love this set because it has a lot of the traditional names like Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Yellow, Prussian Blue. Many of your traditional names. But I never heard of Turkey Blue before. But I mixed some of the Turkey Blue with a little forest green. So this is what is inspiring me is this color. Intuitive watercolor painting. It's not really about recreating the actual image. You're playing with color and water. And as I work here, you'll see that what I do is I allow the shapes and the things that I create to guide me, to take me on a journey as to where I see images. Have you ever... There's actually a scientific name for this. Have you ever had where you're just staring at something like... It used to be, for me, it was a shower I had that had travertine. Oh, here. Let me pause that story. I'm going to be using some props. I got some saran wrap. I got a little toothpick. And I even got a chopstick. Okay, you're going to see me use these. That's one of the fun things too about intuitive watercolor painting. You can just have fun. I'm going to be using some salt too, which gives a kind of a neat reaction to watercolor. But anyway, sometimes we can see images in things like stone. Like I said, I had this travertine and I always saw all of these images just how your brain puts things together. And that's what happens with intuitive watercolor painting. Also notice how I'm laying my brush on the side. I'm imagining a really sunny day. And I loved that cool feel that I had with the yellows and the teals, but a little bit of neutral warm green too. I'm even rolling my brush. But one of the goals here is first to create a background that's inspiring and fun. We're really just letting spontaneity guide the process, which is just so much fun. I have a tendency with pastel painting to go a little dark because with pastel painting, most of my tutorials on my channel are pastel painting. By the way, leave me some feedback. If you want more watercolor painting tutorials, I love watercolor painting. Don't worry though. Sometimes I have some of you guys who are like, please don't stop pastel painting. That will never happen. Okay, so just leave me some commentary if you'd like to see more. I like watercolor painting because it's just so fun and relaxing, especially this intuitive approach. Okay, I forgot what I was saying before. But I'm using now some earthy colors and I'm just making shapes and marks. At first I had a lot of water. Now there's that yellow ochre color. And first I had a lot of water. Notice how it looked very pale. And that's, for me, with this approach a great way to start. And so now I'm rolling and I'm moving my brush around. And before you know it, you start to see some shapes that were reminding me of wild flowers. That was my vision that I had of what I wanted to do with this painting. Light and happy and fun. Alright, this is a technique that I love to use, very intuitive. It's a splatter technique. I literally get some water and paint on my brush. You need enough water for it to splatter. And I tap it onto my finger. What I love about that is the marks that it makes are very spontaneous. Sometimes when we try to make marks for flowers in a field and we dab, dab, dab, dab, we have a tendency to pattern those marks. Well, just let spontaneity do that for you because it will create a much more beautiful and lyrical style of where your placement of leaves and grasses and flowers are. Oh, I added a green that I don't normally use. It's almost like an artificial green. You see that? I think it's like a phthalo green. But in this painting, I kind of wanted to play with color. That is another benefit of intuitive watercolor painting. You are like a kid again and you're like, oh, that's a pretty color. And so you put it down. And we're not following reality that much. Again, grab some images that inspire you but let the spontaneity of the water and the color guide you and then just use the images that you see as possible reference material. Now, you could use other mediums besides watercolor for intuitive type of painting. However, for some reason, I find that watercolor lends itself to this so beautifully. And I think it's because the water. Like I said, let the water take you on a journey. Often, I will... I didn't do a lot of wet-on-wet painting. Wet-on-wet technique is when you wet your paper first, then you lay some color down and let the color just flow. But that is one technique that's really fun with intuitive painting. You let it just flow in the water. Again, that's why watercolor is a really wonderful medium for this type of painting. But it's still, even though I didn't do a wet-on-wet technique, I still just let the water kind of flow and guide me. It still dripped into places that were unexpected. Now, this is fun. What I did is I put a little water in the turkey blue, little palette there, and I laid my chopstick in it and I rolled it around. Now, why would I do that? I'm using my brush now to soften the edges. Why would I do that? Well, for one, it gives more intense color, dipping it right onto the watercolor little place there. What do I call those? Little blocks, palettes? I don't know. In the little square there. And more intense color and it gives a linear feel versus a brush. No matter how hard you try to do a little brush on the tip, you won't get the linear feel, like I'm doing now, with the toothpick. I found I needed to roll the toothpick in some of the wetness of the paint that was on my plate to get it to flow a little bit. Now, a little more splatter. Again, adding to that fun spontaneity of this whole piece. And before you know it, you'll start to see branches and twigs and leaves. Now, I just smushed up some of my saran wrap. I think I had seen this from some other artist a while ago. Sorry, I'm bouncing my whole desk here. And it did, you can't see it much here, but it did give a little bit of a pattern to it. It probably would have done it even more if my paper hadn't already dried as much as it did. So do that technique if your paper is a little bit wet. And again, you're going to see shapes and patterns of things that are just fun. Now, I wanted to add some beautiful pinks. And I turned my brush in different ways. You'll notice, a lot of times I'll turn it, lay it on its side or elongate it and pull upwards. So I'm just playing with some little strokes of color. And now I'm starting to imagine these tall pinkish flowers that are almost like the shape of wisteria. But I'm so bad at my flower names. My mama, God rest her soul, would be like, Susan, didn't I teach you more about flowers? She was the expert. All right, so I put some salt on it. It was a little bit wet. You want to do that if you're going to use the salt technique. You want to have your paper more wet. And it did give some texture to it, which was really, really cool. So play around with some salt. Definitely let it dry first before you brush the salt off and start painting again. And now it's where I'm going to use my little thinnest black marker that I mentioned. I've zoomed in because I'm not using any paint at this point. First, I'm using a Faber-Castell hard lead pencil. It is HB. H stands for hard, I think. I can't remember. But anyway, I'm using it just to get an idea before I commit to the black. And I'm just using a combination of just linear and almost geometric strokes. I don't want those curvy, typical grass strokes. So I'm bending my grasses and just getting a feel for how I want these flowers to grow. And there is no right or wrong in this. That's another fun thing. You don't have to feel like, oh, I messed this up. No. Every painting is a winner, especially if you learn something. That's my motto with painting is there are no failures. And it's really become, I used to be very hard on myself. I still am. I mean, I got to be honest here. But I have learned to relax and enjoy the journey over time. I think it was self-preservation. I had to learn to do that myself. I'm always preaching that. All right. So now I've got my black pen. I'm just going over and making little ideas of leafy grasses and branches. Again, find a reference image just to inspire you for certain shapes. You don't have to put them where they are in the reference image. And now with that tall flower, I'm adding just some little circular marks. I want to keep them random, even giving some spaces in between where they're growing, different sizes. We don't want a pattern. We don't want boring. We want wild and free and spontaneous. Also notice how I'm holding my pen on the back and up high on the pen. That's going to help your marks be more gestural and random. I'm making some large leaf shapes. We don't want all of our shapes to be the same. Again, that's another great reason to find some reference images and go, oh, that's a neat leaf shape. So vary your sizes of leaves and shapes and just get in something that feels organic, free and loose. And then when you get in enough of your marks, you can totally do this with a pencil. You don't have to get these black markers. Then we're going to go in and fill in, well, not fill in because we're not really filling in what we're painting. We're just letting it inspire us as to where we put colors. It's better not to just go in and fill in where all those shapes are. Let it run. Let it go outside of the lines. I mean, when we're kids, they say, paint inside the lines. But no, as artists, we don't paint inside the lines. We want our paintings to feel impressionistic. Well, if you paint like I do or you like that style, impressionistic painterly and lost edges, it's called, where you don't really have tight bound edges. I'm claustrophobic, so I don't even like the thought of tight bound edges. So I love a loose style of painting. So now enjoy. While I continue to work on this, we're all set to start adding the color that's a bit less water to paint ratio. In other words, the paint is going to be more brilliant, purposely created that loose, very light value background. And now we can start adding the color. Again, not painting inside the lines. I'm adding a combination of pink and purples to these flowers and really just enjoying this. Now I did, like I mentioned before, my patrons get all of my content. It's not sped up. I'm talking this entire time. I'm telling you the colors I'm using every single thing like that. If you'd like to become a patron, I always say, you know, to get the extra content, but a lot of people support, it's only $5 a month. You can cancel it anytime, but a lot of people support my Patreon page just because they like the fact that I'm bringing all of these free videos. I'll never stop bringing the free videos. So God bless you if, you know, you're supporting this channel because of that. I get so many beautiful comments. I got to tell you it blesses me so much. People who are from other countries and say I would never be able to paint if I didn't have lessons on YouTube and they're so grateful for the free lessons that I give. I give a lot of instruction even in the free content. So God bless you for your support. Again, my patrons, you're going to get the whole kit and caboodle. But right here, I'm going to start adding some music and you just enjoy, you could still follow along to the music and I'm going to be back. I'm going to actually come back on and add some little bees and just have a lot of fun. All right guys, you enjoy. I'm going to try to find some nice music for you and a lot of people ask what music I use. I have to use copyright free music but I try to find songs that really kind of match the content of the video. All right guys, enjoy and I'll be back. I don't know why I just felt like there should be a couple of little bees at the tops of the flowers and I do mean little. So I practiced on a little page and they're very gestural. They're moving and you don't want to draw any attention away from the flowers. I practiced first with a little pencil and then I just added some teeny little marks to give the impression of some bees. I just added two of them. So oh my goodness, I had so much fun with this. I am totally ready to do more of these. I could just take an afternoon with a cup of tea and just relax and do lots of these. I think these would make great gifts. Oh, it's time to take the tape off. But I also think I'm going to not only sell the original in my Etsy shop but I'm also going to make prints of this. I think this would make a great greeting card and some of the other products that I have on my Fine Art America site. The tape came off wonderfully. I thought it was pulling up the paper a bit so I did what I always tell everybody to do is pull it off at an angle and rather slowly and then it keeps it from pulling the watercolor paper up along with it. And once I get the tape removed I'm going to show you how I take this sheet of watercolor paper off of the block. And again, one of the advantages about this product in general is first of all it's 300 pounds. It's a thick paper. It's not going to warp and because it's on this block literally the sides are glued it is going to keep your paper nice and flat. So what you need to do I have a palette knife here you could use a butter knife just something you can insert into the top and kind of firmly press down and then do the same thing the tops and the bottoms are not glued but it's the sides well depending on how your painting is but you just have to remove two sides and then look at that you've got a nice flat thick actually sturdy surface for your watercolor painting. I decided to go ahead and upload it at Pixels site which is from FineArtAmerica.com and it's available as a print you could just get a print I also love their canvas prints they do a nice job with their canvas prints and you can order it these are my prices by the way but I don't mark them up very much I don't know just a few bucks more than that but you could check it out I'll have a link to this is a canvas print here I'll have a link to my site that will offer all of these products in the description of this video oh and they do a great job with frames too I particularly like this frame with it so I could go on and on about all of the products that they have available and by the way you guys if you're an artist you can add products to FineArtAmerica.com as well I believe it's free to start the account and there's a paid version for extra features something like that so anyway I hope this was a blessing to you most of all I hope you'll try it and enjoy the creative relaxing process of intuitive painting alright god bless leave me a comment by the way and let me know what you thought it really helps these videos if you comment, like, and share of course alright everyone god bless and happy painting