 Welcome visitors and subscribers to Monet Cafe. It's like our happy place where we can share and learn in art together. This latest painting is called Praising Poppies and I'm going to be giving you some instruction on my technique for this. It is available for sale as original and products, so if you're interested just see the end of the video. Now I'm doing kind of a similar technique that I did in my last video. I'm using Daylor Rowney acrylic inks. I will be showing a picture of them up close in a minute. That was my little tray that I used to put them in and then I just use alcohol and a little container and a kind of a stiff bristle brush. I like kind of an old brush. Now here are the Daylor Rowney acrylic inks. They come in all kinds of various colors. The particular colors I'm using, I will have it printed here at the bottom of the screen. I love combining these. They have such a bright luminescent to quality. The reason that they work great for an underpainting is they don't fill up any of the tooth of the paper. By the way this is UART paper. That was just my little tray and I keep some paper towels handy. But UART paper is a sanded paper and if you've been on my channel much, you know I pretty much lean towards pastel painting with various different techniques and underpainting with other various products. But I love the UART paper. It's a sanded surface which holds the pastel well. But it's really awesome to do these under paintings like this. They really just start to set the mood. They give you some beautiful color as a base to work with. And I really liked the combination of this Indian yellow with the blues. The turquoise color and the green color together. Now I'm sorry I can't share the reference photo here. I did get the reference photo off of a website called, it used to be called PaintMyPhoto.com but they've changed the name to PMP.com and it's a great place to get reference photos. I was on a poppy kick and I don't have any poppies where I live. So that's why I needed to go to another source to find some free reference photos to use. But I think one of their rules is not to share the person's photo in the video. So anyway this is just my technique where I'm using alcohol and I'm applying, of course you were, as you saw, applying some alcohol combined with the acrylic inks. It gives it that nice drippy, runny, moody, impressionistic feel. And the reason that I have the green where I do is in the reference photo that area was warm with sunlight and the other areas were a little bit cooler. Now I taped this UART paper up at the top unlike my last video and I thought this would work better. And it did. The paper buckled a little when I had it all taped around all the edges so I blew it dry and it kind of straightened out. Then I just put a piece of tape at the bottom as you see. Now I'm just using a pastel pencil here to sketch in the poppies. I'm trying to keep a real spontaneous feel while still having a sense of where I want to lead the eye. I had an idea to kind of cascade the poppies kind of coming up almost like in a curve and going up to the left. I love it how nature seems to reach towards the heavens and hence the title Praising Poppies. Here are my pastel selections and I typically group them in color families sometimes according to value but in this case I just wanted some of those pretty reds and coral type of colors along with some warm greens and some cool greens. And now I'm just getting started here and I'm basically just getting in this kind of there was in the background of the reference photo. There's kind of like some dark trees real far away and then there was a pale area. I end up just making that more of a sky in the background later. But now what I'm doing is I'm getting in a darker value that's going to be more around where the where the flower stems and the grasses go down to the roots and it also will help to lead the eye where I want it to go. Now if you've been watching my videos often you may notice that this one is really loose. I like a loose style but this one's even more loose than some of my other work and the reason was I just was on an artistic roll. I had done one painting already. I had a few minutes before I had to make dinner and I said oh maybe I can just sneak in one more painting. So some of it was just the speed and some of it was just the moment. I just it was just a beautiful moment to paint and I know probably if you've been painting for a while you know there's just sometimes where it just feels right and it's just really a blessing and that's what this one was for me. It just felt I was just so thankful to be able to paint. Now you can probably see here that if I was applying these pastels just on the white or the cream colored U art paper it wouldn't have nearly the same glow and impact as this beautiful underpainting with the acrylic ink. So you know maybe that makes sense now where you can see how it really does lead you towards a more impressionistic style which I love. Now these poppies are coming to life and bursting off the page and I will mention here that something I'm striving to do more lately and I'd like to share it with others because I think this is probably a goal for many people is there is a way to maintain the freshness of a color like right now do you see how bright those poppies are it's because that's a fresh layer of pastel on that. Now if I was to continue to fiddle and fuss and and make marks and cover up and try to refine I'm gonna lose that freshness. The pastel dust starts to get into the sanded parts of the paper and eventually they combine to make more of a muddy color so there is a real knack to maintaining the freshness and color and the brightness of color but that is to literally not overwork your painting. So I'm gonna continue to work here and just enjoy the music and just the process of creation. It's such a beautiful thing that we can be together even though most of us have never met and may never meet this side of heaven. I still feel like we share a lot together and I truly feel like you're my art family so thanks guys for watching. I hope you learned something and again stay tuned to the end of the video if you'd like to see anything about this particular painting or purchase options. I'm so glad you were with me today while I created this lovely and spontaneously impressionistic painting and again if you would like to purchase products, prints that the prints are beautiful from Fine Art America, various sizes, they do a great job, the prices are reasonable. I happen to like this throw pillow. It's only $26. I like this 20 by 14 format. So click the link if you're interested in the original or any products and always thank you for joining me. Happy happy painting.