 Why are little things so darn cute? Welcome to Monet cafe where you will join me as I paint the smallest paintings I've ever painted. I'm calling them baby paintings They're only two inches by two inches, and I'm even gonna show you how to frame them I'm so glad you're here for the painting fun And why don't you go ahead and click that like button leave me a comment once you watch the video and also go And subscribe to this channel the full tutorial of this lesson will be on my patreon page if you'd like to become a Patron it's in the link of every video So I decided to create the six tiny paintings as part of last month's challenge to create 20 paintings in 30 days I was six paintings short, so I knew I had to work fast and small So I took these little pieces of gator board. They're similar to foam core board But they're a little more sturdy and because I'm using soft pastels I'm gonna show you a technique where you can use clear gesso to make your surface a bit gritty to hold more Layers of pastel reference images are from the PMP dash art comm site also called paint my photo. It was perfect They're already little squares in their thumbnails, and here are the pastels I'm using these are just remnant pastels from the fast and furious paintings I created last month during our 20 paintings in 30 days challenge And if you are brand new to my channel Monet cafe, you may have never painted with soft pastels before So I have turned on many artists to the beauty and joy of painting with soft pastels And I have an Amazon shop where I share lots of beginner products. If you don't have any soft pastels This is an idealist. I call beginner basics for pastel artists and if you click on this here You'll see a lot of pastel products that are more affordable to get started with the first three here are very affordable and You can learn a whole lot just from visiting my Amazon shop and I have a link to my Amazon shop in the description of every video I even have product review videos under the video section where you can watch me review many of the products that I use in My tutorials on Monet cafe and like I always say use what you have you don't have to go out and buy all these expensive Products you could even use different mediums to create these baby paintings. All right Let's get started in order to get multiple layers with soft pastels. I like using this product It's called clear gesso and it adds some texture to my surface I'm just putting a little dot of clear gesso on three of the little two inch by two inch Gator board Squares now I had never done this technique before so I tried it two ways The first way was just to go ahead use a foam brush and just brush on some of the clear gesso I'll talk about why I do this in a minute So I'll let the first three dry and in the meantime, I'm going to just apply some acrylic ink This is just beautiful bright gorgeous color and I'll be applying these colors directly to the gator board Instead of putting down the clear gesso first. So I'm just putting a drop. This color is called Fluorescent pink I happen to love mixing fluorescent pink and the other yellow that I just showed Indian yellow together. They make the most gorgeous golden color But in this case, I'm going to just use my little foam brush and I'm going to apply The fluorescent pink directly to the board now I love pink under paintings. Isn't this gorgeous? So I had never tried this on Gator board before so that's why I wanted to try the two different Methods you'll hear soon which one I preferred and I'm going to now apply the second color Which is the Indian yellow and these are daylight roundy acrylic inks. By the way, I love acrylic inks I have many videos using acrylic inks and talking about why I love them as I was painting this first side I noticed like a cut in the board So I flipped it over and did the reverse side and even though I loved this yellow color I thought I'd add just a little hint of that fluorescent pink I just dipped a little bit out of the dish to give it that beautiful golden colors This is one of my most favorite colors for under paintings and now I'm going to use a beautiful turquoise color I just shake up the bottle. Sometimes they settle a little bit So I always like to shake the bottle and noticed after creating this that my first three colors are actually The primary colors that you use in print. Have you ever noticed? What are your ink cartridges? They're cyan magenta and yellow So I always lean towards those three colors versus the traditional primary colors of blue red and yellow I don't know. I just love those magenta cyan and yellow I just added a little bit of Indian yellow to the turquoise that was already in the dish What a gorgeous green that makes and I'm adding it to the little square that I had already applied The clear gesso to now here's something you don't want to do You don't want to paint it as quickly as I did because the clear gesso had not dried yet And it made little you can see the little lines in it So I made sure to dry the other two with a blow dryer before adding the color to them I'll be sure to list in the description of this video all of the acrylic ink colors that I use But as I add other colors, let me talk a little bit more about Creating these little baby paintings if you don't have all the supplies I have you can get creative You could if you're a pastel artist you could just cut up some little squares of Pastel papers you're a watercolor artist. You could of course use watercolor paper You could even use watercolor paper doing this technique that I'm doing here with the clear gesso The benefit of using these little boards Is that they don't warp they're nice and sturdy and they work really well for the way that I'm going to frame them I put an additional little drop of that purple onto the board Just to give it a little more punch now the reason I wanted to use all different colors Is under paintings is what these are called. These are just kind of Single color under paintings. They really inspire me When I find a reference photo As to how I'm going to paint so I oh that one splattered look at my dish. You see all those splatters I'm glad it didn't splatter everywhere, but this is a really interesting green. It's never my favorite green That's why there was so much in the bottle and it was kind of dried up But I ended up really liking it So I liked using all different colors because it really just made my paintings have more pizzazz Okay, so if you recall I had already added clear gesso to those three And then the acrylic ink, but I decided to add another coat of clear gesso To the top three and the bottom three. That's the first coat of clear gesso They're getting so as I'm blending the clear gesso. Let me talk about my discoveries here The first ones I liked the best those were the three that I applied the clear gesso to first just on the white board And the reason I liked those best is you might be able to see as I'm painting here Try to take a look at the bottom three boards with the magenta the cyan and the yellow You see how modeled they look. I think that's because applying the acrylic ink directly to the gator board The gator board is a bit of a paper product. It's not quite as Porous as foam core board, but it gave it that Kind of modeled appearance doesn't matter that much because I'm applying pastel on top But I just preferred the clear gesso first Let it dry and then add your color And you don't have to use acrylic ink to add the color for these You could use some pastels and just blend them For the first layer you could use water color Really the sky's the limit and Then you can apply your pastels once you have all of this applied and dried And I guess another reason for adding all of the different colors is it's fun And I think it did give a little bit of color influence to all of the final paintings And here they are dried and ready for soft pastel application I will be speeding up the painting process for all six paintings here on the Monet cafe channel And the real-time content will resume where you'll see how I frame these at the end Now if you're a patron of mine You're going to get some real-time footage of these paintings being created and additional commentary This free version here on Monet cafe is still going to include my commentary for this first little baby painting And then I'm going to speed up through the remainder and then show you how I framed them at the end So what you're seeing here is me using a packing peanut to blend with I used a pretty magenta color To get the deep roots or grasses in the foreground A green color to get those distant background trees And I just used this little packing peanut. It's kind of like a little piece of styrofoam to blend things in Now even though i'm covering up that beautiful golden color I think you'll see that if you keep a light touch You still see some of that golden color influencing the painting and peeking through Now because value gets lighter in the distance I'm using a lighter green for those far grasses the ones that are closest to the background trees I put down my darkest layer first for the background trees, but I like to cool them off a bit Color cools off in the distance. So I used a pretty Almost like a turquoise color and then a little bit of a lighter green to give some indication of maybe some light Catching on some of the leaves of the distant trees here I'm cooling off a little area even a bit more to push things back further into the distance that principle is known as aerial perspective It's the same reason why mountains appear purple or blue in the distance things cool off as they recede So I've got kind of my base going here I'll add some grasses to the foreground later, but I'm going to get in some of these flower shapes Now if you're wondering how I'm doing this with these big chunky pastels on a little two inch by two inch square It's not super easy. This is the smallest I've ever painted But I'll let you know that the more you paint with pastels the better you get at Feeling where the pastel is I often just make a little Test mark I'll rest my pastel on my surface And I can kind of get an idea of where it is like I'm doing with the centers of some of these flowers Once you make one mark you can kind of feel where that corner is And it's like anything it just gets better the more that you do it Now I'm using my same principles for painting flowers of getting the darker values down first. That's why they look kind of dark It's just going to create some value contrast And first I gave a little bit of gold to the center of some of the flowers And now you see these flowers brighten up and come to life as I add some brighter reds to them And I'm not covering up Every bit of the first red that I put down there's going to be a little bit of that dark peeking through and this Layering principle with soft pastels is really what gives things depth and dimension And I talk about this in a lot of my videos here on Monet cafe of how with pastels even with oil and acrylic We typically layer dark to light pastel is an opaque medium Meaning that you can put lighter colors on top of darker colors Unlike watercolor watercolor you have to preserve the light. There's that's why there's no white watercolor The white of the paper is your whitest white And now I am putting in a little bit of a darker magenta to give an idea of some little maybe darker types of flowers peeking up And playing with some color here I thought I'd add a little bit of this pretty purple to the tops of some of those darker dots I made again still the same principle layering dark to light now. I've got an even lighter color I kind of got my light blue in the wrong spot on one of the flowers, but no matter But you see that doesn't that um periwinkle blue I just used with the reds. Oh and the greens it just pops It looks so neat. So like I said, this was uh new for me I'm always experimenting with things and it was literally because I had to finish my challenge that I had made for monnais cafe in the month of april of painting 20 paintings in 30 days And so I was like, let me just do six really teeny paintings And I had this extra piece of gator board. It was a scrap piece of gator board Gator board is kind of like foam core board. It's got like foam in the middle of it But it's more sturdy and it's not as much I think it is a paper product on the top of it surrounding the foam, but it's um, it's firmer And it just isn't as vulnerable as the paper foam core board So I thought it was really neat for this So I thought the clear gesso might turn it into a pastel surface and lo and behold it did I love clear gesso. It's a really great way to save money by making your own pastel surfaces Sanded surfaces are really Prime of pastel artists. We love sanded surfaces because of that ability to layer But professional sanded surfaces get very expensive And I've always been on a budget kind of my whole life And I know a lot of budding pastel artists are that way. So that's why I'm always offering My ideas of how to save money by painting with soft pastels And also to it's just a lot of fun. There's just something very earthy and organic about pastels I mean, you're literally holding the color in your hand It's just really you just totally feel like an artist grabbing that color with your fingers and just go into town So I'm almost finished here. I'm going to add a few more little Final marks to give a little pop of that red. By the way, many of these square looking ones or wrecked They were rectangular. I break these pastels. They're called terry Ludwig pastels And terry Ludwig pastels has Some of the most vibrant reds. They're just really really beautiful Adding a little bit of this pretty Yellowy green just to give an idea of some different shapes of little weeds and grasses and things And there were some pink flowers in the reference image. I didn't want to make them Or stand out too much. So I just gave some little indications of pink Going to reinforce a little bit of this pretty purpley blue that I had lost Just to give it a little bit of punch and now this long pastel stick is called a prismacolor New pastel spell in you not any w new pastel So here's my final little painting my little baby painting and it was happy and colorful And here is painting number two some lovely flowers yellow and white flowers in a field I mentioned before these reference images are from pmp-art.com it used to be called paint my photo and I love it because it's just regular people sharing their art for others to use to paint from if they want and it's copyright free and I have a profile It's kind of like a facebook thing you develop your own little profile People can follow you you can see the albums other people save and I have saved multiple albums One of them happens to be called flowers and so I have all this collection of flowers And when you look at your little gallery of your albums, you know, if you're on the pmp-art.com site All of the thumbnails are already in squares. So it worked perfect for my little reference images Now if you click on the photo, they're not, you know, always in the square format But just when you view your little album gallery It worked well for this particular painting project I found that this I think it's called The green that I put down for the underpainting I didn't remember at first what color green it was. It's actually called dark green But it went down not too dark actually It looks to me like a viridian green And I don't know if I just didn't get enough clear gesso on this one I found that I wasn't getting the layers that I did with the first one I Ran out of the ability to layer pretty soon. So this one didn't have quite the pop of color is the first one But uh after I finished it, you won't see the footage here. I found a really soft Beautiful yellow color. I think it was a senelier pastel. It's a french word senelier And they are just so soft and buttery and great for final marks So it looks a little dull here But you'll see when I have it framed at the end that the yellows are much brighter and more vibrant So this little baby painting was also very fun I'm going to include two more of the Six series paintings. So I think a total of four in this video. You'll watch me create These are going to be sped up a little bit more and I'm going to add some music But don't go anywhere because at the end is where I'm going to show you my Method of framing these little baby paintings. I just loved them and I decided I'm going to keep them for myself I thought these will just be so neat to We're actually building another home right now We've been trying to build a home for six years since our home flooded back in 2017 We've been living in a sort of temporary living situation My husband's been working so hard to build our home. It's not a very big home But we're going to love it so much on six acres And we're also building a little studio attachment the brand new monnaie cafe new and improved I would like to know if you guys would like to see a little bit of the Project the building of that project and perhaps how you go about Filling an art studio what things I do my storage systems How I film myself, but maybe if you would like to see the construction of the new monnaie cafe Let me know in the comment section That would be something that I would love to film and share so I'd love your feedback on that All right, so this little painting was really fun as well I'm going to add a little music right now Just a little bit more to watch and then I'm going to show you my diy Framing technique enjoy Here we go all six baby paintings all completed. I laid them all out and noticed something Can you see the white perimeter or the edge to it? I wish I had of used the same underpainting color And painted all around the sides as well. So to rectify that I decided to get a black marker I had some Posca. I think that's how you say it. I'll show you the marker markers They come in black and white their acrylic markers And this is a black one that I have and I decided you have to shake them up like a paint can I decided to use the marker to Make the edges black now this wasn't super easy because it's like foam core in the middle So it took me a little while to make all of the edges black. I just thought it made it A better presentation with the darker edges now. Let's talk about how I framed these I put on my artistic thinking cap I found an old frame that was from a painting I sold but I didn't sell the frame that I thought would fit I got a piece of black foam core board And I cut it to fit the frame and I also cut a piece of black drawing paper This is kansen drawing paper and I took some black artist tape And just secured the kansen drawing paper to the board In basically I just wanted a dark Background to put the paintings on and I wanted something that had a little support like the foam core board And I wanted to test it in the frame just to make sure it fits snugly, which it did Fortunately, I already had a mat for this particular frame this white mat And it was just the right size for all of my six paintings to fit inside So that was a real blessing And so now I'm just trying to get an idea of how I'm going to arrange these and as I do that I want to talk to you about matting Pastel paintings when you have a mat Um, you want to do something that's called a reverse bevel You know how mats have a little beveled edge that's usually showing on the front of the painting Well, pastel dust can fall not a lot of it But little dust can fall and it can collect on that little bottom bevel there So a frame or friend of mine said a reverse bevel I'm like, what is that? He goes just flip the mat over and that way any pastel dust will fall behind the bevel instead of in front of it Genius, right? And now I have the general idea of where I'll place the paintings But how to make them stick I happen to have this stuff called diamond glaze And it's a glue that I had used for another project. I knew it worked very well You could probably use any kind of glue here. I mean, this is a if you use the gator board. It's a hard surface. It's not going to Um bleed through to your painting So I just fortunately could wiggle it around still because the little dot I put on the back was still wet So I could get it right in the place that I wanted and then I just let that sit to dry You have a little wiggle room, you know, see how I'm moving them around. It's not like it dries instantly Um, and I also kind of liked that the edges of the squares, they weren't all perfect They were a little little jagged not too much So gotta give it a signature and of course let the glue dry and then I'm ready to assemble this into the frame Here's a little close-up once the glue has dried. You can see where I've added the black border just for a cleaner presentation Now I'm going to place the mat. Remember I'm placing it Backwards where the bevel is on the inside so pastel dust won't fall on the outside of the white mat And now I've got to get this into the frame So I literally just got everything lined up in position and laid the frame on top Be sure to go ahead and wash the glass clean the glass inside and out before you do this I'm sorry. You're seeing my ring light and my reflection here once I got it in there I flipped it over and I put down the little metal pegs to hold it in place By the way, some of you may be thinking wait a minute. Um, are there spacers inside is the pastel Are the pastel paintings touching the glass and yes in this case I let it be snug to where the paintings were right against the glass And you have professional pastel artists on two sides of this issue I don't usually have my pastel paintings against the glass But many professional pastel artists say it works just fine And these were such little teeny baby paintings any way that I'm keeping just for me that I knew if I had any issue It was my own product or my own painting. So I put on a little sticker I like to put labels on my paintings. My signature is so vague Sj That if my painting ever got given to somebody else, they wouldn't even know who I am So it's a good idea to have some sort of a little identification on your paintings Now you're getting all the glare from my studio, but I think you get the idea This was such a blessed little project for me. I hope it blessed you I hope you'll try it if you're a patron of mine I can't wait to see what you share in all of our sharing platforms If you would like to become a patron and get more full content and commentary click that link right there And as always god bless and happy painting