 my birthday and I got to paint today that's exactly what I wanted for my birthday. Join me for this lesson and a special little cameo appearance by Mr. Jackson. I'm my art studio buddy. Anyway in this little lesson I'm going to be working on a piece of just watercolor paper and which is nice and inexpensive and also applying ink tense blocks. If you don't know what they are stay tuned. I'm going to show you exactly what they are. They work great. Then I use the clear gesso and some workable fixative and voila you get a little painting. So it was fun, it was fast and fun and I'm just so happy I was born. Anyway join me for a fun lesson. Here we go. Okay so here we are with the Derwent Ink Tense Blocks. These are 72. I went ahead and bought the whole shebang. It's a wonderful set. I like how they separate the colors in one of the palettes like this is the warmer tones and the other one is the cooler tones. Now look at the brightness and boldness of those colors and also you have plenty of darks to work with. So hmm why ink tents? Well it's kind of a play on words for intense. They are intense little packs of color that you can use to create under paintings and various other things. Now I'm going to be using a piece of Arteza watercolor paper. It's 100% acid 100% cotton acid-free and it's a great paper I've found for doing these watercolor under paintings. So I've been using some of their products they've been nice enough to send to me. Here are the reference photos that I chose to work from. They're basically just some photos from my backyard where I live at a I call it the farmhouse and it's where my studio is. But there's some beautiful little wildflowers in my backyard and I often like to snap some photos of them and work from them. I'll be working with a horizontal format with the first photo that I showed and this is just the watercolor paper that I showed before and I've just taped it to my board with a hinge system that I use that I have in many of my other videos. But now I'm going to start applying the ink tense blocks and you're going to see how they kind of go on almost they feel kind of like crayons at first and they don't have a lot of brightness when you first start to apply them. So first I'm just working with a couple of darks. One's more of a dark bluish tealish bluish and it's going to be those dark trees in the background. So I'm going to work with big shapes getting in my darks and also just getting in some of the basic colors. Now what I'm working with here would be called local color which means I'm not doing any type of warm underpainting or anything like that. I'm using the color that is sort of already in the scene. I apologize for my camera sometimes focusing on my hair. I obviously forgot to pull it back for this particular filming. Hopefully it won't get in the way too much. But again you see me I just I broke off a little piece. I like to break them because I use them on their side quite often and if I used the whole stick it really be just too long to work with. So the breaking them actually works well for other purposes which is you can have a travel set you break them up and you you have multiple places you can have them and use them. Now this is a little bit darker when I think I'm using here. Yeah I wanted to get more of those darks. This is even a darker green. I'm going to speed this up a little bit and then I'll add some more commentary when I add the water. Okay here's where I begin adding water. It's just regular water and a brush. I try to use the brush not just painting horizontal or vertical strokes just to get the water on. I use the brush in a painterly way to actually paint the scene as if I was you know using watercolor or acrylic paint. Basically just painting in the shapes as they are in nature and this as you can see look how intense these colors are becoming when I'm adding the water. Now that color that I'm wetting right now was the darkest dark. You see that blue that I have background that's kind of like the blue of the sky. I decided to add like a little bit of a hill or a mountain back there. Now I like to keep my brush kind of holding it flat like I'm doing there and now the neat thing is that you can get kind of fun and creative with this and make some big broad strokes and what I'm trying to do here is emulate those grasses how they're kind of wild and free. Now you couldn't really tell what colors I was adding before because they look so dull going on but now you can actually see that I did kind of emulate some of the local color there. I did get in some darker. I wanted to make like a trail or a path that led into it. All right now all I do is wait for that to dry. I'm actually now here I am applying a little bit of water to the back of the watercolor paper. If your paper buckles adding water to the back like this will kind of flatten it out and smooth it out. All right time to let it dry and add the clear gesso. All right this is just clear liquid gesso. Hang on it's gonna focus in a second maybe. There we go. Liquitex clear gesso. Now why add the clear gesso? Because if I didn't add anything to this the watercolor paper is rather flat or smooth and it doesn't have any grit to hold the pastel. So if you're going to do a pastel application this is a neat little homemade way to make your own pastel surface and it's relatively inexpensive. Like I said the watercolor paper is not that expensive. The other neat thing about this is that it's you kind of loosen up more in doing this technique because you don't feel so stressed over working on a piece of expensive pastel paper so to me it's more fun and we all need to practice more. So these are great little ways to practice. Now again I'm using the clear gesso to apply still with interesting strokes. You know kind of going the way the trees would be and the grasses instead of just doing these big broad horizontal or vertical strokes. You know and it may seem like wow why does that make that much of a difference. Actually sometimes that texture does kind of come through when you when you add your pastels on top of this. So you can see it looks like it's lightening it up and it does in general but it's just because it's wet it darkens up a little bit when it dries. But anyway this is a really neat way to get an underpainting and it kind of forces you to stay loose and have fun and and if there's spontaneous drips and lines and things in some odd places it's going to kind of add to the freedom of your work and keep you break you out of that stiff box we get in sometimes where we think we have to paint everything just perfectly. So I find I absolutely love this technique and it's a great way for me to teach because I can get a lot more people trying these when they don't have to spend so much money. So you know I focus a lot on the beginners on my channel. I know there's a lot of other artists who have youtube channels that have maybe some more advanced things but I just love that some people may think oh I don't know if I could ever do that. Yes you can and that's kind of the point of my lessons is I love to encourage people to at least try this because a lot of people want to be able to paint. All right so I'm going to finish this up and then let it dry. Here are the pastels I've chosen and I have to be honest. I really just chose some that I already had out working with from previous paintings and I just chose ones I thought would work good for this painting. I do add a few more before this painting is done but in general you know I try to keep a pretty limited palette with this. Those are my darks I just pointed to there. All right now this is dry and you can see it is actually darker. Remember when I said it looked a little light when you applied the clear gesso. So you can see now that it is actually it dried darker. Now what I'm doing is I'm getting one of my darks. I think that's a little new pastel spelled in you pastel. They're harder. They're good for initial layers because they don't fill up as much of the tooth and we have limited tooth with this liquid gesso technique anyway. So I'm reinforcing that underneath this is going to be like the darks underneath a little trail that kind of leads your eye back into that and you can see I'm not being super neat here. Again sometimes those loose and free strokes lend itself to a more painterly final result. So I'm going to speed this up a little bit. You'll see I'm just working with the pastels here and you know me I'll probably pop back in and add some commentary but for now just enjoy this process. Okay so it appears it looks like a big dark mess doesn't it? Right here I wanted to point out I'm using a piece of pipe foam insulation. It's just a little thing you can buy at Home Depot, Lowe's, whatever hardware store. It's actually used to insulate pipes from maybe freezing or whatever. We certainly don't get freezing pipes here in Florida but I'm just using it to kind of blend in some of the darks there and it looks pretty dark and moody but when I add my final pastel layers on top it's going to brighten things up a bit. To point out here that this is a point where I used some workable fixative. You saw it pop up there real fast. Blair workable fixative. I just sprayed a light coat in some of the darker areas there and what it does is it adds a little bit of extra tooth. I let it dry of course and then I'm able to apply pastels on top and they they really give a neat textured effect. So it's really a neat technique. I learned a lot of the things that I've learned from watching other artists and this particular technique was from Karen Margolis. So it's a it's a neat way to add a little bit more texture when you've kind of lost some of that tooth. Also you don't ever want to use the fixative at the end of your painting because as you could see when I sprayed it it does darken your work. But in this case it works because you're going to be adding more pastel on top. So it's a good tool to use as a work in progress as your painting. Here's where I decided to finish and I ended up calling this painting Tangled Beauty because it was just a tangle of weeds but you know often things that aren't perfect can have their own beauty. And here's the final resulting painting. And by the way I always forget to mention these paintings are available. If anybody's interested just contact me through a comment on YouTube or through my contact information that's always at the end of these videos. All right time to start the next painting. Now this is just more of the same this time working with the reference photo that was the daisies. They're like a daisy type of flower and I do alter the composition a little bit to make it something that I believe was more pleasing and dynamic. If you'd like to know how to do that watch my previous video on how to kind of spice up your reference photo to make a more dynamic painting. I am going to do a little bit different of approach with this painting. Still using the ink tense blocks that's kind of hard to say. But I'm not going to be doing the local color. I'm pointing out kind of the dark roots and how I'm going to kind of create like a path that leads the eye back in there. It's good to kind of really analyze your photo and get a game plan of where you're going to be headed. A lot of times I like to do a little sketch. In these cases I didn't. I didn't have a lot of time to paint. My husband was nice enough to take me out to a sushi dinner since it was my birthday. My oldest son and daughter-in-law joined me. It was a wonderful wonderful night but I was kind of painting just because I had been so busy the earlier part of the day. I didn't get to do my birthday painting so this was a little fast. But as I was saying the approach to this underpainting is a little bit different. In this one I'm going to be not using the local color. I'm going to do a warm underpainting. Meaning I'm going to use warmer shades. Now what I love about a warm underpainting is it really makes the regular landscape colors you typically put on top really pop. It creates a vibrancy and almost I don't know. It just seems like the colors are singing rather than just looking flat. So this is kind of my darkest part of that trail. Okay the other dark that's going to be in the background is going to be those trees in the distant background. I am going to you know of course lighten them up a bit because they're far away. Again pardon my hair that keeps getting in the way. I did a big no-no. I always know to pull my hair back and I didn't do it in this case. But anyway I'm going to speed this up. You'll get the idea of the colors I'm laying down. I wish you could see them a little better. And then I'll pop back in when I do the add the water. All right so there you have it. Two fun and free wildflower paintings using inexpensive products for the most part. The ink tents blocks I don't think they're that inexpensive but they're definitely worth the money. I forget that I have them sometimes but it's a wonderful way to do an underpainting and really add some life to your artwork. So I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Please comment, please subscribe, and as always happy, happy painting.