 Welcome my beautifully artistic friends to Monet Cafe. Today's lesson is going to feature painting with emotion. Have you ever felt like you just needed to paint and you just kind of wanted to escape the challenges of life? Well join me in this tutorial where I try to capture that emotion and have my art reflect it. This is a beautiful photo. I want to give credit to Annette Meyer Atkins. She's part of our Monet Cafe art group on Facebook and I got this from our member reference album and I used it to create this painting that I call Mysterious Journey. Life often has those mysterious journeys, right? I know I've had those but often those journeys can result in something beautiful even if the path is dark for a while. Now this is going to be a great tutorial for beginners because I'm using relatively inexpensive materials. For this painting I'm using a piece of Arteza watercolor paper but you can use whatever watercolor paper you have. I'm doing a sketch with just a charcoal pencil and just so you know another reason this is good for beginners is because this video is primarily in real time so you can really see what I'm doing here and I wanted to mention too I love it when I have a reference photo that's approximately the same dimensions and proportions as my drawing surface because I do a lot of what I call proportional measuring. I look at where things are even on like the edges of the paper like I know that road if you look at the reference photo the edge of the road basically is almost in the middle of the paper often you know we don't draw things correctly we do what our mind says instead of what's really there so I can kind of zone out and just pay attention to where things are in the photo by looking kind of at the edges and making some marks but at this point you want to keep thing everything very loose and energetic that's one of the points of this lesson and tutorial is to learn how to paint with emotion sometimes what helps is kind of in the situation I was in I didn't have a lot of time now if you have any watercolor you just use what you have I have a set of watercolors my little travel palette here you don't have to have as many colors as I have and I like to keep a paper towel handy to wipe my brush while I'm cleaning between colors and for this particular watercolor painting under painting it's going to be underneath the pastels and it really gives kind of a roadmap and a direction for your painting now I'm starting with the dark areas I'm only wetting the parts of the painting that are going to be the darkest value if you look at the reference photo you can see what that is it's mostly that those trees at the very end some of that little borderline of trees to the right in the middle and then of course those grasses growing down at the base on the right side so this is really just like all of the other lessons where I talk about value we're we are using color but we're getting our values established first now mixing your pot your watercolor you want to get a good dark you don't want to just use black so I have a recommendation of three colors that make a pretty good dark it's really just red blue and green but I sometimes mix it up by using a little phthalo blue you can change the colors and all of this color mixing will just get better the more you do it but practice a lot don't expect to create everything looking right to begin with that's why we have to practice oh my goodness I had to practice with watercolor I had no idea what I was doing I had seen somebody did a watercolor under painting in another video tutorial years ago doing a pastel painting and they used watercolor underneath and I was probably like a lot of you guys I was I had no idea what I was doing I didn't even know what watercolors to use but I just started playing and trying and it took a while you know and I got frustrated just like I know many other people do notice here too that I'm kind of using I'm getting the colors down but I'm using it as my brush runs out of a dark color I'm kind of carrying it over to other areas and again that'll that's something that will just get better the more that you do it I'm using kind of just like a wider brush to I like using the biggest brush possible when I do the under painting because we want that loose and free look and feel now you'll notice already that watercolors dry lighter than when they go on so already some of my darks are drying lighter so I just kind of keep reestablishing the darks I think I did speed this up right here two times just so as not to make the video so long and I went ahead I'm using mostly a green and blue kind of a value study right here in a minute I do add some other colors now I'm just kind of wetting that sky area the sky and the road are going to be the lightest things in the painting but I'm just getting kind of like a nice blue in the sky kind of like a cool blue the background field you can see is very warm and also very light I'm getting a pretty cornacrid on gold color that I love it's kind of dirty and I do I lighten this up with the pastel when I'm done but I'm you know just kind of trying to get the general color palette and values in right now watercolor too has just the beautiful way of just staying so luminous if you if you don't overwork it so there's some of those areas that I kind of want to keep that now I'm kind of redoing some areas of my road you can constantly be correcting I again I wanted that energy that feel of like really moving down that road so you want to get your curves and your sweeps right and that gets more established with that feeling later in the painting now I'm working on some of the warmer tones and if you've watched many of my videos you know that we usually have warmer colors towards the foreground I mean you can obviously have some warmer tones in the background that yellow field is a warmer color but the warmer tones really pull your eye forward so I'm kind of accentuating that in the underpainting and it'll kind of like have that feeling flowing through when I add the pastel now I'm using just one of those pretty pretty blues I think that's a phthalo blue or phthalo green but they're kind of a really punchy bolder color so again I'm having fun with this watercolor you don't have to go this far with a watercolor underpainting but I was just in the mood to paint and sometimes when we just kind of pull something out and paint spontaneously we create something that has a lot more life than our pre-planned paintings not always but it's a good time it's good to try that now what I'm using here after you finish the underpainting I'm using Liquitex clear gesso what this is going to do and I know it's like a broken record if you've watched many of my videos if we tried to add pastel right on top of this watercolor it's not going to hold well it needs some tooth to the paper some grit and clear gesso has that in it it's I guess it's pumice something but it it has a little sandy grittiness to it and when it dries it makes an adequate surface to be able to apply pastel to now the reason I use the clear gesso is I've had people tell me one way the other I don't know which one's true is that the regular gesso doesn't have the grit I'm not positive on that I haven't really tried it that way but the clear is clear you can still see through it when you add it on top now it is when you add the gesso it is going to blend your underpainting the watercolor that you've already put down a little bit but I like to go ahead and paint almost as if I was painting with watercolor acrylic notice how I'm applying the gesso not just in a straight swatches across it you know like evenly I'm painting with it I'm still making directional strokes and I think that also adds to the spontaneous look and the more painterly feel I'm pretty liberal with my gesso as you can see here I've got a decent amount but I do kind of blend it in a little more now I want to be careful on that road because it's lighter I do rinse my brush off before I apply anything to that road I didn't want to darken it up because as I was painting some of the darker areas with the gesso it does keep some of that on the brush so I don't want to get all of that that dark color down on the road so so basically this is just getting it all ready to be able to apply the pastels to and you probably noticed my technique I just put the gesso right on my brush instead of putting it sometimes I'll put in a little dish but this was a night where I just literally just had a few minutes to paint I just snuck away into my studio while my husband was watching television I had already made dinner and it was just a nice moment I know probably some of you guys can relate art is really like therapy it's just a beautiful place to be when the world is so crazy and and unruly at times we can just have our own little peaceful moment to escape now the gesso is dry at this point and it is time to start applying the pastels often I will pre-choose my pastels but I as I've said this was kind of a spontaneous painting just a little getaway from my mind and just a peaceful little time for me so I literally just grabbed some pastels that I had in various other little tray palettes that I had for other paintings and I did pretty much local color with this which means the color that is natural to the scene but I do accentuate some of the blues and purples and even some of the teal-y greens of this you'll see as I go along but right now I am remember I mentioned before we can we can correct as we go and I noticed that road was sweeping a little bit more to the left than I had it I had it coming down too straight and I needed more of that sweeping motion there so I am just going to paint here this is real time I've got a combination of pastels I let color make my choice rather than type of pastel for the situation which is what I often do so I just even if it's a much softer pastel I just try to give it a lighter touch so as not to fill up the tooth and you don't have a lot of tooth to your surface when you use the clear gesso so you want to definitely keep a light touch but I'm just really having fun with this this was such a relaxing time I felt like I was only painting for about oh 10 minutes but it actually ended up being oh I don't know maybe a 30 to 40 minute painting notice that purple down there that those purple it's almost like there's a shadow on the road and see how those purple and blues they just really give life to the painting I mean what if I just use just the greens and golden colors and browns and grays and a lot of times you can substitute purple for what you think might be a gray shadow of course always keeping in mind to use the right value get the value right is the most important thing all right so just enjoy this real-time painting I may pop in I've got a lot to do today so I may not be able to give much more verbal instruction here but I think you will get the basic instruction from just watching the real-time footage so enjoy guys and I will pop back in at the end well this was certainly a wonderful experience for me last night just to have some escape time to paint I pray that you try to do that just try to relax and enjoy the creative process and here's the final painting very loose and free and full of emotion and energy I called it mysterious journey and by the way I do sell my art I forget to say that a lot so this one is available until I mark it sold on the description of this video so I hope you learned a lot and most of all just relaxed and enjoyed the creative process as always happy happy painting