 Welcome to Monet Café, artistic friends and visitors. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I think you'll enjoy this cute little owl painting tutorial complete with fireflies. Please subscribe if you haven't already to this channel. Now here's the final painting and I'm going to talk about a lot in this video and I loved this little owl. I made quite a few changes to the original photo so I'll talk about that too. I'm using just a piece of watercolor paper, Arteza watercolor paper, and the reference photo is from PMP-Arte.com. Isn't he cute? So I just used a mat to mark off an 8 by 10 area and I am speeding up the sketch section. This video would be so long if I left real time for the whole painting. It actually took me longer than my paintings normally do. I got pulled away from painting on this this actual painting quite a bit so I think that added to the timeliness of it. You know you just kind of get in the groove when you get to keep painting and I don't remember so much stuff came on. I painted this a couple months ago but I have saved the video footage to bring you guys and I really want to talk about a lot of neat things in here. One of them in particular is just creating fireflies and also about altering a reference photo. Now I love doing watercolor under paintings. I have quite a few video tutorials on this and I find watercolors is usually something a lot of people have. Hey Bob, I have my little Bob Ross mascot in my studio and the watercolors that you see there that's also an Arteza product. I like that little palette. I think it's a 36 set and the colors that come in it are really great. I find they work for almost everything. Now I'm doing a wet on wet under painting technique and what I'm doing, you notice the reference photo has all this green behind this little owl and he's sitting on somebody's hand like somebody who trains owls with that glove on. So I'm picking a few different blues. I want to change the scene like you saw in the photo to a night scene. So I got a really neat phthalo blue and more of kind of like a darker midnight kind of a color and because I already wet the watercolor paper it's gonna flow really nicely. I don't even have it propped up like often we do with painting so that it flows down or maybe no actually I did I used Bob Ross. Poor Bob. He was my prop literally so that's causing it. I noticed it is kind of going down with gravity so so that's what I was doing there. Now see how loose this is? I'm just kind of working around the branch and the owl and actually in hindsight I could have really done a wash over the whole thing because the owl in my scene the night scene is actually kind of dark too you'll see how I go back and give him a wash as well. So I'm just kind of scumbling my brushstrokes. I know there's going to be a lot of trees and foliage in the background even though it's going to be a night scene I'm going to kind of keep it the same. Now for the owl I've got to go ahead it would look crazy if I just kept him white like that and started painting with pastel so I'm using those kind of purpley indigo colors and again a wet on wet strategy. If you look at the reference photo look at his belly part under his head look how dark that is and in my scene I'm imagining the moon being he's looking at the moon and if the moon's shining on him it's night already you know it's going to be dark so his face will be perhaps a little lit like it is here and he'll have more of a shadow underneath his face part and on his belly. So that's why I'm giving him kind of that purpley midnight kind of a color underneath and of course all of this is going to be reinforced with pastel I don't want to say covered up because I like to let some of my underpainting peek through and if you're curious about why doing an underpainting I think it was just two videos back that I did a tutorial I had a large commission painting and it really worked out well for me to be able to teach about why you would do an underpainting that's one of the most popular questions I get on my YouTube channel I actually think I want to do a video about the 10 most common questions I get because over these years I've had this channel it's amazing how many are similar one of them is how do you fix your final pastel painting and one of them is how do you get your iPad to stick up there on your easel so I'll leave that as a surprise and maybe make that video for everybody which I think would be kind of fun so I'm using my paintbrush now literally just painting in values and now I'm going back and reestablishing or establishing some of the darker values I know another thing you want to consider when you're beginning any painting project is what is your focal point well as I've already stated look at that look at those eyes in this face I'm imagining looking at the moon that's my focal point so most of the other elements are going to be a bit more subdued I'm like I said I'm doing a value study right here but I'm keeping in mind that I don't want to give too much detail anywhere else and especially since this is the underpainting but I'm being a bit more precision or working with more precision on the eyes and the beak but again still just working in those values now our brains will tell us that that owl has white on his head and maybe if it was in really super bright sunlight he would and it's not even white in the reference photo it's actually toned it down from white it's got some blues in it and some grays in it so be careful using white alright now I am going to go ahead and start getting in some of these colors of the owl I could have just done a cool value study and started my pastel but I decided to go ahead and I like painting in watercolor I decided to go ahead and get in some of those colors underneath I'm not going to get specific about feathers or anything like that but I am going to use directional strokes like you can kind of see in the where his wing is and under his belly and the more you paint hopefully the more you'll learn to see oh I'm actually using this for the branch but I think I use some on the owl to the more you paint the more you will hopefully learn to see the big shapes and I always say kind of turn your brain off and that may sound strange but I just mean for the parts where you're getting in the basic shapes the big shapes and the values learn to see the shapes and the values and oh man is that going to help you with your painting looking more painterly more accurate and more professional so I am going to speed up a little bit of this because again this video is going to get really long and now I am using some of that same color and a little bit more purple just to I say give myself a roadmap that's what's in my other video about the first principle I think of an under painting is it really gives you a roadmap for your composition and also gives you a value study to work from so I'm just kind of getting in using some of these purpley magenta values to again give myself a little roadmap kind of know where things are headed and I'm keeping again directional strokes I'm using the brush to go in the way his feathers would go all right so that's it for the under painting I didn't get carried away I just use some cooler under painting tones now I'm using this mixture that I've used quite a bit it's clear gesso two parts of clear gesso to one part of marble dust you can get the marble dust on Dick Blick it's pretty cheap a four pound bag I think it's under ten dollars I think now you don't have to use this mixture you do have to use something though I often use just the clear gesso alone and you know I'm kind of torn now I'm not sure I think the marble dust helps get a little bit more texture but I'm really a fan of just the clear gesso alone as well now why the clear gesso clear gesso has a little bit of grit in it which causes the pastels here's my pastels and I'll talk a little bit more about them it causes them to stick to this watercolor paper otherwise they just fall right off and don't get regular gesso it doesn't have the grit now I want to show you something neat when I was looking at my set I saw a couple of teeny pastels well I've been saving them in this little box I got from a craft store in their color families and my goal I've never made my own pastels but I'm gonna be using my pastels my little broken pieces of pastels to create my own pastels and you can do that and I'm gonna hopefully have a video on that when I have enough of them accumulated that should be fun I'm using various colors of pastels that I'll talk about but at the end towards the end of this video I'm gonna show you all of the colors that I used I'll mark them all down so you can see them more closely now I left the sound on this section so you can hear see if you can hear it that scratchy sound that's the grit that's within the clear gesso and the marble dust application and that's why these pastels are going to stick to the watercolor paper otherwise you wouldn't be able to get any layering now it's looking kind of textured right now and not very smooth but don't worry I have a technique that will blend the things quite nicely on this watercolor paper so again I'm doing the same as with the watercolor I'm just getting values I'm using directional strokes to emulate the way the feathers are going but I'm still staying very loose now here's my little trick it's a piece of chamois cloth and this works so great on this watercolor paper with this application of gesso and marble dust and it works fine with just plain gesso to clear gesso I always say clear gesso don't get the plain regular gesso the regular gesso has no grit in it and it also isn't clear you would cover up your whole watercolor underpainting and that wouldn't be very good I have noticed by the way that the marble dust does make it a little bit more cloudy because it's a little more opaque than just the clear gesso so again you can use just the clear gesso I've been doing that for years and it works great so now you can see I've gotten in a pretty decent dark value of this pastel color that I chose to get down and it may feel really dark right now but two things it's night I know that it is darker underneath this belly and with pastels we typically work dark to light we need to get down some value darker values in order for the lighter feathers or whatever it's this is especially true in landscape painting but it's also true with animals getting down the feathers of the fur is it's very important to get the darker values down now I'm using once again I'm using a lot of cooler tones because I'm altering the reference photo to make this a night scene and so I'm using blues your brain might say oh that owl is brown let me use a lot of reds and a lot of brown well not only is it a night scene but there's really a lot of cooler colors underneath the shadow when in doubt if it's in a shadowy area go to cooler colors cooler blues or purples or lavenders I'm using some lavenders now in the face because the face is going to be more in the light from the moonlight I'm imagining now with the background notice how loose and non-detailed it is and that is important when it comes to focal point you want the focal point to be the owl so I'm purposely letting that background be really really out of focus and blurry now here's a trick you can do to really just work with your values you can convert your photo to black and white I just literally desaturated this photo and it's going to allow me to see the values better without color getting in the way and now back to that background I kept it just kind of loose and painterly with my watercolor underpainting but now I know it's nighttime there's going to be a lot of dark back there so I just kind of scumbled it in there's going to be trees there's going to be branches I'm not even worried about individual branches at this point I'm kind of imagining that there's going to be some lighter areas kind of around the owl and then the trees along the perimeter like an ellipse I'll have a little more branches and tree suggestions going on on the outer edges and I'll lighten it up a little bit more around the owl so you see how that just kept it really loose and not too much detail to fuss about now you see that little kind of a cool green that I put down I know since it's night I'm not going to have a lot of warm greens like in the photo there's a lot of warm greens so once again if you're altering a reference photo to a scene that you're imagining is different if you just use the rules of art and of nature I should say it's really the rules of just physics and how things work if you learn those rules you can really alter things the way that you're wanting to and I have another video that's called five ways to create depth in your artwork those are the rules I'm talking about those are five simple rules that once you learn them you can really start to alter reference images and and also even learn to create paintings out of your imagination which is a lot of fun so now I'm using and I know sometimes pastels seem real chunky how are you going to get all that detail well one I don't need a lot of detail I just need to suggest things but the eyes are going to definitely be the focal point that's what drew me to this reference image to begin with now first I'm starting out with kind of a neutral dull green even though I'm going to brighten them up I needed a little bit of something a little bit darker value to put down first before I put those bright greens down now here is another owl painting I did this one out of imagination with the exception of the owl and I'm going to show you guys this little firefly technique to where it looks like there's a glow around the firefly and it's really kind of easy and fun so and I again did that one kind of out of imagination alright so now let's see what am I doing here now I've got some blues it's nighttime so in those branches that I'm imagining around the perimeter the the sky I'm treating this like sky holes the way they work they're usually a little darker behind leaves and branches and I want that really pretty blue color and I started with this pastel but I realized it was too light for the background so I switched to this one which you see how it's a little bit more of a teal I just love this blue isn't that gorgeous so that's where I was saying I'm getting it a little bit more around the owl and not necessarily behind the branches that would be darker that darker blue I used and I always throw in a little bit of color if I have it in my hand I put a little bit of that in the owl too now I'm just working on the feet a little bit and once again I'm apologizing for speeding this up but it would be a really long video this little owl took me longer than it should have actually but I'm getting in some cooler colors for the toes the claws I should say and I don't want them to be that noticeable there would be a tendency again to look at his claw in the picture and I kind of had to imagine the back claw because it was covered up by a strap or something but there might be a tendency to make those claws kind of light gray and they look kind of weird right now I do give it some more color but I know they're gonna be a little bit darker again it's nighttime and it's underneath him all right so now I'm finally getting to some of these brownish colors I I did want to give him some of the natural local color that is in him and so I'm just kind of suggesting it oh and some nice tea is always nice once again it's Monet cafe so make sure you guys relax while you're painting that's one thing I like about what I like to share in this channel is that we can get so hard on ourselves as artists and stressed and compare ourselves to other artists or feel like we're supposed to be better and we forget that this is supposed to be or should be a relaxing experience that I think the joy is in the journey so and I'm you know I should be preaching to myself here because I've done all of these things that's why I can tell you guys my evolution of where I've come to learn to really enjoy it and know that you know I may not be the greatest artist but I'm having fun and I'm sharing it with friends right all right so I am probably gonna have to skip some of this footage to get to some more important things because there was a lot of little tedious details in this I'm gonna zoom in to the eyes a little bit now I want you to notice the eyes took a while because I wanted to make sure I got that illusion of roundness there they're a sphere and so I use the elements or the illusion and strategies of color and the directional stroke and value so I'm using this bluer pastel there'd be a tendency to want to grab a white and do that reflection on his eye but the way the reflection is shaped like that triangle and kind of curved over now I'm using a little bit of a really pale greenish blue right here to give just a little bit of the wider reflection there but the way the direction of the shape there doesn't it give you the feeling that the eye is curved and that's going to develop more the more you see me paint now I'm gonna add a little music here I've been talking for almost 20 minutes so I'm gonna add a little music here you can enjoy and watch and then I now get to the fun green so just relax and enjoy this and I'll be back to give you more content but also definitely to talk about those fireflies oh and this part with the eyes is going to be real time I have had questions a lot on on eyes and and doing people eyes and animal eyes and so because I got so zoomed in here sometimes it's kind of hard my hand gets in the way but I think you should be able to see it good enough on just love those grades all right so enjoy this real time portion to some lovely music I thought I would share here something about this color it might look like wow I would not have chosen that color for this owl but I thought since I'm zoomed in here you can see very nicely how this bright pink layers so nicely with some of the other colors that I've put down and it really gives that hint of the red in the owl I know this reference photo is really small right here but the colors combined give the illusion of a different color and plus it gives some color interest so another question I get a lot is how do you know when to use a different color than what you see in the reference image I think a lot of that is just about practice and experience and I've learned like I said with some of these rules of how things work in nature where you can exaggerate things and have it work and that's a little bit of a darker green I knew that up towards the top or part of the top part of the eye I was gonna have some darker tones and the lightest part was down at the bottom kind of like that moon light shining on it and here's where you can see what I was mentioning before about you've got to get some darker values down before you can layer things like fur and feathers and that's what I'm doing here now that I've gotten in my my blues and my purple colors I'm able to use some of these pastels some of them are harder like that little new pastel but I'm even even able to use some of the softer pastels like I say I usually go by color before pastel hardness or softness because sometimes I'm limited I just don't have that color in a hard pastel so I make it work with softies too now I'm just getting in the colors on his belly his feathers are going to be a little more neutral gray down and cooler again because it's darker underneath him but still working with some little directional strokes just kind of generalizing his feathers you don't have to spell out every feather I've just getting ones that are a little bit closer to his face for focal interest and then just a few little very suggestive directional strokes to give the indication of the type of owl he is perhaps his markings and now that I have the basics of the owl in let me go ahead and show you the pastels that I used up to this point and then we're going to talk about the background and the fireflies that looks just like a mess beside me doesn't it but I got a clean piece of paper and I'm just going to mark these in I'm going to speed this up and then I'll show you a slower version at the end now I've sectioned these off to hopefully help and I also I'm going to take a screenshot of this and I'll have it available as a clickable link in the about section of this video if you'd like to pull it up in your computer screen rather than just here on YouTube so you can just look at it and analyze it if you need to but obviously up top are the darks notice all the variety of darks that I use then I've got my purples my blues my greens my brights where those punchy colors oranges and neutrals now let me show you some of the pastels that I pulled out for fireflies and background leaves now I've got some of these Mount vision iridescent pastels I use this green one it'll get in focus there you go I use this green the 1014 as a little bit of a highlight in his eye to give a little bit of glitter and glimmer and I'm using some of the yellows that you see there that I will describe more as I use them but I'm doing the same strategy that I did in the other owl painting notice how there's a little glow around the fireflies and then there's a little darker color in the middle kind of like you know fireflies have their little tail that lights up there's different strategies in doing this too but this is just one I use for this now I just used some q-tips here and it actually worked quite well to get that little glow that I'm talking about so what I did is I got this I would say this was like one of the medium value yellows that I had and I'm using it to make some random marks there's somewhat circular but it doesn't matter you just kind of get them down and with things like fireflies and stars and snow a key is randomness and also variety and value so what do I mean by that things in nature I always call it just like spontaneous beauty about them with even the way flowers grow there's still somewhat of a order or pattern but it's so spontaneous and magical so we've got to kind of keep that non patterned feel when we're creating things like fireflies I mean they don't line up like little soldiers and light up they're just random now some of them with regards to the size are now I'm using some of that green on the eyes but I'll keep talking about the fireflies some of the fireflies are going to be closer some of them to be further away some will be hidden behind some tree branches or tree or leaves and so you want to make sure you're giving enough variety also do like you do with the owl I was mentioning about focal point pick a few that you think okay how will this enhance the composition I don't want to have one in a lot of detail real close to the edge you really don't want detail on the parameters of your painting so I pick a few that I thought would kind of lead the eye into the owl pull your eye up and around and then just have some other fireflies in the distance for interest and I don't know just to make it look a little bit more magical that was my feeling this is a real whimsical painting so I'm just right now getting you know the general idea of where the fireflies will be now here's my little technique I take the little q-tip I'll zoom in more so you can see it later and I literally just kind of make a little circle and what it does is it kind of dulls it out it's making a little halo and then I'm going into the center and I'm adding that little bright spot that's going to be mimicking the actual little tail of the firefly and this works pretty good now a lot of times with lights and things like that you typically put a dark value down first and work to your lightest light but I looked at another artist who did fireflies his name's James Brown not the singer but his watercolor work is just so whimsical and magical and he has a lot of fireflies so I kind of emulated his style here and I noticed he did he had a little lighter low around the fireflies and a little brighter glow in the middle so I found that worked pretty well now another tip is if you when I'm adding just a little teeny weeny bit of that yellow at the lower rim of his eye and notice there was a little bit of a lighter spot down there and also gave a little bit more of that feeling of a sphere up for his eyeball and what I was going to say is if you have a hard time with the randomness of the fireflies or snow or stars there's a little trick you can do where you literally just grate some of your pastels on the surface and let them just fall you can cover up your main area you know I could cover up this owl with a piece of glassine tracing paper something the areas you don't want the stars or the fireflies to hit and you just grate a little bit of your pastel and then well how would it stick you take a piece of what you could use anything like wax paper or tracing paper lay it down on your painting and roll like a roller or a wine bottle or anything and press really hard and the pastels really do stick down into the grit of that I've done it multiple times with stars I didn't do that with this I just thought I could hopefully make some fireflies that were random enough so still having fun working on this this was like the icing on the cake for this painting I did add some of that really bright orange to kind of the center areas just to give a little bit more warmth I didn't want too much warmth and I just did it to a few of them not every single one again just for interest and now I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer so you can see how I'm doing this you see the little glow around them like there's a little light shining around the the actual lightning bug which is pretty cool and now let me talk a little bit more about the background and after I do the background I did go back in and add a few more fireflies but notice how I've got this little a little bit of a lighter value green and I'm just scumbling in suggestions of leaves they don't have to be anything super specific once again it's night it's dark you wouldn't see a lot of detail especially if branches are far away and here's my final sweet little owl I just love this little guy and I normally say here this painting is available in my Etsy shop but this little guy already sold and has a happy home now and if you haven't visited my Etsy shop yet it's called the art of Susan Jenkins I always have a clickable link in the about section of this video and thanks to all of you have already bought original paintings from me it really does help to support this channel and by the way I'm about to add a whole lot more artwork so keep checking back alright guys thanks for joining me today and happy painting