 Welcome artistic friends to Monet Cafe Studio. This is just a quick sneak peek presentation into what's in store in the month of December. The general theme in the Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook is winter. I love painting winter scenes. These are a few of my paintings from previous tutorials and in the Monet Cafe Art Group and on my Patreon page you're welcome to create any type of winter scene and share in our sharing platforms. And as I've done for a few years now we will have a snowman painting tutorial. As far as painting education I have a theme over on my Patreon page that I'm calling variations on a scene. It's a great way to grow artistically. Also it's a great thing to do during the month of December. Most of the paintings are small and quick so we're gonna have a lot of fun. If you've ever considered becoming a patron of mine now might be a good time to join the family. So enjoy this little sneak peek addressed to my patrons to know what's happening in December on my Patreon page. Hello wonderful patrons. I'm giving you a quick little review of what to expect in December and basically what we're gonna be doing is taking some simplified reference images and recreating them multiple times. These are some of my own photos. I tried to choose some that are kind of simplified and don't have too many things going on. But I find that when we paint from the same reference image over and over and over again it's one of the best ways for you to grow artistically and stretch your artistic wings so to speak. And the great thing is these are fun. They're simple. It's great for the month of December and you're really gonna grow artistically. Also you may have noticed if you if you're a patron of mine you've probably noticed I do multiples a lot. This is a really popular video that I have where I did the same basic scene about or three times and I used different color palettes for each. This was just on unsanded the toned gray paper on one of them. I decided to add some stars and a moon. And what happens is when we do the same image over and over again we get more loose. We learn more things. I will recommend during this month to do a thumbnail sketch first of your simplified image. It's always a great way to start. And then you have a nice little black and white reference image that you can use to create multiples of over and over and over again. And I'm going to keep stressing the word simple. Simple is the key this month. Simple and small. We don't want to tackle these to be too large because we're going to try to create multiples. Not the same image all month long but within each tutorial that I do something as simplified as this. Now look how simple this little landscape is. And in one exercise I'm going to recommend that you do go ahead and sketch out 10 black and white sketches of your same reference image. And then we're going to give it different color palettes for each one probably with a time limit too. So that should be a lot of fun. And when we create multiples of the same small image it allows us to learn more. For example this is one painting demonstration that I did where I did the same reference image. Very simplified. Again a simple landscape on two different underpainting toned surfaces. One was warm. One was a cooler kind of a green tone. And then you get to experience yourselves what a difference this makes rather than just having an artist like me tell you about it. And it's just really such a great tool for learning and exploring. This is another multiple type of painting that I did where I basically just used an unsanded surface. It was a brown surface. And five pastels. One would be dark. One would be light and three middle values with different color palettes for each one. But wow what a fun difference that makes. So this is another one that we'll be exploring this month. And here is a more recent example of a tutorial I did using the color cube. Some of you might remember the color cube where you pull out these color palettes and paint with different color schemes. I'll be providing tutorials but I'll also give you access to some of my own simplified reference images and some that I've collected in unsplash.com. I'll give you a link to this collection. And if you're a beginner artist, something as simple as a little tree on a hill like this. This would be a great one. It almost has an idea of a little road kind of curving up and around even a field like this. You don't have to paint every flower. You could just suggest some. But again, simple landscapes are usually best for this. I love this one with a nice simple road. This is a great one to do for this exercise. Here are examples of some of my little paintings that I've done that I have painted over and over again. And once you have a few paintings that you like that has a simplified landscape like this, I recommend you try that to paint from your own painting and change it up. This one's from my own backyard. Quite a few of these actually are from scenes in my backyard or near a property that we're moving to actually. That's my backyard too. But this little painting, you could do it over and over again with different color palettes and different textures and painting on different surfaces and also different underpainting colors. So the sky is the limit. The process is fun. And the end result is something that will break you out of your artistic boxes and explore painting like never before. So I'm looking forward to these lessons in the month of December and I hope you are too. Alright, happy painting.