 Welcome artists friends and visitors! This is Susan Jenkins and I've got a neat lesson for you today on using acrylic inks with soft pastel. You can have some great results. This is the resulting painting I called Dance of the Koi. I just love koi fish and their movements. Literally they're they're random but they're harmonious at the same time and it just feels like a beautiful dance and this is a photo from a photo that I took at Selby Gardens, a beautiful place in Sarasota, Florida. I just love koi fish and I thought it would be neat to try this technique. I happen to love acrylic inks to use as an underpainting because they're brilliant in color and you can get your values down pretty quickly. So let's join the fun and the experimentation as we get started on this. This is a 11 by 14 piece of matte board that I've made my own pastel surface for. I have another video to explain how to do that. That's what the video thumbnail looks like if you look for it on my channel. But you could use any type of surface that will receive water such as you art paper, any of the other types of pastel papers that will receive water. You could do it on watercolor paper and then use the clear gesso like I've shown before. But now I'm just going to go ahead and sketch in these beautiful koi. I'm using a piece of charcoal. It's just vine charcoal. I like it because it brushes off real easily. But again you could use a pastel pencil. You could use a regular pencil. Regular pencil doesn't show up real great for me with this. So that's why I use the charcoal. But just enjoy while I sketch this in and I'm going to be giving some instruction along the way. I've sped up the drawing part of this quite a bit more than I typically speed things up. But I thought you know it's the sketch. And hopefully you guys know that a good sketch and good drawing skills is going to be the foundation for good art. If you start with a weak foundation just like as in construction you are going to have a weak final result like a building would be weak if it had a weak foundation. So you might notice that I make little marks as I work. I actually have little marks there to divide the halfway points and things. And I'm constantly looking at my reference image to get things correct with the drawing. All right time to get started. These are the Daylor Rowney acrylic inks that I use. Pardon the focus messed up there a little bit. But that's crimson. This one is indian yellow. The next one is sepia. That's a great dark color to use. The next one is purple lake. A great dark purple to use. Antelope brown. It's kind of green. I don't know why they call it brown. But it's a little more green. And then the last one there is a dark green. I think I'm trying to get focused there. Yeah dark green is that last kind of teal colored one there. That's a beautiful beautiful blue. So these are the colors that I'll be using. And I just love them. They're lots of fun. And here's the little plastic tray that I use. I think I just bought this at Michaels. You see I've used it before. I clean it out with alcohol just so you know if you forget and let it dry. These will kind of stain a little bit. But the alcohol seems to get it off fairly well. So I'm just putting a couple of drops. I pre chose these colors even though I have about oh maybe double of those colors 12 instead of six. But I chose these six colors because I thought they were going to work well with the subject matter. Back to the board that you saw I originally used. I have some different colors I've made my pre made boards with. But I thought that blue would be a nice undertone painting because there's lots of greens in the image that I'm painting. And the water is like almost black in some areas. But I wanted to have I wanted it to have more of a translucent feel. And I just thought that pretty crystal blue color would be a nice under painting. I've chosen some of these other colors more in an attempt to create a value study with more of local color. And if you've watched some videos you know local color means what's natural to the scene as opposed to complementary under paintings. All of this will make sense as time goes on if you keep watching and learning. Now time to get started. These are just some very cheap brushes and water. And I use the water not only to clean out the brushes. Oh and the paper towel for kind of cleaning the brush in between changing acrylic inks. But I use the water also sometimes to dilute the acrylic inks. Right now if you could see I'm dabbing. This is just acrylic ink alone without any water. You see how dark that is. That's why these are great for darker values. So I'm getting in the dark values of the of the scene that I'm painting right now. And the reason I like this cheap brush is you see it's just so rough and ragged and and it kind of just has that nice loose paintbrush stroke feel to it. Okay. I don't want really smooth strokes here. I like I like to start a painting almost messy. And I think it leads to that impressionism. You tighten it up as you go along. You don't start out fixed. You start out loose and free. So as you can see here, those are the two colors I'm using there I believe are the purple lake and the sepia. I'm pretty sure. But I'm using a combination of them in different places. The reference photo didn't show really a back part of those grasses as much as I'm going to make it look. I wanted it to look like the water was flowing around a corner like kind of the fish are kind of going and eventually going to turn and veer to the right around that little bank or that corner there. So that's why I'm using more of the purples on the left side. Those are going to be a little lighter value because they're going to be further away than the ones in the front there. So just working working here. Oh and you probably noticed that I decided to lose the the Buddha and you know nothing against anyone's else's beliefs. But it was just a personal thing for me and I thought you know a cross probably would look pretty silly there in the water. So I decided just to leave it the fish and the water and just make it a lovely peaceful scene that was more about the koi and God's beautiful creation. So I'll paint on there. You can see right there. I'm adding some of the water. You say how it dripped down. It almost made a reflective appearance to that back water there and these acrylic inks are something that I'm learning of course by just experimenting and playing. But before you start a serious painting if you've never used them do something small just kind of play around with them. Add some water. Find out how it drips and runs. Again because I like paintings to be loose. Sometimes it's a good idea just to you could even wet. I should try this in a video. Wet your surface. Put some inks on there and just blend it around with a brush you know. Almost like as if you were doing watercolor. So you know again playing is the mother of learning. I think that's normally said a different way. But but that's the way that you have fun and also you don't get frustrated and mad because you just wasted a board you created or an expensive piece of UART paper and you can instead of being so serious just have a little fun and know as often I'll start a small piece with the intent of throwing it away. You know kind of when you start out like that it's like okay I know I'm going to mess up but I'm just goofing off and having fun and that truly is how you're going to learn the best and and not become a frustrated artist but become a happy carefree peaceful artist. That's what we want to have here on our YouTube channel and in our Facebook group. Monet Cafe Art Group. Oh and I appreciate a lot of your comments too guys. You have really helped me so much in providing what you want and often as the artist, the camera person, the videographer, the editor, the producer of all of these, I can't always do it right all the time so your input helps me so much. One of the suggestions has been I love the music and I know a lot of you love the music but I don't think it's beneficial from from the comments from you that during the commentary like this I have had it in the past as really low background music. I try to turn it down but I think it's kind of distracting and I'm glad you guys have pointed that out to me because I agree with that. The ones I'm very proud of you guys who are listening it proves to me you're trying to learn you're not just trying to watch a video and oh neat look at her paint. You're literally listening to the instruction and that part is as important as you know just watching the painting process so I appreciate the hungry artistic minds in our group here and on our channel so I'm gonna this has all been real time so far. You get the idea now and also just so you know I'm working around the fish for now but part of the trick to painting things underwater is to have them appear underwater not just sticking on the surface so I'll talk a little bit more about how to achieve that as we go along but enjoy this process I'll speed it up just a little and then we'll do more instructions soon. Now I'm finishing up with the acrylic inks or getting close here but I wanted to mention that you see I've used a smaller brush and I'm keeping again these strokes so loose and right there I'm actually using a sponge it's a little kind of a ragged sponge similar to the brush effect but it just gives a little more randomness to things but notice with the fish I have not made any marks where there's definite lines or anything again it's all very free and loose and I love to create a sense of energy in the painting if you look at the reference photo you can tell you can just see that even though it's a still photo you can see it's an energetic type of setting and now you can see I'm actually starting the pastels now again still working on values getting in those darks if you just squint your eyes and look at the photograph and look at what I'm working on I'm trying to add the darks in the same areas now this is a little darker than it's going to be at the final because I've still got to add the reflections to the water and various other elements to this painting and that's typically how you work with pastels you put your darks down first and you work on your lights but at the same time I don't want to cover everything up I mean what was the point of that beautiful underpainting you know if I'm just going to cover everything up with pastels so I'm trying to be purposeful and and still work very loosely I happen to tend to work all over a painting I really admire artists who literally they start in a corner or section of the painting and they complete it in quadrants like that and I just I don't know my brain doesn't work that way I want to I want to get all I think it's all about value for me I want to have the value consistent all over the whole painting and and this is just better a better way for me to work it's not the way everybody works but and I'm keeping as I work you'll notice as I go on that I keep those um koi fish still very very loose even in the final I have them looser than than a lot of things in the painting I don't really think I tighten up a whole lot in this painting period but but definitely want to keep those fish loose so it creates that sense of energy and movement that I spoke about before I thought I'd add some commentary here because I've had so many in our Monet Café art group on Facebook ask about how to use fixative for pastel paintings you know it's sold as being able to spray on after you finished your painting and fixative is not good for spraying on at the final because look how it darkens the painting you see how I'm spraying right there now I'm strategically using this to darken certain areas to make that water look a little deeper and a lot of times getting a little darker in the foreground just helps with that sense of depth and getting the values a little bit darker so as you could see I just used it very sparingly in the areas that I chose oh I showed off right here too my new set of great American artworks pastels I got the Richard McDaniel plein air set and I love it it's 78 pastels I'm going to be doing a painting soon using just these pastels I I literally have only just used a couple once right here in this particular painting so finishing this one up I wanted to mention too you see how some of those fish look like they're deeper in the water that is achieved by making their values darker some of the fishes closer to the surface are fishes fish are bolder and brighter in color so it makes them up at the surface oh and here's my little sweet pea dusty saying happy painting to everyone so I hope you guys enjoyed and try this I think you'll like acrylic inks they're a lot of fun and come back soon please subscribe to my channel if you like it and hope to see you guys soon happy painting