 Welcome to Monet Cafe Studio. Do you want to make your floral landscapes really glow? Well, you're going to love learning about my favorite underpainting technique. I've discovered two colors that, when combined, create the most amazing glowing underpainting that works beautifully for landscape paintings. You'll be able to watch the magic happen as you see the effects when I create four small floral paintings. This tutorial is beginner-friendly and great for all levels of artistic experience. If you're ready to take your landscape paintings from ordinary to extraordinary, then it's time to get started. Let's talk about these products. The surface I'll be using is Pastel Matte. Pastel Matte is a wonderful surface for soft pastel painting and other mediums. It's a water-friendly surface. I'll share with you later some other options if you don't have pastel matte. But it comes in pads or individual sheets. The sheet that I'm using today is white. The reason is because I want it to have that luminous glow. It does come in pads of white, as you can see down here. It also comes in other colors that sometimes have white included. I'll have product links to all of the products that I mentioned in the description of this video. Again, I'll give you some alternatives in case you don't have these products. My sheet of Pastel Matte is approximately 12 inches by 16 inches. I love working in multiples, so I decided to divide this up to have four 5 inch by 5 inch square paintings. I left a half-inch space between each one because I happen to have some half-inch tape. Once I had my marks all made, I used some black half-inch artist tape to tape around the edges and through the centers. I love using this technique because when you're done with a painting, it's fun and satisfying to take the tape off and have those nice clean edges. For this painting tutorial, I am working flat. I don't advise working flat with pastel painting. Dust can be an issue, so whenever I do that, which is rare, I use a fan with a HEPA filter on it that kind of pulls the dust away from me as I paint. But again, I recommend painting upright. Because the theme this month in Monet Café is working from the warm side of the color wheel, I wanted to create some floral paintings with lots of warmth. And I'll talk more about the reference images in a minute. Years ago, I discovered two colors that when combined make the most magical glow. Now I accidentally grabbed watercolor ink. I usually use acrylic ink, but either will work. But the colors are any type of magenta and any type of warm yellow. My favorite is Indian yellow, but you could also use a cadmium yellow as well. And I think I do switch to my Indian yellow when I go to add it to this. So again, acrylic ink, watercolor ink, using a sort of hot pink and warm yellow. I'm also going to be using some water. Again, this surface pastel matte is water friendly. So I'm going ahead and just painting clean water onto my pastel matte in each of the four squares. The reason I'm doing it this way is because it's going to cause the acrylic ink when I apply it to just really blend and meld together beautifully. Now, if you don't have this product, don't be worried. I'm going to have an alternative for you as soon as I'm done with this technique. Again, any sort of magenta or fluorescent pink is actually the acrylic ink I typically use. I just dollop some on it and blend it in pretty quickly so it doesn't have a chance to dry. You don't even have to worry about your brush strokes being just perfect. It's sometimes nice if you just have the looseness that will work in your favor. Oh, and my brush is just a cheap brush. It's a little bit coarse, actually, but use whatever you have. Now, here's where the magic happens. There's a combination of colors that I discovered that, again, creates this glow that I just love. And it's when you combine the magenta with any sort of an Indian yellow or cadmium yellow. I always use Indian yellow. And these two colors, I don't know. It just creates, like, have you heard of the golden hour? You know, it's sunset. And that's what this combination of colors reminds me of. So I just dollop some on. And what I'm doing here is keeping it mostly at the bottom section. It's going to make it look a little bit darker. And then what I'm going to do is get a paper towel and literally just blot out some areas in the sky just to lighten up where I feel like the sun might be coming through some of those grasses and flowers. And that's it. You just let it dry before you start your pastel painting. I had a stray little hair from the brush I had to get out of there. Now, here's an alternative. If you don't have acrylic ink, you can use any pastel surface with the similar combination of colors. I just got a bright pink and a warm, orangey yellow. And I'm going to do something similar. I'm going to use the bright pink rather than toning the whole surface with the pink. Because pastels are an opaque medium, they're not going to blend quite the same as acrylic ink. I decided to just keep the pink at the bottom. And then I'm getting my kind of orangey yellow color. I'm getting it mostly in the sky. And then I'm going to blend it in a little bit more down into what would be the grasses or the flowers. In this one, you can see I put the golden color in the sky and combined both on the bottom. So it really doesn't matter. I decided to get an even lighter, kind of a brighter yellow to put in the golden section as well. Now, this is the same thing. I'm using water, but I'm going to kind of keep this a little bit more specific not to blend the colors as much. Again, pastels don't blend quite the same as acrylic inks. So I did it in sections, blending the sky, then blending my lower portion with the pinks and the yellows. And voila, look at there. You didn't even have to have acrylic inks. By the way, you could also use watercolor for this technique. So there are lots of options. And if your budget can't handle some of these expensive pastel papers, I have a video showing you how to make your own soft pastel paper just using watercolor paper and some clear gesso. I'll attach that at the end of this video. So there are multiple options. Now let's talk about these reference images. Some of you may have seen from my previous videos. I've been creating my own reference images using AI artificial intelligence technology using a program called Adobe Firefly. My patrons on my Patreon page got some behind the scoop information about how I do this. I've even created my patrons an AI reference album where they can access the images that I've created so they can use them to paint from themselves. Now you might be wondering, what is a patron? How do I get access to that? A patron is a way you can support this channel for $5 a month and gain access to all the extra content that I'm always talking about. Now if you've liked this so far, I'd love it if you'd click that like button. So I love it when you comment. It really blesses me to hear from you. And I would also love it if you would subscribe to this channel to keep the free videos coming. And now yay, it's finally time to paint. And it is Monet Cafe. So grab yourself a cup of coffee or your favorite beverage. A set that I'm using for this. I really like these cool grains is the Unison 30 half stick set. It's really a great set for beginners. I'm also going to use some of the gorgeous reds that are in the Richardson hand rolled set. It's called Reds Gorgeous Pinks, Oranges and Reds. I did add other pastels, not just those in these sets. And as I always say, use what you have. I don't mean to be a product pusher when I share the supplies that I'm using. I do have the links in the description of this video. I know it's tempting to always want to buy new products, but I know that some of you guys, myself included, I can't buy all the pastels that I want. I'm thankful to get many sets to do demos from, but I get it. So use what you have. And often I find we can really do a whole lot with a limited supply of soft pastels. All right. So I'm using a beautiful dark magenta that was from the Richardson Reds set, just to get in some of these flower shapes. And now I have two darker pastels. This one is like a dark kind of greenish blue. And it is a Terry Ludwig pastel. They're rectangular normally. Here's a lighter, another Terry Ludwig pastel. They're normally rectangular, but I break them often, not always. And here's another Terry Ludwig pastel. And I'm using this one to get my middle ground. If you look at the reference image, you can see kind of right below the tree line there. There's a little area that's a little bit lighter. So I lighten the land up as it gets closer to that horizon line. Now I'm getting in a pretty turquoise blue. If you see in the reference image, it's a little bit darker and bluer up in the left corner there. And I decided, I love the color turquoise. So I decided to use some turquoise colors in the sky. Don't worry if it doesn't look really smooth to begin with. Sometimes our pastels might have a little jaggedness to them. These things usually resolve themselves as we blend and also keep a light touch. Can you see that? You can tell the light touch that I have because you can still see the surface showing through. And that's part of the beauty of doing an underpainting. It is to get that influence. And like I said, the point of this video is to get that glow in your landscapes. And I find specifically in floral landscapes. I love this warm glow underneath. So even though I paint and you'll see me layer and layer and layer, I am still keeping a light touch and I won't have all of the surface covered up. That little glow will peek through in places. Now I'm using a dark pastel. I think this is a dark green. And I believe it is another Terry Ludwig pastel. They make the best darks just to get in some of these tree shapes. Now they look a little bit equally spaced right now. They're kind of the same. They're the same distance away. They're kind of the same shape. But you'll see me develop that as I go. I lightened some of them up with a little bit lighter green. And now I'm giving this one on the left, making it a little closer and a little larger. We can use our artistic license to do these things. And I wanted to create a sense of depth. I put in a little bit of that dark in the foreground for some deep grasses that I'll gradually layer over. Now I'm using this pretty little kind of a bluish lavender color to carve into my tree shapes. That's why I wasn't so worried about the tree shapes to begin with. Because we can paint negatively around them and shape them and give them some individuality and a little bit of variety to the tree shapes in the distance. And this was just such a pretty little color too. And you're seeing this here on the Monet Cafe YouTube channel for free obviously. And at this point I have sped it up slightly. But I'm going to speed it up even more and give some continued commentary for this particular painting. And then I'm going to share the other three paintings that I did really sped up. So this one's the one that's going to get the most commentary here on the Monet Cafe channel. Oh, I'm giving a little bit of that pretty turquoise color to suggest some distant trees. Now I'm lightening the sky up. There were some clouds in the sky. So I don't want to make them too specific or gain too much attention because the focal point is really those poppies that are peeking up and reaching up and praise over the horizon line. By the way, if you're a patron of mine, you're getting this tutorial all real time and all full commentary. I give so much commentary in this version of this video over on my Patreon page. And my patrons on my Patreon page will be getting the other three paintings also real time as separate little teaching videos. So but right here you can see them all. They'll just be sped up more with less commentary. All right, in this a pretty green. I'm getting some of this in in the grasses because a lot of things are in shadow. So I often get my dark values in first and my cooler values. Then I start to warm things up, which is what I'm doing right now. I think this might be actually a great American pastel. I don't use them a lot. They're super soft and they will take up a lot of the tooth of the paper. But it was a nice little color to sprinkle in some suggestion of poppies way in the distance. And I wanted to lighten up that far landscape in the distance where the fields look like they're going back. And things do get lighter as they recede into the distance and flatter more horizontal. So now I've got one of these pretty Jack Richardson red pastels. And the way I typically work with flowers is I get my darker values down first. What I look for is typically in kind of the centers of the flowers or where they meet the stem is its darkest. So I'll just get that dark in for the whole flower shape and then I'll gradually layer the lighter and brighter values on top. Think of it as building a flower. And we're gradually adding that sunlight on some petals that are overlapping the inner parts of the flower. And this reference image was already beautifully composed. I have really been enjoying using Adobe Firefly to make my own reference images. I majored in graphic design and I'm just a nerd for graphic things and computer programs and Adobe Photoshop. And when they came out with Firefly, which is an Adobe product, I'm able to access that because I've had an Adobe subscription for years. I think you can access it for free somehow. One of my patrons told me you can. I'm not sure how. So as you can see, I'm gradually layering some brighter and lighter values to shape and build these flowers. But anyway, like I mentioned before, I made a whole lot of reference images in Firefly. And I made an album that my patrons can access to paint from. You do. If you make an image in Adobe Firefly, you do have their little logo on it. They don't want you to use it for commercial purposes. Like me take this puppy photo that I created in Firefly and use it the photo as my logo or something. I'm not doing anything like that. I'm using them as painting references. And I had never seen anybody do this, so I just thought, why not? You know, I'm not using the photo. I'm just painting from it. And I'm going to make a full video on how I do this. Give me your comments again if you're interested in that because it's a lot of fun. Okay, so now I'm really getting some of those lightest values. Can you see how I went from darker to lighter? And now that I've got my warm flower colors and values in, I am going to add some greens. These were some really pretty greens. Notice again, I had all cooler greens in the deep grasses. And I'm going to warm it up. I'm thinking of it the same way I think of the flowers. Think of the darkest, deepest parts of the foreground, and then you're gradually adding the sunshine, working from the value scale of dark to lighter as you work. And you know, just the way it typically works is the sun is not going to shine down as much into those deep grasses. It's really going to hit the ones that are reaching up or turned in such a way that they catch some sunlight. And can you see that I haven't really done grass shapes until just now? Now I'm taking this, I think this might be a Mount Vision pastel. It's one that got broken. I've had some pastel tragedies with my easel falling over. But that one I liked because I could roll it. But that's the first hint that I've gotten of a real grass, like a linear stroke. Now this is a pretty warm green. See how I'm just carving them kind of down into some of the shapes. And now I'm getting an even lighter green and just hitting some of the tips where the sunlight might be hitting some of the tops of these grasses. And getting another indication that there are some more poppies way in the distance. Notice that my strokes become more horizontal and vary where you put them. You don't want a pattern. You want to randomize this a bit. Oh, I love some of the golden peachy colors that were in the little unison set of 30. That orangey, rusty color was perfect for deep flowers. And now a little bit of greens on these trees carving in more of the trees. See how I carved that in and just made a tree shape by painting negatively. A little bit more suggestion of some clouds. And typically the horizon line, the sky down towards the horizon line is a little bit lighter anyway. Even if you don't paint clouds. And I was playing around with this at this point. This is where I'm just kind of breaking out my artistic license and seeing, you know, how I want to shape the sky. And I wanted the composition to enhance those focal point flowers, which are the ones peeking up over the horizon. I apologize sometimes too if my light changes a little bit. My small little studio here, Monet Cafe Studio, has some windows in it. And sometimes the light will change as I'm painting. And also sometimes my, you'll see things shaking a little bit. The house I live in is a, is it called Peer and Beam where it's built off the ground. And sometimes it's not real steady. If I move around a lot, sometimes my painting surface or easel will move around a lot. I add a little purple. I love purple. And I just thought it would be a neat little shadowy color in some areas at the basis of the trees and in the grasses. And this is coming in for the final stretch here, just giving some more accent to some of the focal point flowers. And as you can see, I added the dark centers. Same as the other things I've been saying, I heard an artist say, if it's everywhere, it's nowhere. You don't want every flower to have a center showing. They're going to be turned in different ways. So try to vary that up a bit. Some little chunky marks in the distance. I also wanted to mention that, oh, I'm adding like some little seed pods here. Peeking up, there were some like that in the reference photo. I wanted to add that this type of painting, painting small, is such an advantage to having an impressionistic style because these pastels are often very chunky and it will prohibit you from getting too detailed. You kind of have to make some of these, I don't know, geometric chunky kind of marks. And I love that. Now, can you see how the influence of the underpainting is still showing through? I'm blending the sky a little bit more. But there is still that little hint and influence of those pink tones peeking through in some areas and even in the grasses and the foreground grasses as well. And this little painting is almost done. I'm going to add some chunkier green shapes, grass shapes, just to suggest some more grasses reaching up. And this is a Prismacolor new pastel, this rectangular pastel. They're really great for making stems. Keep them very gestural and loose. And here's our first little painting. Okay, like I said, I'm going to speed this up so you can see the other three. It won't be full content, but you'll you'll get a little bit of an idea. And if you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page, you'll be getting those as full lessons as well. And this next painting is also poppies. I decided to make these a little bit more orange, you know, to pull out those pretty warm orange colors. I also find that when I do a series of paintings like this, small paintings, that I typically like my work better as I go. And I think it's because you kind of loosen up. And so this one felt quite gestural and perhaps a bit more abstract or impressionistic than the first one. So that's why I really love doing series like this. And, you know, even if you're not a patron of mine and you recreate from my tutorials, I love it when you share on social media. It's so neat when you tag me and I can see what you've recreated. If you want to follow me or share something on my Instagram account, you can find me at Susan Jenkins Artist and on Facebook at the art of Susan Jenkins. Even though I didn't plan it this way, I thought it was kind of neat that the first two paintings that I did were poppies, a little more red-orange. And the second two paintings I did were more like daisies. They were a little more yellow, orangy yellow. And so make sure you watch to the end of this because that's when I'm going to peel off this tape. It's always so satisfying to peel that tape off. And then I cut them and arrange them in a way that I thought was visually pleasing. I love also too when you frame small paintings like this and kind of hang them together in a little grouping. So hopefully you'll give this a try. It really is a lot of fun. And the focus of this video, again, is that beautiful warm underpainting. You can see it peeking through in the second painting as well. And I think it just really makes a great foundation for glowing painting and a painting that just sparkles with color and life. So here, can you see how loose and painterly this is? I really had fun with this one. And here we go with painting number three. I once again used the Adobe Firefly to create reference images. And while I'm working on this painting, I'll tell you a little bit more about it. I think I shared this in a couple videos back here on Monet Café. But what I do is I prefer to paint from something. If I'm going to use AI to make a reference image, I prefer to paint from something that is more like a photo. In other words, I don't want Adobe Firefly to create its own painting interpretation. You can set it. It's different settings you can use. You can have it create a painting. But I keep it set to photo typically. I had to play around with it first. And I tell it to create it in the style of me, of Susan Jenkins of Monet Café. And I guess because I have a lot of content on the internet and in the web of data, I'm thinking it's able to pull from that because it's creating reference images that are very similar to my style. My style of painting and my landscape and floral paintings that I usually lean towards. And so I was just kind of really fascinated with this. And I'm loving it. It's a lot of fun. And I was pleasantly surprised to have my patrons share with me their thoughts on this. Because I said, I know we're going to have different opinions on this. And I was so pleasantly surprised that everybody embraced it. It's like, you know what? It's a reference image. And I think Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, other artists. I mean, it's a tool. And so why not? And it's fun. All right. So here I'm getting this little painting in. I really loved the sloping landscape. I was trying to think back. I don't know if I've done a painting where it just had this hill kind of slanted across the composition and those beautiful purpley, blue, purple mountains way in the distance. So again, this one was really fun. Look at the gesture and the loose color energy of this one and that beautiful glow peeking through. And here we go to number four, which was my favorite of the ones that I did. Like I said, they seem to get more fun and free and loose as you work. I really loved in this one. I kind of over exaggerated the fact that the sky was warmer on the left and cooler on the right. And that just made for a really neat color combination and contrast of color. I also loved, I love purple and yellow together. So I may have had that as a prompt when I created this image with AI. But notice to these daisies or butter cups. What are these? Somebody tell me that are buried down deep. They're pretty in shadow. So that's why I kind of got a darker neutral color in first because there's a shadowy side. Kind of the lower left is where the shadows are. And then I added my lights and my brightest yellows to the sunlight side of the flowers. You'll see me do that in a minute, which is the top parts of the flowers. And then it really looks like they're just peeking up over those grasses trying to catch a glimpse of that sunset. Everything seemed to kind of be leaning towards that beautiful sunset that was glowing and making those trees really look warm and beautiful. I'm getting some final marks and some stems and some grasses and this little painting is coming to life. And here's the final for this fourth painting. And now it's time to take off the tape and see these neat edges. Now I had an idea that the acrylic ink, I mentioned at the beginning, I accidentally used watercolor ink. It works very similar to acrylic ink with this. But I pretty much had an idea that it was going to bleed underneath the tape, which it did. But I thought it was kind of neat. It made a nice little glowing edge around it. And I decided after I get this tape off that I'm going to cut them. And I left just a little edge of that pretty golden pinkish color around the perimeter of the paintings. And I liked arranging these kind of alternately, you know, yellow, red, red, yellow. And I think these would be lovely framed as a grouping like this in one frame or framed individually. But these certainly were so fun to create. I really did create an experience with these. I put on some music. I had me a cup of coffee. Sometimes I just have to paint for me. And this was just one of those times. I hope you have learned a lot about this underpainting technique and learned a lot about pastel painting along the way. I hope you'll like this video. Give it a thumbs up. Leave me a comment and subscribe, of course. And if you would like the extra content and to support Monet Café, consider becoming a patron of mine. Really, it's just a beautiful group of people. I love my Patreon family and I feel so blessed to get to know others in this wonderful virtual world in this way. Oh, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this video or early on, I'm going to include a clickable link at this end screen here. If your budget doesn't allow for professional pastel papers, here's a neat way. You can make it yourself with watercolor paper and it's pretty fun. All right, guys, as always, God bless and happy painting.