 Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe subscribers, newcomers, friends. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. Oh, we're gonna have so much fun today I'm creating seven tiny paintings. And if you're new here, please subscribe I would love that and I think you'll love today's lesson where I'll be completing seven Tiny paintings. There is a lot of learning in this and real time for one of these paintings. Now Let's talk real quickly about supplies today I just wanted to paint for the joy of it so often. I'm making videos editing videos Cleaning pastels coming up with content so many things and sometimes just like you guys I just want to paint relax. So what's a great way to do that? It's actually painting small and I thought I would share with you before I paint I'll show you my painting, but I'm literally gonna put some music on get a cup of tea and Turn on some probably some house or cello music. I love his music, but I thought I'd show you why Painting small is often just such a good idea. You don't have to get so serious about it You can have some fun if you're not happy with it. You can throw it away But let me show you a couple of these products before I begin painting now I do have a few videos already on my channel about painting small. I love it and So I'll try to put some links To give you a little bit more about I actually have a little history on artist trading cards It's it's kind of a neat little history behind how they came about and you can check that out Now these are bait made by the company called color fix. I love these little trading cards Now before you get too excited, I have to tell you they've discontinued making these They are already a pastel surface made by color fix and I like color fix It's a nice sanded pastel paper And they have a little border around it. I usually paint almost to the edge. Well, some of these I haven't I'll show you some of the ones I've already done But it's just so convenient and handy and they come they came in different colors Now I have so many of them because a dear artist friend and patron of mine Marisa she was so kind. She's such a giving soul. She gave me she had a lot Herself for some reason. I can't remember why and so she sent me some treats and goodies Artistic treats and goodies. So I feel so great to have such a great supply of these in different colors Now keep in mind with color fix paper. I Found this out just by buying a pack of color fix a larger pack this this comes in larger paper Okay, some of it is a little bit more sanded than others There's one that's smooth and one that's more sanded. They're all sanded, but just some of them I like better. I like a little bit more of a sanded surface for pastel painting but Don't get too sad because they don't have these anymore. I make my own I think I got a few of them in here. Yeah, these are some that I made with this one's dirty With Cinelli a la carte pastel card. I usually cut them just a little bit larger than the ACO. I'm saying ACO is an acronym for art cards additions and originals I like to call them artist trading cards. Once again see the video I told you about about the history, but don't be too frustrated because we can make our own Artist trading cards even though color fix isn't making them anymore so this is literally just my iPad holder and That's another thing. That's awesome about painting small. You can do it in a small space I know a lot of you are working from your kitchen counters like I used to do for so many years and That's a great great thing about painting small is that you don't have to have a large space Real quickly I wanted to show you the clear bags that I use for displaying my artist trading card paintings These are ones that I used to get from crystal seal I now get them from clear bags calm But they're so great because they're the perfect size to put your little pastel beauties in and I also love that they are Conveniently the perfect size for my business cards that I get from moo.com like the cow That's perfect for me and I love this company I get the rounded corners with the square with a matte finish But you can have multiple images of your paintings in one order very cool Now what else do you need when you're going to do a painting? I just had someone ask me when they saw one of these tiny paintings. Where'd you get your reference images? I talk about this site a lot just because it's convenient for me It's PMP dash art comm stands for paint my photo I have over the years saved all of these different little photo albums in very convenient categories This one is fields so our theme in the Monet cafe art group on Facebook is Fields and flowers this month, so I thought I'd pick a whole lot of fields and flowers and just start painting That's one great thing about when you're painting just for relaxation You kind of lose the stress-free quality when you have to search around and find so many images So you guys are also welcome to get on my or you have to it's free You get on paint my photo comm pmp dash art comm you create a free account If you find me you can follow me and you can go access all these albums of mine It's kind of like Facebook you can look at my photos in this you can look at my my photo albums and see these things So that's where they're coming from and very quickly here I'm just showing my little homemade trough for catching the pastel dust just some aluminum foil I completed a total of six paintings and realized I like the number seven So I actually let my patrons on my patreon page choose from four different reference images and they chose this one So right now you're going to see this created in real time and the rest of the six sped up at the end I decided to just get a piece of foam core board to put here It's a little bit nicer presentation and I kind of like working on the black surfaces and to be able to paint on all the edges I don't want to put tape over the edges. So what I'm going to do is oh by the way I'm you know, I'm talking about my Amazon store a lot But it's because I get questions all the time or comments on my videos about where'd you get that product? Where'd you get that where'd you get this and it's really great for me to be able to just say hey Go look at my Amazon store. I have everything categorized real nicely or a lot of things that I have in my videos I love my limb artist tape dispenser this one actually it did buy on Amazon and It's really nice. I put my three-quarter inch artist tape. This is acid free It's great and I just love having it in the dispenser artist tape isn't cheap but it's really the best thing to work with when you're painting or Storing paintings because it's acid free. So what I do is Usually just do my little kind of hinge system here. I can put the tape on the back Okay, and then I just put some tape on the front Now this one might be No, that'll be okay. What I do is I just tape it on the front of this Both of these Like that. I just have two pieces like that and I will put it up here I usually am pretty good with getting it level. My husband says I have a level in my brain He always just says come here, honey. Is this level? Okay, and then I if I have a little thing if it bothers me, I just fold it over like that Okay Now if that is sticking up at the bottom like this one is you can kind of do the same thing you can even turn it Horizontally if you're wanting to cover a little more space and that way you're able to paint all the way to the edges Alright artists is finally time to paint. I want to share real quickly that I Decided towards the end of my first six paintings to start using white I had used some colored color fix Previously and I love working on white because it allows me I like both But this allows me to create my own tone and color fix is water friendly and acrylic ink friendly You're gonna see me using acrylic inks for this and I'm gonna share with you now some of my favorite acrylic ink colors and combinations But I wanted to let you know I do have Some of these on my Amazon store, but I found out that they recently changed the price It is way too expensive on my Amazon store So find these at dickblick.com and I'm gonna share I'll put a little picture up here of the colors that I use But this is my favorite combination of Indian yellow and fluorescent pink. I find it makes the most beautiful Golden glow. It's perfect for a complimentary warm underpainting color And it's very similar to another golden color I love happens to be by the company golden and it's golden fluid Acrylics and the color is quinacridone nickel azo gold and you see those little bars across the top there I love how golden has a paint swatch across it to show you how Transparent the color is very luminous and transparent So it allows it to show the white of the paper through and it really lets it glow But this combo with the Indian yellow and the fluorescent pink is almost exactly the same So let's mix it up. You could use either, but I love the acrylic inks I just feel like they're so vibrant and beautiful. I'm speeding this part up just to make the video a bit shorter I use just a flat brush and both of these colors now with the Indian yellow one two three four I did about four drops to let me see one one drop of that and you can alter this I wish I hadn't used a red little dish because you can't see the color in the bowl But you'll see it as soon as I get it on the surface and this is so tiny You don't need to use a lot see that color I mean, and it's almost identical to the quinacridone Nicolaiso gold. I love it Now I also noticed that I painted all the way to the edges on this one And I preferred that in one of the paintings or a few of them I didn't paint to the edges and it really looks better when you do if you do an under painting now here is my or are my pastel selections and Let me pause this and talk about them for just a minute the reference image of a Beautiful field with some mountains in the distance and some purple flowers was just lovely now by the way my patrons will get An attachment for that image. I don't share on My videos when I get a photo from PMP dash art comm once again You can find it if you go there and look for it yourself in my album But but my patrons will actually get the actual image now the field had you'll see it on my iPad while I'm painting though my field had some warm and cool Greens in it and I got another video coming up soon I'm gonna talk about when you would use those I mean depending on your reference image, but I needed the cooler greens for some of the distant grasses and I have a decent amount of darks You see the the dark purples and there's a couple of other darks down at the bottom rows of the The middle section there. It's like a dark purple and a dark blue now I've got a little bit of a dark green there and also The second row from the right has a couple of neutrals in there Neutrals are really important to kind of tone things down when things go further into the distance. They neutralize They're usually not as bold in color. Sometimes you could punch it up a little bit But I got those blues to go on top of the purple flowers Often we think we just paint one color or they're purple or they're blue But it's really nice to get a dark color down and then put that pop of blue. That's a senelier pretty blue I love that and then I have that pink is actually for I got another dark there the pink is actually for Layering down Some ground in the distance and I thought it needed to be a little darker than the golden color of the paper and Then of course the white for a couple of the little flowers. Oh, and I forgot about the sky I chose a combination of some warm and cooler blues for the sky and you can kind of see my pastels laid out here I didn't really choose too many more Do another little trick here. This is purple Lake daily roundy acrylic ink. This is a great color It's very dark and it's great. I hadn't done this in a while And I don't know why I hadn't thought of it it is really good for using a brush and I'm using a really small little baby because that's a baby painting flat brush so I'm just a couple of drops is all you need here three drops and I'm using it to get my my darkest values in which is usually things in the foreground and Vertical elements like trees that aren't too far away. So I really love using this technique. It's loose and it's Effective and also keep in mind that these acrylic inks don't take up any tooth of the pastel surface So you're not in danger of over layering or anything like that So as you can see I'm using the brush to make Sort of larger and taller vertical strokes in the foreground and then gradually work to the background first I'm going to go ahead and get in those mountains. Now this image had the horizon line in the upper third which is a nice composition and I also liked the way the mountains were arranged often you have to Kind of tweak your photo a little bit if things are not quite the way you want them compositionally But typically I've learned over the years that it's best to have Mountains that are turning up on the corners I think I think it might have been Karen Margulis who said make your mountains Smiling rather than frowning same thing with trees in the distance Now you don't want to get cliche and have every painting that way you can have it a few variances But it's usually a better composition like that now One of those hills was a little closer and had some tall like pine trees or something So one of my favorite words here lately in my videos is the word suggest just keep in mind All we have to do is suggest things our brains often figure things out with not a lot of information And that is typically one of the questions often ask is how to get a more painterly style Or I want my work to look more loose And one of the ways to do that is to learn to suggest things more than spelling them out You just have a few elements in your painting that are usually what you want to be the focal point that may have a bit more detail And you might spell that out a bit But everything in the painting does not need a lot of detail now my little brush was splayed out a little bit It was a little bit too consistent, but it doesn't matter This is just for a value painting and I'm using the underneath value strokes here to Suggest the motion of these things Getting smaller and some direction towards the distance It will pull the eye that way rather than keeping things just flat and Gradually decreasing the value in the distance. I'm trying to create some movement and energy here And now isn't that a nice glowing beginning and again, it didn't take up any tooth of the paper So I'm going to start it with the sky first. Now. I do have a video I already made the lesson. I've just got to edit it and get it uploaded on How the value It's a value. It's on value and color temperature how they work in the sky and on the land So let me just give you guys a little info here The video will also have it about how temperatures and values work in the sky typically in a sky Your values are going to go dark From from the upper sky to the horizon line or in this case behind the mountains is going to go darker to lighter Now because it's a sky, you know, you got to keep that in mind. It's not going to be like dark dark But typically your values will be a just a tad. I need in my glasses a tad darker in the upper heavens And then get a little bit less lighter value And the lightest value is usually closer to the horizon line now with regards to color temperature The temperature is usually cooler like cooler blues and a sky can be any color, but this is just in general how it works cooler colors towards the upper part of the sky And warmer colors down towards the lower. That's why I'm using more of a turquoisey blue You could see as I was Gradiating down towards the horizon line and then my lightest value will be right above the mountains In that area. I I wanted kind of the for the background focal point There's the lighter one to be kind of right where I'm at right now Okay, I've been talking for a bit now I think I'm going to take a break and put on some music and I'm going to pop back in and give some more commentary When I get to the flowers All right, let's add some flowers often when I start with flowers even if they're a little bit lighter I usually start with a darker value as the base in this case. I wanted a really nice Dark purple, but still a bright purple. I didn't want it too dull or neutral So this is a terry Ludwig. I am not sure of the color number But uh, isn't that pretty and I've found over the years something I'm personally trying to get better at is notice how fresh this color looks notice the Contrast of the flowers in the grass. Well, there's a point when this is At its freshest look and often when we continue to work too much We can overdo it and all of a sudden that freshness disappears And I often say because I have the advantage of watching my videos after I've painted that I've I'm starting to learn to see When I need to go and just Walk away and not paint anymore or at least give it a break And um, I think I'm getting better at it But I still think even this little tiny painting I probably could have just worked on it for about five more minutes or so and had it done So I do love that fresh fresh stage Now here are some of the lavendery purples that I'm going to add to And the way color and value works as it recedes is First let's talk about color. It's going to get lighter in color like a more of a shade lighter and more neutral and With value it's also going to get like a shade lighter in value And that's literally just because that's what happens in real life when things get further away Um color is not going to be as bright It's going to be a bit more neutral and it's going to be a little paled out So that's why I got some uh other colors that aren't quite as bold as those Bright purples and notice I didn't put the dark down first Um for the Midfield flowers now this I'm just kind of glazing things get more horizontal in the distance And we're just giving that suggestion of maybe lots of little flowers way back there And they're so far away that it's more like a blanket of flowers Now i'm adding a little bit more of that blue um That's kind of like some of the blue that are in the foreground flowers And once again not also not as bold but also my touch is so much lighter When I created the flowers in the foreground. I was pressing harder now This is going to connect the flowers to the background by adding Um some of that blue onto the most distant mountain a little bit of that in the sky And it makes things feel very harmonious And um and connected And this is a point where I I actually really like this painting at this stage And I did add some grasses to the foreground You'll see the final in just a minute, but I think I think I overdo grasses often I'm just real raw and honest with you guys because you know, you can learn Not just by what I do right, but what I tell you that I did wrong So, uh, you know and sometimes too, I wonder if I'm You know, maybe a little too honest with stuff. I feel like you know, I've been painting I didn't come from a professional art background. I have said it before I majored in graphic design I got a little bit of a couple of artistic classes. I loved it But I didn't have really any formal art training And so I always feel like I have a lot in common with a lot of you guys Because we're just trying to learn this often from home And um just trying to get better and I always say hopefully enjoy the journey Now I did that one little flower. I felt like I wanted something with a compositional element that's called I think it has another name, but it's also called pointing. It's like a directional element that Something creates a focal point and it also kind of points and leans in the direction to that other focal point area Which is pulling the eye back to those distant mountains Now let's add some of those white flowers for this. I'm using actually I usually don't use something that's this white But I I really liked it. I felt like some really bright white Flowers would look good in this and this is a senelier pastel Notice how you're even seeing little bits of it kind of fall off This is such a soft pastel one of my favorite brands This one is I think a jack richison and just like I did with some of the other flowers I want to neutralize some of them if you put every single flower white, especially In the area that is represented as deeper grasses It's going to look very artificial and like they're just pasted on so I try to Vary that a little bit so you don't have like white popcorn all over your painting now back to a lighter touch I'm just barely pressure has a lot. I should do a video just on pressure It has a lot to do with the believability of your painting And here's the final coming up in just a second and I was happy with it But once again, I kind of like the simplicity of it before adding too many grasses And here it is in the final display that I made literally just by using some black paper And I cut out little frames and I put the paintings on black foam core board I did this because somebody saw online some of the paintings and they actually wanted to purchase all of them So I thought that was a neat way to ship them And there are all kinds of different framing options from purchasing precut mats To maybe making your own little shadow box. These are not my paintings here Or you know, even some kind of fun display like this So there's lots of options now because this video is already at like 33 minutes I'm going to give you a little sneak peek of some of the other paintings that I did and kind of talk through them This was on black color fix paper or sanded paper and I really like working on black So I had fun with this one too. Now, obviously I didn't use acrylic ink on the black or anything I just started working directly with pastels. So here's the little mini baby final of this one This one was a Sand kind of color piece of the color fix Sanded paper and with this one, I decided to give it a warm kind of complimentary underpainting And just keep the general feel warm and I veered away from the reference photo often I'll use a reference photo for a concept And um, just get creative with color and by the way, the next video that I have coming up That's going to teach more on value and color temperature Is going to hopefully help you to learn that once you learn some of these rules You can veer outside of whatever color is in the photograph. All right, let's do another one I wish I could paint these this fast. Actually, they do go pretty fast Because they're little, you know, and that's one of the great things about these is I find Like I said at the beginning. I wanted to just paint for me and just relax I turned the camera on, you know, of course, but um, I really enjoyed this experience Now this one I wanted to keep it a cooler palette Notice the purples and the teals, but I did want to have a little bit of warmth Underneath those grasses and give some of the flowers more of a wine and purple color and added some cool grasses on top But you see how awesome you can layer with this color fixed paper So this one was a lot of fun too. I really liked adding that pop of turquoise at the end I was inspired by some really beautiful yellow flowers in one of the reference images You can kind of see a little peek of it over to the left there. And once again, I'm sorry with the paint my photo site I don't like to pop up somebody else's photo up here. They've given copyright free permission to paint it But um, again, I'll share it with my patrons. That's more of a private Platform there and so I'm doing this typical thing of adding a bit of a dark base before I add the bright yellow flowers And it usually helps to create more contrast And I did add some really softies like those senellier pastels. I was telling you about It's a french word senellier um in a french company But uh that added that little pop of color and usually that's what the softies do They're best for the final stages of a painting and I really liked this one. It had a vango feel to me I loved that uh yellow with the teal sky now these last two are the same type of process of the Real-time footage I showed you earlier Obviously on the white color fixed paper and with this one I did the same indian yellow and fluorescent pink background the same purple lake acrylic ink for the values And then started layering my pastels. I got a little creative with color with this one too I really liked some of the magenta. It's purple lake But it kind of with when it combines with that uh golden color It kind of looks a little bit like a magenta color But I liked the colors in this one too. This one was fun And this was the sixth painting that I did. I used a turquoise acrylic ink for this background and I really liked how I went all the way to the edges It made the final painting look a bit more professional than the white edges showing through And so I again used some of the purple lake to get values in to get the tree line And I really loved that teal background With the colors that I chose for the flowers and the grasses and just a little bit of that wispy sky And the flowers just kind of drawing you in so this was a lot of fun I like this little poppy painting as well. So wasn't that fun? I hope you guys stayed with me to the end of this That was a lot of painting But here again is a better view of my do it yourself frame that I made for these I am happy that it's going to a new home. I hope you guys learned a lot You know, I love sharing what I learn with you guys So as always subscribe if you haven't liked this video Comment I would love for you to comment on this video and let me know how you liked it. What you liked I'm always getting suggestions from y'all too. So it's awesome. All right, my artistic friends a very happy painting