 Welcome my artistic friends to Monet Café. Join me today for this painting Daisy Dance. It has lots of tips and artistic instruction and I'm so glad you're with me in Monet Café. Hello friends in Monet Café. I know I've been hiding behind the camera a lot lately but I thought today a lot of it's because my house is noisy a lot and it's kind of hard to film so I have to do a voiceover but today the hubby is out mountain biking and I have a precious few hours of quiet time and I know a lot of you guys can relate to a busy life and I just like to share that I think that's what's so neat about our channel on our Facebook group is that we have a commonality of realizing that everybody has the same stuff and we have to sneak in our precious painting time so that's what I wanted to do today. I was outside the other day my husband was so sweet he was cutting the grass out here at our little farmhouse where we're living now and he came in to stop he stopped mowing and he came in to show me this little patch of flowers little wild flowers little daisies I know this photo isn't great but I just snapped a picture of them and he actually just left so he didn't mow them over so it's neat I know a lot of you guys I get to hear in our Facebook group a read that you guys have accommodating spouses or partners as well and that's just always such a blessing so anyway thank you kudos to my hubby for not cutting down the little daisies but I've been so busy I know I've been uploading some videos thank you guys so much for all of the the likes and the views and the channel's just growing it's so awesome but I've been busy a lot lately and painting things a little bit kind of a little rushed so today with this little time I have I thought I just paint something just for me and I did a little let me grab it hang on I did a little um like a teeny painting of the daisies the other day just to get an idea and it was fresh and fun and so I thought I'd do a bigger version of it today so I'm gonna give some try to give a lot of instruction but I'm gonna just enjoy myself if you guys ever wanted to do that and I think that's what art is all about is just taking a precious moment to escape and when we paint it's like we can't focus on all the other challenges of life so that's what I'm gonna do today so anyway I hope you'll join me I will give some instruction but let's just enjoy these beautiful daisies in my front yard before I get started on the main painting I wanted to give you a little speed version of the little mini painting that I did it's often a good idea to not only get a sketch you know for values basically but also sometimes just to do a little version of your painting again it just helps you make better choices when you go to commit to the the big version so this is just my little fun mini painting I literally did it the other morning when I woke up early before I had to get off to do other chores and you know sometimes it's just fun to do something that you're not so serious about so this was a fun little painting and I just thought I'd share this process so after this we'll get to the main painting all right before I got started I wanted to go ahead and show you my setup here and my reasoning behind it I've got my little mini painting I did the other day just up here really more for color notes or motivation for my choices with color kind of like the color palette going on I've got my little photo here that I took and by the way you don't have to be an amazing photographer or have an amazing camera to get some good reference images you can really one of the first things is get a good eye for composition and taking your photos but a color I mean a photograph is just kind of a little roadmap for getting ideas for your painting and that's what this one's going to be for me I have a piece of you art sanded paper here you hear that sanded surface we talk a lot if you're a new beginner with when you're painting with pastels you really need a paper or you get better results with a paper that has a sanded surface the pastels need a some grit to hold on to other that's why I have this little tray here it's just aluminum foil I have here it catches the dust that falls but if you don't have grit on here a lot of it's just going to fall off and you can't get the layering so you are paper if you're going to invest in a good paper you are is a really good one I talk a lot on this channel about especially if you're first getting started you don't want to put so much money into everything we have a lot of homemade videos that I've created where you can save some money I still use those to I mean I really like working on some of the homemade surfaces but again if you're gonna invest in a good paper you are is a great one this is just a piece I just pulled out a piece of the 9 by 12 in one of the pads that they sell with 10 sheets in it and so I'm just working directly from from one of these pieces I often buy the bigger pieces of your paper and cut them down to sizes that I like to use that's a little more economical but I like these these pads too now what I'm going to do is a lot of times all the time really it's a good idea to get a plan before you start your painting you don't just want to willy-nilly jump into it and because a lot of times you go in unexpected places but having a roadmap or a plan is a great way to get started and you know I've done this a lot but I was recently at a workshop with Karen Margolis and she just hit it home and stress the importance of it again to do a value study and a simple simple plan before you start your painting so that's what I'm going to do right now and it's best to do it with shades of value of gray I got some markers on Amazon these are gray scale markers and they come with a whole bunch of different gray scale shades or values and I picked out my three favorite you don't want to go overkill with this you really only need about three values to work with and so I'm going to do a quick little sketch here to show you how I'm going to interpret this photo into what I think would make a pleasing painting and composition so let me grab my markers and I'll do that now I'm speeding this up because it's very simple and that's the goal is you want to keep your value sketch super simple focusing on big shapes and really just the three major values and the circles are just to remind me where the bigger flowers will be there's really not much need to put in all of the smaller ones that will be in the painting so that's pretty much it here are the pastels I've chosen for this particular painting it looks kind of like a lot I've been working more with a limited palette lately but I didn't want to have to bother with finding more pastels once I got started so what I'm trying to accomplish here is to I really liked that peachy pinkish sky that I had in the little sample painting that I did and I love some of the teals they were playing off of each other nicely of course I've need some you know good warm greens for the grasses and those flowers are going to be daisies I guess or whatever the little I don't know what they were called in my field they were kind of like weeds but of course I'm gonna need some whites and some or I usually don't use solid white I typically use just a very light value of another color in this case it's blue but I need some cooler and darker values to represent flowers or the petals that aren't in the sunshine and that may be buried down deeper so some of these other colors are going to be the the darker value flowers or petals so you know you get an idea here of kind of of course some purples for shadows and and some more neutral colors this is more of a neutral green and so is this one when things get further back in the distance they get more neutral this is actually kind of a neutral you notice how that one's a duller than this particular tealish green so neutrals are good to have so that the whole painting isn't shouting with color and it pushes things back into the distance so that's how I'm planning to get started so let's see how this progresses for this painting I'm going to approach it with no wet type of under painting if you've watched some of my videos you see sometimes I will do an alcohol wash where I literally put the pastels down or an initial layer and then I paint it really with alcohol or water you can use this you are paper is great for that sometimes I'll use acrylic ink to get an under painting sometimes I'll use the neo color to wax pastels I want to use those again I haven't used them in a while but in this case what I'm going to do and I've done this in quite a few videos is kind of a complimentary under painting just with pastels and then I'm going to blend it with a piece of pipe foam insulation I'll show that when I get to it and describe more about it but notice I'm using lots of warm on the warmer side of the color wheel warmer colors and I wanted to throw in that pink sometimes instead of reds I'll lean more towards pink and peachy colors and there's the pipe foam insulation I showed a bigger piece of it so it was fast but it's literally just something that you can buy at a hardware store it's really cheap but artist Karen Margolis has been the the person I think she might have taken it from somebody else who kind of taught about how to use this and it really does work what great for blending I don't blend a lot except at the initial stages of a painting but what this does is it kind of gets away all that white on the paper or cream colored and it establishes a soft background or under painting now that's the under painting so I'm done there now I'm going and I'm going to establish more of the darks and what I've done is even though the photo didn't have it it kind of did subtly I'm creating a trail or a path that kind of draws the eye into the painting it's going to get mostly covered up but most of that dark will still kind of show through enough to keep the eye engaged now I'm just getting down some of my tree values in the background I darkened up the trees as well trees are almost always one of the darker things in your painting because they stand vertically the sky is almost always the lightest thing and the flat grasses will be the next lightest thing in the painting things like trails like that deep grasses in the foreground they're almost always darker in value I've got a lot of videos that talk about value and that's such an important thing with painting and getting good art now I'm adding some darker greens I want to have some interest and variety in those the darks you don't want just flat color in one color so I'm even with some of those lighter blues I put back there I'm going over them and putting a little bit of a more of a middle value blue to kind of draw the eye back into the scene now I don't even know what I'm doing here oh I'm drawing in the big I've got a little piece of willow charcoal and I'm drawing in my flower shapes and I'm just getting in the big ones I'm trying to get a good composition and not have things lined up or in a pattern life and nature has this beautiful randomness to it so you want to try to emulate that and not have things to say me we just have this way of making things look ordered and structured and sometimes we got to fight the urge to do that and really think you know sometimes we have to pause and actually think about things while we're painting which is a good idea now again I'm still establishing some values I really liked that real kind of a purpley lavender in the sky I used noticed how I brought it down into the field you really want to emulate what's going on with your sky into your ground it's going to make a more harmonious painting so that's why sometimes when I'm working on the sky I'll go ahead and take some of that sky color and just add it somewhere down into the the ground portion of the painting it just again harmony and consistency and it just makes a painting feel more like it really does because that's in in real life because that's what happens in nature color has this neat way of just bouncing and playing against everything or in combination with everything that you see so a painting real quick quickly can look amateur if you just have a blue sky and green grass and you know just colors in little individual places rather than letting them play around with each other all over the whole scene so alright I'm gonna paint a little bit more but you see now I've got the complimentary under painting down I've established the darker values and now I'm gonna start playing around with the actual color of the scene that's what's called local color the greens the things that you naturally see with your eyes so enjoy this you know me I'll pop back in this is a point that I I mentioned often in some of my videos where I've established the painting to a point that I really kind of liked it at this loose rough stage and if you ever get a chance to video yourself painting it's a good idea because you get to look back and kind of see sometimes where we could remember maybe to slow down and keep things fresh and I was happy with the final painting but I was tempted almost at this phase to make the flowers pink they were just there's such a nice little harmony going on with those pinks and those greens but anyway I just thought I'd comment on that because a lot of times we can learn a lot by taping yourself or filming yourself and going back and reviewing what you've done so lesson to myself as well I'm not sure why I didn't notice it early on but that one main daisy that I had even drawn in the value sketch was right smack dab in the middle and a little bit too high in the composition compared to some of the other flowers sometimes I like one that's popping up real high but it wasn't really working great so notice how I turned my easel or my board over and I'm using a stiff bristle brush to just brush that pastel off and the daisy out of there and now I can just kind of go back over and subdue it make the sky kind of put it back in place and and put another daisy I wanted it a little bit smaller and just down a little bit more in the composition it ended up being still a little bit too in the middle for my liking but it was better than it was before so there you go you can actually erase pastel if you need to in a pinch so it worked out well for me here I'm taking a harder pastel called a new pastel in you pastel and it's great for the final stages where I can just kind of outline some of the petals keep it really loose and artistic though and also I you need to keep it a very a light touch if you're gonna do it on some of those flowers that are more in the shadows you don't want a bright white anywhere in shadowy areas here's where I'm using a product called Blair fixative and what it does is when you've gotten too many pastels down and you can't really get in good layering it works twofold it gives you some splattery effects if you barely hold the nozzle which makes a real artistic look and it also gives a little extra grit to the surface so you can put some more pastel down and it gives a little darker in the foreground a darker appearance so I guess it's a threefold benefit when you use this I don't always use it but sometimes if I want to glaze over and get that kind of fresh look it's really really a neat technique also to I have been a little heavy-handed in my past artwork career for doing too many single blade grasses it's better if you do more of an impression of grasses than actually drawing them out with individual strokes so I'm really just trying to put in a few and that fixative helped me to do that and then I'm just gonna be turning pastels really on their side and kind of just giving some color in there rather than thin glass glass glass blades and that I love that teal that I'm adding in there too don't be afraid to use a cooler tones rather than just the greens you see in the in the local color or what you're actually seeing with your eye so again the fixative is a great tool but I don't use fixative at the end of my painting I get a lot of people asking me that question it it will darken the whole painting and notice when I used it I didn't just leave it I'm using it for a purpose to add more on top of it so there's the answer to that question never use fixative at the end of a painting or at least I don't anyway I'm kind of wrapping it up at this point but I thought I'd go ahead and show you a close-up of my little bee process another little helpful tip from artist Karen Margolis she is such a wealth of pastel information and I love her little bee technique I basically just make three little dark of really dark pastel little dots then you add like on the thorax of the body like a orange a warm color and then kind of a little brighter yellow on the back now bees are they're just an impression of them when you see them out in nature you don't see an actual bee you just kind of see them moving they're so fast anyway that you just everything should be impressionistic with the bee it doesn't need to have too much detail but now I'm gonna zoom in here and show you the wing this is actually a pastel that fell when wind blew my pastels over when I was outside and it created a sharper edge so that was a nice little edge to do those two little bee wings but that's all you need is a little impression of a bee and I liked this experience because I got to just relax and do some painting and it was a lot of fun for me so I hope you enjoyed this demo here's the final painting and I called it daisy dance because they look like they were dancing but anyway you guys are awesome I'm so thankful for each and every one of you join us in our Facebook group my May cafe art group if you haven't already and if you haven't subscribed to this channel please do thanks so much guys happy happy painting