 Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm excited to bring you this series of painting tutorials that I think will bring you joy, peace, happiness and learning. What you're seeing now are nine tiny paintings and I do mean tiny, only two and a half inches by two and a half inches. They all have flowers and happy little bees, which seems to represent a celebration of life and God's creation. In each of the nine lessons I will give you information as to supplies, techniques and more. And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do so. I would love that. And now it is time for painting number two, once again a little two and a half inch by two and a half inch painting. All nine of the paintings were done on this piece of pastel matte, one piece with all nine paintings, and it is water-friendly. I use white because I do a watercolor underpainting for each of the nine paintings. The reference images are from the Paint My Photo website and I share a lot more about that in the first video. I also share my system for creating the layout for all nine paintings. If you want to check that out go back to video number one in this series. Before beginning I also wanted to share with you that it's important to protect the paintings that you've already created. Pastel paintings can smudge so I'm using just some sheets of tracing paper and covering up the areas that won't be painted for this video. And just as in all nine paintings I will need some water for my watercolor. They all begin with watercolor and you will see also in the first video. I use a little Arteza watercolor set you'll see me using and I'm trying to show the colors that I use as well. Here is the reference image and once again you'll see it maybe on my iPad while I'm working but if you want the link to this particular photo I will have the link in the description of this video. It is from pmp-art.com. I did a basic sketch for almost all nine of the paintings. I think almost all of them. I don't always do a sketch to begin with but I wanted to kind of get my layout and composition in and I'm just using a pencil and using a light touch I do recommend that you have your pencil really sharp when you're doing especially working on something teeny like this. Now I am going to let you know in advance there is a portion of this video that got out of focus and I'm going to replace that footage with a little tutorial for you guys on how to draw and paint flowers more correctly. So just be advised that you're going to get some extra content to replace the content that got out of focus. I think my head got in the way or something. You know these technical difficulties do happen but you're still going to get a lot of footage and I think you should be able to recreate this painting just fine. I've zoomed in here for the section on watercolor and I'm actually going to try to show you these colors I'm using. I know I'm really close up here but you can see these blues that I'm choosing here and it's a combination of two different blues I'm using to get the centers of the flower in. Also too I know I mentioned my Amazon shop a lot now it's a really convenient way for you guys to find the products I'm talking about. I do have the Arteza 36 watercolor set in my shop and it's really more of a convenience for you to find things. You don't necessarily have to buy them from my Amazon shop but Arteza is a nice little watercolor set. I love the little 36 set. It has some nice color choices and it's affordable. Also too if you're just using watercolor as an under painting I mean you don't have to buy the most expensive brands but it is a an artist graded brand. So as you can see I'm just kind of dotting in the centers to the flowers just kind of for a gauge of where things are and now I'm going to choose a background color. I'm using kind of a cool under painting palette here. All the colors are cooler. This is kind of a turquoise lighter teal and I think I use a combination of two teal colors here but I in this one I'm not doing a wet under painting. I think that's what I did in the first one where I actually applied water first to the surface and it creates more of a wash and so this one I'm just applying dry. I didn't lay down plain water first for this one so but I do have my watercolor quite watery and that's important. I actually have a watercolor beginner tutorial coming soon and I'm going to share with you guys five things I've learned from painting you know for a few years with watercolor that I think would be real important for beginner artists so that's coming up soon but one of them is what I'm saying right here is make sure you have what is your friend. That's I'm going to give you a little upcoming tip that's going to be in the video. Water is your friend plus I know a lot of my subscribers and visitors to this channel like the Impressionistic style and you definitely get more of that feel when you're not afraid to let the water just have fun and explore and I'm definitely finding that watercolor is a great way to do an under painting to get the beginnings of that Impressionistic type of work and this is all real time by the way except for the footage when I was sketching it in. I think you're going to really like the little footage that's going to be coming up soon about how to more accurately sketch out the flowers and you see this is I talk a lot about art being therapeutic these nine paintings were definitely therapeutic for me. I found myself not getting overly fussy because they were so small and I know my patrons are in the process of recreating these paintings. I love seeing what you're doing patrons and you guys have done such a great job on the sunflower painting the very first one and I know some of you are not doing them quite as small they don't have to be two inches by two and a half inches by two and a half inches they can be a little larger that's fine so do what you can and I love seeing what you do patrons so and if you're not a patron of mine it's a way to support this channel for five dollars a month even if you don't you know get involved in the painting part of it or the lessons the extra lessons that my patrons get but if you do I love the fact that you guys share your work with me in your homework album and I get to see it it's very cool all right so wow why am I using that pink color interesting huh well I know that I'm going to have a sky the ending result anyway will be kind of blue in the background and the pink gave a base that's going to give that blue something to play around with and and be more interesting as I layer the blues on top of it now on this one I am going to go ahead and give a base of pink to the flowers these are little are the cone flowers echinacea flowers and they are already going to be pink so sometimes you'll notice in all these nine paintings sometimes I choose to use what's called local color which means the color that you see in the reference image and sometimes I'll use complementary color so there's a lot of different strategies for doing an underpainting and I get that question all the time like there's a hard fast rule to it it's it's a there's a lot of creativity you can have with an underpainting all right so now I know this particular flower is going to be the star of the show I have not even waited for some of the blue that I laid down in the background to dry because I want this to be an underpainting and very impressionistic so it's okay if it's kind of bleeding and blending into the wet I've already put down now if you were doing a serious or detailed watercolor paintings sometimes you want to wait for the initial layers to dry but I like my watercolor under paintings to just be free and really really loose and it creates a nice beginning for the pastel application almost I like to say painting outside of the lines and I say that carefully because you don't want to be so loose and willy-nilly that you lose the structure of the flower and the things that make it inherent to a correct drawing or core anatomically to that particular flower or tree or whatever you're drawing but then you can paint outside of the lines once you've got the basic bones right you can get a little bit free and fun and I know this is still the underpainting so everything is a bit loose but I've learned over the years to keep in mind that I talk about focal point a lot now because it's been a personal goal of mine to develop stronger focal points so I keep that in mind as I'm painting to realize okay what is the focal point it's obviously the flower the big flower that's one of the focal point strategies how do you develop I have a video on five ways to create a focal point something like that and one is size so something is bigger it's going to be more of a focal point and another focal point strategy is detail so I know that the be the flower they're going to have more detail than the other flowers and that's it for the watercolor application it's very basic very loose and simple and the wonderful thing I always like to say about this pastel mat is it receives watercolor almost as good as watercolor paper and it's already ready for pastels because it's got it's so weird I find it fascinating with this pastel mat surface it doesn't feel gritty to the touch like some other pastel papers it feels rather smooth but it receives layers so you're ready to go with this if you want to do a watercolor underpainting and then apply pastel you're good to go okay you can see what I've done I put down a before this one I put down I think it was the Terry Ludwig eggplant color it looks black it's really a dark purple but it's a great base that's another focal point strategy is contrast so wherever you want your focal energy you're going to have contrast that just means the difference between lights and darks or a stark difference between lights and darks creates more contrast so that the centers obviously of all the flowers are going to be a bit darker but notice now why did I pause to do the centers of those background flowers notice that's not quite as dark right it's because they're not only further away and they're not going to be as dark that's one thing that happens to value in the distance you can see that yourself if you're just looking at nature things further away they're just not going to be as dark as the things close up but also because I don't want them to be the focal point they're not going to have as much contrast so there's multiple reasons for some of the decisions that you make and you know if you're just getting started this might be the first time you've ever stumbled upon this channel all of these things are learnable I always like to say if you find that you're interested in art and you're fascinated by the process you probably have a gift a God-given gift a leaning towards wanting to create like that and if you do the rest is really learnable it's just really strategies and techniques and things that you can learn to do this all right you see I'm working what did I do I worked darker and gradually the values are getting lighter okay so I went with the Terry Ludwig eggplant I went with kind of a magenta color now I'm going with these little red colors and once again I apologize for not having the reference image up here but you can click on the link in the description of this video and see it yourself it's because it's someone else's photo on paint my photo or pmp-art.com and you are welcome to go look at that while you recreate my painting if you like my patrons I'm going to give you a you know access to the photo real easily in your post okay now what am I grabbing I'm getting going even lighter in value it doesn't mean I'm gonna go when I say lighter in value sometimes I think we have a tendency to go too light too soon it's still a medium value orange but it's brighter in color and these little cone flowers notice how all of a sudden they're looking more three-dimensional because I put the dark value down first I put my eggplant my magenta a little bit of that red wasn't quite as light as that orange I just put down I grabbed another pastel here by the way some of these RNG reddish pastels I'm using they're part of the unison 120 half stick set I love and I always recommend I get questions all the time about what's the best set for beginners well I always recommend buy half sticks every chance you get because you get double the pastel colors for your money if you're brand new your first start now you don't have a whole lot of pastels so half sticks are great the unison set is great unisons are a great brand of pastels okay I better I better get off of that and tell you what I'm doing notice how I've gradually layered from dark to light and now I'm using these little oranges to think of working from the bottom to the top or the base to the surface and you're gradually just layering those little highlights that are on the cone flower once again back to detail and focal point notice the other cone flower tops they don't have the detail of this main flower and that's because I want that to be the focal point they don't need all that detail if you did if you put detail everywhere then you've totally lost your focal point now I did just add a little bit more dark why'd I do that some of them need a little bit more dark for shadow where it's on the opposite side of where the Sun is shining but also to back to focal point I want that flower in the front to have a little bit darker base at that what is that part of the flower called some of you botanist is it botanist or who are like into the scientific names of things tell me what that center part of the flower is called I know there's a scientific name for it I'm just not thinking of it all right so now I'm adding a pink kind of a bold bright pink I think this is probably a senelier pastel that is worn down I love senelier pastels too by the way oh another point about pastels and beginners I know when we're beginners are we have to be careful of our budget because I mean these pastels can get expensive and sometimes we have a tendency like I did I'm raising my hand to buy cheaper brands I really discourage that because you're going to get so frustrated like I did because they just don't behave like the more expensive brands of pastels it really does make that much of a difference so if you're going to scrimp I always say scrimp on the surfaces I have tons of videos on how to do it yourself DIY pastel surfaces I even have in my amazon shop a page or a section dedicated to some of the products you can get that kind of accompany my videos so you can play around with making your own surfaces especially when you're starting and I still prefer sometimes making my own surfaces but definitely try to get the better pastels and that doesn't mean you have to get the 120 set you can start off with 20 set or a 40 set and I have videos that show you how to paint with 12 pastels so as long as you get the right values I have so many videos on the importance of value you can really create a painting and get going with your pastel art career so and again all of this is learnable and I have been through every stage that I'm sure most of you guys have been through that's why I started Monet Cafe by the way is because I had such a hard time finding information about pastel painting and I do love a lot of other mediums too though so again I'm going to have some watercolor videos coming now why am I adding this lighter or I guess I should have said why did I add the darker if I'm just going to put lighter on top of it well this lighter pastel right now is not going to have the contrast or value difference unless I had put the dark down first so again we typically work darker to lighter it doesn't mean black to white it just means whatever that item is or subject matter is go a tad darker before you add the lights now why did I not do that to these lower flowers well they're not the focal point I don't want them to have as much contrast so and specifically the ones I'm working on right now they're way far away okay they're little you can tell that's another focal point strategy is size all right here we go with the footage I told you I have no idea what happened to my camera and why it got out of focus but I'm speeding it up because there's not much to see but now you can see I added on top of some of what I already did and it does get back in focus soon but here's a consolation and my flower drawing tips all right so here is your replacement footage for the fact that part of the regular footage was a bit blurry because of my head getting in the way so I'm going to show you real quickly how to render flowers draw and paint flowers I think it's a lot easier with this method I'm going to show you and also I'm going to give you a little bit more of a close-up on how to paint these cute little bees all right here we go all right so I'm going to use these flowers in these actual paintings to show you a way that I think it's a lot easier to paint flowers this is just a piece of willow charcoal it's a little wider than it is tall but for this sunflower rather than me um trying to draw the sunflower like this okay we probably would do the center and then we most likely let me darken things up a bit here we most likely would start focusing this is how I used to draw and paint things we would focus on every petal okay one's up here one's coming out here oh let me see one's coming in kind of behind it then you know you get the idea you know drawing all of the petals rather than the method that I'm going to show you now and it ends up looking I don't know not as correct so that's one method of drawing a sunflower now here's another method what we could do I'm just looking again at my painting here is we could get an idea of where the main part of the flower is it's kind of like right here not quite in the center it's a little bit over to the side and of course we've got it's a darker center okay so we got this is just to get the the idea of where it is and now I notice that the petals of the flower if they're almost facing forward right they're almost like the flower is looking at you but it's turned down a little bit so instead of doing the petals I'm going to do an ellipse based on where the flower is an ellipse is just a circle it can be a circle that's straight at you angled you know or how a flower is turned so here I've done this a little bit big but here is the different way to do it go ahead and do the ellipse and then you kind of have a guide now they don't have to go exactly in the the circle they can come out of it a little but you've kind of given yourself a little range of where to do your petals and then you can kind of start looking at the shapes of them the directions of them and and you know focus on kind of the energy so and petals usually they start out thinner here I'm not doing a very good drawing of a flower they start out thinner and get wider typically you know you got to examine the different varieties of flowers so and as you could see this was the first in the nine series but um you know I give a lot of instruction in that too and then some of these come out and come down but you can see that that method is a lot easier and it's going to look a lot a lot more like a real sunflower because that's how flowers grow you know there is um kind of a pattern a circular pattern to them so that's one method if the flower is facing towards you all right now let's look at this next one the one that we're working on in this video it is a cone flower uh is it also called echinacea you guys you're so great to correct me when I get names of flowers wrong okay but it's got a big old kind of like a almost like a triangle type of shape cone to it with the cute little b on the top and then let's say well we're gonna do the the this method of drawing or painting the flower and I'm looking at all the leaves now you do get better though the more you do this I'm looking at all the petals um coming out not leaves but petals coming out and I'm gonna do um you know kind of free hand just going to the different um ending points that I think might be right you know and I you know you can make it work this way that's fine but I find it's much easier now this one's gonna have to be smaller um I find it's much easier to do this ellipse method all right now what is the shape of this particular flower okay it's not facing forward like this one what is happening here if we look at this flower it's an ellipse but the the flower is turned more this way looking that way I always say they're looking um but it's an ellipse more like let me look at it again more like see the petals are going to be shorter back here more like this it's coming around okay so this is more of the shape now these petals can come down a little bit longer but what that's going to do it's going to give you the guide as to where these petals are if you looked at the reference photo on this once again I'm sharing the reference images um in a link in every video it's not my photograph so I'm not going to plop it up here like it's my photograph but it's um it's available in the link okay so see what I'm doing I'm coming out I'm having to look back at this and matching it up to the ellipse that I drew all right so this ends up looking much more like a real cone flower um I guess you could say prospectively and um anatomically do you see yeah that's the right word I think um then this one will okay so I hope you can see that I hope I'm doing this dark enough for you to see so you see now that this is going to end up looking much more accurate that's a good word um then this method or this method okay let's do one more and then we'll get to some bees all right let's try this one this one is uh one of the upcoming videos and it's I think it's like daisies black eyed susans maybe and the flowers had some different gestural quality and one of them in the back where that bee is is even the petals are reaching up even in front of that middle section so let's take a look at that okay we've got one at the bottom now I'm not going to do the wrong way here I'm going to do the method that I'm suggesting we've got one here down at the bottom and uh I always kind of like to get the little center part in first and I noticed it was um its ellipse was more like kind of turned not straight up maybe a little bit of an angle and so I'm going to give it slightly ellipse like this okay let's go ahead and get all of them in first and there was one that is up a little higher up here maybe right about here okay and the way this flower was almost straight up and down it's a little bit bigger than the other one so its ellipse is a little bit more like this okay and I'm drawing the ellipse out to where I think the petals will end now this little guy that was up here um it had its center like here and it's smaller and its ellipse each of the petals is kind of coming up and around but in front of I'll do it a little bigger than it is there okay the top petals are above the center section all right so I'm going to draw these in a minute this one over here was kind of um reaching a little bit this way see how I did that ellipse and then there was a little guy down here that um it was angled a little bit more like this all right I'm not doing them the same sizes as they are in the image and I actually almost have what I hate to do is a pattern here look I've got four with one in the middle they look like flying saucers right now um so ignore that it's much better in the painting but this will make it uh perhaps easier for you to see now with this little one I'm going to make those centers darker now let's do this little one okay I know that the stem of this one is kind of uh by the way with your stems I'll go ahead and give you a quick lesson here usually they're coming right underneath the flower somewhere don't do stems like okay or even curvy all right it's better to do a stem give harder pressure and lighter pressure and a real like like gestural feel lighter and harder okay they look a lot more uh realistic that way often we don't see the whole stem as one thick stem the light is casting and reflecting so that's usually better okay let's get to this flower now um the petals are going to be coming up in the back here okay they're coming up from the back and some of these are coming up from the front they're covering that little center part I hope you could follow that there okay so and you could paint this with the correct values to represent that even better and here I'm speeding up the rest of the little petals filling in the ellipses that I had previously drawn but can you see how that really helps now I'll slow this down a bit for you this is a piece of Sennelier La Carte pasto card I've just put two colors down you know keeping it simple I'm going to use five colors and values a dark this is the terry Ludwig dark but if you don't have this color just use the darkest dark you have and by the way it's better when you're doing these are going to be on top I add them last so you want your pastel to be a soft pastel preferably the next color you'll need will be something that's kind of a rusty color it can lean a little bit more towards red if you like I'm putting down a few different options that second one was a little too dark so just something kind of orangy or rusty colored and not too light of a value remember we work dark to light and that's why I put the dark down I'm gradually getting lighter the next color will be kind of a yellowy orange but you want it to be bright and a little bit lighter than the rusty color it can even be lighter than the one that I used here just kind of a bright yellow I'm trying another one here that one's probably too dull so brighter lighter in color but not super light and value and the next color is going to be a base for the wing okay the wings are going to be the lightest thing but as we always I was testing a color there as I always talk about you need a dark for the light to rest upon so I'm going to use something yeah even as dark as that wouldn't have to be that dark in value but a blue color and that blue is going to be the base for the wing so that I can put this lighter value you can hardly see it on the paper that I have on my board but the lighter value is going to rest upon that blue so we got five colors one two three four five I know you can hardly see the lightest value those are going to be the five colors for our b use something similar to that if you don't have the exact colors but if you get the values right you should be good to go and here we go once again working dark to light you can do either two or three body parts a b actually does have three segments to their body but I find if the bees are super teeny it's best to do two it's almost like it's overkill see the little ones how they just have like two little black marks and then you add your little rust color that you saw me add and then you add your little golden color and the rust kind of acts as a nice background and obviously we're adding the little rust and then the golden right behind the head and all it has to be is a little simple mark I find the simpler the better with this now again we're going to need a little darker value base that's the blue that the wing is going to or the light part of the wing is going to rest upon you can make these in little v shapes but don't make them too cliche you know sometimes I'll make the wings going down even I think I made them all kind of going up here and even if they're not perfect it's all right these bees are in motion they're supposed to be energetic and moving and you could also add a little indication of feet or antenna if you like but make sure you do this with a very thin mark and a gestural stroke all right we are back to the lesson I apologize again for the out of focus footage but now we can get back to this bee now I thought this bee looked like a flower hugger he was really curved over top of that middle part of the flower and I'm doing the same strategy but this bee is actually larger and he's not in motion so I'm giving him just the areas of dark in the little bands that it would be and I've sort of been playing around with his shape and getting enough of that flower underneath him to get the the gestural feel and the curve of his back so but it's the same idea I'm getting down you see here how in the previous bees I used a rust color but here I'm using kind of an orange color so as long as you have a little bit of a darker value before laying down the golden color you should be good I also find the less you fiddle with these things the better they start to get muddied very quickly so don't get frustrated if things don't seem to come out the way you want them to at first we all get better it is definitely a journey and as I always say and I'm saying this to myself because I did not do this I have learned that we need to appreciate the experience more than the final product often I know we want to create something we want to show it we want to share it and you know just say hey look at what I've done but that takes a while and so don't get frustrated if your beginning attempts are not so great certainly mine or not I can't tell you how many paintings I have thrown away but like I said before this is all learnable so the more you have fun the more you will be a successful artist because that's part of the success is enjoying this journey now for this bees wings I wanted it to be a darker base like we talked about before than the background so I chose this purple marks were kind of thin but that's okay and then I will add the lighter on top of that so I fiddled around with this painting a little more added some lighter greens some warmer greens and kind of refined the flowers so I hope you enjoyed this experience and learned something and if you're a patron of mine or someone just following along with this video please tag me on all of the social media platforms so I can see what you create alright guys as always happy painting