 Welcome to Monet Café. In today's lesson we will be painting impressionistic butterflies in soft pastel. Oh, you're going to learn a lot. We're going to talk about sketching tips. We're gonna have some underpainting fun, getting creative on watercolor paper, and creating our own do-it-yourself pastel surface. We'll also talk about the pastel application to keep your butterflies light and airy. This is a two-part series and I think you're going to love it and learn lots. I'd really appreciate it if you would go ahead and like this video and if you haven't already subscribed to this channel and hit that bell icon to be notified of future videos. This lesson will have full real-time content over on my Patreon page. For only $5 a month you can join my Patreon family and also support this channel as well. And real quickly before we get started here is our subscriber spotlight. Thank you so very much Susan. I've been trying to paint with beginners videos for months and I was always so disappointed with what I did. This is the first painting I've done that I like and I'm so delighted. So thank you Tile for your comment. Keep learning lots and here we go. So I'm very blessed to have so many butterflies in my own backyard because I have a plant called milkweed. So I've gotten to watch so many of them, I guess you would say, be birthed out of their cocoons and they're actually quite friendly when they first come out and I'm able to really examine them closely. I have a little special guest in the studio who is snoring behind me literally while I paint. You can kind of hear him snoring. It's my neighbor's puppy. I'm puppy sitting. I'll be creating these butterfly paintings on a watercolor block. It's made by arches. You do not have to have this product. I'm just going to show you my setup and then I'll talk about other surface options for you. What I've done is I've divided it into four sections. The center section there, I know the pencil is very light. It has one inch divisions in the centers and half inch around the perimeters because what I'm doing is I'm going to put some tape around it for a nice clean edge. And I recently got this tape. It's from Hippie Crafter. I love the name and it's called Artist Tape, but it's really like masking tape. These are little half inch rolls. You get two. I think you might get three in each pack. Yeah, I think it's three and it really works great for making a border and this tape is residue free. It's also acid free and it's removable or repositionable and it works really well. Now I'm going to put mine in my limb tape dispenser. I love this tape dispenser. I use it for artist tape and masking tape and it just makes it so much easier than fiddling with the tape. So here you'll be able to see I'll speed it up where I'm putting my masking tape border around again a half inch all the way around the edges and one inch in the middle because I'm going to be cutting each one of these and I wanted them all to have that same half inch border all the way around. If it sounds complicated, it's really not. You'll see at the very end how I do that. But I do love those clean edges. So you can use whatever you have. If you already have some watercolor paper and it's smaller, you can just mark it off in a five by seven size or even a soft pastel paper. As long as it's water friendly, I will be applying some water based mediums to this watercolor paper. My patrons will be receiving a downloadable image of all of the butterflies I used and these are all from pmp-art.com. For my Patreon version, I actually show a little method that I use where I put a square around elements that might require a little more attention to sketching and I go into full detail as to why that is so beneficial. But I'll speed it up here so you'll get the general idea. It really would be best to use a light pencil for this but I'm using charcoal just so you guys can see it better. I know it's a little hard to see. Now here's the concept. If you isolate your image such as a butterfly within a square, you're able to see or rectangle depends on how you isolate it. It's really just giving it a frame to put around. But you're able to then see the negative spaces along with the positive spaces. What I mean by that is I can see not only the shape of the wing but I can see in my reference image the shape of the space kind of like to the top right of the butterfly. I see it's almost like a diagonal line and a triangle in the top negative space. So it really does help you to get that accuracy without having to do like a grid method. You know how you have to do a grid. You make a grid on your image and then you make it on your paper. And I find just sometimes isolating and framing out elements like this really helps. And this sketch is basically to get the general shape and gesture of the butterfly. Now I'm using a little eraser, a kneaded eraser. You'd be like, why are you erasing it when you just drew it in? But it's because I don't want that charcoal to be so heavy. Butterflies are delicate. One of the things I want to do in this tutorial is help you to create a butterfly that has that gestural delicate feel. I've painted butterflies I know in the past that just felt too heavy and too contrived. And we want these to feel like they could fly off the paper. For this first part of painting the butterfly, I'm actually using some watercolor pencils. I remember quite a while ago where I discovered I could literally just paint with some watercolor pencils on my watercolor surface and then wet them to get their color. Now I purposely was trying to keep this very light and just kind of playing around with these particular pencils. This is once again another product from Hippie Crafter. Thank you to them. They gifted these to me to be able to do a painting tutorial. And I found that for this particular purpose, now the butterfly is light. So the colors I chose did keep it very light. But I realized, you know, I'm going to be adding pastel to this. So I changed my direction a little bit in a minute. You will see. But here I'm actually adding a pretty kind of teal and I believe purple color to the center section of the butterfly. I did also decide to use a darker colored watercolor pencil. I believe this is kind of like a dark blue, like a dark teal blue. Just to sketch in a little bit more around those wings. If you notice, there are some blacker areas or darker areas, especially where I'm working now, that kind of go into that little tail of the butterfly. And so I'm just kind of getting some light little sketchy marks in there, which is really just establishing the markings of the butterfly and the general shape. And I'm just using a round watercolor brush. I don't remember the exact name of this one, but it's one that has a pretty good tip on it. But I typically, I don't fuss about brushes, especially when it's going to be an underpainting of sorts like this. Once again, this is to get that general anatomy shape and just a beginning of some of the markings of the butterfly. And I will stress that I do think those things are important when we're doing animals or people. There are certain things. If you don't get it right, your painting will start off in the wrong direction. Now, here's where I change direction, speaking of direction. I decided to break out my neo color to water soluble wax pastels. That's a big old mouthful of a name. They are, they literally look like coloring crayons. I love these. They're so fun, but they explode with color. Now, they're called wax pastels. Yes, they are indeed waxy and they're called pastels, but they don't feel like pastels. However, they're water friendly. And you can see the texture of this arches watercolor paper when I put it down. But when you add water to these, they just explode with color. And because I'm on watercolor paper, of course, I can use water. Now, you're going to see the difference here between like a watercolor pencil versus these neo color to water soluble wax pastels. The watercolor pencils, I do love using them. I love to use them for an underpainting to sketch things in, to get a little bit of color in. But often with soft pastel painting, we work dark to light, we work darker values and we're able to lay lighter values on top. So often I want to get some dark established. And you may be wondering right now, how are you going to add pastels to this? Because this is watercolor paper. Well, I'm going to show you that trick in just a minute. Okay, so watch how fun this is literally just adding water with my watercolor brush. And the color is just so brilliant and fun. And I used a combination. I use kind of some red, I think a red orange and a blueish purplish color. I'm even adding a little bit of that color into the butterfly wings. I find that when you isolate elements with color here in one spot and then a different color in another spot, the painting doesn't feel connected. So often, I mean, even though that butterfly is yellow, sometimes I'll put a little hint of the color, you know, like I'm doing right now. See how all of a sudden that butterfly feels like it's more part of the painting rather than something that was just pasted on. Alright, so I have my basic underpainting now. And it's time to turn the surface into something that will be able to receive soft pastels. So what is it? It's clear liquid gesso. If you have followed many of my videos, you know, this is one of my favorite ways and most affordable ways to make your own homemade soft pastel surface. Yes, pastel surfaces can get very expensive. The sanded surfaces, they literally have a little bit of a grit, a texture like sandpaper to them. They can be very expensive. They're great though, because it allows you to add multiple layers. One of the most awesome benefits of soft pastels is the layering ability. So what this clear gesso does is add texture to this watercolor paper. Now regular gesso does not have the little bits of sand in it that clear gesso has. And also, clear gesso is clear. So when this dries, you'll be able to see your underpainting regular gesso because it's white would totally cover up your work. I had first pulled out a set of Paul Rubin's pastels, the bright set that you saw underneath that I thought I would use. But I I had a few of these darker pastels that I had used for a previous painting. And I thought these colors would make a nice background for some of the flowers and foliage and greenery that I was seeing in the image. So what you're seeing now as I'm applying these as you can probably see the texture. And I remember when I was first painting with soft pastels. This happens on sanded pastel surfaces as well. Like I said, this clear gesso really makes this feel much like it's sanded paper and it behaves that way. But when I first started, I would see all that blank space and all that texture. And I thought, well, surely I'm doing something wrong. But you're going to see me blend this in in a minute with a paper towel. It's a technique I like to use a lot when I'm making my own pastel surface like this with the clear gesso. What it does is it's going to really soften that background and it's going to blend in those spaces. You're not going to see as much texture. Now, sometimes I love this texture. I embrace it. I think you can make something that feels even more impressionistic. All right, here we go with the paper towel and look at that. See how it blends in the color even gets more vibrant as you blend it together. And a paper towel works great for this. I like to turn it I blend sections one at a time. So I'm not contaminating the color you see I'm kind of working in sections. And you might be thinking, well, look, you're covering up all of that underpainting that pretty red. Well, actually, no, you can still see the influence of that red underneath. This is totally different than if I had left that surface white. Can you see those colors interacting and behaving together? I just think it's beautiful to me. This is part of that painterly impressionistic look is when you when you make these under paintings and combine colors in this way, we're not trying to reproduce a photograph. We're trying to create a painting something that's unique and feels artistic and painterly. Now you're going to see me do something else that you might be thinking, huh? Why is she doing that? You see how I'm adding this blue to the yellow that I put down? The yellow still acts as allowing that butterfly's value to be lighter than other elements. But it's too light. If you squint your eyes and look at that butterfly, you'll be able to see in the reference image that there are shadows. There are areas that are darker. So what I'm doing now is establishing some of those darks. Now I'm going to start working some on the really dark areas of the butterfly. I'm getting a soft pastel. I believe this is the the dark that I use a lot, which is the eggplant color. I think it might not be. Yeah, it is. It's the Terry Ludwig eggplant color. You see how it almost looks black, but it's actually a really dark purple. Another thing you want to focus on, too, is gestural marks. That's probably one of the things that I tried real hard to get better at as I was advancing with my art career. I used to have tight mark making mark making. I'm still trying to loosen up. And these things get better the more you paint. So I advise paint often. Don't paint so seriously, though. Try to paint little studies. And I promise you with every painting, you'll learn something. Now I'm really just focusing on the the form of some of these wings. While I had the butterfly shape in, I am getting a bit more accurate with some of the shapes of the wings and some of the marks on the butterfly. So this is where I want to get things correct, but also keep it very light. Now what if I had just taken those lines and just made hard, dark marks? The butterfly would have all of a sudden felt very heavy and not as fragile as they do. Now what I'm getting right now is one of my little blenders. If you've watched my recent videos, I've been using pan pastels a lot. I did not use any pan pastels in this lesson because I've done it in the past three or four videos. But notice this is one of the little blending tools, an applicator for pan pastels. They're very affordable and they make nice little blending tools. Now you could use even a little Q-tip right here or a little eye makeup applicator if you wanted to blend. You could roll up a paper towel and just use the tip. So, you know, you don't have to have one of these blenders. But notice how I'm softly pulling some of that dark rather than making all of the dark area. It would have been too heavy. I'm using it on the little blender to pull and soften some of that into the butterfly. Now I'm going to speed this up just for a portion of it. But you're going to see me add some of the markings. I'm going to do it very softly using my blender again. And I'll be using a pastel pencil to get some of those like zebra stripes that are on the butterfly. But not to worry. I'll be back and have some more commentary for you soon. All right. It's taking shape. I'm starting to feel the delicacy of the butterfly. I'm still not wanting to overwork this. So, I'm just very lightly suggesting some of the other marks on the butterfly. And what's really fun is when I go in and add some of that beautiful blue that's in the tail part of the butterfly, I really feel that's what gave it the color punch. You'll see me do that in a minute. So, I'm back to using some colored pencils here. I felt like I wanted to get some gestural strokes to kind of suggest movement and just that sketchy feel. All right. Here's where I'm adding that blue. This is just a beautiful blue. And I'm just dotting it in the darker color first and then the lighter color on top. I'm adding a little bit of that blue highlight in areas to the back of the body. And just suggesting it to some of the wings, even though I didn't really see it there, it kind of connected the butterfly. And now I'm starting to add some of these flowers. Okay. One of you flower experts, you can name the flower for me because you guys know I'm not great at that. I always say my mom would be so frustrated with me because she was amazing at botanies. Is that what you would call it? Naming flowers, horticulture, something like that. And she was just amazing in so many ways. So don't get me on a tangent of talking about my mama. But anyway, so you can see I am just suggesting things. I am just barely suggesting the shapes of these flowers. They came out in these little little areas on the stem. All of them were a lot of stems, not many grasses. So I did like I typically do. I put my darker values down first. I layer the lights on top and I am being very interpretive with this. Really just having fun. But now can you see how that underpainting really makes a statement? I decided to keep that one little area kind of light, almost like there was some sky, kind of to the upper right area above the butterfly. Like there was some sky beyond. There was something in the reference image. I don't know what it was. But these floral elements, I'm purposely trying not to over detail them. Because what is the focal point here? It's that beautiful butterfly. And I know he was resting on a stem, but I didn't attempt to try to make that stem really apparent. He was resting on it. I just kind of let him he's either about to land on it or or just flying. So don't get all caught up on feeling like you have to copy the reference image. Now you can see a little bit more closely some of the marks. I'm using a pastel pencil to get those little gestural antenna and to kind of shape his head a little bit more. A little highlight on the head. And you can see it's just so suggestive. Adding a little bit more purple. Now you can get a little hint now of part two coming. You can see that Monarch butterfly. I've got it covered up with some tracing paper. I had finished it. And then I decided to go back and add a little bit more color. Sorry for my shaky camera. I had my camera resting on my table. And add a little bit more of that purple for some fun. By the way, I'm working flat for filming purposes. I don't advise it for pastel painting. The dust, it's really better if the dust falls if you have your painting up on an easel. I mean you could do all the water color portion flat. But it's really just for filming. I prefer working with my paintings up on an easel as well. So I hope this was fun for you learning about painting impressionistic butterflies. There's more to come. Also in the second video you'll get the reveal of me pulling off the masking tape. And also taking this watercolor paper off what's called the watercolor block. The reason it stays nice and flat on watercolor block is because the edges are glued. So it stays really flat. And you'll see me actually taking it off, taking the tape off, cutting it, putting it in some nice little mats. And here's a sneak peek of what's coming. Give me a like if you like this video. Comment on this video. I will have these paintings available in my Etsy shop pretty soon. Become a patron if you'd like to get full content or just to support these free videos. I am so thankful to all of you who comment and tell me how much the free lessons mean to you. I pray blessings over your life and your artistic journeys. As always God bless and happy painting.