 Hello my cherished friends in Monet Cafe. I'm so excited to be bringing you this painting. Oh I'm in my studio. Yay! I feel so good. I'm excited. I'm going to show you some of the things I'm using to create this impressionistic painting. I'm going to begin with some new pastels built in you P-A-S-T-E-L-S. It's not new like any W but they're very hard and very good for getting your sketch in to begin with. This is on you art paper and it's a paper I know I talk about a lot. It's one of my favorites but I have a lot of papers and surfaces that I use as well as creating my own which I love to do and I have some videos about that as well. So I'm going to try to keep this video as much of a real-time video as possible because I know you guys love that and I understand that because when I was first beginning pastel some of the speed videos were just kind of hard to follow. I was like you know everything was brand new to me so I needed to watch everything. So hopefully this will help some of you who request for the real-time videos. So once again this was just a darker new pastel that I used to get in the tree line. I didn't do much of a value study with the one dark pastel in this case because I wanted to just go ahead and start laying in some colors some kind of big blocks of color to get my general composition in and again I stress this in all my videos is work large to small less detail to more detail. We call it often as artist blocking in. So we have a tendency always to go in and get all those little details. I mean even with those trees I didn't focus on anything other than the shape of the tree or the tree line and now I'm just kind of focusing in on some of the colors and you know on our Facebook group Monet cafe art group I get a lot of great questions and one of the questions is how do you decide are you going to do an underpainting to begin with? Are you going to do something with local color? Are you going to do something with complementary color? If you're just beginning these terms all might sound like there's so much to learn but trust me you can learn it all. If I can learn it you can learn it. But sometimes it's just a matter of your mood and in this particular case this was such a precious moment for me. I'm doing a voiceover now after the painting because I some of you know and you might be getting tired of me talking about the flooding of my art studio in my home but it's been a long time since I've gotten some just a dedicated time to paint just some spontaneous time to paint our lives have been so busy just getting everything restored. So this was one of those moments where I turned up the music I can't play that music this is some YouTube music that I get people often ask about the music I use you have to use music that has no copyright but the music that I play if you want some good music to paint to look for an artist named Lindsay Sterling she plays some violin music that's very energetic and I was just by the end of this I was almost dancing when I was painting and sometimes the mood helps you to stay impressionistic too so if you put on some good music and you know just get the vibes going that really helps. So again I'm just laying down some general values instead of doing it like I've done sometimes with just one color you can do a value study with one pastel color I'm doing it in big blocks of color and this is what's called using local color meaning the color that's in the scene in the photograph or in the actual place that you are you know if you're painting plein air on location. So as in contrast to complementary color you might check out some of my other videos where I talk about using complementary color I also love that technique so again sometimes the technique just depends on your mood and if you're just starting out a lot of times it's you don't have a lot of techniques under your belt you've just got to start practicing some of them so practice practice practice that is the way to get better and again in our group Monet cafe art group on Facebook you do have to ask to join and but if you answer the questions and say that you saw or you found out about the group from me on the youtube channel you're almost you know guaranteed to be accepted into the group it's an amazing group though because beginners you are so welcome you have nothing to worry about sharing your art you can't ask a question that's uh that's a dumb question because we're all we all started somewhere so anyway that's just a beautiful way to feel welcome and learn things now my paper here I pointed at that it had a wave in it I have another video where I show how to flatten out you art paper if you get it bowed or buckled and this was one of those pieces that I had to correct and so I'm kind of having to work around one of the the bumps in it that didn't go away that's why that pastel isn't laying down very flat but it's okay because I'm going to blend it all in anyway and and and work around it besides this is impressionism and sometimes the little inconsistencies can help things look even more real a neat thing about nature is that it has what I like to call a spontaneous harmony there is harmony there is design there is beauty that comes from order and design but the spontaneity of it all I like to think of how God you know just causes a big wind to flow across a field of flowers and and there's a there's a motion almost like a musical movement of it but there's still a harmony there so sometimes in our art if we get things just too fixed we lose that that music to your painting and so that's what I hope to achieve in making this video is to help you understand just how to keep things loose and not too fixed I already feel like my background trees are getting a little too fixed there so in the future I in the future of this video anyway I give it some more jagged edges on the top and let them reach up into the sky a little bit more but in pastels it's a little opposite of some medians you typically put down your darker colors first and your lighter colors last you don't always have to do that but it's a it's a good rule of thumb when you're beginning so especially when you're doing like in this particular reference photo I'm squinting all the time to see my values you know I talk about value is king and value simply means how dark or light something is and as a standard rule of thumb values are darker in the foreground and lighter in the background now I know those background trees look pretty dark right now but again you could put down your darks first I'm going to lighten them up as you'll see as we go on with some cooler and lighter values to push them back into the distance and the reason that's a scientific thing actually the reason things do lighten in value in the distance is because of atmosphere for example there's everybody thinks air is nothing well atmosphere and air actually has substance and the more atmosphere or air or distance of that air between you and the background the lighter it gets and also the more washed out and paler the colors become perfect example is mountains if you're ever you know somewhere in a mountainous scene where you can see very far away the mountains typically don't appear green like the trees that are on the mountains they appear bluish purple that's because things blue out and and pale out in the distance so that is one of the best rules of thumbs first two things I can mention here is one blocking in big shapes not much detail you're really just getting in values and second of course values getting your values correct so as you can see I'm just getting in a really loose general composition here and it really helps to just set that mood of getting an impressionistic pain big strokes another thing probably a third thing is the direction of your strokes again this field of poppies I called it poppy dance because they seem to just be dancing from the foreground to the background that beautiful harmony and you want to emulate that in the direction of your strokes so that has a huge impact on the feel of the painting so if the grasses and the poppies are leaning harmoniously in one way or the other you want to try to capture that by how you move your pastel now another thing that i'm doing here is things don't only get paler in value in the distance they get closer together and less detail so again see those grasses in the back there they are not as broad and bold and big strokes as they are in the foreground because things get smaller and less detail in the background so already we've hit like three or four things in just good art that will help you to create a painting that represents reality in your own impressionistic way so i'm gonna just paint here a little bit and i'll add some commentary as i see that it's needed all right here we go yes sometimes i just feel something in the music and i enjoy this process so much and having fun and dancing while i'm painting now this is a regular spritzer like a body mist spritzer that i used to put in some alcohol and water i think it's about half and half and i'm using a wide flat brush where i'm going to really blend the background it's like a method to do like a wet underpainting and the only reason for alcohol is it dries faster you could use water you know if you don't have any alcohol but i i have a clean paper towel and i'll explain this technique as i go i'm just shaking up the spritzer and i'm spraying it i usually work top to bottom but i definitely work in sections for example this blue sky here i'm working kind of down to blend it and i don't want to get that dark treeline in my brush because it would like contaminate that sky so i'm being a little careful here um and just so you know drips are okay in this sometimes i spray i'm a little heavy handed with the alcohol and it drips and runs down the uh the ur paper and um and it actually kind of lends towards the impressionism it really helps so now i'm uh again i cleaned off my brush really good and i'm spraying some of the darker areas now and i'm going to specifically work on just the darker sections again those trees in the background they're going to get lightened up a little bit but they're dark because they're vertical that's something i learned as an artist that the things that are vertical in a scene are typically darker because the sun is not shining uh on the vertical part it's shining on the top part so trees are typically lighter on the top but not on the sides and um again cleaning out my my brush now i'm going to work on these background areas again i'm focusing on the motion of the grasses those background grasses are pretty tight and close together so i just little short strokes there but as i go on i make the broader strokes and start letting that uh the little drips happen and everything so it's kind of fun i love this part of the painting and uh sometimes i think i would really just love doing just the underpainting part and very little pastel so that might be something i do in the future i thought i would mention here that often you can use some of the like the darker area in the front there as i'm using my brush i still have some of the darker on the brush so i'm using it almost like just a paint you see i added some of the the darker areas if you look at the photograph you can see where flowers grow down to the ground you really see it in the foreground it gets darker down by the roots and that progressively gets lighter as you go in the background but that's why i added some of that kind of in the mid ground of the of the painting there where you you've still got some of those roots showing and again it's just going to get less and less as you go to the background you're not seeing the roots anymore because of the distance and the angle of your vision so so it's often really interesting how you can do the underpainting and establish a lot of the correctness of the painting before you even start to lay down the pastels now here of course i'm just blow drying the painting so that i can work faster alcohol does dry pretty quickly but i keep my blow dryer just plugged in um this is just like a spare blow dryer used just for my art and uh it just makes it really handy when you're like again when you're in the mood and uh you don't want to wait and it's just fun you see how it did dry lighter you know of course everything's going to dry lighter um in many times different types of medium so that's pretty normal all right so now time to apply more pastel on top of the underpainting that's been blended with the alcohol wash so this all of it's fun but i really love this stage where i get to kind of go in and start really making some um more suggestive marks and um really start establishing um what the painting is going to be instead of just the underpainting again working big to small less detail to more detail uh the background you never want too much detail anyway um you see me blending a little with my finger i don't do that a lot but um sometimes if something's just not just right i'll use my finger but then i'll also use uh you'll see in a little while where i use a piece of pipe foam insulation there it is oh no that's a pastel but um i'll talk about the pipe foam insulation more in a minute now that's actually what i'm using there it's uh more of a deep bluish purple and uh it's really a great idea to lay down multiple colors it's going to make everything more interesting you see how those trees are already more interesting with that that deep purple in there um it's also a great idea to have a little congruency in your painting and to keep the colors um kind of consistent throughout so putting that purple in the deep grasses there is just going to make the painting more harmonious and um pull together better i wish i could think of all the right words to say here but it it just kind of creates the same and i think that's because of what happens in color and nature is that often the lighting and everything that's in the surroundings colors play upon each other so it's really just kind of emulating nature with that now again i'm doing the same thing in these foreground grasses i'm just establishing more of the darks but i'm also using various dark colors if i was just to use that dark actually i think that really dark color is more of like a dark burgundy really dark purplish color and then that medium to dark bluish purple there so it creates a lot more interest now i've got a darker green but it's not quite as dark in value as the the purples and the the dark burgundy i added there that's going to be more of a mid value color mid to dark value color and if you look again at the reference photo you can see where some of those um as i'm drawing squint your eyes and look at the reference photo and you can see where those middle area of the photographs where the roots of the flowers are going down that's what i'm establishing here and i'm going to progressively get a lighter touch and lighter values in the distance notice how i changed not here but in the other just a second ago the colors in the background oh actually that is lighter too i decreased the value as i moved back and i'm still establishing it throughout the painting to give some congruency and harmony there and i'm really just trying to emulate those grasses and roots of the flowers going down and gradually getting lighter and less detail as i move back into the background art is all about illusion i think i love art so much for multiple reasons but one of the reasons is i got very into illusion when i was a kid i um i don't like to call it magic because i think of magic is like dark magic but i love illusion i love um even optical illusions tricks of the eyes and things like that and that's exactly what art is it's an optical illusion we're taking a three-dimensional world and trying to represent it on a two dimensional surface so that it appears three-dimensional and uh it's really just a lot of rules you have to learn now a lot of people have a gift to be able to do this more naturally than others there are going to be those um wonderfully talented people i believe i have a gift of color and a gift of value but there's other gifts i don't have that some of you might have you know so the cool thing is is that if you love it and you're fascinated by it you can learn the rules you know and um that's really one of the great things is that if you just study it enough and um not only become a student of art become a student of nature that's the beautiful thing about god's world is that art allows you to see the world through an artist's eyes you're going to start looking at everything in a different way your friends and family may think you're strange because all of a sudden you're squinting when you're out with everybody and you're just looking at nature all the time and you really learn to start looking at the world and it's a beautiful thing because you start seeing um the beauty when many people are just looking at their cell phones so that's a great thing about being an artist so i just always want to encourage you guys to love our our earth that's so beautiful and to just continue to experience it as an artist so anyway a little more painting here just keep enjoying this process i know i sure was as i was painting i thought i would pop in here and add some commentary as i'm beginning to start the flowers in this part i'm choosing my reds and i'm starting to work on those background flowers which of course like we talked about before things in the distance don't have as much detail and they're smaller obviously sometimes you can also just really lay down almost like the side of your pastel and lay down like a light touch of a like a coating of flowers across the back instead of getting so specific some of my marks here are more like individual flowers and some are more like kind of groupings of flowers so you know you really have some options there but in the distance they're not going to be spaced as far apart as they would be in the foreground so that's why sometimes in the far distance you can do you know just almost like a a layer of flowers across the grass again i'm just creating that sense of illusion and depth i'm also trying to mimic the motion of the flowers if you notice the in the reference photo it almost looks like there's a slight hill to the field like it's bowed down so that's what i'm trying to emulate with those background flowers now a lot of times i will obviously the flowers in the foreground they're getting a little bit more brilliant in color i'm making my marks a little bit stronger and this is a terry ludwig pastel that you see i'm using here they are really just such a great pastel for putting on towards the end of your painting and they work really well when your painting or your surface has already had a lot of pastel layered onto it now i still at this point have a decent amount of tooth left to the pastel so i'm still able to get in some good layers what really helps with that too is the alcohol wash that i did in the beginning it tends to keep the pastels from getting so deep into the the grain or the grit that it allows you to to really have more of a surface to work on after the alcohol wash so that's really a benefit now i a lot of times like i said i lay down the darkest darks which is kind of like the base of the flower and then i'll put the petals on the lighter petals on on top of the darker color now those distance flowers they're actually even though typically you don't use warmer colors in the distance that part of the field back there it's not as bright in the photo as i've made it in my painting but i almost felt like the sun was like really just shining back there and so i chose more of a coral type of a red in the distance back there and again you barely see those up in the top of the field there in the top right you can barely even distinguish them as flowers so again things just getting more subtle and less detailed in the distance really helps to create that illusion so enjoy while i create more of these flowers and i've really been enjoying this painting i wanted to mention here that when you're painting flowers often we have this tendency to paint all of the petals and it's sort of paint them all the same way and that is not how it works in nature flowers have their own personality and often they're moving in different ways some are bending over some are facing different directions so think in terms of shapes when you're looking at your reference photo try to forget that they're flowers and just focus on the shape that they are and there's a fine line with painting quickly and painting messy so painting quickly and having it look impressionistic is something that comes with just lots of practice you know so your marks become more purposeful and this is also a point in the painting i like to mention i have the advantage when i videotape my process of being able to look back at different places where i'm like hmm it would have been nice to maybe stop sooner than i did that happens i'm sure many of you can relate and in this painting i was very happy with the final but i do all right at this point i like the looseness here maybe with just a few more grasses but i do decide to continue working and again it's all a learning process even for me well this was certainly a wonderful painting experience for me just to have some carefree and relaxing time to paint and really enjoy the process this one was fun so i hope you learned more about impressionistic painting and how to keep things loose and also i hope you'll subscribe to the channel if you like it you'll just have to hit the subscribe button or just click the icon with my face on it at the end of this video and again please join us in Monet cafe art group on facebook it's a growing community of artists of every level learning and growing together and as always happy painting feel free to check out some of my other tutorial videos because art truly does make life better