 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm glad you've joined me today for another in the beginner series using watercolor paper with watercolor and soft pastel. This is a photo that I got from my Patreon group where my patrons share their own photos and this was from A.R. Mason, a lovely photo indeed. And if you think you're doing a double take and saw this video before, it's probably because I did another painting with the same reference image using pastels alone and a pastel paper. And in this video, once again using the same reference image, I'm going to create my own sanded pastel surface that's so much more affordable. I always feel this is great for beginners because these things get expensive. I'll be using a new pastel, that little pink one, which is a harder pastel, a set of watercolor. Whatever set of watercolor you have is fine. I'm using a little set of 36 Arteza It's a neat little watercolor set. It has lots of colors available. Any piece of watercolor paper, I'm using a 140 pound Kansan. The final painting, I believe it's like an 8 by 10. I'm using the smooth side this time. Watercolor paper has a usually a more textured side and then one that's more smooth. So all I'm going to do right now is just kind of sketch in my image to get started with the watercolor. I have a mat that I know the exterior is 8 by 10. It just makes it so much easier for me to be able to mark around the mat rather than measuring it out. And I leave myself a little bit of a border just so I'm not so strict with having to stay so tight in an 8 by 10 format. Now, here's the reference image and I'm basically speeding this up a bit to make the video a little bit shorter. But really, I talk about this a lot in my videos. It's just my little method of measuring. I really just kind of look at the perimeters. If you're working with a drawing and an image that's proportionately the same. In other words, my drawing is 8 by 10 or my surface that I've measured out. My reference image is 8 by 10. So I know that my negative spaces and general composition is going to be the same proportionately. So I really look at big shapes first and where things fall. So I often divide my paper in halves or sometimes thirds and compare that to the image that I'm drawing from. But notice I didn't get into any of the petals right now. I'm just drawing again the big shapes, general ideas of where the vase is, where these flowers are. And I also got in a few of their centers because I like to know kind of where the flowers are facing. All right, so I've just got a flat brush with some water and I've got my little set available and I decided that since the last painting I did with the same reference image was very blue, the background was kind of blue-gray, that I wanted to warm it up. So I thought I would make a yellow-orange background as if the sun was shining. So first I'm really just wetting it. I know I've got a little bit of that orange on my brush but I'm wetting the whole surface. Now if you do this and your paper curls, like this is doing, that's kind of naturally what's going to happen, turn your watercolor paper over and I put a paper towel down so I wouldn't get my front of my paper dirty from my board and just brush water on the backside of the paper and it reverses out the curl. So it flattens it out quite a bit. Now just so you know what we're doing here is we're doing a watercolor underpainting and then after we're done with the watercolor portion, we're going to be turning this into a surface that we can use with soft pastels. Again, much more affordable than your typical sanded pastel papers. Okay, so this is a wet-on-wet watercolor technique. What happens is when you put the water down it allows for it to just wash over the whole thing without a lot of brush strokes. So I'm just kind of working in some areas. I went ahead and covered the whole vase even with the yellow because we know that if there's yellow light shining through it, it is going to affect the vase. Even though I'm going to be putting down some teal colors for the vase, it would look very fragmented or separated if I didn't give some sort of that color in the background of the vase as well. And I think that's kind of a common mistake we do sometimes when painting, especially with watercolor, is we forget that the light and the color usually is consistent throughout the theme and it helps to unify your subject matter. Now, as you can see, all I'm doing is it's still wet-on-wet technique. I decided to just go ahead with these pinks. Again, it's a warmer color. This is more of like a complementary underpainting because I know I'm going to have the blues and the vases or the vase and some of the lighter colors and the flowers. I just thought these colors would work well as an underpainting. An underpainting is just a painting underneath a painting. And I know a lot of people have questions as to why, but really it, for one, it fills in a lot of empty space. Two, it gives you a mood or a color to set the theme. And three, if you choose the right colors, especially like with the complementary colors, like I'm doing here, complementary just means the opposite on the color wheel. Like a teal vase, look on the opposite of the color wheel, you're probably going to see like the oranges and the more warmer colors. So if you, if your subject matter is cooler, it's good to put a warmer color underneath. Not always, but it just makes those colors really vibrate and sing and makes your painting much more visually interesting. So I'm actually really kind of liking just this watercolor here. There's often times when I look back at my videos and I'm like, you know, sometimes I'm like, I could have just kept going with this as a watercolor, but oh, I have so much fun. You know, that's my goal is just to have fun with these things and not get too, you know, fussy or fastidious about things. So now I'm using more of a deeper magenta to go in there. The vase definitely has some darker stems and things reaching down. Shadows, there's almost in the reference image. There's almost some blacks. I hardly ever use black. I make my own mixture of black with watercolor or I use really dark, darks in with my pastels to represent black color and value is all determined by what it's next to. So your brain will perceive something as black. If it's really dark next to a really light another surface or value that it's next to. So again, just still playing around with this watercolor. Watercolor is so fun. I know I've had some of you guys request that I do some more watercolor alone videos and I'm definitely going to be doing that. I've got a list of painting tutorials that I'm going to be doing. And as soon as I get done with those, I'll be working on some pretty basic watercolor tutorials. I'm glad you guys are liking the beginner videos because I really feel my heart is a lot to teaching the beginners. You know, I just have a passion for that. Now what I'm doing here is again, I'm just kind of developing the flowers. I'm still not doing any individual petals. I'm working more on the value that just means lightness or darkness of the individual flowers. The ones at the top, you see they're much lighter and the ones in the front have that shadow on them because the light is coming from behind. Now all I'm doing here is blowing it dry just because I'm impatient. And after I get it blown dry is when I'm going to take this surface and turn it into a surface where I can apply soft pastel. Now with everything dry, we can use this product, which I'm shaking up that is called Clear Gesso made by Liquitex. And it's a product that has a little bit of grit to it, which turns it into a sanded paper. It's important to get the clear gesso because it's the one with the grit, not regular gesso, and it's clear. So you're not going to cover up this watercolor that you've already done. Now there's different methods you can use for applying this. And I've recently found out that this little roller brush, a foam brush, works so well for applying a smooth coating to this. Now sometimes I want a lot of texture, but if you're looking for more of a consistent surface, this brush works really great. I've recently discovered that I used to put my gesso in a dish, but you know why not just pour it over the painting. So one maybe slight disadvantage to the brush technique is that it does soak up a lot of the gesso. You need more of it to get it down good, but it's a great technique. It works very well. Here's a painting from a previous video where I used a very textured brush. You saw the brush I just showed to apply the clear gesso. Same exact technique. This is watercolor paper. I did an underpainting with these warm tones. I applied the clear gesso with a coarse brush and I got all this gorgeous texture. So it's just kind of, you know, the mood of the painting or your final result you want to achieve. And for this painting I will once again be using the 120 hafstic set of unison pastels. I know I'm using the heck out of these pastels, but for these beginner focused videos I like to share that you can get sets where you can complete a whole painting. Now this is some sandpaper that's an 800 fine grit, like hardware store sandpaper. I'm not going to do it for my painting, but I do know that some artists sand down the surface to even get it smoother after the clear gesso has dried. Now it is dry now and there is a little bit of warping, but I find that once I finish the painting it's pretty much all flattened out. So you might have to work around a little bit of the bumps. I just want you guys to be aware of that. But for the most part you can, it will flatten out at the end. I'm choosing my pastels that I want to use. I know I've got that gorgeous vase and I love the way this set is arranged according to color and value. It makes it very easy for the beginner to get it like a row of color that's increasing or decreasing depending on how you look at it in value. I know this vase has, it may look very teal in the photo, but without some other colors to punch it up and give it some interest, it will look very flat. So I'm using some purples. I'm using the teals of course and I'm using some rich gorgeous blues. I'll be starting with the darkest dark first in the vase and again it's where those shadowy areas are or where all those stems are all kind of joined together in the vase. And notice I turn my pastel sideways sometimes. I recently in my, on my Patreon page had a video for my patrons that talked about the differences of line versus edge and it's too much to describe here. But basically when you use edge you often can use the side of your pastel rather than the point or lifting your pastel up to create more of a line. And by using edges and soft edges we often create a more painterly look. Now it's going to, I want to let you beginners know this. I just had recently had a question regarding pressure and that someone felt they used so much pressure that their painting just turned to mud really quickly and they couldn't get any more layers. And so definitely focus on a light touch. I know we have the tendency to want to get the color to look rich or fill up the tooth of the, or all those empty spaces of the paper more quickly than we should. But keep in mind don't worry about these splotchy spaces behind your color, okay? Now I'm going to be blending this in in a minute with a chamois cloth but don't over pressure or give too much pressure early on because you're going to end up overworking your painting. Now this is just a chamois cloth. I have found that when I create my own pastel papers this way a chamois cloth that you can get at and you know pretty much any store. I got these at the dollar store. I bought a huge sheet of it for a dollar and it works as a great little blending tool. And so early on is usually when I will do blending not later on in a painting and usually it is just to kind of, you know, like I said, cover some of those blank spaces or to create a softer impression. And I know that the left side of that vase is more see-through so that's why I didn't put any dark right there and sort of see where it is right there. Now what you just saw was all real-time. I'm speeding this up just a bit and going to finish out some of these colors in the vase, pulling a few more colors, some more purples, more of a dull teal color. And just watch as I gradually layer different colors and values. And again, don't press too hard, keep a really light touch for this phase because you can always go back and add more pressure, but you can't really undo once you've muddied your surface. I mean, there are techniques you can do to erase pastel. Oh, I'm still using some blending with the little chamois cloth. But again, there are techniques you can do to erase them or so-called erase them. You can use a stiff bristle brush if you've got an area that you need to kind of get back some of the tooth to be able to layer. And I always recommend go outside if you're going to do this instead of doing it in your studio where you could get a lot of pastel dust. If I've got a big area like that, I definitely go outside and then I give my painting a good tap or whack on the back to get all that dust out of there. But anyway, it's always better to not rely on that. Try to get your strokes efficient and correct to begin with and keep a light touch. So that's my point there. Now, I'm gradually just, all I'm doing with this reference photo is looking at color and shape. I'm not even thinking about this being a vase. I'm not thinking about the stems of the flowers. I am literally just looking at color and value and making shapes. Some of those little brighter teal areas you saw where they look kind of dotted. That's just some of the areas where I saw some of the brighter colors. I know it's like light coming through the vase and again, just working on shapes and values and colors, of course. But again, I'm using the chamois cloth gently. I'm not overblending. If I took the chamois cloth and I blended all of those colors, they'd all lose their gorgeous color. They'd start to get combined together and kind of get muddy, you know. So that's a general kind of soft look to this face. And now that I have the basic color and value in, now I can start working a little bit more strategically with some of the colors and then eventually deeper shadows and then more highlights. And pay attention in this video. You'll see how, oh, gotta have some coffee. You'll see how the vase right now looks very flat. And then I move on to other areas of the painting often because I want to have a cohesive feel. So I'll work it to a certain degree. And sometimes I will have already moved on past this, I mean, before I got to this stage, but I kind of wanted to get some of the specifics of the vase in before I moved on. But typically it is better to work all over your painting versus get so caught up in one little area. Again, you won't have the cohesiveness of your painting. Sometimes you'll just frustrate yourself. And I just feel like it really helps the painting overall for your values to be more correct if you don't get stuck on one little part of the painting. All right, so now you can see how I'm just gradually getting some of the darks in. But notice how early on when I added those darks, I didn't focus on getting them as dark as they are now. In other words, I wanted to get the basic values in, not a lot of pressure. So I don't over muddy. I want this vase to be very vibrant and gorgeous with color. So again, I know I'm kind of overemphasizing that, but keeping your pressure light at the beginning is important. You can always, always press harder later and get more colors as long as you haven't muddied up those gorgeous colors. And that's one of the beauties about pastels. I really feel, I think it's actually true and it's been said that pastels are the most vibrant. They really do have the most pigment of any medium that you could use. It's got more pigment and less binder than, say, acrylics or oils or watercolor is pretty vibrant, but you're adding water so you're diluting it, you know. So pastels just have that gorgeous brilliance and vibrance. I think that's why so many artists like it. And I like it for multiple reasons. I like it the user friendly quality that I can just lay my pastels next to me and they're not going to go anywhere or dry up. Now you saw me just tapping that because I'm working flat for filming purposes. I know some of you guys like that every so often if you work flat, pick up your pastel paper and tap it off. Again, if you want to go in another room or outside or whatever, I don't find the dust. I don't get that much of a problem. I recently had somebody ask me about that and the toxicity of pastels. I know there are pastels, there are warnings on pastels about toxicity, but myself and many other artists, I know haven't had a problem with that. But if you're more sensitive or you're just concerned about that, there are things you can do. You can get a mask. You can also get, for your hands, it's called, what's it called? Gloves in a bottle? Let me look at it real quick. Yeah, it's called Gloves in a Bottle and it is made by, well it's all in one shielding lotion, but you can find it. That's the name of it, Gloves in a Bottle. You put it on your hands and it's literally like an invisible pair of gloves. Now I'll be working on the lighter areas of the flowers. I'm going to use a cooler blue color palette for these. And once again, I am not going to focus on individual petals just yet. I still want to get the values in correctly. And those upper flowers are going to be the lighter ones. And the ones, more of the ones like where you see I've drawn the centers in already, they're more in shadow. In the reference photo, you can see they, probably because they're facing the viewer more, the light's coming from from the back. And so not as much light is getting inside of the flower. So I am just blocking in some shapes here. And again, same as the vase, you don't want to give too much pressure here. And you just want to focus on shapes and values and, you know, color with regard to color temperature and, you know, your basic color palette that you've chosen to use. So now I'm, I'm working in different shadowy areas where I know there's more, more shadow and depth. And using the chamois cloth every so often, but I, I'm still, I'm working all over the whole body of flowers in the vase and just zoning out kind of and forgetting they're even flowers. You know, I know that might sound weird, but sometimes when our brain tells us what something is, we tend to paint an interpretation that we have of that thing rather than maybe how that thing actually looks in this particular situation. So it's a really good idea. I don't recommend you always zone out when you paint, but that's just my term that I use to help you to think about the shape and the value versus what your brain is going to tell you it is. So I know I sound like I talk about that all the time, but it really is so important. It's kind of like little kids when you tell them to paint a sun and they paint a circle with these little rays and most likely it's probably because they've seen it painted that way before or in their young life without a lot of information. They haven't really analyzed what the sun looks like and how, how it can look differently at times. So we're trying to break out of that pattern of painting what we think something looks like rather than what it really looks like. All right, enough of that. Okay, so I'm gradually getting lighter as these flowers get it, get higher up and kind of further back where that sunlight is actually hitting them more than the ones closer to the viewer and, or closer to the vase and facing forward. All right, so I'm going to paint for a little while here. Just kind of pay attention to the values and the shapes and I'll be back. I am starting to differentiate some of the shape into petals and, you know, there's, I really could have just blocked it in and done the darker petals on top of it. That's often how I work and where most pastel artists work is like that layering method, but this one's going to be, that one and a couple of the other ones that are facing forward are going to be more of my focal point. And so I'm going to kind of differentiate between some positive and negative shapes. At least that was my thought. Okay, now I'm using the shaming cloth and I'm blending it a little more because I felt like they were a bit too chunky. And in hindsight, if I did this again, I probably would have done a softer approach and not distinguish the petals as quickly as I did. I mean, you do definitely develop the petals as you go, but I think I got them a little bit too fragmented, I guess I could say, in this particular flower. So, hey, in these videos, I like to share when I would have done something different myself. But notice how this is still very blue right now. It's still a very dark value because it's in shadow. And by the end of the painting, I, and even right here, I'm adding some lighter values on those tips where the sun would be kind of reaching over or peeking through. And I'm really referring to the reference photo a lot. You know, I'm not imagining this. I'm looking at how the light is really behaving on this face of flowers. And I actually want to paint this again after watching this video. I find that's a great thing for beginners to do is take the same reference photo and paint it not just to vary it up and changing and having fun with color palettes. But also, I mean, even if you try to paint it the exact same way, you learn something every time you paint something. And I feel like we're always learning. I mean, that's why I feel like I want to paint this again. I got the flowers too heavy looking with the darker values too quickly. I mean, I'm still happy with it. It was a fun little painting, but I see things that I could have done differently. So I really advise you to do that. That's why I often advise to paint smaller and do studies more often because sometimes we put pressure on ourselves as artists or beginning artists to think we have to get or be so good so quickly. And it just doesn't happen that way. So embrace your mistakes and your failures. And when you see something that's not so awesome, like I'm looking at myself with some of these flowers, I end up kind of correcting it at the end. But I know that, you know, it could have been better, you know? But that's okay because we're human and we're all learning. And as I often say, the glory is not or shouldn't be just in the final product, but in the experience. I mean, we sometimes think that the physical object is the goal and it being a beautiful painting. But there is such a beauty in creating and the process and the intangible aspects of art that I really want to focus on that myself. Because when we focus so much on the physical, this is not just an art, but in life, we can become very materialistic and we can become very disappointed, you know, in things. There's so much more in life intangibly that can be experienced. I play around with the background a little bit more here. I am speeding up this last part of the video. And again, per your request, I am trying to focus on certain aspects that I can share instead of getting overwhelming with talking about every single thing that I'm doing in the whole painting. And even again, some of the things that I thought I could have done better to help you guys know or learn even more about correct and incorrect ways to do things. So I warm up the flowers a little bit and so just watch to music as this painting develops. And I hope you learned something. I hope you'll hang out till the end. I hope you'll subscribe. And if you'd like to become part of my Patreon fun on my Patreon page, you can become a patron of mine which supports this channel. I want to focus that that is the main reason for supporting my Patreon page is to keep Monet cafe keep me able to financially bring free videos to Monet cafe. But I always feel that, you know, if you're going to spend $5, there's two levels five and $10, you can pick whichever one you want just as a support level, but they both provide the same thing. But I feel like if someone's going to support this channel that I really want to give them a little more. So we I actually am giving probably too much of my time right now. We have so many neat things that we're doing. We have homework assignments. I have a story time. I read from different art books for you guys. And it's just a wonderful way for me to get to know you guys a little bit more too. So anyway, if you'd like to become a patron, you'll see the link posted. Enjoy the rest of this video. And I'm just so happy you joined me. I'll say bye at the end, though. So hang out till the end. Get a little more work on this. And then I tried to really lighten it up. I felt like I had lost some of the color intensity. So I hope you enjoyed, learned something. And I hope you'll come back. All right, guys, happy painting and have a blessed day.