 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I hope you'll join me in this continuation of a series of nine tiny paintings featuring bright and lovely flowers and bees. These are paintings 5 and 6 of the 9. And if you haven't subscribed, I hope you will, and join the artistic family. You can use whatever supplies you have for these lessons, but I'm using a piece of white pastel matte. It's an excellent pastel surface, but it also is water-friendly, so you can use water. And in all of these paintings, I am beginning with a watercolor underpainting, and I'm using my little Arteza 36 watercolor set. And I like this set. It's very convenient, but you can use what you have. The reference images for all of the nine paintings are from pmp-art.com, a great place to get free reference images. And if you'd like to recreate the grid system that I used for these nine paintings, you can find this slowed down with instructions in video number one in this series. And here you can see the actual reference image that I'm using. I'm not going to be popping it up on the screen while I paint because it is someone else's photograph, but I'm going to put a clickable link to that reference image in the description of this video. You can access it by going to the link. I'm keeping the actual painting for you to see as a reference while I'm creating this painting. Now, I'm trying to zoom in and show you some of my color choices with watercolor. With this particular one in the series, I decided to go ahead and give the base of these poppies a nice bright golden kind of orangey color as the base. I'm also going to be mixing up a little bit of real time and a little bit of speed footage that won't be sped up so quickly that you can't follow though. And this is because I'm doing two paintings in the same video, and I don't want it to get monotonous or too large to be able to upload. And in each of the nine paintings, I seem to use a little bit of a different strategy when it comes to these under paintings. These are called under paintings when you're literally doing a painting under a painting. And it's such a common question to ask why we do these. And it really does influence your final painting. The colors that are underneath usually vibrate, interact with the colors that you lay on top. But I have switched back and forth with the different strategies. Some of them are more what's called local color, a little bit more like this one. I'm keeping the flowers similar to the color that they were. I wanted them brighter, not just red, but some of those golden oranges as well. But some of the paintings I do in this series of nine are what's called a complementary underpainting, where I might use the complement of a color to lay down. So this one's definitely more local color. Now, this is the green that I used. I apologize. I don't have the names here. You can see it's kind of a cool, a little bit of a darker green. And I'm using these to get in the tree forms in the back. At this stage, you are not doing anything tight or specific. And I'm just kind of working around the flowers so that it doesn't bleed too much into each other. That's okay sometimes if it does, because it gives that impressionistic feel. I know many of you who are subscribers on Monet Cafe are like me. You lean more towards that feeling of impressionism or a loose painterly feel. And this is a great way to get that impressionistic beginning is by doing an underpainting. And now I'm going to be adding some blue that's actually going to be the sky color. This is a little darker than what my sky will be, but I'm using enough water. I also know watercolor in general lightens as it dries. But I wanted kind of that little darker blue so that I can lay some lighter blue when I get to the pastel on top of it. And now I'm adding a little bit of this lighter blue. And you see how it's kind of blending and bleeding. I had a little bit of extra water on my brush, but I don't mind that. I kind of like these happy accidents that happen. Watercolor has such a beautiful quality that way that you do get these accidents when you're just playing with the water. Let things just happen. And sometimes you'll find you like where the accidents happen and you just kind of go with it. And it might even take you in a new direction. So now I'm adding, once again, this is like local color. You see I'm using similar colors to what was in the scene. This is like a nice warm light green that I'm adding around the flowers. But notice this gestural soft quality this has. And that is inherent in watercolor. And again, this pastel matte surface, I know this paper is a little expensive. It's a lot of quality pastel papers are expensive, but they really do make such a difference. And the reason I like pastel matte so much is I've become such a fan of its ability to receive watercolor. Now, normally what I just added with that purple there would be called a bloom in watercolor. Sometimes it's something you don't want to happen. But in this case, I thought it worked well. Again, an underpainting is supposed to be loose and free. Now I want to show you my pastel selections. I thought as I worked on these nine paintings, I gradually decided to give you more information. I know that's what you guys want. So I'm using this set of Diane Townsend greens. And I love the set. Now I have my little actually take out Chinese tray that I've repurposed for my pastel palette. And I'm choosing some colors. This is the Sennelier half stick 40 set. I was showing it has some nice reds. But I decided to go for this half stick set of unisons. I love this unison 120 half stick set. They're nice, perfect little sizes for me. These are the sizes that I like to work in. I always recommend buying half sticks when you can. The full sticks are just so long and large. I cut them anyway. This way you can get more bang for your buck. You literally can get double the color for the money. So I'm choosing some colors out of various pastels. Now this is my little in between palette, I call it. It's where I put my pastels in between paintings in a little makeshift repurposed Sennelier box. And I have them arranged according to color and value. I have my much larger studio palette. I don't have the biggest pastel selection as a lot of pastel artists, but bigger than this. But I find this little one works great. And I think it's often great for teaching in Monet Café to make you realize you don't have to have the biggest selection. But okay, so here's my beginnings. And of course I need my coffee to get started. It's Monet Café, right? And time for pastels. Once again, the neat thing about Pastel Mat is you don't have to do anything for pastel application. It's already ready. I always say it's kind of interesting when I first used Pastel Mat, I was used to other pastel papers. They literally are like hardware store sandpapers. They have a little bit of grit to them. It's like a sandpaper, but it's archival and artist quality and all that. But Pastel Mat doesn't feel really gritty and yet it still receives the layer so well. Now I'm using a chamois cloth, a regular chamois cloth you would dry your car with. And it works great for blending. And now I'll be adding a combination of the pastels I've chosen. Notice even though these Diane Townsend greens are so large, I'm still able to work them on such a small little teeny painting. Using the chamois cloth again there, I chose a little bit brighter color to represent those really distant trees here. Now this is, I believe, one of the Sennelier pastels. Look at that gorgeous blue. And you see how the watercolor dried? I also had that little bloom that happened so it kind of lightened the paper. But with pastels over watercolor, it's just a gradual layering process. The watercolor acts as a roadmap for you to paint with. And as long as you're not too heavy handed with your pastels, a little bit of it peeks through and does definitely influence the overall painting. So I'm going to add some music. And I want you guys to pay attention to just the gradual layering process here. Oh, here's a new blending tool. I just kind of thought, hmm, why not try something smaller? And I thought, let's try a Q-tip. Because some of the little areas were kind of hard to get to to blend. And the Q-tip actually worked great. You got to remember, this is a little two and a half by two and a half inch painting. So yeah, it worked great. Now I'm adding a little bit of a lighter and warmer blue just down a tad at the horizon line or just above the trees. That's the sky typically gets a little bit lighter towards the horizon and a little bit warmer. And I'm just kind of working some of this green down into some of the grasses, adjusting the shape of the trees a little bit to make them more interesting. One of the goals with painting, I think, especially landscape painting, is to draw the eye into the painting and to have a path or a reason for the viewer to want to explore and move into the distance and back again and play around in your painting. So I always like to create interesting tree shapes that draw the viewer in, interesting colors, even though you don't want to get too bright in the background. Sometimes you can add a little pop of color in the distance. And now I'm just using those Diane Townsend again to gradually work in some grasses. Color gets a bit warmer in the foreground typically and darker in the foreground. And also I know these flowers are buried deep in some tall grasses. So we've got to have some roots and some depth down there. So I just basically added some darker green and blended it in to give those flowers something to grow out of. And now I'm gradually working in, again, I use these Diane Townsend quite a bit, working in some of the lighter greens that will represent a little bit more, just very impressionistically, some of the lighter grasses or where the light might be filtering through and perhaps some of the stalks to the flowers. So, you know, this was a quick little painting too. Even though I'm speeding it up, I'm not speeding it up too much. This is the lowest amount that I could possibly speed this up. And now just a little bit of that cool green kind of on some of the tops and in that distant field I just created a feeling of distance by adding that horizontal shape in the background. Things are more vertical in the foreground with grasses. And then in the distance you just think about how it works in nature. You can't see tall grasses in the distance. It's just too far away and things flatten out more horizontally. So that's always a great little illusion. Now I wanted to bring some warmth to this. You see how in the actual painting I had some warmer grasses and I really did like that about the reference photo. So, you know, I'm just gradually working around here. And for my patrons on my Patreon page, patreon.com. You guys have been participating with these nine paintings thus far and submitting your homework in our homework album. And I have been loving seeing them. Some of you guys have blown me away by your work and they're a lot of fun. And I know some of my patrons, you're looking forward to the next ones. You're patiently waiting. I apologize, we had a lot of things happen when I started this series and Easter holidays over the weekend, of course. So I'm going to be uploading two at a time like I am now for the remainder of the series. So hopefully we can all be finished with these soon and have your nine paintings all ready to go. All right. So my patrons, you're going to be using this lesson to create from and submit your homework assignments. So I'm always so proud of y'all. And for Monet Cafe, of course you too can follow along. You may be part of the Monet Cafe art group on Facebook. That's a place that you can submit your work from any of these lessons. And I mean, you don't have to be a patron of mine. Being a patron is only $5 a month. You get a little extra and it supports this channel. But you certainly can submit the work in the Facebook group Monet Cafe art group. Also, if you'd like to share what you create from any of my tutorials on Instagram or Facebook, you are perfectly welcome to do that. I just would love it if you would tag me on Instagram. It's at Susan Jenkins artist on Facebook. My page is the art of Susan Jenkins. So that way I get to see what you do. And other people can learn about the channel and join in on the fun. All right. You see, I'm gradually working these poppies and layering flowers is usually dark to light. So when I say light, it doesn't necessarily have to be lighter in color. It can be brighter in color. This orange is brighter than the other colors. So I'm just adding it where I think the light might be hitting upon some of the petals. And they're also teeny anyway. You definitely want to keep it pretty impressionistic and not get too much detail. A little bit of a center for the poppy. Oh, and didn't I say I was going to add some music? So watch the rest of this one to music. And then I will be back for the next painting in this particular tutorial. All right. Enjoy guys. Now I thought I'd slow it down to real time with the addition of the cute little bees. I'm using a dark Terry Ludwig eggplant color. It looks almost black, but it's going to add some nice contrast to get those little bee bodies. I did have in the, I think it's the second in this series of lessons. I had a lesson or a little tutorial on exactly how to create these little bees. How to add, which colors to add and kind of their little anatomy and how to add the wings. And they're just so darn small. It makes it a little challenging, but you really don't need a lot of information for them to read as little bees flying around. And just a few of them and vary the sizes and kind of their positioning. And they're supposed to be in motion anyway. So usually little quick gestural marks are the best type to create or to make for this. All right. So this was a fun little painting. And I am so looking forward to see what you create, whether you're my patron or just sharing on Monet Cafe. I'm sorry. My hair is getting in the way. I need a sticker on my easel that says pull your hair back. Now I got a new pastel here. These are harder pastels. I was going to see if I could add some little legs. And with these, you definitely want to be gestural and really, really little. Just a little fine gestural mark is all it takes. And you don't need to add the little legs to all of the bees. Just maybe a couple. And here we go. So this is the final painting. It was a lot of fun, very happy and free and bright. All right. Here we go for the next in the series. Oh, but first I decided to go ahead and kind of rearrange all of the colors that I use for this painting and slow it down so you can get a good look at it. And for my patrons, I will actually include a photo of the pastels for you in your post. Okay. This next one, I wanted something bright. I was trying to vary the flowers and arrange them like you would a bouquet with little paintings. And so I had a yellow one at the beginning. So I thought, now let's go ahead and do another yellow one. But I'm going to make these flowers a little bit more yellowy orange. I didn't have any orange flowers yet. And also too, I think it's in the second or the third in this series of paintings. Maybe the third one. Sorry for my shaky easel there. I give a little lesson on how to render flowers more easily. It's usually easier to draw the little ellipse, the circle, you know, kind of in the positioning it would be first and then draw the petals rather than trying to draw the petals to match a particular shape. So go check out that lesson if you'd like to see more on how to render flowers perhaps a little better. And I'm going to try to put all of these of the nine paintings, which will end up probably in about four or five videos probably in a little playlist itself. So you can just access all of them from a playlist if you'd like. All right. Now in this one, remember how I mentioned doing sometimes a local color underpainting, sometimes a complementary color underpainting. This one will have complementary colors. There is some greens, are some greens in the grasses and elements of the painting. So I'm going to use colors that would be more of the compliments to greens, a little bit of those, those pinks or golden colors maybe even. And some, I think I showed you down there also some of the blues that I'm going to be using. So pay attention here and see how I strategize this. First, I'm putting down water like I do often. If I want to, I didn't do this with every painting. And that's what I love about doing a lot of little paintings like this is that you learn a lot of different things and you break out of your comfort zones. But for this one, I am doing the wet on wet. That was my point. I didn't do it for all of them in every part of the painting. But I decided on this one, I wanted to do it. And you see why I love it? By putting the water down first, it acts as a channel and the water colors literally follow it like a river that has a river bed. It would naturally flow to that. So the paint just goes wherever you put the water. And because I have my easel at an angle upright, it's going to have a tendency because of gravity to drip down, which is really how things work anyway because colors are darker in the foreground. So, so it really makes for a nice effect to keep a lighter sky in a darker foreground because of gravity. So working again around these flowers, I'm painting negatively now. You know, I put in the shapes in general with pencil and now I'm just kind of negatively painting around them and letting the water take the paint where it will, which is really always kind of fun. All right. So on the background there, that's my mother-in-law. We have a camera on her. Some of you have followed. Most of my patrons know I'm caring for my mother-in-law who has terminal cancer now. So she's always with me when I'm painting on the little camera. I can watch her and listen to her as I'm painting. So I know a lot of you guys are in situations like that. So, all right. So now I'm getting, it's a little bit of a cool red. Notice I'm combining a cooler red and kind of a little bit of a pinkish-orangey color. And I'm go ahead and get the centers of those flowers in. Now in, oh, I'm actually going ahead and doing all of it. And some of the parts of this is still wet. I didn't wait for it to dry, but I didn't mind it. Once again, the petals are going to kind of just go impressionistically kind of flowing out and being very soft-looking, rather than these very defined petals. So yeah, I did the whole flower pink, not just the tops of them. And so now I'm just, this is real time too. Okay, so I've got a little bit of real and a little bit of sped-up time. So just kind of following the general marks that I made. And the more you do flowers, the more you start to kind of learn, I'm not saying I'm an expert, you start to learn how to place the petals to give that illusion that the flowers are maybe turned a different way. They could be turned totally away from you. They could be bent over. They could be facing you, facing the sky. And having a variety of positioning of the flowers is important. Now, I know these in the back are smaller. And so it works in my favor, the fact that most of my paint has come off. I did have to add a little bit more. But you don't want these to be so dark. I know I'm adding pastel onto them anyway. But I want to go ahead and keep things a bit accurate with regard to value. All right, now grab some of that purple to put in the centers that will represent the dark centers. And again, this will be a nice little roadmap for me to start. And even though it looks like, you know, you covered the whole thing up with pastel, there still are little bits peeking through. That bottom flower in the final painting, you can see the little bits of pinkish or reddish peeking through there. So, and I think a little bit of the purple from the paper in and amongst some of the grasses. So under paintings are so much fun. I use under paintings so often, even if I just tone the paper one color. That's considered an under painting as well. I don't like working from white. And the only reason I love this white pastel mat is because I can create with watercolor. And watercolor, you're working on a white surface with watercolor almost always. And it allows for the colors to be so luminous. So this white pastel mat is just perfect for that. So I put a little suggestions in the background of some other flowers. Now let's make some pastel decisions. Oh, my hands are dirty. I'm going to probably use some more. I'm loving these Diane Townsend greens so much that I think I'm just going to stick with some of those. They make such nice grassy colors. Back to, let me see them. No, I'm not going to do that one. This is the Sennelier 40 half stick set. Oh, yeah. It's got some great golden yellow colors, doesn't it? So I thought this will be perfect for my orangy yellow flowers. So I grabbed a few of them. I get a question often while I'm choosing pastels about do you keep your pastels in sets or do you incorporate them into your studio palette, which looks a little bit more like this, only bigger. And it's a little of both. When I first got started, if many of you are starting, you don't have many more than a couple of sets. So you're probably working from a set. And then as you gradually add more, you will want to incorporate them in a one palette. It helps you. Now here's my colors. I'll talk more about that in a minute. Aren't these just some lovely oranges and greens together? A little bit of purples for the shadows, a little magenta. But back to the pastel palette question about incorporating them or keeping them in their sets. When I started to gather a few more sets of pastel, I took the plunge. I decided to do what many artists were recommending and arrange them all into one working palette based on value and color. And I actually do have a video. If I can remember when I'm done editing this video in YouTube, I can put a little link up in the top corner. I think it's a little I like for information and it'll pop up the title of a video where I actually, you can watch me putting my Heilman box together. It was my travel box of pastels. And you can see me arranging a palette according to color and value. Like some of you guys might want to do eventually when you accumulate enough pastels. So I do recommend doing that when you've gathered enough pastels and you're feeling like, man, this is something I really want to keep doing. But when you get to where you have a nice studio palette, sometimes you may want to buy a set and keep it intact. Just because you know there are certain things in that set, you might access often just because of those qualities. For example, I like to keep my Unison 120 half stick set together because it is a fast and easy way for me to grab a set of pastels and be able to create from almost any painting. Or if I'm trying to do a quick example on my Patreon page for some of the story time lessons that I do, it's a go-to box of pastels that I can open up and really create almost any painting. Other sets that I like to keep intact, I have a set of both the sets of Terry Ludwig Darks. There's a set one and a set two. And I tell you, dark pastels are such a great thing to have in your pastel palette. Not that you can't paint with lighter values. There's something called High Key Painting which is usually lighter values without a lot of darks, which I love. But you don't always want to paint that way. So having some good darks is definitely a good thing to have. And I keep my Terry Ludwig Darks separate so I can just know I can go grab some good darks. I keep a few of them in my workshop palette. Again, you can see I'm using the Shammy cloth just to blend in and around the flowers here. But let me think. Some of the other sets you see as I'm going back in these little lessons to my pastels, they're on these little shelves. Those are all the ones that I've kept in sets. Some of them I will keep. Some of them I literally just haven't had the chance to incorporate them into my studio palette. One of the ones that I hope to do like a product reveal and a painting from is the Richard McKinley set by Terry Ludwig and Richard McKinley's Fantastic Artist. I will say though that I was quite surprised at how many light values are in that set. So I'm kind of looking forward to digging into that one and creating a painting and just see what having a different set of pastels will force me to create, which leads me to another neat reason. Even if you get a set of pastels that you intend to put into your working palette, incorporate all the pastels into your studio palette, go ahead and try to create a little painting from the set because it might just take you out of your comfort zone. Sometimes we have, not sometimes, almost always, we have habits of going to certain colors that just become our go-to colors. And that just because they're our favorites or they're the ones that we go to easiest doesn't mean they're the best for that particular subject matter. So we need to stretch ourselves. And I don't know why I think, do I either get bored or do I just love exploring? I don't know, but I'm always stretching myself. Probably so much that I don't get great at any one area. But I tell you what, I'm having fun. And that is totally the goal of Monet Cafe. I felt many years ago that art can get really too competitive and too serious. And it can take the joy out of it, you know? And I think too, sometimes we start painting and we think of, I want to get good. I want to become successful at this. I want to be able to sell my pieces. I want people to like my work. And we really lose part of the beauty of art, which is truly just creating for the joy of it. And I just always look at it as a celebration for nature and what the Lord has provided us. So it's a celebration. Think of painting like that. And if you're not happy with it, toss it. What do they call it? File 13 is the trash can. You just toss that baby and you learn something anyway. All right. Look at how these oranges are going. Oh, actually I did put. I thought it was a little bit of pink showing through from the underpainting, but I actually did add like a deeper reddish orange underneath. Now in these background flowers, I'm not adding as much of the base or the darker red underneath it. I'm just adding little bits of the gold and color and giving the petals some variety. The one that I did in the background up to my left there. Notice how those petals were almost scooping up around that little center part of the flower. So definitely try to give them some variety. Now right now they all look rather pasted on top. I didn't bury a lot of them too much in this painting. They were kind of floating on top, but typically I will take some of the flowers and I know that when I'm finishing, I will just bury some of them in the grasses that I layer on the top. That keeps them from feeling just pasted on. So now this is a brighter yellow. It's not a super light value yellow. I could get one that's much lighter, almost white, but the painting would quickly look kind of, it would kind of dull it out. Always go for that brighter color if you can, unless something really needs to be light, like a sky or something like that. All right, I'm just adding some little bits of interest. These are just suggestions. I don't even have to make these any kind of specific flower. Just that purple just seemed like it would be nice, a nice complement to the orangy golden colors. So I'm popping them in here and there and it really does have a nice happy feel. Now this is a new pastel. It's made by Prismacolor, new pastels spelled in you pastel. They're harder and they do have their function. They're really good for getting in little thinner lines like this. Make sure you keep them very gestural. You don't want a straight line. What is it? Karen Margulis calls them. You don't want balloons like floating on a straight balloon string, you know, give them some nice variety. Now back to this lovely dye in town. So look at these chunky marks. It makes for the neatest just suggestions of grasses. All right, little bits of yellow. And you know at some point I'm going to add the bees. We're getting close. Yep, we're going to do the bees right now. Here we go. I'm making a little bee shape, the little body and just a few of them. Like I said, they're so teeny. You don't want them to steal the show. They're just kind of like icing on the cake. And I don't know what got me in this bee strategy. Maybe because when I started these, it's when I had come back from picking up my mother-in-law in Mississippi where we got snowed in in that big old snowstorm that happened. And when we got back, I usually, I like cooler weather. I feel like we don't get enough of it where I live in the Tampa, Florida area. But I think we had just had so much of white and ice and snow, and plus the emotional heartache and everything of our situation. And you know, just her physical challenges she was going through. When I got back, I embraced the warmth and just the fact that spring was coming. So I think that's what motivated me to do these nine little tiny bee paintings. And bees, I just love them. Bees are awesome, you know. We really need bees. They are very, very valuable in our whole ecosystem. All right, so here's the sweet little happy flowers. Now I hope you enjoyed this. You know, we've got three more coming. We'll take a look at, yeah, three more paintings coming. And this is my process of just covering them up so I don't damage them while painting. So all right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that. Once again, feel free to recreate from these, share them, enjoy, have fun. And as always, happy and blessed painting.