 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today I'm bringing to the Monet Café channel one of my Patreon lessons. Fridays is called P.E. Day patron education. Today's lesson is on less is more. So again this is a taste of some of my Patreon lessons and patrons you know you will have a homework assignment from this lesson over the weekend. Now this lesson on less is more is really a lesson in learning to simplify things. Often we get overwhelmed with so much detail, complicate things, and this is a reference photo from a friend of mine who literally gets to travel all over the world. So if you have some non-artist friends who don't mind you using their photography that's awesome. Before beginning I'm going to show you a few different examples of what I've done in Photoshop. I've used a filter that really simplifies things to an extreme. Now I always say you don't have to have Photoshop. I use it as a teaching tool and here's another example of a photograph from another friend of mine and another version of simplifying it. Here's yet another photograph. By the way the filter I'm using is called the cut out filter and it's just a neat way to see things simplified but you don't have to have Photoshop. And here's a quick little intro from me and then we'll begin the lesson. Hello artists and welcome to P.E. Day. It's Friday and that means patron education. So we're gonna have a lot of fun with this one and I apologize if you hear some whimpering or tapping in the studio. I am dog sitting, my grand dogs, and they're awesome but they're getting a little rambunctious. So give these lessons on Fridays obviously as your homework assignment as well but they are in an attempt to break us out of some of our maybe our patterns that we get into and I know often as beginning artists we copy the work of other artists. Obviously that's how we're learning but we're also attempting hopefully in time to develop our own styles. I'm trying to develop my own style still. So these exercises should help you realize some things that you're like oh I kind of like that. I did that pretty good or this really made my artwork look different and I like that or I don't like that. So that's the goal of some of these patron or Patreon education days. So here we go with the lesson. I'm gonna explain a little more. Pardon my appearance. I figure I don't even need to put on an apron if I do the lesson after I go jogging because I'm already yucky. So anyway here we go. Let's do this. Also the majority of this lesson will be sped up very little so you can see what I'm doing. I'm using a piece of Arteza watercolor paper. I am using the smooth side. I have some water. I'm gonna be using acrylic inks to tone the paper and the brush you saw me holding you'll see me using is a Chinese watercolor brush. Now I held up some these are new pastels. They're harder pastels. You don't have to have acrylic ink if you want to tone your paper. I'll tell you why I tone the paper in a minute but if you have some harder pastels they're usually better to use. You could just literally lightly glaze them over the watercolor paper and then wet it like I'm doing now to kind of blend it all in. So if you don't have acrylic inks that's fine. I just love the vibrancy of the acrylic inks and because I don't like working on just a white surface like this I wanted to give a warm underpainting tone to the paper because that sunset sailboat scene felt like it should have some warmth to it. Now this is Indian Yellow, Daylor Rowney and this is pink fluorescent or fluorescent pink. Now because I've put the water down. Oh I've never done it this way before but it worked great. I thought why put them in dishes. I'll just drip them across the paper but because the paper is wet they're going to blend in very much like a wet on wet technique with watercolor and once again if you don't have the acrylic inks just lightly glaze some pastel over it some warm tones and brush it in with some water or some alcohol. Now my reference image is a square format so I wanted to make sure I got enough on here to be able to paint on and also I realized the darker part was up top so I realized I want to flip it over and have the usually things are lighter up towards the sky and now I'm flipping it on the backside because if your watercolor paper warps at all you can literally just put some water on the back of the paper and it will unwarp it. It's a neat little technique or trick that you can do so now after this I'm just going to blow it dry and see how now I have the lighter at the top and the darker at the bottom and once I blow it dry I'm talking ahead of time here but once I blow it dry I need to do something so these pastels will adhere to it and so I'm going to use this product here called clear gesso not the regular gesso because it doesn't have the little grit in it and if you use regular gesso you won't be able to see through it this is clear okay so we can see our beautiful warm underpainting we put down so I just brush it on I only did one coat with this and I blow it dry and now I've got a nice homemade pastel surface and it's got some grit to it ignore if you hear my dogs tapping around in here while I'm talking now I used a piece of vine charcoal sometimes called willow charcoal because I wanted you guys to be able to see it in the future I probably would have used something or if I was just doing this without a video lesson I would have used something lighter because you know the dark charcoal really did show up a lot now using the photo that I have altered to stress simplification less is more notice how simplified that image is and it's really kind of neat and I'm also using kind of that same geometric edges to things I really like that I actually almost did this lesson talking about using like let's get geometric using edges rather than curves a lot of times we have a tendency to curve roads and curve clouds and the geometric lines often are much more interesting so Photoshop did give that harder edges to it and I liked it so because it's so simplified I literally can't even tell if there are sales on those sailboats when I went back and looked at the image again I realized there weren't but I end up going ahead and making it look like it really it's all about an impression that you're giving it doesn't really matter if everything is so detailed because our brains will fill in things if something is just barely suggested and so again like with this cutout image I think I was like I guess there's another sailboat back there so I did a second sort of sailboat incredibly simplified and then a third sailboat over to the the right side there kind of down in the lower third so I'm like okay let's go with that and once again it's so simplified I can't get hung up on detail at all and it's a really fun way to work now again if you don't have Photoshop you can learn to do this just yourself we just one way is to super squint your eyes it's the same way our technique that we do to see value and or lights and darks and if you squint your eyes or work in low lighting I actually sometimes work in very low lighting so I can simplify simplify values and simplify shapes so this is more about simplifying shapes in this lesson you notice how the water you don't see every ripple in the Photoshop version and all right so here's my my sketch look at that it looks kind of blocky right now here are the pastels I decided to do a printout of the sketch I mean of the of the photo that was altered and go ahead and lay some pastels I'm going to talk to you a little bit about these pastels as I work but a lot of these are from notice that there's a lot of neutrals there are from these two sets of Terry Ludwig pastels the shades of nature these are some nice neutral sets both of these there's 30 of them and you can see the two that are missing those are the two that I use the second row the first and the fourth so it'd be 362 and 251 in 362 and 251 now this one these are a little darker neutrals the umber shades and shadows again the Terry Ludwig pastels once again you can see the ones that are missing the three in the third row there so those are going to be the B623 B622 B621 and once again these are awesome neutral sets I did use this is the Terry Ludwig darks there's two sets of darks this is the darks look at the number one or two I can't remember but the one that I used is that G570 it's a really nice dark so here's the ones that I begin with I did add a little bit more lights I realized I needed a few more lights and some warmer shades you'll see as I work I I'm doing the technique I've started doing lately which is putting my colors down on an index card and unfortunately I placed my index card up too high so alright so I got a nice gritty surface now to work on don't worry when you start applying pastels if it looks oh gosh it's not applying very well all these the blending and everything happens as you go don't get too fussy when you first start you're just getting down again simplifying blocking in the shapes as you can see the darkest blue is that little rim that's up top in the photo there and then it's a little bit lighter blue my blue is a little bolder like you can see in the photo those are very neutral colors and it doesn't matter if you don't have the exact colors that I have or that's even in the reference photo the Photoshop photo here because it's really all about value you can tweak colors by you know whatever you have so as long as it's it's a blue and it's the right value you can get it to work sometimes you come out with really interesting results when you don't have the exact same colors now even though I'm staying pretty true to the photo in keeping the shapes very geometric and segmented that doesn't mean your final painting will end up this way if you remember the painting that I shared at the beginning you can soften these edges but it's a great way to simplify things so this blue that I'm using is kind of a periwinkle blue I'm kind of softening that up a little bit and I don't know I think I just like that color I do love that color that's a beautiful color so anyway I am going to keep working here for a bit add some music to this don't go away because I'll be back and I'll talk you through a little bit more of this demonstration I wanted to mention here that I'm cautiously approaching the middle section the brighter water underneath the sun because I already have such a nice warm glow from the paper that I don't want to overfill it I kind of want to keep a little bit of that and the value of the paper if you squint your eyes is already kind of similar to the value of some of that brighter parts there now I am getting in my darks the dark values is what's going to make this painting really pull the viewer in and create the focal interest that that I was looking for I really liked this photo it had some nice compositional elements in it I liked how there was darker water down towards the lower right and how it the boat was darker and it kind of pulled your eye up from the lower right up to the mid lower third left and then back around to that darker bank to the right again on the horizon line so it had it had some really nice nice things going for it so I wanted to keep it pretty true to the photo this is kind of a green and this is another example of how it doesn't really matter if your colors not exactly the same as what's in the reference photo or what somebody else's painting as long as you get the value right so I did tweak some of the colors for a couple reasons sometimes I didn't have the exact color and I might have just like that color typically though the way things work in the background on the horizon is things are going to be a little bit lighter normally when they're far away that bank of trees or mountains or whatever they are this is so simplified you don't even know what it is was pretty dark because of the sun setting there's a real stark shadow on the shadow side of the boat and those two larger they are actually banks of trees I think that's the neat thing about working from this I don't even remember what the original photograph had in it so I'm forced to simplify so do you see how now I'm just working on shapes you've probably heard many artists say this if you've been doing many tutorials is just simplify big shapes now here's two more of the pastels that are from the Terry Ludwig shades of nature like I said they are lighter neutrals and the umber shades and shadows shadows and shades are darker neutrals neutrals are really great I just had a lesson if you're one of my patreon's patrons you know I had a lesson on that when we do story time from the the book we're going through now is the pastel workbook by Jackie Simmons excellent excellent pastel instruction in that book and we just talked about neutrals not that long ago and how you can make your own neutrals that was really fun I appreciated a lot of your comments patrons and how you realized oh I just increased my pastel selection because you realize you can make your own neutrals so that's a that's some cool stuff we do on the patreon page so once again I'm just working with the big shapes the simplified shapes and the values also to notice that just because of like the rules of perspective the waves and the shapes and the linear things in the waves are larger in the foreground because they're closer to you and they gradually get closer together and then just kind of fade out the further away that they get all right more music gonna paint a bit I hope you're enjoying this let me know and I really do appreciate your comments and also I never I forget to say it all the time please subscribe I'll be back in a minute lightest light which is the reflection from the Sun in the water and notice it's even lighter than the Sun itself and don't get hung up on the geometric shape of that Sun I know it looks a little weird right now and I'm definitely gonna have to soften out those charcoal lines like I said I did it so you guys could see but it did I did have to cover it up a bit to get it to not be so obvious and I lightened up the Sun a little bit I felt like I wanted it a little lighter and then I added some more golds but it's really gonna start to take shape when I I get more things laid down so I'm not gonna over fuss about things I'm using here a chamois cloth if you've seen any of my recent videos you know I've been using this it's a wonderful little blending tool I wanted to soften the sky and on watercolor paper coated with clear gesso like I've used it's excellent I went ahead and blended the Sun in because I realized I had it too light so I just used some of that rosy color now I'm blending the the blues in the sky I do end up softening the edges between here I'm softening that and again the chamois cloth works so well on pastel matte paper and this watercolor paper even coated with clear gesso it does not work so great on you are paper the you are papers just a little bit too much like sandpaper and it it it catches the the fibers of the chamois cloth so it doesn't work quite as great I'm even using it to blend in some of the darker values in the back and I think I even blend some of the water but that's it I usually I usually don't over blend towards the end of the painting I might blend a little at the beginning to kind of cover up some of the blank spaces you notice how much smoother the sky looks now some places I like to have it look very textural and especially with the beautiful glow of this paper I don't want to blend over blend and cover that up you can still see the glow of the paper even behind that sky area that's around the Sun and I kind of want to keep that all right so I'm going to work a little bit more on the Sun notice again I said it's it's not quite as light as the reflection in the water but it's still pretty light and I also worked on blending in some of that charcoal the vine charcoal that I had put down now enjoy the rest to music relax enjoy and stay tuned to the end though because I'm going to do a compare to the original photo the simplified version and my painting and I think you will see that simplifying things really does create to me more beautiful art more painterly impressionistic type of art so all right guys enjoy I'll be back this part here is real time these last few minutes have been real time and I did you'll see the final painting in a minute and I did intensify the color a bit here I've been keeping it pretty true to the values in the reference image and here's one of the examples I added that that beautiful bright orange you saw it there and this kind of rosy color into the sky now once again here's the original reference image notice all of the detail and I now can see there weren't even sales up on these sailboats I don't I can't see any sales on any of the boats but because I simplified the image so much I couldn't tell so I ended up adding sales so here is the simplified version from Photoshop and now here is my rendition of the painting so I hope you enjoyed this lesson and can see the importance of simplifying things in art please subscribe to this channel like this video and feel free to comment also I have the new Monet cafe logo with products available t-shirts coffee mugs so just look down below the video 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