 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm glad you're here and today we're going to learn about the combination of pastel and watercolor. It truly is a beautiful combination. Now this is painting number nine in a series of bee and flower paintings, but this is a self-contained lesson and I hope you'll subscribe if you haven't. We have a lot of fun here. I used for all nine of the paintings in the series one piece of pastel matte. I used the white. Now this is a pastel paper, but it's water-friendly, so that allows me to use watercolor. I used the Arteza 36 watercolor set. All of these products will be in the description of this video. Now this was the ninth painting, only two and a half inch by two and a half inch. Sadly I lost some video footage, so I had to recreate this painting. I did it a little bit larger so that you guys, especially my patrons from my Patreon page, who have been faithfully painting all of these paintings so that you could follow along. So this one's a little larger and actually it worked out better because you can probably see it better, but you can actually see my little teeny painting in the corner there. Instead of painting from a reference image in this case, I'm painting from a painting, from my painting. So I'm just speeding up the sketch portion here. Most of this will be real time except for a little bit at the end. Now here we go with the watercolor and I'm going to be trying to show you the colors that I'm choosing. Since I did nine of these, I got better with each one, giving some good instruction. First I'm putting down some water. I'm going to do a wash and I actually ended up just painting water over those top Queen Anne lace flowers. They look kind of shaped, just kind of triangular and sometimes it's okay to create just kind of loose geometric shapes when getting your sketch in. You want it to be really sketchy and not too tight. So I'm painting the sky and the flowers with water and I'm going to choose some cool colors. This is the coolest blue that I have in this Arteza set. I'd say it's similar to a cerulean blue perhaps and it's a nice turquoise color. So I just went ahead and painted on the whole wet upper portion that I have here and I used quite a bit of this color because I know watercolor dries lighter, but look how great this pastel matte paper receives watercolor. I love this surface for combining watercolor and pastel and I love pastel matte in general. Sometimes I buy the pastel matte sheets or pads that are already toned to color. They have some nice colored surfaces, but I like to use the white when I know that I'm going to be creating my own under painting, whether it's watercolor or some other medium and you could do an under painting. Really for this tutorial use whatever you have. If you follow my channel on you know I do a lot of do-it-yourself surfaces and a lot of my subscribers and patrons who follow me here. You have other surfaces you could do this with, so get creative. You don't have to use exactly the products that I'm using here. Now you can see that I took a darker, I'm not sure which blue this was in the set, but if you have the Arteza set you can actually really see the ones that I'm choosing. So just something a bit darker for the flower shapes. Also notice how the ones that I had wet that are in the sky, they look a little more dreamy because they have that wet-on-wet background and the ones that I'm applying here, they're gonna look a little bit darker because I didn't have any water applied first, but these things don't matter in this under painting stage. What we're really trying to do is to create a roadmap, some nice color energy, and some drama. We want our under paintings to be painterly and free. Now I was thinking about which under painting color I wanted to do here and since I knew the foreground had so much green, green grasses everywhere, I thought I'll go ahead and use its complement, which is orange or golden colors or reddish colors. If you look opposite on the color wheel to green that's what you would find. It also makes a really nice complement, the kind of blue and orange here that I've got going on. It's really kind of neat already. Those colors just really work well together. So it's going to be a nice underlaying of color and energy prior to starting the pastel portion. I'm using a little bit of a darker orange now. It's leaning a little bit more towards red and I'm working that more in the area where it's almost like a hidden little darker value path or trail that goes through the painting. I'm just gently working around these flowers. Also avoid a brush that's too little with things like this. Larger brushes create those big block in shapes of color, value, and nice loose beginnings. Alright so I'm almost done with the orange foreground here and I do add a little bit more of that more rich red in the foreground as well. Now you'll see after I finish this orangey area where the grasses will be the white area that's blank. That's basically the tree line in the background and what I'm going to do for that is I'm just going to choose a color. I'm going to darken it more with pastels but I'm going to choose like a purple and even though I know this is going to be the darkest value element in the scene, vertical things like trees are usually the darkest value of any landscape painting typically. So I know that with watercolor I'm going to have to really mix up some paint, more paint to water ratio to get it dark but I'm not going to worry about getting this as dark a value as it needs to be because I'm going to do that with the pastels. This is just to get the shape, a little bit of nice color temperature going and then I'll be ready to start with the pastels and after this dries I always shoot it with a blow dryer. I'm impatient and after this dries voila it is already ready to receive pastels. That's the beautiful thing about this pastel matte surface. I just love that. Oh now these are some other trees that I decided to make more distant area of trees that's kind of right there in the middle and I will develop that further when I add pastels. And now my crazy looking underpainting is dry and I will be using primarily for this demo this set of Sennelier soft pastels and it is the Paris collection. Now let's take a little trip to Paris. I found this interesting. I wanted to show the location for where Sennelier pastels are made and art products and I found out Sennelier is the oldest art shop in Paris. Wouldn't you just love to go there? Let's all go. Come on guys. And the company had its beginnings in 1887 on the picturesque Paris street of Quai Voltaire. I hope I'm saying that right. So I thought that was really cool. It's the oldest art supply store in Europe and some famous artists actually use their products Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas and also even Picasso. So it's really neat to know a little bit of the history behind some of these lovely sticks of color that we use today. It's one of my favorite pastels for sure. So I hope you enjoyed that little bit of history and let's start painting. I wanted to keep these colors similar to the sky colors that I had already laid down in watercolor. I really liked the idea. You see in my first painting I did the little two and a half by two and a half inch painting. It had a very cool sky, a little bit of a turquoise feel. So that's why I stayed with that. So I'm using mostly turquoise but this is a little bit of a blue I just used there and I'm gradually getting lighter as I get down closer to the horizon. Now it may look a little bit chunky at first and sometimes that's fine. You can have that expressive feel in your sky but I wanted this one to be smooth. I remembered that when I did my small painting I almost kept it just the watercolor and it really made for a nice, very smooth sky that didn't compete with some of the energy of the flowers and it made a nice contrast with the flowers too to have smooth versus texture. So now you can see I'm laying down that dark I mentioned before. This is a, it's really like a dark, dark bluish color and it looks almost black here but it's a nice dark just to lay down for these trees. They will be lightened up and if you're new to pastels we typically go dark to light. That doesn't mean that's a hard and fast rule but it's a general rule because it helps to create contrast with color and value. And like with the sky you can see I'm keeping the initial color the same as the color I laid down with the watercolor. I wanted to reinforce that reddish, orangish color and I went a little bit more red in the foreground and now I'm gradually getting a little bit lighter. That's an even lighter value of an orangy, rusty kind of color in the background there. Now my handy dandy chamois cloth I've been using in a lot of my later tutorials now because it works so well. Almost too I lose the flowers that I put up in the sky but that's okay. I just kind of work around them even blend right over top of them because I know I've got their general form and shape. I did darken the sky a bit more and blended it in again because I realized my flowers which are similar to like Queen Anne's lace type of flowers they're going to be lighter. Not at first. You'll see I put down darker values first but I wanted to create a nice contrast so I didn't want the sky to be too awfully light because the flowers are going to be laid on top of that. A little more blending and we'll be ready to go. And I wanted to take this opportunity here to explain something I shared in the last video. I recently started something on a site called Coffee K-O-FI and it's a neat little place, a page that I can have where people who are not patrons of mine can either just give a tip for the video or sometimes you can purchase extras. I'll share a little sketch. You can purchase like a dollar or two really not expensive but it's a neat way for Monet Cafe to not have to be a patron to come over and see some other things, get some goodies and maybe give a tip for a video. Now my patrons on my Patreon page will get the whole kit and caboodle. Patrons don't ever have to worry about going to my coffee page giving a tip or purchasing extras because whenever I upload a video to my Patreon page they get all the goodies that goes with it because it's a five dollar monthly subscription. You can cancel it at any time but that's a little bit more of a commitment than just the coffee. I call it my coffee shop. Isn't that perfect? I mean it couldn't have worked out any better. Coffee with Monet Cafe that's too cool. All right enough of that. I just wanted to clear that up because some of you had questions. Now notice what color I'm putting down here. It's like a dull neutral green and I love the Sennelier Paris set because it does have some nice neutrals. It's a really great set and I will show you by the end of this painting I had only used three other pastels that were from a different set. I actually used some unison pastels. I'll show you what those three pastels were and I used some harder new pastels just to get some grasses. You don't even have to have those. But now once again this is a darker value and why would I and I'm painting right over this some of these background trees but it's okay. Why would I use such a dark value? I should not such a dark value but something a lot darker than white because these Queen Anne's lace flowers are going to be white. We would have a tendency and that's exactly what I did when I first started painting was just to grab white and start painting the little white little individual parts of the Queen Anne lace flowers. But what we need like I said before is some contrast. That flower actually has more shadow areas to it and darker values than you think with the light laid on top. So that's why we typically get in a darker value. Now these are nice they're kind of a warm color and I wanted to cool it off a bit. This is actually almost just like a gray like a nice taupe color like a color I would paint my wall maybe a little lighter. I love a nice neutral taupe that doesn't lean too far to pink or doesn't lean too far to green. It's really hard to find if you've ever done any painting like indoor wall painting and it's I find it's really interesting when you paint walls for any of you have ever done your own painting probably everybody who owns a home has is it's so apparent how color changes with different lighting. You can be in the hardware store picking out a paint color and it looks perfect and you get home and you're like whoa it looks pink or it looks green. So it really does have a lot and it's the same thing with painting. It has everything to do with the color and value that surrounds something as much as it has to do with the color. Color is dependent on its surroundings and value is too. I have a video on that that's pretty cool. Now I've got my flowers in now the the mountains that I had put in mountains trees you know there could be anything but I'm going to make them trees. The trees that I had put in were quite dark. I knew there were going to be a darker value so I'm just kind of scumbling over them. This is a almost like an evergreen color it's still a little dark. I'm going to even lighten them up a little more. I'm just giving like I'll give like three different colors and values before I'm done. Now I did even though my flower covered up some of my really far background trees I think I end up making those a little bit more background trees too in there. I knew that I wanted to kind of get a little bit of that in there because it creates a sense of depth rather than it just being a band of dark trees going across the back. Also they're kind of corralling the viewer's eye in perspective back to that kind of sort of middle area there. So again I scumbled a little bit of that color on top of those trees as well. Now I wanted to go ahead and get it a little bit darker. We've got the orange and reddish colors in the grass area that will be the grass and it's a little flat right now a little two-dimensional. So I thought I'd add in a little bit of this darker look at this gorgeous um I don't know rich dark brick red that I'm just putting in down where there'll be a little bit of a visual trail around some of the roots of the flowers and just creating a little bit of a more of a three-dimensional feel than it being so flat. Also the majority of this video is real time and this will be the full regular tutorial on the Monet Cafe channel. I know sometimes guys my subscribers in here I sometimes have a little bit extra for my patrons but I never forget about giving enough content to Monet Cafe as well. I know we've got subscribers from all over the country people who have limited resources so I love offering free art instruction. Now I'm cooling these off even more. I know there's going to be some shadowy areas and I really wanted to keep a little bit of color harmony going. There's a lot of cool going on in the sky so so just giving some of these flowers a little bit of that cooler tint of blue I thought would be nice. Now I'm going to paint here for a while and add some lovely music for you. I will be back at the end. Don't go away because I am going to have the real time of doing these adorable little bees and I even though I went over this in some of the other flower series tutorials where I talked about the bees you can see them much better in this tutorial because it's a bigger painting than those little teeny ones over there. So stay tuned for the bee portion. Enjoy this music. I've recently found a musician on YouTube. His name is Josh Snodgrass. I was actually when I lay down at night sometimes I try to find some nice music to listen to and his music just blessed my ears. He plays acoustic guitar and I contacted him and he's letting me use his music for my videos. Thank you Josh. He does a lot of hymns a lot of old hymns and since he was so kind to let me use his music I would love it if some of you would find his YouTube channel subscribe to him and perhaps buy one of his CDs. That would be awesome. So enjoy and I will be back when I get to the portion on painting the cute little bees. These little bees similar to the last tutorials where I said you just make three two or three little black marks. They're all kind of close together one two three and I'm giving them some different gesture. One's kind of curved around make sure you make them carefree. They're moving remember they don't need to be stiff or stagnant. Now I just take a darker kind of golden color and I put in the middle section of the body and then I get a really bright yellow and put just on top of that just a little quick gestural mark. Now in the last video I used two colors for the wings but I realized all I really need is this really light light blue and again quick little energetic marks. Now don't they look fun and give it a little signature and there we have it. Oh and I mentioned I would show the other pastels used only these three unison and these three new pastels. All right guys here was the final unveiling of all nine. Now my hopes was that this black tape was going to create a nice white edge or border but I realized early on that the watercolor it wasn't the pastels that were the problems the watercolor seeped through but it doesn't really matter because I am going to matte these to be framed all together very similar to another tiny series I did and pardon me the only place I could find this was on Instagram follow me on Instagram by the way at Susan Jenkins Artist but in this series I made my own matte this is out of black drawing paper and I'm going to show my patrons how to do this with this nine painting series. All right guys I hope you enjoyed Monet Cafe thank you God bless you for being subscribers patrons thank you for supporting me and I pray you guys keep pursuing your artistic goals and keep making the world more beautiful you truly do. All right guys happy painting