 Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm excited to bring you this series of painting tutorials that I think will bring you joy, peace, happiness, and learning. What you're seeing now are nine tiny paintings, and I do mean tiny, only two and a half inches by two and a half inches. They all have flowers and happy little bees, which seems to represent a celebration of life and God's creation. In each of the nine lessons, I will give you information as to supplies, techniques, and more. And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do so. I would love that. Rather than working at my standing easel, I decided to work at my large craft table. Now I'm going to be talking about all of these products, where I found my reference images, and also how you can use alternate products if you don't have the ones that I'm using in this video. Many of the products in my videos and in this particular video can be found in my Amazon shop, where I have products conveniently organized for you to find. I have categories such as pastel papers, pastel painting products, practical studio tools, do-it-yourself pastel surfaces. So when I refer to that in my video, this is where you go. I always have a clickable link in the description of each video, where you can find the products and check them out. I'll be using an assortment of pastels for each particular video, but I will try to give you advice and tips on the colors and values that I select. Also, for each of the paintings, I am using pastel matte. I love this pastel surface. I use the white when I want to do an underpainting, especially like I'm doing in these videos, with watercolor. This receives watercolor so beautifully. Now, pastel matte is a bit pricey, so you know I love to give you alternatives of perhaps using watercolor paper with some of your do-it-yourself techniques that I talk about. I do have a video that I'll try to put a clickable link for making your own pastel surfaces. The watercolor I'll be using is this little Arteza 36 watercolor set. I use this all the time. It's really dirty. You can tell I use it all the time. I think I accidentally used some acrylic ink and other products that didn't clean off very well. But I love that it comes with this little color chart, where you can fill in each watercolor. And this is so important because watercolor looks so much brighter and more luminous when it's applied on paper, rather than it does in the individual little palettes. It's much darker, so you need to do this to make correct color choices often. You see how dark it looks compared to that? But anyway, this little set is the one that I use for each of the nine paintings and also easy to find in my Amazon shop. In this first video of the series, you'll see me laying out my nine painting format on this Dick Blick Healing Matte. I wanted to let you know I got this from DickBlick.com, and I love it. And here we go. I have my Pasto Matte. I also have my Healing Matte, and I love that it has this grid system. It helps a lot for measuring. What I'm going to do here is I had it in mind that I wanted to create a layout to have six or nine paintings. The last tiny painting lesson I did had six, and I thought I wanted to go even smaller and do nine of them. So what I did is I taped it off onto the grid. You know, it's square. It's measured up on the grid, so I know it's square. By the way, I love my limb tape dispenser. This is artist tape that is so handy to have in a studio. It takes different sizes. I think this one is oh, three quarters of an inch or an inch wide, but you can buy various sizes. All of these again on my Amazon shop. I hate to sound like a broken record. For this, however, I'm going to be using half-inch black tape to make a grid or guide for my nine paintings. Also, back in my graphic design days, I love using my t-square and a triangle. You'll see me use in a minute for accurate and precise measuring. Here's a quick graphic for you to understand what I'm doing. I use the t-square to get my horizontal lines, and I use the triangle to move along the t-square to get my vertical lines. So that might help you to understand what I'm doing as I work here. Now, I wrote down that I'm decided on doing two and a half by two and a half little squares. The reason is because I wanted to go with three by three, but the paper wasn't wide enough. So I had to make some measurement decisions here based on the size of my paper. So now I'm just marking off my measurements and my borders, and I know now what the measurements are to get nine of the two and a half by two and a half inch squares. And I knew I wanted to keep a half inch between each of the squares because the black tape is one half inches. Now you can see me using this t-square that I'm really just guiding along the sides of my healing mat. Now I'm making my vertical marks or measurements, once again keeping a half inch between each of the squares. And now you'll see me using my triangle. It's really just a 90 degree angle that I'm sliding along. And I'm sharing this in case you want to do something similar. My original thinking was to have nine of the paintings with a nice crisp border between them. You know like you could put painter's tape in between it. And the artist's tape would work similar to painter's tape where you can peel it off at the end and have this nice crisp white border between each painting. Well I'll let you know ahead of time. It did not work that way. I think it's because of the pastel mat perhaps that the watercolor kind of seeped through. But I still would do it again this way because I really like, first of all I use black tape instead of white tape because I wouldn't be able to see the borders that well. And I also liked having a half inch distance between them. But again I would use this method again because I think I would like to frame them all on this one sheet. You know I could get a mat and cut out little individual sections for each painting. It would really make a neat final painting presentation. And finally we can get started. This was so much fun. I really needed this. I am choosing some brushes. I love this little art bin. I think that's also in my Amazon shop. It's a very convenient way to keep your brushes. And even though these are tiny paintings I didn't really use little teeny brushes. You'll see as I get started. And every painting will begin this way. All nine paintings. I like to keep some paper towels folded up to kind of control my water flow as I'm working with the watercolor. I recently got this nice little ceramic dish for holding my water. I needed something bigger for my water. Now this square format worked out quite conveniently because in my photo albums on the pmp-art.com website I noticed that all of the little images are already in little squares. And so it made it really easy for me to have these little thumbnail images to work from. Now let me talk about pmp-art.com. I found this site many years ago and it was such a neat way for people to share their photography and allow artists to use it for painting without a copyright. Here's the page of the woman of the first photo that I'm going to be using. Now I'm not going to put the photo in the video while I'm painting. I think pmp has something to where I don't put it up there so it looks like mine. But I'm going to put a clickable link to this image from the pmp website. pmp-art.com website so that you can use it if you would like to. I'm just using a pencil. This happens to be a Faber-Castell 6B. It didn't get in focus very good. I normally would use a lighter pencil than a 6B but I tried to go a little darker so that perhaps you can see it better when I'm sketching. Also I love this is the best pencil sharpener I have found. I got this on amazon and of course it's in my amazon shop. It's a German pencil sharpener and I absolutely love it. Many of these lessons will have a lot of real time but I'm speeding up little sections like the sketching portion and specifically in this video because this will be the only one of the nine lessons that has all of this intro showing you how I set it up and all of the supplies. And again for the reference image you can look in the description of this video and I will have a clickable link to the actual site of PMP, the artist who has this particular photograph. And by the way PMP is free and you can also follow people kind of like you do on Facebook. So if you want to follow me find me on there. I think it's just Susan Jenkins but you can find all of my photo albums and you could just literally look at all of these from my page or photo album section. And I believe most of these were under, you can categorize photo albums. I find it very convenient because sometimes you just want to paint. You don't want to search for a photo. So if you ever have any time where you can just sit down and pick out some of your favorite photos and categorize them and little albums. It makes it so nice when I have a moment like this and I'm like I want to paint some bees and flowers. Well thankfully I have two photo albums. One's just called flowers I think but I happen to have a lot of bees in them and one was called bees. And so it was easy for me when I had this concept to just find them. I have some that are organized by landscapes, valleys, trees, all kinds of things, animals. So feel free to get on there and find me, follow me and use my photo albums if you would like to. So here we go. I've got this sketch and it's time to add the watercolor. I am choosing some warm colors. I'm going to talk about these when I put them up but I'll also hold up my little color guide so you can see the ones I'm choosing. Now here's my brush I decided on. It's the Princeton Brush Company. The label has worn off but I see it's a brush that is not as small as you might think for something like this but I prefer using a larger brush. The largest brush I can use because I think it keeps things painterly. First I'm using a wet-on-wet technique. All that means is you're wetting the paper first before you apply the watercolor. It really helps to keep things subdued and again a painterly feel and makes the paint just kind of flow and create more of a wash. So I'm speeding it up now but you can see I'm working around the flowers. I'm only working on the background and the negative shapes behind the flowers with applying the water. Now once you have the water applied you want to relatively quickly go ahead and apply your watercolor. What I'm doing here is I'm getting some of that magenta color. I've learned over the years I used to not add enough water to my watercolor. The water is your friend so wet it good enough not so wet that it's all runny because you remember you already have a wet surface but see how when I'm just touching this watercolor to the spots where I've already wet it that it's just kind of it creates a channel the water that's already there and it's almost like the water flows into the areas that you've already wet. So now I'm going to be toning this Oxford blue and I think I use a little bit of the violet. I'm going to be toning the flowers. Now this might seem a little bit opposite here. Why would I tone the flowers a purply magenta purply kind of blue color and it's because it's the complement to yellow. These are sunflowers remember they're yellow so often I will put what is opposite on the color wheel in some of my other videos. I actually show you how I do this so make sure you watch all nine of these. This is just the first one because you'll learn something new probably with each one. So now what I'm doing is I'm using a little bit of this darker purply blue to get the centers because the centers are the darkest thing in this image. Now notice that one did just kind of bleed a little bit because it touched some of the water but that's okay. That's a sunflower that's in the distance and often things in the distance are less detailed a little out of focus and blurry and I strive not to have too much detail anyway. I've been really focusing more on having a strong focal point in my latest artwork and what would you think the main focal point would be in this image? Well probably that flower I'm working on right there. It's kind of the star of the show and then next in line would be that flower. All right so you see I'm using a little bit of the magenta and the purple to just get these centers in and once again you can do this with just watercolor. This lesson works for different mediums and I've got my little bee I wanted to also to he's of course a focal point too right so I want to make sure he's got a decent amount of contrast and I'll talk about that a little bit more as I work. I'd really just want to get him in here so I didn't forget to not give too much detail on the flower area around him. Oh so I did use the color wheel in this video. Now what color are the flowers? They're yellow. What's opposite of yellow on the color wheel? That's what's called it's complement a complementary color and it's always the opposite side of the particular color you're using. So I know that it's going to be blues and I probably wouldn't be toning all of these petals this light blueish cool color if I was keeping this primarily a watercolor painting. I would probably add some of the blue for the shadow sides but because I know I'm going to add pastel we can layer things and it's really nice to have a complementary color underneath often. So here's the blue that I'm choosing to use for the petals a little bit of the lighter and a little bit of the darker blue. Now you probably noticed what I was doing before was doing the same technique of the wet on wet. I had applied water to these petals. Now you want to make sure you let the pink portion dry first before you do this or it'll all bleed into each other. So you know you learn these little tricks as you're working with watercolor and other mediums but the fun thing is it's all a learning process. You can learn these things. And now I'm ready to get started with the pastel. And what am I doing here? I actually am adding a piece of tracing paper and this is to protect the other areas for painting. I wanted to keep them nice and clean for each new painting. And now we are ready for pastels and again this is pastel matte so it's already ready to receive pastels. I'll talk about these pastels more in a minute but I'm using a little repurposed Chinese takeout tray and a piece of foam I cut for my for holding my pastels as I use them. Now the pastels I'm choosing here are really from all of the pastel paintings that I do. It's a little temporary storage system I have. I repurposed a box of Sennelier pastels that had come in this. It had those nice divisions in it and this works great for me just to put my pastels in after each painting instead of going back to my studio set that you know is bigger and everything. So it ends up being a great little set in itself to choose colors from. So I'm choosing some darks. You see I've got some darks in the centers of the sunflowers. Often there are some magentas and purples in there and of course we're going to have our typical sunflower colors of the golds. Now keep in mind if you look at that reference image as I'm choosing pastels do you see there is a shadowy side. It's like the light is coming from the upper left and really just dancing across some of the petals. So I'm keeping in mind that some of them are going to be brighter and some are going to be more in shadow. This is a little set I like. It's a Sennelier 40 half stick set. I really love this little set. It's got some bright yellows, some really bright pretty colors. I'm choosing some of the purples and bluer tones for those shadowy colors and really just I don't even think I used all of these colors but here's the beginning. I will apologize that the beginning of this pastel application had a little technical difficulty. Some of you know I'm caring for my mother-in-law now who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer and I wanted to share too that that was one of the reasons I chose doing some of these little paintings and this particular project. I thought it would be therapeutic. Often small painting can be that. You don't take it quite as seriously. Have a little more fun and I find that anyway. Maybe you will too. But you're seeing the pastel that I'm using now is a neutral color. Okay it's not real bold in color and I know some of the petals in the shadowy area aren't going to be as bright and sunny yellow as the rest. Once again you can find the reference image in a clickable link in the description of this video but patrons if you're a patron of mine from my Patreon page I will give you the image in your post along with links to all of the products. So that's one of the perks of being a patron of mine. Thank you patrons. You guys have just been such a blessing to me and now you can see I'm using one of the kind of gold tones that's a little darker. I'm still working on the more shadowy parts of the sunflower and typically in pastel painting we work dark to light because of the ability to layer. Often it's good to get a darker color down first because it gives the lighter color or the brighter color something to rest upon that's going to give it some contrast and interest. So that's why you see it looking darker before I turn on the light so to speak by adding some of the brightest yellows and lighter value yellows. Often too sometimes we we go light too soon so it's best to kind of be careful with that. Also notice my strokes are very light pressure. I found that was one of my challenges when I started pastels was I went too heavy handed too quickly and I also felt I needed to fill up the tooth of the paper and you know get it take away the white of the paper or whatever it was very quickly and you don't need to do that you need to take your time with this these colors will start to blend themselves and the color stays fresh and more vibrant the lighter you apply because what pastels actually are pigment that has these little almost like crystals I guess and they shimmer in the light and the more layers you add the more you muddy the colors the more you press or destroy that ability for the color to be as vibrant as it's as it can be so perhaps keep that in mind when you're working also too this is real time you notice the pastel portion is real time I can't remember if I have the whole thing real time but the centers do you see how I added purple and a little bit of that magenta color to the center rather than just choosing a black or a brown for the center that we often see in artwork okay so now I'm going to start going a little bit lighter and whenever you do look at the reference image you'll see that the light is catching some of the outer petals and so I'm just trying to gently work those in now this is a Sennelier pastel I love this brand of pastels but when they're rolled when they make them they often have little I call them little tails on them it's not real smooth on the end of it sometimes there's a part of pastel that's kind of pointy so sometimes you have to kind of sand it down on another piece of paper or something or work with it I realized too I needed I was going a little light too soon like I mentioned before I have this other type of orangey gold color that is not quite as light yet so I'm still gradually working towards the light and I'm also not being so fastidious about the petals being absolutely perfect and I want to have a gestural feel I want them to feel like they're flowing maybe blowing in the wind which it does kind of look like in the reference image and now I'm finally getting to some of the lighter values but notice it's not as light as it could be it's more bright it has a higher saturation of yellow it is a little bit lighter in value but sometimes like I said before we go too light too soon or we feel like we have to grab a yellow that's almost white and I find paintings have much more color interest when you try to go brighter rather than lighter if that makes sense now I'm going to talk a little bit here while I work about this painting and the paintings to come like I've been mentioning they all have flowers and they all have little bees and I'm going to give a little example of some of the bee techniques not in this video but in some future videos and often I do this I feel like I have to give the bee more detail than he needs okay you know how bees you see them flying they're usually full of energy and they're in motion and we want them kind of to appear that way so I've found that the fewer strokes you can make and having strokes with more gesture and energy really gives the feeling more of a bee because they're usually busy right they're in in flight in motion and I found to and you may find if you choose to tackle this endeavor of nine paintings with me your paintings will get better as you go along and your bees will get better as you go along my bees continue to get more gestural and full of energy with each painting so this bee that was a precursor to let you know this bee wasn't my favorite bee that I did but um but I will be giving you more instruction as these paintings progress to get the the fun freedom of a bee and have it represented in your painting all right you see I'm just gradually adding some of these yellows now back to focal point again I know the background flowers not necessarily this one I'm working on but those behind there they're not going to have a lot of detail because if you give them a lot of detail they're going to be competing for focal point a neat thing happens with our eyes and our vision okay let me pause real quick here I'm adding you see that pretty that's another senelier I'm using that little tail or point to my advantage here but I'm adding a little bit of those shadowy colors you know I covered up some of the blue from the watercolor so I'm kind of adding it back a little bit here okay back to our miraculous eyes I love how when we look at something like say you're looking at the sunflower what automatically happens with our eyes because of peripheral we have peripheral vision but you can't focus on everything all at one time usually you focus on one thing and if you can stay focused on it and imagine sort of kind of looking at the things around it they're all fuzzy they're out of focus well cameras don't often do that they have an automatic setting on them usually where the aperture is set to where it focuses pretty much everything and that's not to me if you want an artistic and painterly final painting it's not the best way to paint we want to emulate in our artwork usually what our eyes see and so it's good to find a focal point that you give more detail as if you're looking at it that's what you're focusing on and make almost a fuzzy or halo effect of other elements so that they're not competing for attention I hope that makes sense so try to paint more like our vision works rather than how a camera works sometimes I'm being gentle around the bee once again he is part of the focal point obviously and that flower and so I didn't want to give so much detail and fine lines to the petals where he's going to be and that's kind of why I'm taking my time in finishing that area I also wanted to add a little bit more shadow to the centers of the sunflowers there is an area like I said the light is coming from the upper left area somewhere so the lower right area of these sunflowers are going to be just a tad more in shadow and for this I'm using the Terry Ludwig egg plant color it's really a dark dark purple I avoid using black because black is really just void of all colors so this is definitely one of my favorite darks okay now I'm back to using a senelier I also wanted to mention I'm have the advantage again of using this little imperfection on it the little point that makes it easier to get into some of these petals but some people have commented on how can you use these big chunky pastels for such a little two and a half by two and a half painting well there's a little trick and I'm going to be talking about it more in future videos about how you feel your way what not in a movie like grease or something you literally feel your way by just giving a little almost like a press practice touch to the surface with your pastel where you can feel even sometimes when you can't see where the pastel is landing you can feel it so you make a little little teeny tap or mark and pull it up and you can see where it was and then you just continue to feel where it was and work your way around it may sound difficult but actually the more you do it it's really not that hard at all and one thing I find about these tiny paintings is because you're forced to use big chunky pastels with such a tiny painting it forces you to be more painterly often we get too detailed and too fussy we feel like we have to make all these fine lines and details and things and you really just can't do it in these little paintings so here you can kind of see how I'm I just make a little mark and I kind of feel where it is and then I can kind of keep going I wanted to add I've got some of the blues in the top part there that were more cooler blues now this is would be considered a warmer blue a turquoise is a warm blue or you could say it's a cool green if you don't understand that I've got a video I did a few videos back on color temperature and I really go into detail about color temperature and what it means to be a cool color warm color and all of that so but now I'm adding the warmer blue the teal or turquoise a little lower into these petals because that's typically how the sky works we go from cooler colors up in the heavens usually gets warmer down towards horizon line where the sun usually is down further in the horizon so that's why I decided on this and this painting because the sunflowers were everywhere and there wasn't a lot of background it kind of came out looking a little bit abstract which I liked you know with the negative shapes and that's kind of what I'm doing right now it's called negative painting I'm painting the background into the petals I got the general petal shapes and then I'm negatively painting in between the petals you see the petals at the bottom of the main sunflower they're not really formed all that great so I I actually work around them now this pastel you see how it's more linear it's a harder pastel I'm not sure if that's a Rembrandt but I wanted to get some of these it might even be a new pastel a prismacolor new pastel spent in a spelled in you pastel and those are harder pastels and they actually have more of a point or an edge to them but I let color be my guide here I wanted a color that was kind of that ever green looking green so I just grabbed whatever I found and even though it's harder can you see the difference of that color versus those teals up there it's uh it doesn't go on as buttery smooth but that's okay because I know as I add more colors like now I've got a warmer green here that is a bit softer as I add more colors all of those little blank spaces or linear looking marks will be blended out by the layering process so sometimes we worry we have to over blend we'd get a blending tool and think we have to blend in that little green area because some of the paper showing through but resist that urge because again you're going to take away the brilliance of the pastel the more you blend the more you lose that precious color that's so emblematic of soft pastels I think it's one of the brightest and most colorful mediums ever I mean even more than oil painting the challenge with pastels one of the I guess if you want to call it a downside is that you have to frame it you have to put it behind glass or protect it somehow I use clear bags from clearbags.com to store my pastels prior to framing or I use them also to ship my pastels in I even found the neat little way you can have pastel greeting cards right now I'll have to share that in a video but you do have to protect them but I think that adds to their preciousness or uniqueness you know they're just so precious they need to be protected and they're perhaps a little bit more durable than some people think all right so now I'm working around the bee a little bit and I'm kind of losing him a bit but I do re-establish that in a minute again I kind of put my watercolor bee there to remind me not to overlay her in that area because I wanted him to still have some contrast and focal energy and this terry Ludwig pastel was a perfect example of having to feel my way now I'm back to using a Sennelier and now let's turn lights on can you see how bright that is now this is a little bit of a lighter value I've gone a degree lighter in value because this is where the sun is hitting on those petals it doesn't need to be everywhere I've heard an expression I can't remember which artist said it if it's everywhere it's nowhere and that really is so true if something is everywhere nothing stands out as important you know it's not it doesn't stand out anymore if you've got that same color all over the painting so we want to reserve those areas of the brightest highlights to just where the sun is hitting in this particular reference image and again I apologize for not having the reference image right next to the painting but when it's someone else's photograph as in this case with pmp-art.com by the way pmp stands for paint my photo it used to be called paintmyphoto.com but when it's someone else's reference image I want to make sure they get the glory for it so that's why I put the link to the image in the description of this video so you can go check it out again you might have to sign up for pmp-art.com if you're not not already a member but it's free you know why not I also like to remind you guys that I love your comments not only do I love reading them you guys have given me some great advice and you're what's helped me to know what to provide here improving my videos just some tips and things you guys have all right back to a terry Ludwig pastel it's a big old chunky kind of a rust orangy color and I'm kind of re-establishing sometimes when the petals come into or come out of the center they are bunched together a little bit more so you're going to create a little bit of a darker value in those areas and it's kind of segmenting the petals a little bit they were all kind of one color there so it's giving some division or separation from the petals it also looks so nice there's a little bit of that purple in the center I don't know if you can see it on whatever device you're looking at but often like I said in the centers of sunflowers and even in the petals kind of where I'm working now you can have some purples and some reds and punch up that color a little bit I can't remember if I added any red to some of the areas that I'm working on now usually like right where that petal like I said comes right out of it you can get some pretty rich reds and it always creates interest rather than just going with yellows and browns now I'm using a little tool that I've recently discovered that works good when working on tiny paintings it's just a little q-tip and so what I'm doing again I did not give a lot of detail around the bee because if I had all those petal divisions behind him he would lose his focal interest so and I ended up kind of covering up the bee but again I remembered not to add like all those highlights around where the bee was and I'll actually be getting to the bee pretty soon but I'm adding now this is another Sennelier pastel look at that gorgeous yellow now it's not quite as light as the first one it's more bright you know it's more intense in color but it's going to stand out because of its brightness I think I go back and re-establish some of those lighter yellows at the end just on the tips now I'm going in and adding a little bit of this lavender this is a shadowy area of the flower it gets going to make it feel a little bit more in shadow and often I use a lot of lavenders and blues in shadows and shadows and flowers and various other subject matter so it does make it feel a little bit more like the light is behind and above the sunflower not down in the center in that on those lower petals now here's where I'm adding a little bit more of those lightest lights like I said just where it looks like the sun is just dancing across a few of these petals notice how the front sunflower is now becoming the main focal point I put a little bit on the back but I don't overdo it because it's it's second fiddle to the first one here okay and then the ones in the very back-back they're you know they're stage hands or something I don't know why I'm doing theater analogies and now let's add Mr. Bee I'm using a dark again the Terry Ludwig eggplant color pastel he needs to have a dark base so I learned this little technique from artist Karen Margulis just watching some of her bee videos of her flowers and bees and she's really just so darn good at it her bees are so cute but you put down she always does three little marks sometimes I'll do two little marks a head and a body even though an insect usually has three divisions and then you use kind of a orange or bright yellow for that center part just a little mark then you put down almost like a blue periwinkle blue and then you can put down a lighter color on top those are for the wings now I've got a lighter color just a little brush and you can have two little wings coming out I added some little legs with a harder new pastel and a little indication of a little antenna but again my bees got better the more that I did and they just got more fun so we're always learning right so this was obviously part one in the series and notice all real time for the pastel portion of this which will be the same for the next lessons so I hope you will tune in for all nine of these paintings this video will be the only one that shows my technique for laying out the nine painting format but it should be a lot of fun it was a blessing to me very healing for me during this time in my life so I hope it is for you too and if you haven't subscribed I hope you will also follow me on Instagram please at Susan Jenkins Artist I always forget to say that alright guys that's it happy painting happy spring time and be blessed