 Well, hello my friends in Monet Café. Man, have I missed you guys and I've missed painting and here's Jackson. I thought I'd just take a moment, just to take a deep breath and actually have some time to make a little video. My husband and I have worked so hard just to be able to move into this new property. Many of you followed our saga with the flooding of our home and how after that we had to move into a couple of temporary homes. One of them was, ignore all our equipment out here. One of them was that travel, actually a travel trailer before that that was even smaller. Then we lived in that travel trailer. Then we lived in another little house where I had my art studio still trying to make videos for Monet Café. And now we're living in this little house. It's less than 600 square feet, but we're making it work for now. But the wonderful thing is that it's on six acres of land and it is absolutely gorgeous. And I'm loving the tiny life right now, but I am missing my art studio. So I'm still in the process of getting that rectified and a way that I can still record videos and paint because I do miss it. But right now, because my husband's out of town, I'm going to sneak in the house here, ignore everything. We've only lived here a month and a half. The backyard is so amazing. Oh my goodness. It's just beautiful. So ignore, I'm going to try to avoid seeing my unlandscaped front area here. But let's go in the little house so you can see it. And the great thing is it has very high ceilings, which I love. But here's how we're operating right now. This is the little tiny kitchen. We did, we live near Ikea in Tampa, Florida. So Ikea has a lot of things that focus on tiny living. One of them, one of the things I love is this little narrow cabinet here that is right behind this door. I mean, it is such a small little section, but that helps so much with efficiency and storage space. I mean, just like having places to put things is so awesome behind the door. Look, that would have been a wasted space. Anyway, I don't mean to make this a do-it-yourself show. But this is a teeny weeny kitchen. And there's my little space where I work on my desk, dining room. Everything is a combination. Combination, dining room table, Bible reading area. My business for my one business that I have that's more accounting and bookkeeping, and my artwork that I do all right here at this little table. But man, look at that view, isn't that beautiful? Now, here's what I don't get. That's my little work area, combination dining room table. And there's my husband's work area. What's up with that? Anyway, oh, and there's me in my work attire, or yard work attire, I should say. But anyway, so then our living room, because we had no closets in this house. It's literally one room. This is just one room with a kitchen on the back here. But this needed to function as not only a living area, but a bedroom. So we're literally sleeping on the couches right now. But these are some awesome closet systems from IKEA. They're really great. I love that. So that's our closets. That's our bedroom living room, sorry for the sheets all in the bed. And have a neat little, actually, even though it's a small bathroom, it's nice. Again, that's high ceilings. That's what's so awesome. I love that. So here I don't have all my family pictures hung up on the walls yet. But it's a nice, so cozy bathroom. It's kind of neat. And then this goes back out, the awesome thing is it has this amazing patio in the back. And here the owl. I love it. So nice. And I got Jackson and Dusty, still not done setting things up. But I did something neat that was set up this little coffee station outside, instead of taking up counter space that I don't have a lot of. There's the owl. Who cooks? Who cooks for you? That's the type of call of this one particular owl. So anyway, this is my little life right now. And I just wanted to share that with you. But I'm going to create a painting now sitting at my little Bible reading business art studio table. So here we go. Yay. OK, here's my little setup here. I've got my watercolor paper. I am now using the smooth side. Again, like I mentioned, I'm left-handed. Actually, I use both left and right, but primarily left-handed. So I try to keep my spiral on the opposite side, just not to get in my way when I'm working here. But a regular watercolor paper, smooth side. I've got some brushes here because I'm going to be using the ink tense blocks. I haven't even opened this package. Pardon my dirty hands. But this has still got the plastic on it. But oh, I'm so excited to use these. Mostly like as an underpainting. If you see me use the wax pastels, it's the same concept of laying down some color and value and painting it with water. And it creates an underpainting. I've had some great questions as to why an underpainting? It just creates a great spontaneous value study underneath your painting with some colors that might make your painting pop. I like to use complementary colors often, not always. Sometimes I use local color. That means the color in the scene. But I'm not sure how I'm going to approach this right now. But I'll try to talk a little bit in this video. This is my subject, my little reference photo. I use OneDrive. It's a file storing, photo storing system that I can use that works across all devices. I have a combination of Apple iPhone devices and Microsoft Windows products that I need to be able to use both. So OneDrive works really well. I have a video on how to use that to store photos. When you're ready to paint, you don't want to go, oh, let me find that photo. So it's a neat way to find it. So this is Oreo. It's a cow that live next door to my property. Oh, there's such a beautiful story. I wish I had more time to tell it. I met this cow when it was just a little baby before we even bought the property before there was a flood. And I ended up being able to watch her grow into this beautiful, they're called heifers, when they're a young cow. So this is Oreo. And I think I'm going to try to paint her today. And these are after I lay down the ink tense blocks as an underpainting and with some water, okay, and just a brush, trying to show my supplies here. Then I'm going to use these new pastels. Now they're all out of sorts here because they got thrown in my drawer. But this is an old Rembrandt case of Rembrandt pastels I used. It was a neat case. So I used it, I repurposed it to use for travel. Put my new pastels in here. New pastels, this was a 96 set that I literally just broke little pieces off of them to make a travel set. This is one of all of the colors, I think, you know, broken up like this. So I'm ready to go. Got all my supplies. Got my little fish Shiloh here. He's looking kind of bored. Come on, Shiloh, get excited. So here we go. Ready to paint Oreo and I'm excited. Okay, so now I'm going to get started with a little sketch of our friend Oreo here. I apologize for the poor lighting. I'm literally using a clamp on light that's from one of my, from my former studio that works much better far away. So it's a little bit of a spotlight effect here. But I'm just using a charcoal pencil here. Getting in a good sketch is very important. I have found with people and animals. It's interesting to me that animals have a personality like people and you want to get their proportions accurate. So without further ado, let me apologize for the shadow here too. I know I feel like I'm apologizing all the time here, but I'm going to try to talk a little bit in this video. Big shapes is the same with animals as with people. I've learned with sketching that it's important to see shapes and compare shapes. So let me get going here. I'll probably speed this up so it doesn't take forever. All right, so here's a general sketch of Oreo and I'm keeping it a sketchy painterly type of feel to it when it really loose. And I encourage to do more artwork where it's fun instead of having to become something like you want it to be a masterpiece. So I'm keeping this fun and very loose and the more you do, the more you sketch, the more you draw, the better you'll get at that. So, you know, don't get frustrated with yourself if it doesn't come out just right at first. Do a lot of sketching. It takes thousands of sketches and drawings before someone becomes really, really good at it. And that's not to discourage you, but to encourage you to do more sketching. I don't know if I've done thousands of sketches. So what I'm going to do is you saw in the previous video that these intense blocks, again, it's my first time using them. And they're pretty intense in color. There's not a lot of light values. And these are all relatively dark with the exception of the yellows and greens down here and some of the orangey colors here. So I'm going to use them sparingly, but more as an idea for an underpainting. Now, in my reference photo, you can't see the whole thing here. But the background is dark, but always when things are in the background, they push back their lighter in value, typically, and duller in color. So I think what I'm going to do for this background is I'm going to get this intense, I probably should experiment with how how dark they're going to be when I wet them. But I know this is a duller and a lighter value than some of the other ones. So I think I'm going to use this. I like to break my wax pastels. So I just broke this one. It's a little a little softer than maybe new pastels or wax pastels. So I'm just going to take this. My watercolor paper is a little warped. I can't get a good there we go. It's starting to work better now. Kind of like grind it down to where it starts to behave, behave like it should. So I'm going to use a little bit of this in the background. I'm thinking it will be a duller blue, not sure. And then a lot of times what I do when I'm working is while I have this pastel in my hand or this intense block, I look at where else I might have a dull blue like that. And again, if this looks like something totally strange to you, it gets better the more that you do it. And so I'm squinting my eyes and I'm seeing some of the body here actually has, even though you think something's black, it's not. You can add purples and blues and shimmery colors. So I'm just trying to get an eye here of where some more of that is. I'm actually seeing on this ear will be like some of these more purply colors right here as a highlight. OK, so I got a little bit of that. We know this grass back here is green, but I also see that down below his muzzle. There's some shadows in these grasses. So and there's a little bit more back here. So I'm getting a little bit of that in there. All right, so I'm going to work a little bit more since I'm still fairly new to intense blocks. I'm not going to give a lot of instruction, but maybe give some more comments at the end. OK, so because I don't know how they're going to behave since I've never used them before, especially on watercolor paper, I'm going to keep it kind of loose and free and not overdo it with colors. These are the intense colors I used. And again, they're all pretty dark. So I'm hoping that I'll be able to apply some of the lighter pastels, which new pastels, the the set of 96 these here, they're actually kind of limited in some of their lighter values, too. So I'm not sure what I'm in for here, but I'm going to go ahead. I love to use the biggest brush that I can use. It will help you to keep a painterly style instead of getting a little fine brush and like getting his eye in all the little teeny details. It's going to start to look, I don't know, too fussy. So I'm going to start with this one. And then I may go with this other more round brush than a flat brush. All right. And this is just water. So here we go. Experiment time. So far, I am really liking the intense blocks. I think I will use them more definitely in the future as an underpainting. And even though this has a very loose feel right now, keep in mind, this is just an underpainting. This is just to give that. I've had, again, some people ask, why an underpainting? It establishes your values. It establishes your color palette. And it also establishes a loose background to work upon. If I just started painting on a white surface and started getting, you know, detailed and have some finesse, it's not going to have that fun, spontaneous spontaneity that I like in art. And I think a lot of our people that follow our channel and our group like as well. I also wanted to point out that I've noticed that even though you may have seen in some of my other videos that watercolor paper has a tendency to warp when you add water to it. And a lot of times some of you ask in our Facebook group, what I was doing when I flipped the paper over and I put something on the back. And actually it was water that I put on the backs because if your watercolor paper warps or bows, you just put some water on the back and it straightens it right out. But I did notice that this is pretty flat. This water that I added to the ink tints doesn't seem to have bowed as bad as some. So again, this is a real loose, sketchy quality to it that is merely an underpainting. And now I think because this is watercolor paper, it does come off a little bit. Let me see. Not bad. I'm just checking. Yeah, ink tints does still come off on your fingers afterwards. But I think because this is still a smooth surface, my even though I'm using harder pastels, the new pastels, they're not going to stick very good to a watercolor paper surface. So I'm going to add some clear gesso. This is the clear gesso that is a great product because it has a little tooth to it, a little grit. And if you followed any pastel channels, you know that pastels need a little something to hold on to. They're going to kind of fall right off smooth surfaces, especially your softer pastels. Harder pastels, that's why I'm using the new pastels. They do a little bit better on smoother surfaces. New spelt in you pastels, not in EW. So that's why I use these when I'm doing work with limited supplies and also sometimes you might want to paint somewhere where you don't want to have a lot of dust pastel dust. So new pastels are better than, say, some of your softer pastels like Terry Ludwig's, Mt. Visions, Sennelier and Unicens. There's so many that are softer that create a lot of dust. But, you know, ink tents, no dust, wax pastels I've used before, no dust. And these new pastels, oh, that's a gorgeous color. They don't have a lot of dust as well. So I'm going to apply the gesso with a brush to get some tooth. And then I'm going to apply some new pastels. Now I've applied the clear gesso and you can actually sort of hear the grittiness to the surface versus, let me find a smooth surface here. That's smooth with no gesso. That's gritty. And the reason we use the clear gesso versus the regular gesso that's more of a white color is because it's clear. It allows your painting underpainting to show through. So now all I'm going to do is start to apply these new pastels. Again, I just break them up. I don't know where the shell came in, but I leave it here because it's just cool. So I'm just going to start using these again. They're harder so they don't have a lot of dust. And we're just going to have fun with this. So time to get started. I apologize that I didn't have my filming going when I added a few other things. But I noticed that I've got something off here with the eye and it's never too late to correct something. If you see it off, don't keep going. If it's bothering you, go ahead and fix it. And if I hold my brush up, what I'm looking at now is like the little eyelash area right above the pupil. And it should be, I think this eye needs to be lower. So when I look at this one, constantly measuring, yes, definitely. You see the eyelash of this one is actually higher than the eyelash of that one. So I've got this eye too high. So not a problem. All I got to do is move it down. I don't typically use black. I added some black just to punch up the value. I'm probably going to soften that a little bit. But I definitely need to lower this eye to get the proportion right. Even as loose as it is, you still want to get certain things accurate to make it a more professional painting and not to have anything awkward about it. So let me fix that and I'll get started. So I finished up my pal Oreo. And as always, I had to punch up the color a little bit. I just love that. And I hope you enjoyed this tour of my little life right now, which we are very blessed. And I hope you learned a little bit more about painting in a small space. I know a lot of you may be in situations similar to me or even have less space. So hope you enjoyed. Hope it was big on fun and big on education. And I am so glad to be back. Happy painting.