 Hello my friends and visitors and welcome to Monet Cafe, my home studio where I bring you free art lessons, specializing in pastel art, but sometimes other things too. So welcome everyone and today it's a rainy day where I am and I love creating on rainy days. I haven't had a lot of time to paint lately and I know a lot of you can relate because I see your comments of how you just long to get some free time. Life is just too busy isn't it? So I was fortunate to sneak in a little bit of time sneaking away from my other responsibilities and get into my studio today. So what I'm going to do today is I'm just going to share with you the process of how I go about, especially in a limited time, of how I choose what I'm going to paint and some of my thought processes. I get a lot of your questions and comments about how do I choose a photo, how do I work from a photo that maybe is lackluster, doesn't have a lot of color, how do I choose my color palette and so I thought, you know, I don't have a particular plan other than letting you join me in my journey of starting a painting and where I go from there. So I'm glad you're here with me and let's get started. I hope we're going to have some fun and create beautiful things. Alright so getting started is usually about finding a good photograph or some sort of reference image to get started from and I took some photos recently when we were in St. Augustine Beach, Florida. It's just such a beautiful place and some of the days I was there, it was a little bright for great photo but I had enough good material to snap some shots and work from, you know, even if it's not a perfect photograph. So anyway I was flipping through here and looking at some of my images and I found one that I really liked which is, oh that's got some beautiful color in those waves there and sand and I believe it, yes it was one of these. Notice that again I always am, I'm just a fan of the S shaped curve and going off into the distance. I also like how this just has a little bit of water showing back there. I love something that leads your eye and you just want to go back there and it's almost like you want to climb that hill and see what's over there but there were a couple more that I really liked. This one I have the horizon line a little bit too in the center so if I was to paint this I would move it either down or up more. There's another one that I like even better than these. This is looking really nice. I like that one but I just did a painting that was vertical so I was thinking I might do, yes that's the one right there. That's just got some nice energy going on in it and even though this is one of the things I'm going to talk about we've got kind of a bland colored sky and the sky is like the same color as the sand. I'm going to reevaluate that photo and kind of let probably the color of the sky set the mood so sometimes I just put on some music and I just let the music guide me and just choose a color to start working with and the other colors just kind of flow from there. So I'll try to talk through that process a little bit but this is going to be my choice. Yes I like this photo. Let's get to it. So now I just show a little bit of my setup. I like to gear my videos. I know we've got different levels of artists that view these and come to our Monet Cafe art group as well. So we've got beginner to advanced and really some really advanced beautiful work in our group but I never want to forget the beginner. And sometimes when we're teaching or doing anything we can take some things for granted that you know these things and sometimes you don't. If you hear tap tap tap that's my little Boston terrier. So anyway I thought I'd just talk through a little bit of this. I just have you know people do various things of how they set this up. I have a piece of foam core board that I use to put up whatever surface I'm going to be working on. I have a system that I'm going to probably tear all this off. I have a way to keep my my surface on here without having to tape all the way around it. It's just a little hinge system that I use but right now I have a little challenge with my UART paper. This is UART sanded paper 400 grade or grit and it's worked. Okay this can happen in humidity and we have a lot of humidity in Florida so sometimes my paper does this but someone in our group shared a wonderful tip of how you can iron your UART paper and I have another video I'll try to put a little information button in the top of the YouTube video so you can click that or just find it on how to straighten out work to UART paper. Anyway now I already know I'm going to have a horizontal format so I've got to get that going. This is just a simple piece of aluminum foil that's going to be my dust catcher. It's very easy and cheap and effective. I keep down here. I like to clean my pastels as I work if there's any dirt. I used to do it on the side of my painting but it kind of gets in the way of just the whole process. So I end up keeping a piece of newsprint somewhere near me. So this one's from the previous painting and I just mark, make a quick little mark and it cleans it off before I start using it if it's dirty. Sometimes it's not. So anyway that's just a little general of how I get started. I like to keep my tools close by. Many have asked what is this little blending tool? It's just a piece of pipe foam insulation that you can buy at any hardware store and learn this trick from Karen Margulis, incredible pastel artist. So I don't blend a lot but when I do this is a good way to do it. Somebody else on our channel told me I saved this wine cork top that you can use to blend. I haven't tried it yet but I thought well hey I'm gonna stick it over there and give it a shot. So anyway just things like that and your pastels readily accessible and then the rest is just to prep work is getting our color palette and getting our sketch in. So let's get started with that. Okay so this is my basic setup. I had to do a little bit more taping down with my tape because I ironed the UART paper. It still had a little bit of working to it. I hope it's not too bad but that just secured it down a little bit more than I normally do. And I like to keep my iPad or whatever reference image I'm using on my right side since I'm left handed. That way if I had it on this side, which I've done sometimes, I mean it's not terrible but it actually is just easier when you don't have to look over your arm. This way it's more open for me to paint. You guys may have noticed that I often keep my filming on this side though so that you're not looking over my arm and the camera is over here. So little things like that sometimes help just to where you're comfortable painting. And so you know kind of maybe think about where you put your reference image so it's just easy to see. Okay so now I'm just gonna get started but I wanted to mention that I often will play around with the reference image. I'll put it in some sort of photo editing software and play around maybe oversaturated a little bit, play around with some filters and all that really does for me. It's not like I'm gonna try to recreate exactly how I've changed it but it kind of gives me some creative ideas and sets a mood perhaps. I think sometimes when we get started we try to paint the photograph exactly everything, even all the detail, all the colors and everything and that's great when you get started. But eventually with a lot of practice we learn to realize that the photograph is basically just a photograph. We want to use it as a guide and interpret it in our way that we see as art. So it's really just inspiration and that doesn't come easy at first. That takes a lot of practice and I'm still practicing too. So anyway, so I might play around with the photograph a little bit then I'll get started with the sketch and then we're gonna pick out the palette. Yippee! All right so I've done just a little bit of editing to the photograph to really get a little bit more contrast and to see things a little better and kind of get rid of some of the whiteness of the sand. And now sometimes I like to be careful if I'm trying to do an accurate drawing of something like a person or an animal to have my sizes in the same ratio. This is actually a little wider format than this is horizontally and in this case it doesn't matter because you can kind of just make it work. And now I just have a new pastel, Prismacolor new pastel, it's a harder pastel. I can actually paint with these too but they're better for beginning a painting rather than ending a painting. Soft pastels are better for the final, like the icing on the cake is the real softies. And there's a great catalog you can get from Dakota Art that has all kinds of information about pastels and papers and good info. I'll have to share a picture of that catalog. But anyway, so this is just to get in a basic sketch and I got some other decisions to make such as underpainting and things like that. So I'm just kind of looking at, I like to usually break these. I have a smaller one somewhere but I'm gonna break it because often I like to use the size of it. All right, so now I've got me just a little piece here. All right, so I like to work in shapes rather than lines and I'm already feeling that buckle a little bit of that paper here. And I don't have much of a skyline here. It's really pretty minimal but I know I've got this little bank here coming down. Might have a little high there or the end of the trail, so to speak. And then I've got some grasses coming up here. They're gonna be real wispy. And then just kind of, I'm not worried about that fence or anything right now. This is just a general shape. We're gonna have coarse grasses going up there. I'm just kind of getting in where this background line goes. Definitely feeling some of the shape of the paper there that's bubbled up, so that's okay. We want to see, it'll keep me impressionistic, right? Now this is going to be a darker area back here but it's a little further away than this front area. This will be the darkest but this is gonna be in the, it's in the shadow too. The sun, you know, you can already kind of tell where the sun's coming from. It's hitting on some of these grasses here so you can kind of get an idea. You want to keep that in mind as you sketch. Okay, so I know I have this little area here. Again, you're just getting in basics. All this other stuff, if it's not just right, can kind of be corrected as you go. Now I do kind of want to look where the entry way to this is. So sometimes I'll pause if I don't have the same ratio of paper to the image that I'm drawing from and bigger is better always when you're starting out a painting. Just get it nice and loose and free and fresh, okay? So this is actually gonna be some grasses coming around here in this area a little bit down there and then there's more sand. There's like a bank right here, all right? And then this is gonna just come around and have that fence just kind of getting the flow. That's kind of what I think of when you're starting a painting. You want to capture the energy. Now I know what exits like about, not quite, that's a halfway mark where my iPad dot is, it comes down a little more than halfway. Here's about halfway. So it's gonna exit right about here, okay? So that's just sometimes you learn to visually measure quickly the more you do this. So just getting some general shapes, okay? So there we go. Looks like a mess, but that's okay because you don't need to do anything special at this point. We've got a general curvy road, it'll curve a little more when we add little highlights and things. Then we've got our blue water back there and now I just have to make a decision. Kind of want to get something down on the paper of how am I going to do an underpainting? I can do a complimentary underpainting where I put down a lot of the opposite colors of what I'm gonna be using. In this case, if you're gonna be using greens and anything in the nature kind of palette, you typically do an underpainting. Complimentary colors would be oranges and yellows and reds and things like that. But I don't know, I'm not feeling that right now. I'm actually thinking, I might use, I have some acrylic inks I haven't used in a long time and I think I'm gonna try those. The neat thing about UART paper and a lot of pastel surfaces, not all of them, there's one in particular you can't really add water to which is Sennelier LeCart. I think someone said you could but I've never had any luck. But UART paper, quite a bit of the surfaces with pastels, the sanded surfaces, you can add water to. UART is very durable. So you've got a lot of options as to what you wanna lay down as an underpainting. You can use watercolor, you can use thinned out oil paint, you can use acrylic paint. You can use gouache, you can use wax pastels which I've used before. Anything that you don't wanna fill up the tooth of the paper. So anything that's just kinda glazed over the surface you can use and it works great for an underpainting. So yeah, I think I'm gonna try some of those acrylic inks and maybe lay down a few other little new pastels lightly and kinda blend those with some alcohol. Yeah, let's do that. All right, here we go. It's always fun and always fresh. All right, so I decided to use some of the new pastels by Prismacolor to lay down a basic underpainting. I'm gonna do an alcohol wash over that and then apply some acrylic inks to get the real darkest darks. And the reason new pastels will work okay for an underpainting is because they're harder, they don't fill up the tooth so much, okay? But I love to get the surface covered before I start working on any little detail like that. So this is a great way to do it. Now as far as color palette goes, this is just a little tray that I use to travel with. I've broken up almost every color of my new pastels and so it's just easy to travel with these. And I am going to be kinda choosing a color palette and a lot of times I let the sky set the mood of, which actually is a great way to think of it because often the sky does set the mood because almost everything in the land on the earth is a reflection of what's happening in the sky, okay? And I don't know why, I'm feeling some pinks going on back here, I'm just kinda seeing that. And so I kinda wanna get that but I wanna make sure I get these values right. I know value is king, I always talk about that. It gets, you get better the more you do it. But if you have trouble with seeing values, there's this neat little grayscale value finder. I don't know, it's a couple of bucks. You can get it on most art supply places online. And it's got these neat little keyhole things. So in your reference photo, you can kind of judge what that value is. But again, it gets better the more you do it, the better you get at doing it. And values tend to decrease in the distance, okay? So a lot of little tricks you can learn. But I'm gonna go with this, notice how it kind of comes out dark on this paper but I'm setting a mood to the sky and I just really like this pink feel. And this is going to get blended in with alcohol or water. You can do either or alcohol just dries faster. And I'm gonna let this be real flowy and drippy. And again, this is just to fill up this background. All right, so I've got the kind of pinkish peachy sky. I really like the idea of this water that's back here. It's gonna be a little bit more right here in between the two. I like the idea of like a turquoisey water instead of that like almost royal blue water. I don't know, I just like that idea. I'm gonna keep this kind of light in color in mood, you know, springy and fresh. I don't know, maybe because it is spring right now. Okay, so let's see. We do need to get in some of our deeper colors. I like to use purples a lot in shadows but we gotta get kind of some earthy colors going on too. And by the way, what I'm doing now, even though I'm kind of altering the colors a little bit, I'm doing what's called local color, meaning you're doing a color that would be more natural to the scene instead of complimentary color that would be opposite to the color. Complimentary color is nothing more than opposite the color wheel. So if your grasses are green, you got a lot of green grasses going on somewhere, complimentary is gonna be red. It's on the opposite side of the color wheel. The color wheel is your friend. A lot of people are like, oh, that's cool, what is it? It's got so, just read your color wheel. You will get so much information from it. I have a video that really helps learning about colors, the color wheel, warm and cool colors, what colors to use together. Oh, that's so pretty. I'm such like a magpie for color. That's the most beautiful blue. Okay, so gonna get going on this and I'm gonna, again, this is more like local color. So I'm just, I'm looking quickly at, I wanna keep some energy and direction to this too. I'm looking quickly at just the, my reference photo, and I'm just kinda jotting in some of these darks here. Okay, I've got more over here. I'm not worried about that fence right now. Put some more darks back there. Like I said, this is going to be done. I'm gonna make this darker. But this backside of this hill, it's gonna be dark. I even see some pretty blues in there that we'll add later. Okay, so we got, direction really helps with how things move and flow, okay? All right, so let me get in some of this. We've got, if you squint your eyes, you can see more value, value more clearly if you're squinting than if you're just looking at it with your eyes wide open. All right, so I'm gonna get in some of these other colors in here. All right, so I've got the pinks. I've got the turquoise. I've got the purples. Now, I think I wanna get in some good rusty colors in here too. I've got one that I started with, and this is kind of a medium kind of a value here too, that I'm getting in some of those little areas that are a little bit darker. And I'm just, I'm not going really hard with this right now. It's kind of a little light touch coming down here. Wanna kinda get that road a little bit more defined there and where things are going. Okay, I'm keeping all the ones that I've used in a little section in this box. And now I'm seeing where, this is actually not a new pastel, it's another pastel. See how that is. I like these blues here for this side of the hill. This isn't shadow right over here. So, I might can actually use that turquoise. I wanna keep it consistent. So, keep your colors kind of harmonious. So again, as long as you're getting value correct, you can just really kind of get super creative with color as long as it's kind of consistent throughout the piece. All right, so I'm getting the mood going now. That's the main thing. All right, I'm just gonna paint a little bit and then I'll get the alcohol going. So I have to resist the tendency to keep painting and not get too many colors going on here. But I've just again set a mood kind of with a general color palette, keeping values accurate to the scene, but they don't have to be the exact same color. So now all I'm gonna do, I keep a little spritzer bottle. What is this? Some kind of a vanilla and sugar spritzer. So if you have any of these, they make a pretty fine mist, which is why I like to use this. This just has alcohol and water in it. I think it's probably two thirds alcohol and one third water. And I just use it to spray. And at this point, I'm gonna need some paper towels, which I'll see back here, because I want to keep my brush cleaned out. I may grab some water real quick too. All I'm gonna do, I work top to bottom or sections because I don't wanna contaminate areas. This is gonna bleed and run a little bit in here. But we're just gonna basically get the underpainting kind of set. When you add the alcohol to it, it's gonna make it to where it doesn't blend as much when we add the pastels on top of it. So all right, I'm gonna get started. Okay, so now I have my water, just a cup of water down here to clean my brush, my paper towels. And I like to use the bigger, the brush the better. I actually could use one bigger than this. But sometimes I'll keep a small brush if I have something in little areas or whatever, but I think this one will probably suffice. So this is going to be just to set the mood and you want to stay loose with this. It's okay if drips happen. I kind of like the drips. So I put down a really good amount of the alcohol and I just start kind of blending and working. And brush strokes can be random. I'm careful to try to not get the colors mixed too much in certain areas, because you don't want like all that dark coming up in the sky. And I just rinsed my brush again. And now I've got enough of this alcohol down here to be able to work that little water back there. And maybe blend that a little bit more right in there. Set in a nice little tone. And once again, this is not anything more than what you're setting your painting on top of. I kind of look back at the reference photo to once you get in these areas, you can get your strokes kind of a little bit more in the way that they are in the painting or in the photo. All right, so this is dry now. And this got a little muddy here. I got too much water on it there. But at this point, that's the cool thing. It can be a mess. It doesn't matter. We've got some values in and now we can get started. Now I have these acrylic inks. These are acrylic inks by Daylar Rowney. I hope I'm saying that right. And I learned this technique. I'm not very experienced at it, but I learned of this technique from Bethany Fields, another great pastel artist. And this is just kind of a deep, deep green. It almost looks like a black, but I'm using just a really old bristly brush. And the cool thing about that is, it keeps it really loose looking. So we're just gonna take where those darkest darks are down there, where the grasses are. I'm just getting in my darks. Now this is the darks are really what makes the painting start to come alive. And you wanna keep them obviously in the areas where the values are the darkest. It's not that hard. But now I'm just using this brush to kind of paint these darks in. The pastels can go over top of this. This does not fill up the tooth that much. I see this little area right here. It's almost like a little indention area where the grasses are coming up. So I kinda wanna get that section that comes out like right there. The cool thing about just a rough brush like this, is nature is pretty, I like to say harmoniously random. It still has harmony, but there's like just a neat variety to it. Now I don't wanna get too much of this back there. I'm just little bits right back in there, okay? So these are the darkest darks. I'm gonna dab a little bit more of this in here. And as it gets off my brushes, as I'm moving back, because values get lighter in the distance or less value in the distance. All right, so I still have it. I'm squinning, squinning, squinning. That's, these two are definitely the darkest parts. So you see how I just added those dollops of dark, dark on top of that? Even more. Really dark down in here. And again, you can put pastel on top of this because it will, this doesn't fill up the tooth. All right, I'm gonna be quiet and just work a little. All right, so this one is a little bit more of a green. I don't have my glasses on, so I can't see the names of the colors, but I'll try to share what they are. This one's not quite as dark as that other really deep one was. You can kind of see this color here. It's almost like a deep, mustery color. All right, and my brush is a little wet. So see, that's not as dark in value as this one was. So that's why it works a little bit better for further away. Okay, so this is the purple I'm going to be using now. I put my glasses on, so maybe I can actually see the color. Velvet violet, that is teeny. I actually wanted to get a color I had seen called, I think it's purple lake, it's a dark, ooh, here that thunder, I love it. It's a dark deep purple, which it was out of stock when I ordered it or would have ordered it. But this actually is more, it's actually almost an iridescent kind of a purple. And it might work for the purposes because I don't need a real deep purple on this side of the sand where it's going to be shaded. So again, I'm gonna use my bristle brush. I'm just going to work with this and have fun. You know, that's what we're doing here.