 Well hello my friends and visitors in Monet Cafe. We're going to get a little tropical today and I'm sharing some of the photos from our recent cruise. It was wonderful. We needed this break. Amazing. And I got some great photos and there's the hubby. I don't know why he's next to a monster picture, but again we needed this relaxing time and I got a chance to take some great photos and I got a good shot of these golden blue macaws. I thought I'd share a few little fun facts because art is definitely educational. Now these next photos are not my photos, but just some pictures of beautiful macaws. And here's some interesting things about them. Did you know they can live up to 80 years? That's pretty amazing. And they also have a wingspan that is at least or up to 60 inches long. They're just beautiful in flight. They also make great pets. They are great at communicating and talking and very connected and loving with their owners. So anyway, again this is the photo that I took. I did do another video on this where I talked about how to get an accurate rendering or drawing before you even start. Now this is the final painting and in today's lesson I'm going to talk a whole lot about depth of field and how to create that depth in your painting. And I'll also add a little bit about light and shadows too because this particular photograph had a lot of that in it. Now this is part of the video from part one where I did the drawing and the sketching. And it was crazy. I did it upside down. I turned the reference photo upside down and you'd be amazed at how accurate you can get your drawing because you're not focusing on what the thing is. You're focusing more on spatial relationships and shapes. Okay, so now is here where I'm going to get started. And I'm going to be quiet now and let you listen to my instruction from the actual video. Alright, now I did a little bit more adjusting to this parrot's head. It's not exact but the great thing is that this parrot won't care if it looks exactly like him as long as the anatomy is correct. The difference with that is that if you're doing a human portrait and it's someone who is expecting it to look like them you got to be a little more specific. But you know so he's got some a little bit of a different look than the other parrot. But it's okay with this as long as it's not off with his structure of being a parrot. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and get started on this. But I wanted to point out a couple of things with my approach before I even start. Notice in the photograph that the background especially back here is going to be the most out of focus. Then this tree in the background like a palm tree this is the trunk is out of focus as well with a bunch of shadows from the leaves. This little branch coming across here is out of focus and this bird is actually out of focus. This bird is in the shadows too so he's going to be quite a bit darker in value than this bird. All of those things of addressing that to begin with and thinking about how you're going to approach it is going to lend to the believability and the good art of your painting in the end. It creates that sense of depth and if you've ever worked with photography it's something that's called depth of field. It creates a really neat effect where your your eye will focus on the main subject which in this case is going to be this parrot. I really love the light coming across him right here. I need to move his shoulder down a little. That's what's bothering me. And so we want to we want to control where our viewer looks. So the eye is going to be drawn of course to this parrot. You know more of the detail in the head and his body here and then it's going to meander around the rest of the painting and find interesting things to see. So our eye does not work like a camera. That's the disadvantage of working from a photograph. Unless you have a photograph this one happens to be done with an aperture setting that creates that depth of field. But a lot of photographs will be detail everywhere. You will see detail in the back and detail in the tree and detail in this. And if we paint that it's not believable as to how our eye works. For example just right now look at something near you. If it might be a glass on a table. It might be a plant on your counter or pencil or whatever. When you look at that thing your eye is not focusing on the other stuff. In other words in your peripheral vision it's blurry and it progressively gets more blurry the further away and the wider the distance. So we need to remember that when painting. That's a mistake that we often make early in our art career. We feel like we have to paint everything in detail. All these little marks on the tree and all these little leaves back here. But that won't be believable. That's what's so great about some of the masters. They figured that out a long time ago and made really beautiful art. It's art versus a photo reproduction. I'm impressed with people who do realism like that. It's amazing and the work that it takes to do that. But we're not doing that here. We're trying to create Monet Café. We're trying to create art. And I think a lot of us love Impressionism and that loose painterly feel. So that's what I'm trying to approach right now. So what I'm going to do is when am I again like I said in this first part one of this. When am I not experimenting. Because this is the surface that I made myself. It's a homemade surface. I know that it does not have a lot of grit to it. Okay. So I'm going to be a little limited in how many layers I can get down. Now here's an advantage of something that you can do. I've done some of this in some of my past videos. But certain things you can do won't affect the layers. Okay. You can add more pastel and one is watercolor. Okay. So I have not done watercolor before on this prepared surface that I've made. So I'm going to attempt to do watercolor. The reason being I want to create a loose and impressionistic background. More blurry. I'm going to work on the background with the watercolor. Probably do more pastel on this bird. A little bit on this bird. Progressively get less with the pastel. And then I will hopefully be able to get more layers on it. Because the watercolor won't eat up the tooth of this. So I'm going to give it a try. If I notice that the watercolor is not working. Because this is matte board. I think it'll work. I'll pause and you'll learn not to do that. So let's see. I'm going to give it a try. Now what you see here is my it's basically a travel watercolor palette that I have. And it's a neat little thing. I've kind of over filled it with paints. Just to get every color I possibly could in there. And it's really neat because it has a little section over there to the upper left that is a place where I put my thumb. And if you want to hold it and paint. I'm left-handed. So I would hold it with my right hand and paint with my left. It's a little messy right now. Like I said I have so many colors in there. But anyway now I'm going to get started actually painting the under painting. All right. So I can already see now that just doing the little bit of watercolor wash almost has helped with the sense of value. If I squint my eyes and look at the photo. I can see that that back pair is way darker. Even the highlight on his chest that I have here is a lot darker than the high. Not a lot but darker than the highlight here. So he's sometimes we have a tendency to go oh that's bright. But you got to compare your values with your lightest value. It's always good to get a your lightest value in mind and your darkest value in mind. I know probably the darkest dark in here. Of course it's going to be under here. It's going to be under this log. And back in here is some of the darkest values. But I don't want to make those as dark as these. Because again I want this guy to be the center focus. So these will be more of a muted dark. You know not quite as dark in value as as some of these to bring to bring him in the foreground. So yeah I can squint my eyes and kind of get an idea that the watercolor has helped to push that back. Now this because I put blue on top of this lime green. I mean it appears as green and it's a sky. It doesn't matter. You know as long as you have your values right you can get still creative with color. But I probably will go back in with some pastel. I'll play around with it and add some blues in there and a hint of those palm fronds in the background. They are very blurry. So all we have to do is give a hint of that. All right I'm going to work a little more and let's see how this goes. Okay so I don't want to get too carried away with it all being about watercolor. This was just to get a few basic values in to get going. And again if I squint my eyes I can see my lightest lights are definitely going to be here. I've tried to preserve some of the luminosity there. This even though our brain says that this part of the um of the parrot's face is white. It is if you shine the bright light on it. It's still going to be grayed out a little bit here. It's not as white as you think it is. Again you squint your eyes and you see again this is the brightest bright. Of course this is some and then the back of his head super bright and then right down here on this rock. So those are definitely the lightest lights and then of course our sky is going to be light but it it appears more light up in this area than it does. These are deeper blues down here in the shadows. Okay so the rest of this is all shadowy. We've got some lighter parts on this tree back here but it's still not as light as some of these lights in here. Okay so getting an idea value. Again value is king. So this is just a way to get some values down before you start and to kind of have a good head start before laying the pastels down. So let's get started with pastels. Yay! All right so I've picked out some basic pastels to start with and you kind of add and change things as you go but it's a good idea to go ahead and start with a general palette. I've got of course some of the brightest brights that are going to be part of that foreground bird with his feathers. He's going to be the star of the show and I know that he has some of the lightest lights on him. Now one thing I did want to point out is when I use a surface like this I want to make sure I preserve that luminosity. In other words this is as light as it's going to get. Even if I take this and put over it or some of these others you're going to kind of lose that brightness so it's good to be sparing with covering things up like that. I kind of want to let that show through a little bit. An artist who is an expert at that is Rita Kirkman. She prepares her own surfaces usually with a golden underpainting and she has this beautiful way of allowing it to show through and it really makes the painting just pop. It's so beautiful. Which leads me to mention this. This is a product that she uses. I could have used this instead of watercolor. This is called Color Fix Primer. It also has a tooth to it but what I do and what she does is I take some of this and I literally just take a brush and I do an underpainting kind of like I did with this but in a one color one value study. I use water and I'll have to do it. I think I have one where I have a few where I've used this before as a value underpainting. So you can do it all with one color too. I just happen to have the watercolor handy. The cool thing about pastels is there are so many different ways that you can work with it and do an underpainting so a lot of it's kind of just you know your own personal preference and experimenting like we're doing now. But anyway, so I'm going to start with these pastels here and give a little commentary as I paint. Let's do it. I wanted to point out some differences here. I'm moving along pretty quickly and I sometimes thinking things I want to say while I'm painting instead of just doing the voiceover and I wanted to point out the noticeable differences between the brightness of the foreground bird and the dullness darker values of the background bird. That's what's going to cause this bird to appear to be more in the foreground. Also too, something I get a lot on our channel and in our Facebook group are questions about keeping things bright and not letting your colors get dull or overworked and that is basically what I've learned in the past is that that is exactly what we do a lot of times is we overwork a painting and it ends up looking more muted like this one. This one is purposely done that way but if you want to keep your paintings bright and fresh with color we need to work on something I call it efficiency of stroke. I don't know if that's a real term for it but it basically means being purposeful with your strokes you can still be free and loose but don't just keep going so much and keep correcting, keep correcting, keep correcting. Before you know it you have lost the brilliance of the pastels and you've created a muddy color. The more colors you put on top of each other the more brightness or brilliance you lose. I mean you can get you know three or four layers usually with a good quality paper but when you keep going you lose that and it and it does get muddy and it gets muted looking and not fresh and vibrant. Now again my surface is a homemade service so I'm a little restricted in how many layers I can get anyway so it's probably why I'm working a little bit more carefully about not overworking it so anyway that's just a little tip of how to keep your colors brighter and fresher.