 Hello my artistic friends. This is Susan Jenkins here in Monet Cafe, my little home studio, where I bring you art lessons and tutorials and just creative things that might make you happy. And I'm really happy today because I did an experiment that was a success and I thought it might help some other people. I'm constantly trying to find creative ways and other different things that I can do in creating my paintings. And often I'm trying to do things on a budget, like a lot of people are. I was just having a conversation to a comment of one of my videos about just that, how sometimes we need to come up with some ways to save because these art supplies can get expensive. And one of the things that we can do is to find other ways to use the papers if you're doing pastel paintings because pastel papers can get pricey. But watercolor paper is a lot less expensive, especially just kind of some basic watercolor paper. And so I did have a question on my channel about can you use watercolor paper for pastel paintings? Well, here's proof right here. This was my experiment. Oops, sorry for the shadow. And this is a piece of watercolor paper. And I'm going to kind of go into more detail what I did, but I'll give you a quick little idea first. First of all, all I did was I did a watercolor underpainting. Again, I'll do an example of this. Just on a regular piece of watercolor paper. And I typically, you may have seen from my other videos, like to do watercolor underpaintings on pastel paper, the correct type that can take water, such as UART paper. But this is really handy because this is a lot less expensive than UART paper. So what I did is the underpainting first, I let it dry, and then I applied this product called Clear Gesso. Now the neat thing about Clear Gesso is that it has a little bit of a grit to it, which is what you need for pastel painting. So I was laying in bed one night, it was getting close to the early morning hours, and I don't know why this popped into my head about trying to apply Clear Gesso, perhaps, to watercolor paper. I may have seen it in another video and just not remembered it, for some reason I woke up that morning and I said, I've got to try this. And so I did, and it worked. So after I applied the Clear Gesso, you get a rough enough surface to go ahead and apply pastel on top. So that's what I'm going to be doing today, is just giving you guys a little tutorial of how I do it. It's not very hard. And I'm gonna pick a reference photo here. In my last video I talked about using Paint My Photo for finding reference materials. And these are just some of the ones that I saved. I thought it would be fun to do some little bees and flowers, kind of like in this one, I added a couple little buzzing bees around. So that's a nice photo there. It's either between that or the daisies. All right, so I've got some choices to make. Let me decide and then we're gonna get ready to experiment and do something fun. All right, let's go. All right, so I'm gonna get started now and I decided on the cute little Bumblebee painting with the daisies. Daisy's just make me happy. And I'm really happy today because it happens to be my birthday. And of all the things I would like to do on my birthday, sharing art with my friends. And I truly feel like you guys are my friends, even though I don't know any of you personally, I get to feel like I'm actually with you when I'm creating and it's pretty awesome. And so it's a great day. It's my birthday. It's raining right now here in the Tampa, Florida area. And it sounds so wonderful. It's one of my favorite times to create. It's just so cozy. I thought I would share real quickly too. I had someone ask about, even with my pastel work, why I don't have like a border. I used to use tape and I would tape all around the border, even with watercolor, so that when you finish your painting, you have a nice little border. You peel it off and it looks really nice. It is a neat thing. And I do that sometimes still. But I came up or actually saw someone else do it with a way that's pretty handy where you just, actually I usually put this to the back of the paper, first two pieces of tape, put it up here and then I put a strip across of it. But I already had a strip here. So I'm just going to go ahead and stick this one down. And it's watercolor paper. It's going to warp a little bit, but I'm not going to worry about that for this one. Okay, so I've got my watercolor paper up here and we're going to get started on the bumblebee. And sometimes I will work with a sketch and sometimes I won't. For this particular one, I am going to do a quick sketch. Sorry for that little bit of a shadow behind my hand. I may add a light to fix that. But I want to get some things in here pretty good. So I am going to go ahead and do a sketch, but I'm still going to keep it loose. You know this is called Monet Cafe for a reason. We don't want to get too fussy and we don't want to get worried and bogged down with too many details. Life should be free and spontaneous. Okay, so I'm going to fix the shadow a little bit and come back to sketching. Okay, I have enough in here to get going. I decided against the bee. It's actually not a bumblebee. It's a honeybee that happens to be on this flower. I love honeybees. I love all bees. But I didn't want to get that fussy this early. So I think what I'm going to do is focus on this and then throw in some bees at the end, kind of like I did with these little guys here. Just something, some suggestive bees, maybe further away. I didn't want that to distract from these flowers. So that's the neat thing about being an artist is you have that creative license to do that. Okay, so what I'm going to do here, I had another person ask a question, how do I decide on a color palette? And sometimes it's just kind of my mood. But often I alter a photo based on just some good rules of art. Like for example, the things in the background of this photo, the particular photograph are actually very green. The whole thing's really green. Kind of like the last painting demo that I, the reference photo I was using. And so I happened to think that in the back some cooler colors and maybe some purples would look good far away. And then maybe more of the richer, more yellowy greens up front. So that's kind of how I approach it right now. And then I kind of just get kind of inspiration as I go. I'm not getting fussy with going around, super specifically around these flowers. Right now I'm just working on this background. I've got some of the flowers I may leave. Well my brush is dirty, I didn't even realize that. But some of them I may kind of just let the water go over and let some paint cover them. Now the neat thing about watercolor is it's almost like creating a channel for your paint to follow. I used to when I was first starting in watercolors. Watercolor is not my most experienced medium, but I love it. And so I'm always playing around with it. But when I was first starting, I got real fussy with it. And it took me a long time to realize how to let the water work for you and create the beautiful, just, oh, spontaneity is a good word to hear again, but just the life that's in it. It's just so wonderful. Okay, so I'm just getting in some water. And again, this is going to act as a channel for my colors to flow. And it's okay if this background color has a wash that kind of goes all the way down because I'm gonna add my darker colors down at the bottom. And also, colors always lighten with watercolor. You put them on, you think, man, that's a nice rich color. And then give it just a few minutes, it'll dry, and it's a lot lighter than you put it on. So it's very forgiving in that respect, but it's not very forgiving with the respect of keeping your lights. If you cover up something really dark, you can't get it back unless you put down some sort of other medium. So I don't like that about watercolor. Now I've been really loving this phthalo blue color that's right here. It's just such a beautiful color. And I mix that with a magenta and sometimes can get a pretty nice purple. So let me work on that right now. I really like that color. Now I have the underpainting watercolor done. I wanted to mention another little trick I learned is that I had spoken about the watercolor paper buckling. And sure enough, it did because I don't have it taped around the edges or anything. But there's a neat little thing you can do. If it buckles, you take it and you wet it on the back as well. So I lifted it up. You can do it before the fact or after you've already painted your watercolor on here. I did it after and I just did an application of water on the back of this covering the whole back. And sure enough, it kind of straightened itself out. It's kind of neat. Another thing I wanted to talk about here before I put down the Gesso product is just a little bit more about underpaintings. I've got quite a few videos where I've done an underpainting and I wanted to describe a little bit of the different ways that you can do it. One is you can just do an underpainting with just solid color. I could take this. I don't like working on just white paper to begin with. So if I don't feel like doing a detailed or somewhat detailed underpainting, I can just tone the paper like a beautiful magenta or gold or whatever. Then there's another type you can do where you do actually do some of the scene. You kind of paint it out, but you can use a difference between local color or complimentary color. Local color just means you're using colors that are kind of natural to the scene anyway. That's pretty much what this one is here. I have a little bit of complimentary color going on with the purples and stuff, but complimentary color is where you lay down like the opposite on the color wheel, your complimentary color down so that when you put your pastel on top, it really makes it stand out more. For example, I've done the heads of these flowers in local color because the color of the Daisy heads are more orangey yellowy. However, I've done the background a little bit of a complimentary color because it shows in the image of them being green, but I like purples. I like purples for shadows and I like these lighter values in the back because this is far away. It's actually a little bit more of the field, but you can leave it so impressionistic that you're not sure is it field, is it sky? So anyway, a little bit more about how I do the underpainting. Okay, now I'm going to just simply apply the liquid gesso, the clear gesso in contrast to regular gesso is white. You'll see when I put this on here, this is clear now. I shake it up before I get started. Okay, and I think last time I did this, I did it on a brush, but on this case I'm gonna do it on a foam brush just so it's consistent and I'm just going to apply this stuff. And it is probably going to blend the watercolor a little bit. Ooh, I just spilled a lot of it down there. Thank goodness I keep that paper down. Okay, so, but it doesn't matter if it blends your watercolor. It almost adds to that impressionistic feel. It's kind of neat actually. Put down a big dollop of it there. Yeah, that's kind of nice, I like that. It's dreamy, so dreamy. And again, this is just so awesome that you're basically making your own pastel paper here. And I'm putting down enough because I wanna get that grit so that I can apply the pastels to it. Pastels have got to have that gritty surface. I feel like I didn't get enough up here. It just doesn't look thick enough. Okay, so let me look around at that and see if I got a good application. I think I did. Again, the paper's gonna buckle a little bit. And now I'm just going to take my blow dryer again and blow it dry. I'm gonna rinse this out though because I like to reuse these again, of course. So then once I get all this dry, I will get started on the actual pastel. My little dog Jackson sometimes gets curious about what I'm doing. What do you think of that painting, huh? Now I have the Gesso All Dry on here and I'm gonna be quiet and see if you can hear that it does have a sanded surface. Can you hear that? And underneath my fingers, it feels like sand. So it's actually, it really makes for a nice pastel surface with the other one that I did. I really was very happy about that. Oh, typically I put down something to catch my pastels down here. I don't have it, so let me just put down a paper towel so I don't make a total mess. Pastels, that's one thing. They do get a little dusty, but I don't mind. All right, so now we're ready to go to lay some pastels down. Now what I'm gonna do here, I've already got, like I said, the nice kind of complementary color going down under the grasses. But with watercolor, we know we preserve the light and you tend to work lighter to darker. With pastels, it's the opposite. We can work darker to lighter. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get down some good darks in here. I still wanna get down, still a little bit more of this complementary color for some darks. And I know that behind my day, I'm squinting my eyes. It's a good tip to squint your eyes to see where are your darkest values. I'm just using kind of like, got a little pastel that's gotten really flat. Oh my goodness, I can't believe I forgot. I have got to go get my birthday present. I sound like, what was it, Gollum? My precious, my birthday present. I got a set of Terry Ludwig pastels for my birthday. And I haven't even used them yet. So I've got to go break them out. Let me get the rest of this purple going on down here. And then I'll go get them. Man, I totally forgot about that. I am so glad I just thought of that. Now these are the Terry Ludwig set that is the Plin Air set. And I hope I'm saying that right. These French words just mess up a Southern girl like me. But it's P-L-E-I-N air. And it's a word, it's a French word I think that just means painting on location. So it just describes when artists go outdoors and paint not from a photograph, but what they really see. And this set happens to be great for that because it has such a nice variety of colors for your color palette. There's a lot of other different sets you can buy. You can buy one that's more Southwestern, more that's just for portraits. But being that I love landscapes so much, this one suited my needs a lot. So anyway, I love these pastels because they're soft and buttery and beautiful. And so I'm so glad I remembered because I wanna add some of those or maybe just use exclusively this set for this pastel work. All right, here we go. Okay, as you can see, I've been painting along and I really have been able to get down a lot of layers. Typically with pastel paper, even the good pastel paper, you get to a point where you can tell your colors aren't laying down. They start to get kind of muddy. I'm starting to get to that point now, but as you can see, this product did a pretty good job on just watercolor paper. So again, this was a great experiment to help maybe others and myself in getting a way to paint and not have it cost so much. I feel like I need some red down in there. And I've got, I followed this reference photo but I could tell as I've been painting, I have been looking at Karen Margolis's paintings a lot. I really love her style and I don't mean to totally emulate it, but I do love it. It makes me feel good if I even get close to her work. But I do feel like I want to add the original reference photo had a bumblebee right here and it was big. And I feel like I just wanna add a little one back in the back somewhere. And again, I saw how Karen Margolis did on one of her tutorial videos and it was really kind of a neat technique that I used on my other little bumblebees that I did here. Let me pull it up here. Just these little bumblebees. You know, you can get too much to where it just looks kind of fake and not impressionistic or too realistic. And these, they're just a hint. Our minds, our imagination can do a whole lot with a little bit of information if you put other things around that make it believable. So that's what I'm gonna attempt to do right here is to do this bumblebee. And I'll tell you what she said. I feel like it should be right in here and it's gonna have to be really teeny. If it's back here, if I did one up here, it would be bigger. But basically it's three black dots and I'm also working around my camera here. I've got it kind of right in front of my face. It's hard to see. So again, this is kind of, I have to be teeny. This is an incredibly dark green pastel but it will read as black when I put it on here. So let's see here. One, two, I can't even see it. Gotta get around here. Can't see where my pastel is. Two and three. I don't think I got it quite in the right spot. But maybe. And then after you do that, my three dots didn't come out that great. Then you get just kind of a golden color. This one might be a little too golden. Maybe I can use, yeah, this one that I did earlier. And you do it kind of like on the body here. Kind of on the, is that called the thorax? And then you can do a really bright kind of a yellow on the back like the sun's reflecting it. And now these are chunky pastels and they're hard to get specific. But I need a little bit more of that black down here. Let me see if I can get it. You kind of, when something's small like this, you learn to feel your way with your pastel more than seeing it. Okay, so that kind of looks like an indication of a little bee. And then you take just a pastel that is lighter in color. I'm losing my corners on this one here. And you just give it a little wing kind of like behind it. Oops, that's too high. Something like that. And that just gives a little indication of a bee. If you wanna get a little bit more of a darker, kind of an orangey color underneath it, it might like right in there, it might help with that illusion. But I might add a, let me do another couple over here. Let me do like one over here. One, I don't want it on the same level. That's not a good idea. So maybe like, well, maybe even up in here, he's gonna be really teeny. Let's do a head, a body, and well, a middle part and a body. Well, he's even bigger. That's probably not good. All right, let me get the little orange on him. Kind of cover that up. Okay, and then the bright yellow. Probably even find a brighter yellow than this, but okay, let me find a corner. These Terry Ludwigs, they're so soft. Sometimes it's hard to find a spot to even work with. Okay, there we go. And now another little bright spot like for a wing. This one's a little whiter. See if I can do it. And all you're doing is kind of coming off the body part. Just like that. You can kind of do another one too. So there we get the indication of a couple of little bees there. I might fine tune it a little bit, but you get the idea. And if I wanted to get even more layers down, I could spray workable fixative. And I'm gonna grab that product real quick and show you one that I just bought. All right, this is called Blair low odor, very low odor. A lot of times fixatives, they just smell so chemically. Is that a word? Like a chemical. And what you do, this is the matte finish. So it's not gonna have a gloss to it. Is a lot of people use this to spray at the end of their painting. I don't do that because it darkens your painting. But during the working process, like if I wanted to get a few more layers down in here, I could hold it about six to eight inches away from it and spray a light spray on it, moving your hand around. And it's going to darken it, but you get enough layers to put down and it, you know what, maybe I'll just try it right here in one area. Let's just experiment some more. But this is the first time I'm using this particular kind, again, this is a recommendation from Karen Margolis. I don't wanna spray it right here on my pastels. But I haven't used this can yet. So, whoops, it's sprayed on my iPad. Ha, ha, ha. Okay, actually not six to eight, maybe even a little further. You see how that's darkening that up? But that would allow me to get some more. And sometimes I kinda like it when it darkens it in areas like that. I kinda wanna keep this back part a little bit lighter. So, and it doesn't have as much of an odor as my other fixative. So that's really good. My other fixative has like a ball inside of it you shake and this one does not. So anyway, I'm gonna let this dry. I might, I think I will, it darkened it so much. I'm gonna add a little bit more color here. And I'm just gonna keep this loose and free. It kinda came out neat. And as always at the beginning of my videos, I usually share the final and then sometimes at the end. So you'll be able to see how it finally ended up. I'm pretty much done with this. But I hope you had fun. This was a great birthday video for me. What I love doing and I love sharing with you guys. Oh, and I have a great announcement to make. I had the wonderful suggestion by someone on my channel, a comment that they made that said, why don't I start a Facebook page for Monet Cafe where others like all of you guys can share your artwork. I'll share the videos of course. And I would love it if you guys would share what you've created and we could kind of use it as a place to encourage one another of course. And I'm always careful with critiques but only if somebody asked, hey, could you tell me am I doing this right? You know, it would just be a wonderful resource than just me talking all the time. I'd get to hear a little bit from you guys. So I already have it created but there's a lot more I wanna do to it before I'm not even sure if I have it active yet. But that is something that's coming soon and I will be so excited to see some of y'all's work. There's my Southern accent coming in again. And that would just be awesome. So anyway guys, thanks so much for being here with me today and Monet Cafe. I truly feel like I am with my friends. So God bless and I will see you again soon.