 Welcome visitors and subscribers to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm bringing you just a little short video that is actually a fuller longer version video on my Patreon page. But I thought I'd give this channel a little sneak peek into some of the fun things we do. This is part of what I call story time. We have each week where I choose a book and we read through it together and I provide a lesson where my patrons can practice or participate in the lesson and share their results in a homework album just for my patrons. Currently we're in the book called The Pastel Workbook by Jackie Simmons. It's an awesome book with ten lessons and it's a complete course, one of my favorite pastel books. This particular lesson is on choosing a paper color. I get that question so often. So this is just a quick little sample and you can always find a link to my Patreon page at the end of every video and while I will always bring free content here to the Monet Café YouTube channel, the Patreon page is a way for members of the Monet Café family, subscribers on YouTube to support this channel. It really does help me to bring better content and there are two levels, Art Angels for $5 a month and Art Samaritans for $10 a month. Both actually offer exactly the same benefits. I just had a few people ask if they could give a little more. How sweet of them, right? So you can cancel it anytime and you certainly can still get a lot of free content here on Monet Café but I wanted you guys to know that when I mention the Patreon page, they get a little bit extra and it's a lot of fun. Alright, let's get started. Now again, this particular storytime episode came from the Jackie Simmons book, the pastel workbook. I do these storytimes every Wednesday. They're a lot of fun and in this particular lesson I was reading through a section on working on a colored surface. So I read through the lesson and then I actually showed some of the paintings in my studio that I've been working on recently where I have been preparing a lesson for YouTube and my Patreon page using a similar reference image on two different colored surfaces. I do this a lot with a warm underpainting as in this case and it's probably one of my more common question as to why and how do you pick a different colored surface to work on? Just so you know, I have eight different videos. This is a little picture of a playlist that I have on creating your own pastel surface and in these videos, you can find them right here on YouTube. You can discover why and how I create surfaces with different colored backgrounds. Now this is a sped up version of what was in the storytime on my Patreon page where I talk a little bit about how I or I gave an example of how I'm taking two different background colors. I'm basically just using a little new pastel on some watercolor paper. This is a technique I've been showing a lot in the beginner series on the Monet Cafe channel where I create my own surface. I'm using alcohol here just to blend these but you could use water where I blend them and basically just create kind of a tonal wash and then I let it dry and then I apply clear gesso. If you've watched my channel much, you've seen I use this technique a lot because I like to give beginners a way, a method to create a pastel surface sanded surfaces are really one of the better ways to work with pastel and this is a way you can do it DIY. Do it yourself, okay? So once it's dry, I use clear gesso, not regular gesso. Regular gesso isn't see-through for one and it doesn't have the little grit that clear gesso has. I think you can find clear gesso on Amazon. I like this big bottle that I have because I use it a lot. So I just brush it on, let that dry and now I've got my own homemade pastel surface to work on and in this example I create the same very quick kind of a sketchy demonstration of a similar scene, a landscape scene from the Jackie Simmons book. I use four different value pastels all analogous color in the blue family. A dark, a dark to medium, a medium and a light and I use these pastels to create the same image and reveal that it really does give a different mood, feeling, impression when you use a different colored background surface. Now in the book Jackie talked about, and if you don't know Jackie Simmons, her work is beautiful and this book is fantastic, but she talked about how sometimes you just pick a background color based on your mood and I can so relate to that. Sometimes I just want something more vibrant and punchy and just have fun with color and sometimes I pick a compliment to a landscape scene which has a lot of greens and blues and a compliment is just the opposite on the color wheel so I'll choose an underpainting that's golden, more warm and this one in this example this background painting is or background surface color is warm, it's pink and the one beneath is cooler kind of a minty green so anyway you'll see the sped-up version of this and get a little taste of what we do in the Patriot group it's a lot of fun. So it was a really quick and basic landscape demonstration but in looking at these you can see how the pink underpainting gives a mood of more of a sunrise or sunset with that warmth beneath the blue. While the same image using the exact same pastels has a feeling more of cold and maybe more of a wintery scene so this is just a quick little example and just one of the ways that I can go a little deeper and answer some of the questions that you guys have plus we all get to share together in the Patriot group but I hope you enjoyed this little sample of some content on the Patriot page and just know how very special you all are to me Monet Cafe and my patrons so as always guys happy painting