 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm happy to bring you this tutorial of an iridescent butterfly created using gouache and these metallic gouache paints. It was so much fun. Now this was part of a live video that I did over the weekend and I have made it a bit more concise and perhaps easy to follow. If you're a patron of mine I'm going to be giving you a list of all of the colors that I used. You can sort of see them here though if you pause the video. And my patrons from my Patreon page will also get my reference photo and a few more goodies. And if you would like to become a patron of mine to support this channel and keep these free videos coming it's only $5 a month and as I mentioned before my patrons get some extra content and we just have a great happy family. Also go ahead if you don't mind and click the like, subscribe, and the bell icon to get notified of future videos. Those simple things really do help the success of this video on YouTube and help ensure others get to see it as well. I've really been enjoying using this black paper by Arteza. It's their acrylic pad. They're little six by six sheets. I've been using them for various mediums even soft pastels but these metallic gouache work great on them. Now to sketch in my butterfly it's a little out of focus here. It's a charcoal pencil but it's white so you can see it on the black paper. Here are some of the brushes I used. Kind of a medium to large flat brush. I also tried for the first time this bamboo brush. Again apologize it's out of focus a little bit but it wasn't my favorite. I'll just let you know. So I resorted to this brush that I really like. It's a Velvet Touch Princeton made by Princeton. It's around number eight. Also I used my little plastic palette here. It's really inexpensive and you can find it at lots of little hobby shops. Now I'm just putting in some colors that I think will work well. Often I'll put in a bit of color that's in the same family like you see I put three greens there together and that was an ultramarine blue and a Prussian blue and some of my more brownish tones and also a little bit of purple. Here's a little bit of a close-up of some of the colors. If you have some gouache and you'd like to try to match it. I don't have any of the metallic or what's also called pearl gouache colors on this palette yet but I'll talk about those when I add them. Now as I said earlier this was part of a live stream video that I did. I'm sorry I missed a little bit of footage with painting in the background but I wanted to do a voiceover and give a little bit more instruction. The live stream was a lot of fun. I enjoyed just kind of chilling out. It was a Saturday and it was just relaxing for me to paint and talk to you guys. You guys also gave me some great suggestions. I'm going to try to start doing live streams more consistently. Perhaps on Saturdays that's a good day for me to just paint and sometimes even though I have a monthly theme every month for my Monet cafe art group and also for my patrons I sometimes just want to paint whatever I want to paint and that's what my Saturdays are for me and so that's why I thought I'm just going to have fun. I've never used these metallic gouache paints. Oh I think I tried them for an underpainting but someone recommend I try them on a black surface and I got to tell you they are shimmery and beautiful. So as you can see here I painted the butterfly in negatively. In other words I painted the spaces around the butterfly the background before actually starting the butterfly. I find that it helps create more painterly edges and it just feels more impressionistic in general. Now I'm just getting in some of the general colors. The butterfly you can see the lower wings have more of a brownish almost like a burnt sienna or a burnt umber type of color and now I am getting in some of the greens. This is the I believe it's the Viridian green and my general strategy was similar to how I paint with soft pastels. I want to get in my basic shapes values and colors and then add the highlights or the sparkle towards the end and for me that highlight was going to be the metallic colors. So I'm going to give a little bit more of a voiceover but I'm really going to let you guys just watch. It's really kind of a relaxing process often just to watch and listen to some nice music and also I do have the full live stream. If you want more commentary you can go watch that one. It's the video right before or a few videos before this one if you go to my channel and I also wanted to share that these are some butterfly photographs that are my own. This is one of them from a trip that I took with my mom. Some of you may know my mom passed away in 2021 in May of 2021 sort of unexpected and she had had some cancer treatments the year before that even and I went to be with her to help her through her radiation and we went to a natural history museum after one of her radiation treatments in Gainesville Florida and it was awesome and they had the most beautiful collection of butterflies under glass and I snapped a whole lot of pictures of these gorgeous butterflies. You know if you're an artist you're probably going to love butterflies because of all their gorgeous color and I have just been itching to paint some of those and so on this particular Saturday because someone had told me about the metallic paints working well on black paper I thought let me try some of these butterflies. I am definitely going to do more of these it was so relaxing and just very very peaceful for me especially since it was a moment with my mom. So you can see here I'm painting in the shapes really I haven't drawn in I did kind of drawing on the upper right wing there I drew in some of the shapes but I decided you know what you can do it without having to get detailed drawings in there it's really just learning to draw I call it using proportional relationships you're really just comparing shapes and spaces and the more you do it the better you get. So these were the regular colors I think I did add one of the metallic colors already down on the lower part of that wing I'm working on now you can see it a little bit shimmery when I move my hand and once again if you're a patron of mine I'm going to give you a list of the exact colors that I used and also the downloadable image of this butterfly and maybe even a few more so this month we happen to be or I've created the theme about water painting water so I do have more of those tutorials on the way but this was my random just paint for me Saturday experience and let me know if you'd like to see more live streams I'm trying to get better at it I think I am one of my patrons recommended that so that I can chat with you guys a little more it was hard I was filming with my my camera phone that I use and I backed up and saw a few of your chats but my phone was I had a holder and I couldn't see or respond to it so I'm going to sit my iPad next to me when I do live streams in the future so that we can just have a nice Saturday you guys can grab a cup of coffee and it'll really be what Monet cafe is that's why I named it Monet cafe it's like art with friends and just hanging out and experiencing art and learning together all right now enjoy the music I have sped this up a little bit but it gets a little monotonous I mean each wing is almost the same you know these are mirror images of each other on the bottom and then the top wings will obviously be a little bit different so enjoy to the music please do like this video it helps the the ability for it to be seen to more people YouTube shares it more when it gets a lot of likes so go ahead and hit that like button and leave me a comment that also helps and subscribe if you haven't subscribed I'd love to have you come join the family and if you create from these tutorials or any of my tutorials find me on instagram if you're on instagram you can find me at Susan Jenkins artist and share tag me all you have to do is tag me at Susan Jenkins artist when you share your post and that way I can see what you do I love seeing what you create from my videos and follow me on instagram as well so enjoy this tutorial and I'm going to be back with more live streams and I've got a really good or I hope it's good I hope I hope you learn a lot from it but a a video coming on water and painting reflections and moving water all right guys enjoy I was getting close to finishing the butterfly so I decided to go ahead and get more of the background in I wanted it to have more of a neutral palette the original color was a little bit lavender and I thought the neutrality of the color would make the brilliant colors in the butterfly show up even more now there's one thing I did forget to add I still actually want to go back and add it was like a shadow under the butterfly most of these butterflies that I got the pictures of were in a glass case like they typically display butterflies and often they'll have a little shadow and it'll really enhance that feeling of three-dimensionality is that a word so I did do a little bit more after this but I really hope this was relaxing and educational and perhaps that you'll give it a try even if you don't do it in gouache I was so tempted to add pastels to it and I have some iridescent pastels but I decided to leave this as a gouache painting some of you suggested that during the chat on the live stream and I thought you know what let's just leave this a little gouache painting I definitely want to do more of these I think they would make such a neat little display almost like we really do hang these real butterflies that people create and put in these glass frames so that would be kind of neat so I hope you enjoyed please like this video leave a comment subscribe to this channel become a patron if you'd like to follow me for five dollars a month on my patreon page you do get extra goodies you can cancel it anytime so blessings everyone and happy painting