 A very warm and fun welcome Monet Cafe visitors and friends. Today we're going to be doing a new underpainting technique that's going to be a lot of fun and this is specifically for pastel painting. I'm going to be using these acrylic inks which are so fun. If you like mixing colors you're going to love this lesson. Sort of like when you do Easter eggs and you make all the different colors. It's really fun. So let's get started. To begin I just use regular alcohol that you get at any drug store and you can experiment with this about how much alcohol to acrylic ink you want to use. Now I'm going to be putting in, sorry for the focus here, some of the Daylor Rowney acrylic inks mixing each one with the alcohol. That other one was a blue. This one's more of an emerald green. I'll put the colors up here so you know what they are. I got a great sale at Michael's or took advantage of a great sale it was buy one get one. So that's just a regular watercolor brush. You can use whatever you want. You could use a foam brush or whatever just to apply it smoothly. And here I'm just simply pouring in the alcohol into my little plastic tray and I do a pretty terrible job at it. I'll think I'll try that differently next time. But then I just go ahead and put in some of the blue I begin with and I shake them up good. I'm not sure if they settle at the bottom too much or not but I just always you know as a good rule of thumb shake them up anyway. Now you saw I actually when I did this before I had less alcohol and more acrylic ink. The proportions were a little different but you can play around with that. I just do a little alcohol and like three or four drops of the acrylic ink and again my sloppy pouring job of the alcohol fortunately it dries fast and everything's no big deal in my art studio anyway. So I am first I'm using some of the green, the blue, the green and I think I apply red is the next one I do and then later I add some of the like a really bright pretty yellow and it really makes for a neat effect. Yeah there's the red. So again shaky shake shake and about three or four drops in there. And now for the fun. This is a piece of UART. It's the letter U. A-R-T UART sanded paper. I love this paper because it is so durable you can apply water to it you can apply obviously acrylic inks you can apply alcohol all kinds of wet mediums you can apply to get an underpainting technique. Now if you see this paper it looks a little wrinkled it's kind of a scrap piece many of you know of my situation with my home flooding. We rescued a lot of things as quickly as possible and some of my supplies got a little beat up but this makes for good practice pieces you know you can always recycle and reuse. All I'm doing is using that watercolor brush and simply applying the mixture I already created I realized this one was a little weaker than one that I experimented with before making this video so I just added a little bit more of the the blue acrylic ink to it. And I've got it pretty drippy and runny but actually it makes it dry kind of consistently you won't see those stripes as much once it dries because it all just kind of bleeds and blends down. So that's one example of just kind of a single color and now I'm going to get into doing some of the different colors and then mixing some of the colors to make some neat effects. And now I'm simply doing the same technique in the green on the on the top section there and you can see it's a little bit more of a teal green or a turquoisey type of green instead of rather more of an earthy or warm green it's a little cooler in the green family and these acrylic inks come in all kinds of colors and again I got a good deal on them. Michaels had a buy one get one and I was actually with a fellow Monet cafe artist Linda Bishop we had just toured the mountain vision pastel company in Tampa and we hopped on by Michaels for a sale she told me about and I was able to get some more of these acrylic inks that I really like as you can see I just now added more of the green I think I put it in another one of the little plastic holders there and I was able to not dilute it quite as much so you see the intensity but what this is going to do what is an under painting why am I doing this and I talk a lot in previous videos about why an under painting is beneficial in art for one you just get rid of that blank white piece of her creamy colored whatever it is piece of paper and it creates a nice tone and a nice mood you can use a single color like I'm doing here you can use these to do a under painting that is a complimentary under painting or to emulate more of the local color in your scene so there are various ways that you can do this but for me I love setting a mood and look at that red I love this if you've watched more of my videos or previous videos you've seen I love doing complimentary under paintings that just means whatever the opposite to whatever your main subject is whatever is the opposite on the color wheel typically with landscape paintings I do a lot there's lots of greens and blues so on the color wheel the opposite of greens and blues is reds and yellows so it's a great color to put down as an under painting because it's just going to make your landscape pop more who this color is the one I love I would love this one by itself I wish I'd have done one just with the yellow but it really makes a nice warm under painting when I combine it with this red and again this you are papers great for applying any water mediums but there are some pastel papers you can't one is Sennelier Lecart it's a pastel card that you don't want to apply water to so now you see how pretty doesn't that look good it almost reminds me of another under painting technique I use where I use a quinacridone gold and it's made by the golden product line and it's almost exactly the same color I'm very excited about this because what's neat about this on you are is acrylic ink and alcohol is not going to take up any of the tooth of your pastel surface a lot of times things take up the tooth and and you only you're limited with how many layers you can get so now you are unlimited because this doesn't take up any of the tooth of the pastel grit now I just combined that blue I'm sorry the red to the blue which we know if you you know we don't do as much color mixing and pastel art but most of us veer in and out of different mediums you know that the red and the blue make a purple so I didn't do a great job at this one but you could blend that one a little better you see kind of in the middle of where I did that it's getting a nice purple purple tone now I think I get more of the green and I apply oh no I'm sorry I got more of that golden color and guess what happens when you apply it to that turquoise you're going to get more of that lime green yellowy green oh my goodness isn't that beautiful so I would recommend what I did here because it was a scratch piece of paper I just got some mats that were pre-cut for five by seven and I think I don't know what that other size was but I just you know put them down there and made the little rectangles but what I would do is I'd maximize my paper I'd come up with the best way actually you kind of sorry you do need to do it like this if you're going to be doing different colors because you don't want them bleeding into each other so you would need to separate them a little bit but if you're not if you're doing all one color like if you were doing that pretty orangey gold down there in the bottom left you could just divide your paint the whole paper and then divide it how you want whatever is your most practical sizes that you would use now you see how I added that uh that green over that look at that color oh my goodness isn't this just beautiful so you know lots of possibilities even with just these four colors that I used again this is going to be a really great way to use an underpainting or do an underpainting because you're not going to take up any of the tooth or use up any of the tooth in your pastel paper adding more red to the gold and look at that pretty oh my goodness that's another beautiful color for a complementary underpainting wow I I had fun just doing this so you guys try it and now I'm just going to be doing a little painting where I had already pre-done before I experimented with all this color now I'll I'll actually use some of these more in the future but I experiment with one of the little teal and uh and blue colors to do a little wave scene that was when I was in Belize so let's get started on that and here's the little pastel painting I did over this technique the you'll see in a minute the underneath part of it was more of that teal bluish color this was just an incoming wave I shot a photo of when I was in Belize it was such a beautiful place and I did this painting rather quickly um just because I was in the experimentation mode these are the pastels I picked out I kind of have a lot of them there but I was working in a hurry this day so let's get started now with our little piece of paper that I used the u-art paper that I have already pre-toned with the acrylic inks and as I've been doing in the past few lessons I like to go ahead and just put my pastels down next to my working surface there so for one you kind of see I know I've sped this one up some of them aren't quite as fast you kind of see which kind of pastels I'm using if they're big and square they're the terry Ludwigs if they're a little more round and kind of big they're either mount vision or senelier I've got some unison that are also round if they're a little smaller and round they're Rembrandt's and I plan to do I've got some videos about different pastels and papers in the past but I'd like to do another one just going over some of the different pastels and give recommendations for good starter sets I've got a lot of beginners who ask what's a good starter set and that would be a neat video for you guys okay so here's my reference image I've just got a little new pastel in u pastel not any w that I use sometimes to sketch with and it's a good sketching tool because it's harder than some of these other softies it works better for sketching so I'm going to be really speeding up this video because this lesson was not really about this painting it was more about the experimentation of using the acrylic inks but I still thought you might like to see the painting and I love your comments by the way thank you guys for so many useful comments you're giving me that helped me to know how to make these videos that help you the best and some of them I've loved in particular are somebody just recently said you know she said she or he said you often say how you're going to be quiet now and play the music and and she said I happen to love hearing what you have to say and like hearing the lessons and the teaching and the learning from that so that made me feel good that you guys don't get tired of me jabbering on and on like I do so that's good because I could just keep talking in these if I didn't have other things to do but anyway so but this one is going to be not as much about me giving instruction in this lesson and I hope I really hope you enjoyed learning about this technique because I am definitely going to use this in the in the future I like to go ahead when I do something like this with the under painting technique and do a lot of them at once because you know the time it takes to get out your acrylic inks get out your alcohol and if you did that each time you did a painting you're going to be wasting precious painting time and sometimes when you're in the mood to paint you're just in the mood to paint or you're like me you have limited time and you've just got to squeeze in painting time you know as you can now I apologize for the jumping around of my camera here I had two little friends that were enjoying playing underneath my tripod while I was trying to film this some of you guys may have seen my videos where I found a rescue kitty you guys were giving me some awesome names for her and I decided to name her Dusty I call her Dusty girl and she and my dog Jackson were underneath my tripod thinking it was just having a they were having a great old time playing around but they kept knocking it over or almost knocking it over I literally had to catch it a couple of times so I had to ban them from my studio for the moment to finish up this little painting and I'm just having fun with this one like I said earlier this wasn't a very serious piece it's kind of small and I was really just playing around with this technique for an underpainting but I did add you'll see here some of my iridescent mount vision pastels my last video I used some of these to do a little bit of pastel work with these iridescence and they're fun you can't really appreciate it in the video but they really do glimmer and shimmer in the right lighting and if you move your painting around you can really see it shimmering so I thought it'd be fun I had that pretty turquoise I remembered a bluish tealish color that I thought would be nice in those waves I also wanted to mention that I don't talk about it a lot every so often in my videos just the importance of good drawing skills I know it doesn't appear that I've been drawing in this I mean I'm really just working with color and shapes but none of that would come together if I hadn't practiced a lot of drawing and and trying to get accurate representation of things that I'm trying to paint I've heard a lot of times people say you don't have to be able to draw to be able to paint but I don't think that's true at all I know that you're only going to strengthen your painting skills and the beauty of your work by having good core drawing skills I've got a couple of videos early on where I talk a lot about drawing and good drawing skills oh you may have heard my little doggy there and I really just can't stress it enough I even though I like to paint a lot I still try to get my sketchbook out and work on sketching because it's it's just key it really is so I don't want to belabor that but if you haven't been practicing on drawing skills I would really recommend you try to do that try to do it in a fun way a little quick sketches now I'm going to finish this one up and I have sped this one up quite a bit more than I normally do again the focus was on the under painting the new technique and not really the painting but I am going to go ahead and finish this little painting up and hopefully you guys even learned from this part of the lesson and I am again enjoying your comments so much I thank you so much for how we feel like a family you know I don't feel like I'm alone in this because every time I make a video I truly feel like I'm talking to you guys and especially when I hear back from you so keep those comments coming and if you haven't already joined our Facebook group Monet cafe art group it is a great community we it's really unique it's something different I haven't found any group like it on Facebook maybe I'm being prejudiced but anyway so I hope you enjoyed this try this yourself please do I know I'm going to use this technique again and as always happy happy happy and blessed painting bye