 Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're gonna have some fun today And if you're new here, please subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos Well, have you ever gotten in an artistic rut? I know I have so I hope you will enjoy this lesson That will give you some techniques and things that I do to get spontaneous and to break out of those stagnant periods in our artistic lives and do some things that are fun and May even help you learn to do new things in new ways Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins And this is a lesson that I'm bringing to both the Monet Café channel and my patrons on my patreon page on Fridays we do something called PE patron education We usually do something fun and educational and it becomes their homework over the weekend So sometimes I create the video to work on both platforms now Have you ever gotten an artistic rut? And you're just like I want to paint or you get so overwhelmed by looking at reference photos and Or you just feel like you've lost the urge and you just need something to kind of get you going Well, this is a great exercise It's something I do just for fun a lot of times I think we forget to have fun as artists and paint and play like we were kids again So this is a neat exercise to not only get you out of that rut to help But to help you have fun and also to give you new habits and maybe new ways of doing things That you may not have done before we get in these artistic habits or these patterns of the The reference photos we pick or the colors that we pick You know, so this is a neat way to break out of our old habits Create new ones and have some fun. All right, let's get started Now for this exercise, what we'll be doing is allowing ourselves only 10 or 15 minutes per Painting you might be thinking wow, that's not a lot of time. Well, they're gonna be small I'm choosing to do five by seven sizes. You can choose smaller or bigger Whatever works for you, but we're gonna do multiple paintings. I'm doing six again You can adjust those numbers whatever works for you. I recommend four or more and We're to kind of get us more creative and everything we're going to tone each one a different color And we're gonna choose colors not based on a reference photo based on just what colors we think look pretty and To tone my watercolor paper a different color for each painting I'm gonna be using a few different products just to show you some varieties Maybe introduce you to some products. You've never used before. I actually really really love these Neocolor wax pastels. They are made by Kardashian-dash, I never say that name. So I'm not sure it's a Swiss made company But they are wax pastels water soluble wax pastels and what I love about these is their brilliance in color And it's so weird. They look like crayons. Literally This is the set of 40, which I really like and I've used it for multiple painting demonstrations and But here lately I haven't used them a lot, but there's such nice vibrant colors And I thought some of these would be nice to use To tone some of my painting under painting surfaces. I'm gonna be using now. I also will be using These intense blocks now these are compressed ink made by Derwent and I got the big 72 set But you don't have to get a set that big if you want to try it out. There's two layers to the set This is the like the warmer tones. Oh some cooler ones actually, too We got a lot of greens and everything underneath And kind of like your more neutral tones So so blues and greens and then reds and blues and pinks in here So I really love the set but the the great thing about these is they also are so vibrant in color Now here's another interesting things about both of these products. They are They don't fill up the truth of any paper if I was to apply pastel to this It counts as a layer, you know now another thing I like about these two products is that they are Translucent in color. They're not opaque. They leave the white of the paper showing through and I really like that I like the brilliance of the color to start working on For example, if you used pastel and you can to tone this if you don't have either of these two products You could use some harder pastels or whatever pastels you have I mean, this is like a yellow Rembrandt's kind of dirty. You could use this To tone it like I said, I'm gonna be using water to wash these or alcohol But you don't have to you could just use some sort of blending tool and blend them in if you're not using a water-friendly surface I often use let me go over here real quick Here lately I've been using these little chamois claws a lot I find they work great on watercolor paper and some of the other surfaces I use they don't work so great on You art sanded paper the catch in the grit But if you are using you art paper you can blend with a little piece of pipe foam insulation So you have multiple ways that we can do this we can use one of you could use watercolor Okay, so if you're using watercolor paper or a water-friendly paper So watercolor some of these products some pastels if you're using another medium use some acrylic paint You know whatever so we're basically gonna be toning each one just some colors that we like so this should be a lot of fun All right, I'm gonna get started I also wanted to share that I made my little five by seven frames by a technique I use a lot I use a mat and the inside is five by seven the outside is eight by ten So it's a nice quick way to make a standard size for whatever you're gonna be painting. All right Also, I wanted to mention to that my reference images. I'll talk more about them as well when I get done with this Same thing. We don't want to get bogged down with getting so serious about reference images So I'm gonna show you when we're done with this and I get the paper ready Just a way to also break out of our comfort zone with choosing reference photos and having fun All right, so I'm just gonna get started. I've got the the bright pink one here now I'm simply applying the the first page here. I'm using the neocolor wax pastels and I did the pink. I did that really interesting lavender kind of purple and that minty green I really don't like tearing these labels. I suggest always tearing the labels off your pastels But that's a little pet peeve of mine. I like it when oh, I'm finding my little cigar Cutter because I don't like them the full length sticks. So I always cut them And you can paint with them better by turning them on their side So those are the neocolors and now I'm going to use the ink tense blocks to tone This side and once again, I may have said this already before use what you have You can do this with pastels, but the point is get some interesting colors You might not normally pick and just tone it without thinking of any reference photo in mind Okay, now let's go ahead and wet these. I'm going to use alcohol Oh, I love this part. It's so fun. So I'm using alcohol. I could use water once again I'm using a water friendly surface watercolor paper. I'm also using my Chinese watercolor brush I really love this brush and I think I might have said this I can't remember but if you don't have any water friendly paper, you're using uR paper or something else Well, you can wet uR paper, but like Sennelier paper You can do this like I said with pastels and just blend it with a piece of pipe foam insulation Or like you see me using lately a chamois cloth. You'll see me use that again in this Example, I find the chamois cloth works really well Um, but no see how pale these are I've used wax pastels before on uR paper and they were way more vibrant So now I'm going to do the ink tense blocks Now they are compressed ink and they are bright and bold and more vibrant than see that than the wax pastels So you can immediately see that they have more color intensity and I love bold colors So I end up going back on the wax pastels and adding some acrylic inks You'll see that in a minute now. I'm altering my strokes On this one. I kind of did a little circular motion the first one sideways strokes the second one vertical All right, see that was much more pale. So now I'm going to add the dailer roundy acrylic inks Now these are very vibrant. I love using these. I want to keep the colors kind of the same so for the first one I'm using a It's called dark green, but it's really kind of a blue green And for the second one, I've got a couple of purples. One of them is a little bit more metallic I decided not to use that one and uh, the other one is called purple lake It's a gorgeous actually a wonderful color to use for Getting your darks in like if you want to do a value study with a brush For the pink one, I'm using fluorescent pink and I'm going to show you this color indian yellow I use this combination a lot because it creates a color very close to the Kwanakredo nickel azo gold. It's just this gorgeous golden You know how like a warm underpainting often. So, um, all right, so let me get started with these I didn't want to do this slow or regular time because you know, you get the point Oh, I remembered I had a color called turquoise too. So I'm mixing turquoise and dark green And oh, it's so pretty. That's just the dark green. No, that was both. No, now I'm adding the turquoise. Sorry Dark green and now I'm adding the turquoise and oh, it creates such a lovely color And I'm just mixing it up with my watercolor brush I didn't add water to this and you see isn't that a beautiful color So I kind of went with the same minty green kind of color Um And just intensified it with the dail around acrylic inks And this next one is the purple lake color. That's the one I decided on and you'll see it's kind of a magenta purple It's not it doesn't lean towards blue as much as it does towards a purpley reddish Magenta kind of a color. Oh, isn't that gorgeous? Oh my goodness. I love it And last but not least is the fluorescent pink And it's a gorgeous color and once again this this hole in that pretty this whole exercise Is to just get spontaneous with color. Maybe choose some you wouldn't normally choose and To just have some fun and to play again We always talk about art being therapy and often I feel like uh, we get too serious So oh now i'm showing you what it looks like with the pink and the indian yellow added Isn't that gorgeous and I actually end up using this color To go back and tone one of the other ones. All right, so what I will be using to create texture is the technique I use often just clear Gesso clear liquid gesso You know how I talk about the clear kind not the regular gesso has a little bit of the grit in it It's like they add a little bit of pumice to make it a little bit sandy So it's just such a great way to make a little sanded pastel surface Many of you may remember or know I've been using a combination of the Clear gesso and the marble dust. That's my little two to one mixture two parts clear gesso one part marble dust But i'm not going to be using that for this particular example And here's where I am intensifying that one reddish color with the acrylic inks the indian yellow and the fluorescent pink that really like I said It looks so much like the quenacridone nickel azo gold that I just love. Oh my goodness. I love this color as an underpainting I'm speeding this one up kind of a lot because you get the idea I'm literally just putting some clear gesso on each one of these and Sometimes I just put it on my brush like I'm doing here rather than put it in a jar. It can get a little messy doing it this way so But use again, whatever you have if you don't have the acrylic inks I never want to you know encourage everybody to go out and buy these products because you can do this with just pastel All right, so now we have some fun colors to work with my clear gesso is dry I'm going to try to be quiet and see if you can hear this Hear that compared to Probably can't tell but There's definitely like a sanded surface to these so the pastel will apply now to continue with the spontaneity What i'm going to do I have a google album that I have reference photos in that my patrons have access to those photos But there's a lot of different sites that I recommend That you can use paint my photo is one of them pixabay is another Paint my photo is good because you can go through if you have an afternoon of just wanting to look at some photos You can save photos to particular albums. I'm on paint my photo It's kind of like a little group you have your own little page and profile and I have you know landscapes marshes I have them all divided up birds Cows, I mean everything sunsets and what's neat about that is when you do an exercise like this and you're wanting to Loosen up and just have some fun. You don't get bogged down with going in and going. I need a reference photo So this I call it reference photo roulette Where I've saved a whole lot of them somewhere these happen to these will all be mine I have a google album that i'm starting to put all of my photography Shots in that I think are good for painting and my patrons have access to that So the ones you'll be seeing me use right now are mine But I do recommend that you have them on hand even if you print them out I have a box that I keep or here's a file But I actually have a box too that I keep little cut up reference photos in and just do like Close your eyes and grab one and that's what you got to paint and then you've got 10 or 15 minutes to do it Okay. Oh, that's a sketch. I can't paint that This is not the way I'm going to do it But this is just a general idea of what you could do and this is good to take on trips if you travel There you go. I actually think I have one that's kind of like that. That's my backyard So, you know, and then go, okay, I want to do that one here And once again, I said I might turn these that might be pretty or might be pretty with the blue background Okay, so Purple I'm going to choose for this one. Let's take it down a little bit here All right, let's get going. What time is it? It is 210 all right I'm speeding this second one up just a little bit But the next one will be all real time. This one took about 11 to 12 minutes And the next one that is real time took about I'm thinking about 14 minutes So, um, I'm just speeding this one up to keep the video from being so long So, uh, you guys, I hope you have fun with this So, um, I'm going to add some a little bit of music right here You can enjoy this one and then like I said, the next one will be all real time All right, here's the quick little final on this one And I'm starting the next one now that once again is real time and also just a Reminder refresher of the point of this exercise is to get more Spontaneous Breakout of old habits have some fun And I think the end result for me anyway is it usually causes me to have more creative color In this photo it was obvious that the Energy and the focal point was the clouds those sweeping clouds that once again This is my backyard like many of my photos. I don't get to go many places, but praise the lord I got a cow pasture in my backyard and and just some awesome wide spaces to see these gorgeous gorgeous sunsets and sunrises on either side of the field and So the energy and the focal point was those clouds and there's my Oreo. You know, I didn't realize that until I Really looked closely at this photo that cow that's running in the lower left side is a cow. I named Oreo All right, let me you know I go on a tangent sometimes But the story is kind of neat of how we ended up where we are if you follow my channel for any length of time You may know that Three years ago hurricane Irma our home was totally flooded due to hurricane Irma And fortunately we had bought this property My husband and I were doing some home renovations trying to get into that, you know as another source of income and We bought this property. We found it at a good price but actually We got a better price because the lady who sold us this house. We call it granny's house right now Or the farmhouse She sold it to us because she was just a beautiful christian soul And she really liked us and she actually our offering price was less than others that she had And she decided to sell it to us. Well little did we know when we got this house now it was Not in good shape. Okay bad shape. Okay, but pretty pretty property Little did we know or did she know that within A year Our home would flood now we had we didn't have any time or the money to even work on this property where we live now But after our home flooded We had to bring our travel trailer to this property It's the only place we had to live and live in our travel trailer on this particular property Until we could renovate the house that we call the farmhouse now our granny's house. So that's the story But what's really interesting is when we were looking at this property before we even bought it I saw this cute little calf Named and I named it orio later. I didn't even know I was like, oh my gosh. I love this property I said there's a cow pasture next door and this little baby cow came up to me And I was just shocked that it would even come up to me And so I took a picture of it. We hadn't even bought the property yet It was much later that I just you know the whole flood and everything that the cow grew And um, I I guess I didn't realize that this was the cow because they're always having new babies That I had first met. I have a picture of right. I need to see if I can find it and put it in this video This was the cow that I met when I first We first looked at this property So anyway, I am just loving the fact that god provides even when you don't know what's going on So we ended up getting this place renovated. It's nothing like our other house was It's smaller and you know, there's a lot of things that are different But you know, we just make it work But I just wake up and cherish this beautiful sky every morning And I know many people I know many of you because you're patrons of mine and man, I love you patrons If you're a patron of mine, I just love what we have going on. It's really awesome I know a lot of my patrons they support this channel Just to keep the free lessons coming to youtube on mona cafe, but um And but I do give extra lessons when I can to patreon. So anyway, so I'm just very grateful for everything I've really gone on a tangent now, but I wanted wanted to say back to my point was that I I loved that I saw Oreo running to me She's come to learn to know that The cows are like my garbage disposal. I save everything I do a lot of juicing. So I save all of my They love lemon rinds orange grapefruit rinds tomatoes Just any kind of produce that I have left over they love it But Oreo has to run to me because the other cows they're kind of like bullies. No pun intended, but She runs to me because she knows she's got to get there first and I'm kind of partial to her. So Notice though in the sky Typically we think of skies of being blue with white clouds white puffy clouds Look how warm the sky is the tones in the sky and even in the upper heavens You see I'm using those neutral colors right now And I want to carry that forward a lot of times when I'll put something in the sky I'll see if I can bring it down and put it on the ground You know, normally you would definitely do that in a reflection like if there was water But I even do it in things like fields because you want to bring a harmony to your painting And so I connect it that way But anyway Find what your focal point is and again the energy in the sky But it was really if you look in the uh photo you see that brilliant spot That's kind of to the Not quite the middle down a little lower and a little bit to the right where there's just the brightness That was the focal point and I changed the color a bit. I made it a little bit more of a bright pink But as long as you get value, right You're doing good and you follow the rules of Neutrality and when things should be bold and when they should be neutral I always recommend this one video I did because it's so popular right now, but it's five ways to create depth in your artwork and I think just over the years of me learning from others and everything that video just came together in such a Good way, and I think it's a really great one for beginners. Okay So you see the color that I'm using right now that kind of rng neutral color. I just had Can't you see the warmth in the clouds right there? So that's why I was choosing colors like that And I guess I should talk a little bit more about the point of this lesson to get out of an artistic rut And I really do think when you have these surfaces that are A color that you you just really didn't think about all that much. You just thought it was a pretty color And uh, then we just kind of go with it with a painting. Um, I really think it creates fun excitement energy and Kind of gets us out of our comfort zone. So Now I do recommend This is another thing to get out of an artistic rut This is going to sound weird. You got to be prepared to be spontaneous And what do I mean by that if you're going to go ahead and do these which I recommend Do a lot of them get them done and have them readily available so that when you get that artistic urge You don't have to you know, break out all the stuff again create an underpainting. You're like, oh, let me grab one I can't tell you how often I do that when I'm like I just have a few minutes and I've already prepared some of these whether they're a five by seven or six by eight And eight by 10 11 by 14. I prepare multiple sizes And then also have you like I say my reference photo roulette have you some reference photos in a little grab bag or Like I have some now on my Google album. Google albums are great But you know, there's other things like Dropbox and places where you can save things I've just found the google albums are really neat now notice. I'm giving a lot of cool colors to the grasses here and It's like many artists say Value is king meaning the lightness or darkness of something But color gets the glory So what does that mean? It means you get your values right And you know, your colors are actually second to value So as long as your values, right, you can get exploratory with color And that's one of the most common questions I get is how did you know to not make that field green? Well, I know the value was right It's if you squint your eyes you can see the the field is darker than the sky obviously The upright trees by the way things that are upright are typically darker in value like trees and Four ground grasses if they're tall like that things that are flat Um are usually lighter and they get even lighter in the distance. So if you understand those rules It's like I've been saying lately. It's not rocket science. It's just some artistic rules You get it right you get you some some supplies you play around have some fun And before you know it bam, you're an artist. So Um, so anyway, let me uh, let me finish this one up here. I think this this painting Took me like Between 12 and 15 minutes something like that But I am speeding up this last little part to keep my video size down It's already right now showing it about, you know under 40 minutes And I did finally add some green you see that but I chose to use Uh more neutral cooler greens and here you'll see I'm doing a little bit of negative painting Kind of carving into some of those areas where there were brighter clouds and that is the focal point So that's why i'm spending a little more time on that now. I did do a total of six paintings Yeah, six paintings that I did and um Kept them all at about between 10 and 20 minutes. I have to say also my patrons did a phenomenal job on this Exercise or this what I call their pe lesson. This was last friday's pe lesson for them So patrons if you're seeing this you're not seeing uh, um a double take I just I give you guys the lesson with a little more content And you guys also get to share your work and I get to see it and we get to communicate which is awesome But I decided um that I would also share this to the regular Monet cafe channel And the paintings that I did are all viewable at the very beginning of this video I kind of do a little uh picture in the screen where you can see the paintings that I did And these were a lot of fun. These were really relaxing for me and The good thing about this is that you don't have to fuss so much or worry about it being some kind of perfect Uh creation of artwork. You're not so serious about it So once again, it may sound strange to say that you have to be prepared to be spontaneous But go ahead prepare some of these surfaces get you some reference photos available So that when you get that energy you can just paint and that is truly the way to get out of an Autistic rut. All right guys. I hope you enjoyed this video as always. I hope you will like this video Comment give me your feedback. I just got some feedback from someone who said they were looking for a video like this So here it is and please subscribe and come back often. All right. Happy painting