 Welcome to Monet Café. I'd like to invite you to share in an artistic experience. This is a session from my Patreon page. I call this series artistic meditations. It's a chance to relax and enjoy the beauty of creation and color. I'll be going over all of the products that I used and show you how I cut my final creation at the end of this video. I was inspired to try this by another artist that I found on YouTube. Her name is Denise Love and her YouTube channel is Too Little Owl Studio. She is such a delightful and refreshing soul with some great videos. She introduced me through the video to this color meditation deck. This is primarily for watercolor, but it would work great for any medium. What I love about it is it provides you with inspiration. It has a great book that goes into color theory. The book tells you how to use the color meditation deck. Let me show you quickly how it works. Underneath the book is a deck of cards, like a deck of playing cards. I didn't count them. I don't know how many there are. This had to take a lot of work for this artist slash author. The first cards are called parameter cards. I call them as prompts of sorts to get you going and have a direction of how you're going to have your playtime through art. After the parameter cards are the idea cards or the inspiration cards. That's what I call them. They don't really have a title, but they'll give you all these different inspirations for painting. The book gives a recommendation to begin your artistic meditation by choosing at least one parameter card and one inspiration card. You can choose more as I will be doing, but at least one of each is great to get started. What I'm choosing is the parameter card of saturation play. I love things that are saturated and also the parameter card of a limited palette. Two, three or four hues. I'm going to be using analogous color. One of my two fun inspiration cards are the one on the left using a straw. You'll see me do that. And the one on the right, you can't see the back, but it says abstract. I was really inspired by that pretty design on the front. The surface I'll be using is just 140 pound cold press watercolor paper. And I know my channel and Patreon page is almost exclusively pastel painting, but I love watercolor. I have notebooks full of different watercolor. I call it playtime when I just relax. Watercolor is a very relaxing medium, but I'm not using watercolor on the watercolor paper actually. I'm using some acrylic inks. I love acrylic inks. I love their vibrancy. And I'm going to talk a lot about these products as I paint and I'm playing with a new fun product. This is like liquid gold. Oh my goodness. It is so fun. The tools for this meditative painting adventure are a few brushes and some other fun implements. Let me show you. This is a little painting, like the little quill. Is that what it's called? A little painting nib where you dip it in the ink. I think I dip it in the ink and in that gold liquid that I'll be using. This is a brand new brush. I just got, it has a very large head to the brush. So it holds a lot of water. It's a quill brush made by Princeton. A fan brush. I don't think I use it on this painting, but it's a really great tool for some fun marks. Of course I'm going to need some water to rinse out my acrylic ink and also some paper towels just to control my water. I have taped my watercolor paper down to a piece of foam core board just using some artist's tape. You could use masking tape. And now it's time to get started. You'll see in this Monet Café version of this lesson, or should I say experience? It's more of an experience, but you'll see the products that I spoke about and shared at the beginning of this tutorial. You'll see me using them without any commentary. I'm going to add some very peaceful music and you can just relax and enjoy this and perhaps just see some of my strategies. And also again, on my Patreon version of this, I go into, all of this is where I'm talking. I'm talking about the products and how I'm doing things. But I still think just watching this to music will be a blessing. And just something that might spark your creativity and give you some ideas for your own artistic meditative session. It's my recommendation that before starting, you gather all of the products that you think you might use. Again, you don't have to buy that color meditation deck that I spoke about, but it is a really great tool to just get some creative direction. Here's where I'm using the straw that it recommended to blow and look at these great gestural linear marks that it makes. But again, have your supplies ready. The reason for that is you want this to be an experience and not have to get up and go, oh, let me try this or that. So kind of pre-plan this and pre-plan it as far as finding a moment for yourself. I know if you're a mom with young kids, that's a rare thing, right? But hopefully you can find just an hour out of your busy life to dedicate to this peaceful moment, artistic moment. Also, I recommend playing some music. I recommend it be soothing. I prefer songs that have no words when I'm doing something like this, just very peaceful. And also, you know, get yourself a cup of tea or coffee and just really make this a moment of creation. And one of my patrons said, this one needs to be called at the subtitle, Artistic Meditations, No Rules Allowed. And I really like that. I'm embracing that because we talk so much and get hung up so much with the rules of our color theory. And am I doing it right? So this is a way to just create and let the randomness of things take you on a colorful, artistic journey. All right, here's that music. Enjoy. And don't go anywhere because at the end, I'm going to show you how I cut these up. And it's really kind of neat that you can get multiple paintings out of one large painting. All right, enjoy. I truly enjoyed using the gold ink product. I have never used anything like this in any of my paintings. If you've been on my channel much, you know, I'm primarily a soft pastel artist. I happen to love watercolor and I love acrylic inks as well. So this was a way for me to play and to discover new products and to perhaps loosen up my work even more. And I think you'll discover the same thing will happen for you if you try this. Here is a close up of some of the mark making. I feel that it's so gestural and free and energetic and it really is such a great way to relax your mind and just enjoy color and art. Now I'm taking off the masking tape. By the way, I've sped this up a little. My suggestion is take it off slowly and at an angle so that doesn't pull up your paper. And you may choose to do what I did, which is not just have this as one painting, but to crop it, find interesting areas of your painting and make different compositions. And then you'll have several paintings from just one artistic meditative session. Oh, I almost see a bird in the upper left there. Looks like a little hummingbird with a teal eye. So it's just so neat. I really enjoyed this, as you can tell. So let's get to the actual cutting up of my painting. This is a little tabletop cutter made by Furban. I got it off of Amazon. I have a nice tabletop cutter, but this one's kind of fun for projects like this. I'm going to speed up the cutting process and you can see my compositional choices. And I think they look really so great as a little series once I was finished cutting them all. And I kind of want to keep a few of them. But the neat thing about these is they make wonderful gifts. If you wanted to just send this as a little card to someone for an occasion, or just an I love you present, they look lovely framed. So if you like color and you like fun, you're going to love this project. I cut my main areas of interest out. And then with the remnants, I even had these little pieces that I trimmed to make some kind of interesting composition. So wow, this was just a wonderful exploration for me. I'm definitely going to continue this series on my Patreon page. And oh, my patrons created some amazing works from this lesson. I just love seeing their own artistic meditations in our Patreon homework album. I hope this was a blessed and relaxing experience for you. And if you would like more of my lessons that are full lessons and more of this series, why don't you become a patron of mine? It's only $5 a month. And my Patreon family is just such a lovely and beautiful group of artistic souls. All right, everyone. God bless and happy painting.