Harry 
title
hello and welcome to monet cafe i'm excited to
bring you this series of painting tutorials that i think will bring you joy peace happiness
and learning what you're seeing now are nine tiny paintings and i do mean tiny only two
and a half inches by two and a half inches they all have flowers and happy little bees
which seems to represent a celebration of life and god's creation in each of the nine lessons
i will give you information as to supplies techniques and more and if you haven't subscribed
yet please do so i would love that rather than working at my standing easel i decided to
work at my large craft table now i'm going to be talking about all of these products where i
found my reference images and also how you can use alternate products if you don't have
the ones that i'm using in this video many of the products in my videos and in this
particular video can be found in my amazon shop where i have products conveniently organized
for you to find i have categories such as pastel papers pastel painting products practical
studio tools do-it-yourself pastel services so when i refer to that in my video this is
where you go i always have a clickable link in the description of each video where you
can find the products and check them out i'll be using an assortment of pastels for
each particular video but i will try to give you advice and tips on the colors and values that
i select also for each of the paintings i am using pastel matte i love this pastel surface i use
the white when i want to do an under painting especially like i'm doing in these videos
with watercolor this receives watercolors so beautifully now pastelmat is a bit pricey
so you know i love to give you alternatives of perhaps using watercolor paper with some
of your do-it-yourself techniques that i talk about i do have a video that i'll try to put a
clickable link for making your own pastel surfaces the watercolor i'll be using is this little arteza
36 watercolor set i use this all the time it's really dirty you can tell i use it all the time
i think i accidentally used some acrylic ink and other products that didn't clean off very well but
i love that it comes with this little color chart where you can fill in each watercolor and this
is so important because watercolor looks so much brighter and more luminous when it's
applied on paper rather than it does in the individual little palettes it's
much darker so you need to do this to make correct color choices often you see how dark
it looks compared to that but anyway this little set is the one that i use for each of the nine
paintings and also easy to find in my amazon shop in this first video of the series you'll see me
laying out my nine painting format on this dick blick healing mat i wanted to let you know
i got this from dickblick.com and i love it and here we go i have my pastel mat i also have
my healing mat and i love that it has this grid system it helps a lot for measuring what i'm
gonna do here is i had it in mind that i wanted to create a layout to have six or nine paintings
the last tiny painting lesson i did had six and i thought i wanted to go even smaller and do nine
of them so what i did is i taped it off onto the grid you know it's square it's measured up on the
grid so i know it's square by the way i love my limb tape dispenser this is artist tape that is
so handy to have in a studio it takes different sizes i think this one is oh three quarters of an
inch or an inch wide but you can buy various sizes all of these again on my amazon shop i hate to
sound like a broken record for this however i'm going to be using half inch black tape to make a
grid or guide for my nine paintings also back in my graphic design days i love using my t-square
and a triangle you'll see me use in a minute for accurate and precise measuring here's a quick
graphic for you to understand what i'm doing i use the t-square to get my horizontal
lines and i use the triangle to move along the t-square to get my vertical lines so that
might help you to understand what i'm doing as i work here now i wrote down that i'm decided
on doing two and a half by two and a half little squares the reason is because i wanted to
go with three by three but the paper wasn't wide enough so i had to make some measurement decisions
here based on the size of my paper so now i'm just marking off my measurements and my borders and i
know now what the measurements are to get nine of the two and a half by two and a half inch squares
and i knew i wanted to keep a half inch between each of the squares because the black tape is one
half inches now you can see me using this t-square that i'm really just guiding along the sides of
my healing mat now i'm making my vertical marks or measurements once again keeping a half inch
between each of the squares and now you'll see me using my triangle it's really just a 90
degree angle that i'm sliding along and i'm sharing this in case you want to do something
similar my original thinking was to have nine of the paintings with a nice crisp border between
them you know like you could put painters tape in between it and the artist tape would work similar
to painters tape where you can peel it off at the end and have this nice crisp white border between
each painting well i'll let you know ahead of time it did not work that way i think it's because of
the pastel matte perhaps that the watercolor kind of seeped through but i still would do it again
this way because i really like first of all i use black tape instead of white tape because i
wouldn't be able to see the borders that well and i also liked having a half inch distance
between them but again i would use this method again because i think i would like to frame
them all on this one sheet you know i can get a mat and cut out little individual sections
for each painting it would really make a neat final painting presentation and finally we can get
started this was so much fun i really needed this i am choosing some brushes i love this
little art bin i think that's also in my amazon shop it's a very convenient way to
keep your brushes and even though these are tiny paintings i didn't really use little
teeny brushes you'll see as i get started and every painting will begin this way all nine
paintings i like to keep some paper towels folded up to kind of control my water flow as i'm working
with the watercolor i recently got this nice little ceramic dish for holding my water i needed
something bigger for my water now this square format worked out quite conveniently because
in my photo albums on the pmp-art.com website i noticed that all of the little images are
already in little squares and so it made it really easy for me to have these little thumbnail images
to work from now let me talk about pmp-art.com i found the site many years ago and it was such
a neat way for people to share their photography and allow artists to use it for painting without
a copyright here's the page of the woman of the first photo that i'm going to be using now i'm
not going to put the photo in the video while i'm painting i think pmp has something to wear
i don't put it up there so it looks like mine but i'm going to put a clickable link to this
image from the pmp website pmp-art.com website so that you can use it if you would like to
i'm just using a pencil this happens to be a faber castell 6b it didn't get in focus very good
i normally would use a lighter pencil than a 6b but i tried to go a little darker so that
perhaps you can see it better when i'm sketching also i love this is the best pencil sharpener i
have found i got this on amazon and of course it's in my amazon shop it's a german pencil sharpener
and i absolutely love it many of these lessons will have a lot of real time but i'm speeding
up little sections like the sketching portion and specifically in this video because this will
be the only one of the nine lessons that has all of this intro showing you how i set it up and all
of the supplies and again for the reference image you can look in the description of this video
and i will have a clickable link to the actual site of pmp the artist who has this particular
photograph and by the way pmp is free and you can also follow people kind of like you do on
facebook so if you want to follow me find me on there i think it's just susan jenkins but you
can find all of my photo albums and you could just literally look at all of these from my page or
photo album section and i believe most of these were under you can categorize photo albums i find
it very convenient because sometimes you just want to paint you don't want to search for a photo
so if you ever have any time where you can just sit down and pick out some of your favorite
photos and categorize them and little albums it makes it so nice when i have a moment like this
and i'm like i want to paint some bees and flowers well thankfully i have two photo albums one's
just called flowers i think but i happen to have a lot of bees in them and one was called bees
and so it was easy for me when i had this concept to just find them i have some that are organized
by landscapes valleys trees all kinds of things animals so feel free to get on there and find
me follow me and use my photo albums if you would like to so here we go i've got this
sketch and it's time to add the watercolor i am choosing some warm colors i'm going
to talk about these when i put them up but i'll also hold up my little color guide so
you can see the ones i'm choosing now here's my brush i decided on it's the princeton
brush company the label has worn off but i see it's a brush that is not as small as
you might think for something like this but i prefer using a larger brush the largest brush i
can use because i think it keeps things painterly first i'm using a wet on wet technique all that
means is you're wetting the paper first before you apply the watercolor it really helps to keep
things subdued and again a painterly feel and makes the paint just kind of flow and create
more of a wash so i'm speeding it up now but you can see i'm working around the flowers i'm
only working on the background and the negative shapes behind the flowers with applying the
water now once you have the water applied you want to relatively quickly go ahead and apply your
color your watercolor what i'm doing here is i'm getting some of that magenta color i've learned
over the years i used to not add enough water to my watercolor the water is your friend so wet it
good enough not so wet that it's all runny because you remember you already have a wet surface but
see how when i'm just touching this watercolor to the spots where i've already wet it that it's
just kind of it creates a channel the water that's already there and it's almost like the water flows
into the areas that you've already wet so now i'm going to be toning this oxford blue and i think
i use a little bit of the violet i'm going to be toning the flowers now this might seem a little
bit opposite here why would i tone the flowers a purpley magenta purpley kind of um blue color
and it's because it's the complement to yellow these are sunflowers remember they're yellow so
often i will put what is opposite on the colored wheel in some of my other videos i actually show
you how i do this so make sure you watch all nine of these this is just the first one because you'll
learn something new probably with each one so now what i'm doing is i'm using a little bit of
this darker purpley blue to get the centers because the centers are the darkest thing in
this image now notice that one did just kind of bleed a little bit because it touched some of the
water but that's okay that's a sunflower that's in the distance and often things in the distance
are less detailed a little out of focus and blurry and i strive not to have too much detail anyway
i'm been really focusing more on having a strong focal point in my latest artwork and what would
you think the main focal point would be in this image well probably that flower i'm working on
right there it's kind of the star of the show and then next in line would be that flower alright
so you see i'm using a little bit of the magenta and the purple to just get these centers in and
once again you can do this with just watercolor this lesson works for different mediums and i've
got my little b i wanted to know also too he's of course a focal point too right so i want to
make sure he's got a decent amount of contrast and i'll talk about that a little bit more as
i work i really just want to get him in here so i didn't forget to not give too much detail on
the flower area around him oh so i did use the color wheel in this video now what color are the
flowers they're yellow what's opposite of yellow on the color wheel what that's what's called
its complement a complementary color and it's always the opposite side of the particular color
you're using so i know that it's going to be blues and i probably wouldn't be toning all of
these petals this light bluish cool color if i was keeping this primarily a watercolor painting i
would probably add some of the blue for the shadow sides but because i know i'm going to add pastel
we can layer things and it's really nice to have a complimentary color underneath often so here's
the blue that i'm choosing to use for the petals a little bit of the lighter and a little bit of
the darker blue now you probably noticed what i was doing before was doing the same technique
of the wet on wet i had applied water to these petals now you want to make sure you let the pink
portion dry first before you do this or it'll all bleed into each other so you know you learn these
little tricks as you're working with watercolor and other mediums but the fun thing is it's all
a learning process you can learn these things and now i'm ready to get started with the pastel
and what am i doing here i actually am adding a piece of tracing paper and this is to protect
the other areas for painting i wanted to keep them nice and clean for each new painting and now
we are ready for pastels and again this is pastel matte so it's already ready to receive pastels
i'll talk about these pastels more in a minute but i'm using a little uh repurposed chinese
takeout tray and a piece of foam i cut for my for holding my pastels as i use them now the
pastels i'm choosing here are really from all of the pastel paintings that i do it's a little
temporary storage system i have i repurposed a box of sennelier pastels that had come in this
it had those nice divisions in it and this works great for me just to put my pastels in after each
painting instead of going back to my studio set that you know is bigger and everything so it
ends up being a great little set in itself to choose colors from so i'm choosing some darks
you see i've got some darks in the centers of the sunflowers often there are some magentas and
purples in there and of course we're going to have our typical sunflower colors of the golds now keep
in mind if you look at that reference image as i'm choosing pastels do you see there is a shadowy
side it's like the light is coming from the upper left and really just dancing across some of the
petals so i'm keeping in mind that some of them are going to be brighter and some are going to be
more in shadow this is a little set i like it's a sennelier 40 half stick set i really love this
little set it's got some bright yellows some really bright pretty colors i'm choosing some
of the purples and bluer tones for those shadowy colors and really just i don't even think i used
all of these colors but here's the beginning i will apologize that the beginning of this pastel
application had a little technical difficulty some of you know i'm caring for my mother-in-law
now who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer and i wanted to share too that that was one
of the reasons i chose doing some of these little paintings and this particular project
i thought it would be therapeutic often small painting can be that you don't take it quite as
seriously have a little more fun and i find that anyway maybe you will too but you're seeing the
pastel that i'm using now is a neutral color okay it's not real bold in color and i know some of the
petals in the shadowy area aren't going to be as bright and sunny yellow as the rest once again
you can find the reference image in a clickable link in the description of this video but patrons
if you're a patron of mine from my patreon page i will give you the image in your post along with
links to all of the products so that's one of the perks of being a patron of mine thank you patrons
you guys have just been such a blessing to me and now you can see i'm using one of the kind of gold
tones that's a little darker i'm still working on the more shadowy parts of the sunflower and
typically in pastel painting we work dark to light because of the ability to layer often it's good
to get a darker color down first because it gives the lighter color or the brighter color something
to rest upon that's going to give it some contrast and interest so that's why you see it looking
darker before i turn on the light so to speak by adding some of the brightest yellows and lighter
value yellows often too sometimes we we go light too soon so it's best to kind of be careful
with that also notice my strokes are very light pressure i found that was one of my challenges
when i started pastels was i went too heavy-handed too quickly and i also felt i needed to fill up
the tooth of the paper and you know get take away the white of the paper or whatever it was very
quickly and you don't need to do that you need to take your time with this these colors will start
to blend themselves and the color stays fresh and more vibrant the lighter you apply because
what pastels actually are pigment that has these little almost like crystals i guess and they uh
shimmer in the light and the more layers you add the more you muddy the colors the more you press
or destroy that ability for the color to be as vibrant as it's as it can be so perhaps keep that
in mind when you're working also too this is real time you notice the pastel portion is real time i
can't remember if i have the whole thing real time but the centers do you see how i added purple and
a little bit of that magenta color to the center rather than just choosing a black or a brown for
the center that we often see in artwork okay so now i'm going to start going a little bit lighter
and whenever you do look at the reference image you'll see that the light is catching some
of the outer petals and so i'm just trying to gently work those in now this is a sennelier
pastel i love this brand of pastels but when they're rolled when they make them they often have
little i call them little tails on them it's not real smooth on the end of it sometimes there's a
part of pastel that's kind of pointy so sometimes you have to kind of sand it down on another piece
of paper or something or work with it i realized too i needed i was going a little light too soon
like i mentioned before i have this other type of orangey gold color that is not quite as light yet
so i'm still gradually working towards the light and i'm also not being so fastidious about the
petals being absolutely perfect and i want to have a gestural feel i want them to feel like they're
flowing maybe blowing in the wind which it does kind of look like in the reference image and now
i'm finally getting to some of the lighter values but notice it's not as light as it could be it's
more bright it has a higher saturation of yellow it is a little bit lighter in value but sometimes
like i said before we go too light too soon or we feel like we have to grab a yellow that's almost
white and i find paintings have much more color interest when you try to go brighter rather
than lighter if that makes sense now i'm going to talk a little bit here while i work about this
painting and the paintings to come like i've been mentioning they all have flowers and they all have
little bees and i'm going to give a little example of some of the bee techniques not in
this video but in some future videos and often i do this i feel like i have to give the bee
more detail than he needs okay you know how bees you see them flying they're usually full of energy
and they're in motion and we want them kind of to appear that way so i've found that the fewer
strokes you can make and having strokes with more gesture and energy really gives the feeling more
of a b because they're usually busy right they're in in flight in motion and i found two and you may
find if you choose to tackle this endeavor of nine paintings with me your paintings will get better
as you go along and your bees will get better as you go along my bees continue to get more
gestural and full of energy with each painting so uh this bee that was a precursor to let you
know this bee wasn't my favorite bee that i did but um but i will be giving you more instruction
as these paintings progress to get the uh the fun freedom of a bee and have it represented
in your painting all right you see i'm just gradually adding some of these yellows now back
to focal point again i know the background flowers not necessarily this one i'm working on but those
behind there they're not going to have a lot of detail because if you give them a lot of detail
they're going to be competing for focal point a neat thing happens with our eyes and our vision
okay let me pause real quick here i'm adding you see that pretty that's another sennelier i'm using
that little tail or point to my advantage here um but uh i'm adding a little bit of those shadowy
colors you know i covered up some of the blue from the watercolor so i'm kind of adding it back
a little bit here okay back to our miraculous eyes i love how when we look at something like say
you're looking at the sunflower what automatically happens with our eyes because of peripheral we
have peripheral vision but you can't focus on everything all at one time usually you focus on
one thing and if you can stay focused on it and imagine sort of kind of looking at the things
around it they're all fuzzy they're out of focus well cameras don't often do that they have an
automatic setting on them usually where the aperture is set to where it focuses pretty much
everything and that's not to me if you want an artistic and painterly final painting it's not
the best way to paint we want to emulate in our artwork usually what our eyes see and so it's
good to find a focal point that you give more detail as if you're looking at it that's what
you're focusing on and make almost a fuzzy or halo effect of other elements so that they're not
competing for attention i hope that makes sense so try to paint more like our vision works
rather than how a camera works sometimes i'm being gentle around the bee once again he is
part of the focal point obviously and that flower and so i didn't want to give so much detail and
fine lines to the petals where he's going to be and that's kind of why i'm taking my time in
finishing that area i also wanted to add a little bit more shadow to the centers of the
sunflowers there is an area like i said the light is coming from the upper left area somewhere
so the lower right area of these sunflowers are going to be just a tad more in shadow and for
this i'm using the terry ludwig eggplant color it's really a dark dark purple i avoid using black
because black is really just void of all colors so this is definitely one of my favorite darks okay
now i'm back to using a sennelier i also wanted to mention i'm have the advantage again of using
this little imperfection on it the little point that makes it easier to get into some of these
petals but some people have commented on how can you use these big chunky pastels for such a little
two and a half by two and a half painting well there's a little trick and i'm going to be talking
about it more in future videos um about how you feel your way wasn't that in a movie like greece
or something you literally feel your way by just giving a little almost like a pr practice touch
to the surface with your pastel where you can feel even sometimes when you can't see where the
pastel is landing you can feel it so you make a little little teeny tap or mark and pull it up
and you can see where it was and then you just continue to feel where it was and work your way
around it may sound difficult but actually the more you do it it's really not that hard at all
and one thing i find about these tiny paintings is because you're forced to use big chunky pastels
with such a tiny painting it forces you to be more painterly often we get too detailed and too fussy
we feel like we have to make all these fine lines and details and things and you really just can't
do it in these little paintings so here you can kind of see how i'm i just make a little mark
and i kind of feel where it is and then i can kind of keep going i wanted to add i've got some
of the blues in the top part there that were more cooler blues now this is would be
considered a warmer blue a turquoise is a warm blue or you could say it's a
cool green if you don't understand that i've got a video i did a few videos back on color
temperature and i really go into detail about color temperature and what it means to be a cool
color warm color and all of that so but now i'm adding the warmer blue the teal or turquoise a
little lower into these petals because that's typically how the sky works we go from cooler
colors up in the heavens usually gets warmer down towards horizon line where the sun usually
is down further in the horizon so that's why i decided on this and this painting because the
sunflowers were everywhere and there wasn't a lot of background it kind of came out looking a little
bit abstract which i liked you know with the negative shapes and that's kind of what i'm
doing right now it's called negative painting i'm painting the background into the petals
i got the general petal shapes and then i'm negatively painting in between the petals you see
the petals at the bottom of the main sunflower they're not really formed all that great so
i i actually work around them now this pastel you see how it's more linear it's a harder
pastel i'm not sure if that's a rembrandt but i wanted to get some of these it might even
be a new pastel a prismacolor new pastel spent in spelled nu pastel and those are harder pastels
and they actually have more of a point or an edge to them but i let color be my guide here i wanted
a color that was kind of that evergreen looking green so i just grabbed whatever i found and even
though it's harder can you see the difference of that color versus those teals up there it's uh it
doesn't go on as buttery smooth but that's okay because i know as i add more colors like now i've
got a warmer green here that is a bit softer as i add more colors all of those little blank spaces
or linear looking marks will be blended out by the layering process so sometimes we worry we have to
over blend we'd get a blending tool and think we have to blend in that little green area because
some of the paper is showing through but resist that urge because again you're going to take away
the brilliance of the pastel the more you blend the more you lose that precious color that's so
emblematic of soft pastels i think it's one of the brightest and most colorful mediums ever i mean
even more than oil painting the challenge with pastels one of the i guess if you want to call it
a downside is that you have to frame it you have to put it behind glass or protect it somehow i use
clear bags from clearbags.com to store my pastels prior to framing or i use them also to ship my
pastels in i even found a neat little way you can have pastel greeting cards right now i'll have to
share that in a video but you do have to protect them but i think that adds to their preciousness
or um uniqueness you know they're just so precious they need to be protected and they're perhaps a
little bit more durable than some people think all right so now i'm working around the bee
a little bit and i'm kind of losing him a bit but i do reestablish that in a minute again i
kind of put my watercolor b there to remind me not to over layer in that area because i wanted
him to still have some contrast and focal energy and this terry ludwig pastel was a perfect example
of having to feel my way now i'm back to using a sennelier and now let's turn the lights on can
you see how bright that is now this is a little bit of a lighter value i've gone a degree lighter
in value because this is where the sun is hitting on those petals it doesn't need to be everywhere
i've heard an expression i can't remember which artist said it if it's everywhere it's nowhere and
that really is so true if something is everywhere nothing stands out as important
you know it's not it doesn't stand out anymore if you've got that same
color all over the painting so we want to reserve those areas of the brightest highlights to
just where the sun is hitting in this particular reference image and again i apologize for not
having the reference image right next to the painting but when it's someone else's photograph
as in this case with pmp-art.com by the way pmp stands for paint my photo it used to be called
paintmyphoto.com but when it's someone else's reference image i want to make sure they get
the glory for it so that's why i put the link to the image in the description of this video
so you can go check it out again you might have to sign up for pmp-art.com if you're not not
already a member but it's free you know why not i also like to remind you guys that i love your
comments not only do i love reading them you guys have given me some great advice and you're
what's helped me to know what to provide here um improving my videos just some tips and things you
guys have all right back to a terry ludwig pastel it's a big old chunky kind of a rust orangey color
and i'm kind of reestablishing sometimes when the petals come into or come out of the center they
are bunched together a little bit more so you're going to create a little bit of a darker value
in those areas and it's kind of um segmenting the petals a little bit they were all kind of
one color there so it's giving some division or separation from the petals it also looks so
nice there's a little bit of that purple in the center i don't know if you can see it on whatever
device you're looking at but often like i said in the centers of sunflowers and even in the petals
kind of where i'm working now you can have some purples and some reds and punch up that color a
little bit i can't remember if i added any red um to some of the areas that i'm working on
now usually like right where that petal like i said comes right out of it you can get some
pretty rich reds and it always creates interest rather than just going with yellows and browns
now i'm using a little tool that i've recently discovered that works good when working on tiny
paintings it's just a little q-tip and so what i'm doing again i did not give a lot of detail
around the bee because if i had all those petal divisions behind him he would lose his focal
interest so i'm and i ended up kind of covering up the b but again i remembered not to add like
all those highlights around where the bee was and i'll actually be getting to the b pretty
soon but i'm adding now this is another sennelier pastel look at that gorgeous yellow now it's not
quite as light as the first one it's more bright you know it's more intense in color but it's
going to stand out because of its brightness i think i'd go back and reestablish some of
those lighter yellows at the end just on the tips now i'm going in and adding a little bit
of this lavender this is the shadowy area of the flower it's going to make it feel a
little bit more in shadow and often i use a lot of lavenders and blues in shadows and shadows
and flowers and various other subject matter so it does make it feel a little bit more like um the
light is behind and above the sunflower not down in the center and that on those lower petals now
here's where i'm adding a little bit more of those lightest lights like i said just where it looks
like the sun is just dancing across a few of these petals notice how the front sunflower is now
becoming the main focal point i put a little bit on the back but i don't overdo it because it's
it's second fiddle to the first one here okay and then the ones in the very back back they're
uh you know they're stage hands or something i don't know why i'm doing theater analogies
and now let's add mr b i'm using a dark again the terry ludwig eggplant color pastel he
needs to have a dark base so i learned this little technique from artist karen margulis just
watching some of her bee videos of her flowers and bees and she's really just so darn good at it
her bees are so cute but you put down she always does three little marks sometimes i'll do two
little marks a head and a body even though insect usually has three divisions and then you use kind
of a orange or bright yellow for that center part just a little mark then you put down almost like
a blue periwinkle blue and then you can put down a lighter color on top those are for the wings
now i've got a lighter color just a little brush and you can have two little wings coming out i
added some little legs with a a harder new pastel and a little indication of a little antenna but
again my bees got better the more that i did and they just got more fun so we're always learning
right so this was obviously part one in the series and notice all real time for the pastel portion
of this which will be the same for the next lessons so i hope you will tune in for all nine
of these paintings this video will be the only one that shows my technique for laying out the nine
painting format but it should be a lot of fun it was a blessing to me very healing for me during
this time in my life so i hope it is for you too and if you haven't subscribed i hope you will also
follow me on instagram please at susan jenkins artist i always forget to say that alright guys
that's it happy painting happy spring time and be blessed you
