All right, good afternoon. Welcome, so happy Halloween, this one as a Halloween treat. The lecture will not probably take the full time and we'll be able to go ahead and either commiserate or work on lab four or you can study for your other midterms because apparently that's the thing. So, lab four is released after your midterms. If you wanna feel good about yourself for reading week, just do lab four, it shouldn't take that long, hopefully. If you understood the lab four primer, you're like halfway there. So, all the tests are there, it should be hopefully not too bad to implement. As long as you're careful about your file descriptors, you won't have any real hard to diagnose bugs. But today, this will be a quick one and we will talk about page replacement. So, on your machine, you have this trade-off between capacity of memory and speed. At the very top, the fastest thing is your CPU, which has a set number of very fast registers where all the operations happen, but there's not that many of them, but they're very, very fast. And below that, you have your CPU caches, your L1, your L2, your L3, somewhere in the range of like, the newer processors have up to like 32 megabytes of cache. It's really, it's much faster than RAM, but it's still slower than actual registers. So, below that, you have some more capacity, but it's a bit slower. And then below that is memory, which is pretty fast. We have like, you know, 32 gigs is not too uncommon, it's relatively fast. Then below that, we have NVMe storage for non-volatile memory. So that's like your newer M.2 SSDs and all that stuff. So they're in the range of, you know, terabytes are pretty affordable and it is much, much faster than old spinning disks, but still it's going to be more expensive than RAM, or less expensive than RAM, but have lower capacity. Then beyond that is like your flash memory SSDs, like your two and a half inch drives. They're terabytes, not that uncommon either, and they're going to be much, much cheaper, but they're going to also be slower. Then below that, you have spinning magnetic disks, which, you know, 12 terabytes is not uncommon to buy and it's fairly cheap. And that's going to be fairly slow. And then below that is tape drives, which I'm sure no one has ever seen before, but they are used for like archival storage, like Google data centers and things like that. They are exceedingly cheap and can hold like, you know, like 50 terabytes, I think is not uncommon, but likely you will never ever see that because you don't need to store that much data. They're really, really slow, but they're super cheap. So we have this whole hierarchy and you want to kind of hide it away from the user and give them an illusion that everything has the speed of the layer above it while the capacity of the layer below it. So you have the best of both worlds. So I have large, fast capacity and it is our job to kind of hide that to users and make it as easy as possible to actually use. So normally the memory used by all the processes on your machine can't exceed the amount of physical memory, but they may not be all in use at one particular time. So you can take advantage of having fast disks and any access storage or any access memory. You can put some unused memory onto the disk and get it later and then swap things into main memory and kind of create an illusion that you have lots of memory so we can actually use like visual studio code and all your browser tabs with only like eight gigs of RAM as long as you have your disk as the backup there. So that's what we'll be talking about today is how to actually which pages you would swap to disk and into memory. So ideally you only keep the pages that are in use in memory so they're already there and you can use them and then anything that's not used you put to disk and then hopefully that's used very infrequently so you would swap that back into memory whenever you need it and hopefully that doesn't happen that often. So you just swap pages back into memory as they're needed. So these page algorithms there are several of them and again it is just swapping things from disk to memory and memory are the pages that are actually in use. So the first algorithm is the optimal algorithm. So this is to replace the page that won't be used in the longest time. So I swap out the page I know is not going to be used in the longest and the intuition behind that is all the remaining pages are going to be used more frequently and so whenever those get access they're already still in memory so they would already be there you don't have to do any swapping and everything is good. Another strategy might be just random which is just replace a random page. So whenever I need to swap memories full I need to swap something out I just pick a random page and throw it out. Yeah from memory yeah. Yeah so if you have eight gigs of RAM and all your processes are using like 10 gigs two gigs of that could be pages that it throws onto the hard drive and then it would swap them back in as they're needed. Okay the third algorithm would be first in first out so we swap the oldest page first nice and simple first in first out is kind of your go to for scheduling and page replacement it's the simplest thing to do. Then so optimal also requires looking into the future so I'm looking into the page that won't be used in the longest. Obviously you can't actually do that on your machine because you won't know what page isn't going to be the longest because you cannot perfectly predict the future so it's not really practical. So a more practical version of that is least recently used so it's kind of an approximation so I replace the page that hasn't been used in the longest and the idea behind that is well whatever I most recently used I'm likely to use it again so I should just keep it in memory and swap out anything that hasn't been used in the long time because likely I'm pretty much done with that or I just access it very infrequently. So this is going to be the running example we use the whole lecture and this is how we evaluate page replacement algorithms. So it's going to be a slightly convoluted and silly example where we only assume our physical memory can hold four pages because I don't want to write like 10,000 numbers. So memory can only hold four pages and then there's going to be five pages we access we just give them a number so we access pages one to five and we access them in this order and we're going to assume all the pages are initially on disk so we have to swap them into memory so these are our access one, two, three, four, one, two, five, one, two, three, four, five. So this is going to be a running example for all of our lectures or sorry all of our examples in this lecture and to evaluate page faults it's a bit easier than scheduling because we only care about the number of page faults because then it's slow to swap things in from disk so we just want to minimize the number of page faults. So that makes sense to everyone. Okay, so let's go through those accesses and see what happens in the optimal case. We were where we replace the page that isn't going to be used in the longest time. So again, physical memory can only hold four pages so inside of those boxes are going to be four up to four numbers that's the pages that are currently in memory and then above the boxes is going to be the current page we're accessing and then if the number's in red that means we swapped in that page in that slot. So when we first access page one we're going to assume they're all on disk so we have to bring it into memory so we swap page one into memory so now in memory in our box we have one and it's in red. So when we access page two it is also not in memory so this is going to get fairly boring so it's not in memory we bring it into memory there's still additional slots so now we have page one and two into memory and we swap page two in at that access. Then page three, same thing. We have another slot, we bring in page three. Page four, same deal. We bring in page four, now our memory's full. So now after page four we're accessing page one. It's already in memory so we don't have to swap anything. It's all good, we have essentially a cache hit so it's in memory, we access it, we continue on with our lives. Now we have an access to page two, same thing. It's in memory, so it's all good. We access page two and then we don't have to do anything. So now the interesting thing happens when we access page five. So it's not in memory and now we have to pick a page to swap out. So remember for optimal we're going to swap out the page that is used the furthest in the future. So if I want, and that's the goal is to reduce the number of page faults. So should I swap out page one? No, because it's going to be accessed next so page one safe. So I shouldn't touch page one then after that I access page two so I shouldn't touch that. Then after that I access page three so I shouldn't touch that. So now I only have one option left. I have to get rid of page four. So I swap out page four with page five. So on my access to page five I swap out page four so I put page five in red and it replaces page four. So now in memory we have pages one, two, three and five. So after that, well, we're going to get a bunch of hits because we were smart about this. So now we access page one. That's a hit. It's already in memory. So we're good. Access page two already in memory. That's a hit. That's good. Then we access page three. It's a hit. It's already in memory. So we're all good. Now we have page five. So we have to swap in page five. So we have to swap out either page one, two, three or five. So which one should I swap out? One, two or three. So I basically, the next access is page five. So as long as I don't touch page five, it's fine. Generally we don't like page one so screw page one. So we replace page one with page four and now this is what's in memory is four, two, three, five. And we swapped it in. So when we access page five as long as we didn't swap it out and again the previous one we could have swapped either page two or page three as well. So page five would be a hit. So now we just count the number of page faults which is essentially the number of red number. So how many page faults are there in this case? Six. So we're done. So in the optimal case, there's gonna be six page faults. So whatever we evaluate any other algorithms since this is the optimal, it should be either six or higher because if it was, that'd be a contradiction and then optimal wouldn't be optimal. So remember six page faults here. So let's do the same thing with first in, first out. So first in, first out, the beginning four accesses are gonna be all the same. Actually the beginning six accesses are gonna be all the same. So one, page fault have to bring it into memory. Two, page fault have to bring it into memory. Three, same thing. Four, same thing. And then I'm going to access page one. So if I access page one, it's a hit. It's already in memory. Then I access page two. It's a hit. It's already in memory. Now we get to page five. So page five is in memory. So we have to bring it in. So we have to kick out something. What do I kick out? Number one. So first in, first out. First thing I put in was page one. So it's the first thing out. So I replace page one with page five. So page five is in red. And now in memory it's five, two, three, four. Okay, well, that was silly. So next access, I access page one, which I just removed. So now I have to swap back in page one. And what do I pick to swap in for page, so page two. Page two is now the first one in. So page two gets swapped out. So now memory looks like five, one, three, four. Ugh, shucks. So now I access page two. And that's a miss as well. So now I have to swap out something else. So what should I swap out? Three. So I swap out page three because now it is the oldest. So you can look backwards too, so you can see the nice diagonal lines of red. So first in, first out, you'll know you're doing it right. If you see the diagonal lines of red or circles or whatever you choose to put in for your swap. So now when I access page two, I replaced it, I replaced page three. And now memory has five, one, two, four. Now I access page three. Ah, crap, I just swapped that out too. So now what am I replacing? Four. So now four is the oldest. So now I replaced page four. Now in memory it's five, one, two, three. Now I'm accessing page four. Oh no, I just swapped out page four. So now I swap out page five because now it is the oldest. So now in memory I have four, one, two, three. Now I access page five. Again, I just swapped it out, so I made some poor decisions in life. So now I have to swap out the next oldest one, which is going to be, what's it now? One again. So now I swap out one. And now in memory I have four, five, two, three. So how many page faults do I have here? Ten. A lot worse than optimal. Optimal was only six. So that kind of sucked. So you might be thinking here's a brain teaser. So if I have less physical memory, so if I only had like three, if memory could only hold three pages, that should make this problem even worse, right? Because I have less physical memory, so I should probably have more page faults. That makes sense? Because the reverse is definitely true. If I had five pages in memory, I could fit everything and I would just have the five page faults and then everything fits. So I would only ever have my five page faults. So let's test that theory. So let's do FIFO again, but this time we can only hold three pages in memory. So we have less memory, so we expect more page faults. So let's go through it again. Now this will get slightly more interesting. So for the first access, again, now our boxes are smaller because we can only hold three pages. So first access, swap it in. Page one is in. Two, swap it in. Three, swap it in. Now in memory, we have one, two, three. And now we access page four. So what am I kicking out for page four? One. Okay, I kick out page one. All good. Clearly made a poor decision again because I just swapped out page one and now I'm accessing it again. So when I access page one, what am I swapping out? Two.  So now in memory is four, three, one, and now I'm accessing page two. So if I access page two, I have to replace something. When am I replacing? Three. So we got that nice diagonal line going on. So I replaced page three. Now I access page five. So what should I replace with page five? Four. So now in memory is five, one, two. So finally now I get a bit of a break. So when we access page one, it's there. Good. Then we're going to access page two. It's already there too. So we're good. Now we access page three. Oops. Now we access page three. We have to kick out something while we're kicking out. Page one. So page one gets replaced with three. So now in memory we have five, three, and two. Okay, so now we're accessing page four. It's not in memory so we have to swap out something. What are we swapping out? Two. Two is now the oldest, or the first in. So it is first out. So now we have five, three, and four. Then finally with our last access we have five, which is a hit. How many page faults do we have now? Huh, weird, huh? Didn't we say that we should have more page faults with less memory? Yeah, that's kind of weird. So we had 10 page faults before with four physical memory holding four pages and now we have three and we only have nine, which is better, which is kind of weird. So this weirdness has a name. It's Abilities Anomaly. And it says for first in, first out algorithms that more page frames actually cause more faults in kind of a fun paradox. And this is only a problem with the FIFO algorithms. It doesn't exist for at least recently used. And it is one of the very many reasons why you wouldn't use first in, first out. Cause the more memory you have, the worse it gets. Yeah, so just as, can you just use one, which is the best? No, because that would be terrible. So there's this fun paper because it involves a lot of math. So if you're really interested, you can read that. Or if you wanna like have something to read before you go to sleep to put you in a coma, you can read that. Basically the paper, if you read it says that most of the time you would expect that to be true where you've less memory and you have more page faults. But this says with those algorithms, you can carefully construct a sequence to get any arbitrary page fault ratio you want. So it depends on the accesses. In normal accesses, it would typically be better to have more memory. But because FIFO and the way it works with this, you can just, if you carefully craft it, you can get just some arbitrary page fault ratio. Yep, yeah, some cases you can craft cases to get whatever miss ratio you want. Yes, for, and for least recently used, more, the more memory you have, the better the less page faults you have. Everything follows, it's only for FIFO where you can carefully craft stuff. Yeah, it doesn't have this. So yeah, for any of the other algorithms, not FIFO, if you increase the number of page frames or the amount of memory you have, you'll have fewer page faults. Yep, yes, yeah, yeah. When I say page frames, it's like kind of redundant because frames typically means physical memory. But page is like a set size. Generally people just say page when they just say anything is size of a page, which is at four kilobytes. Okay, so let's do one of the other examples. So least recently used, in this case, you would use FIFO to break a tie. In this case, it's like a unit processor system, so there'd be no way to have a tie. But if you had multiple processors and you actually implemented this, there could be scenarios where you would actually have a tie so you might use something like FIFO to break the tie. But in this scenarios, we'll never have a tie because we're just arguing essentially about one CPU. So, again, go back, our physical memory can hold four pages again, same page accesses. The first six are gonna be really boring yet again, so one, have to swap it in, two, swap it in, three, swap it in, four, swap it in, and now we access one, it's there, so it's a hit. Access page two, it's there, it's a hit. Finally comes the time where we can think, so now we access page five, so what should I replace with page five? Three, yeah, so if I look back, so least recently used, I'm going to look back in history and then figure out what I have used most recently, so I just used page two, so page two is safe, I can't get rid of that, I shouldn't get rid of page one either, and then pass that, I shouldn't get rid of page four. So, if I can't get rid of one, two, or four, the only one left is three, and that's the least recently used, so I would replace page three with page five. So, I swap in page five for page three, and now in memory I have one, two, five, and four. So now I'm going to access page one, so it's already there, that's good, we didn't kick out page one like FIFO did, so it's already there, it's a hit, access page two, it is also a hit, it's already there. Then we go to access page three, so it's not in memory, so what should we kick out? I see a four, we agree for four, so between one, two, five, and four, while I wouldn't kick out two, I wouldn't kick out one, I wouldn't kick out five, so last one standing is four, so I replace page four with three. So now in memory I have one, two, five, three. Then I made a poor decision because now I'm going to try and access page four, so now I have to kick something else out, why am I going to replace for page four, five, right? So, I'm not going to kick out page three, I'm not going to kick out page two, I'm not going to kick out page one, so last page standing is five, so it is gone, which was a poor decision, so I replaced five with four, so then next access, I am accessing page five, so I have to swap out something, why am I swapping out one? Yeah, so I wouldn't swap out four, I wouldn't swap out three, I wouldn't swap out two, so last page standing is one, so I'd swap out one with five, now I would count how many page faults I have, how many page faults do I have? Eight, so I was better than FIFO, I wasn't quite as good as the optimal, but hey, I was better than FIFO. All right, any questions about that? Nice and straightforward, finally, right? So, when you actually go to implement, how least recently used, it's actually pretty bad, so we could think of an implementation where for each page we have a counter that says, what's the time it was last accessed, and then every time you access any page in memory, you would have to update that timestamp, because that's when it was used last recently, and then if you need to replace a page, well, you need to scan through all of memory and then find the page that has been used in the one with the oldest clock, which is going to be really, really slow. If every memory access you actually had to write a number and access your system clock, that would be really, really bad, so that would essentially at least double the amount of memory operations you have to do, which is terrible, and when you replace scanning through all of memory every single time, it's going to be just really, really, really slow. So, we might be a bit more clever if we try and implement it using Qs and software, so you could try and be a bit better and create doubly linked list of pages, and then for a reference, well, you just move it to the front of the list, and then whenever you need to replace it, instead of scanning through all the pages, you can make it a lot better by just taking the page at the back of the list, because that would by definition be the oldest one, but now it still requires like six pointer updates for every page reference, which you might be like, oh, it's 01, so it's all good, but six memory accesses essentially means you're slowing down your computer by six times, so if every reference you did six pointer updates, that would be atrocious, and because they're all pointer updates too, you could imagine if you had a processor with multiple cores and they all use memory, there would be some contention because you would have to put a mutex around that link list and then you have every core fighting for the mutex and you essentially make it serial, and it would just be a complete disaster. So, implementing this is not going to work. So, when you implement this, which is what we'll see in the next lecture, you essentially take some liberties and implement an approximate lease recently used, since lease recently used is like an approximation of the optimal case anyways, it's okay, we're all engineers, approximation is the name of the game, so it's all good, it's heuristically, it's about the same and we can implement it more efficiently. So, there's lots of different tweaks, you could do it used to implement more efficiently, it's kind of like scheduling in a way that there is also no one size all fit solution, it depends on the scenario and kind of the workload that you have. Next lecture, we'll be looking at something called the clock algorithm, which will take longer than we have left in the lecture, so we can just end early because we have midterms, so we can do that, or we can all work on lab four, we could, if we all, we could probably finish lab four if you wanted to, it's not that big, I finished lab four on the train in like 20 minutes, so you should be able to as well, so don't worry about it. So don't feel bad, that was a re-implementation because I did it before, so on the train, I just ran out of internet, so instead of waiting for air and end, I just did it better, so.  Just be really careful about your file descriptors and you won't have any terrible errors. So we'll be looking at the clock algorithm, there's lots of different flavors, there's like least frequently used, which is slightly better than least recently used because you just keep track of the number of accesses instead of the time. There's something called 2Q, there's adaptive replacement cache that we won't get into, but like scheduling, there's a ton of options that you can use. So the goal of page replacement algorithm is to reduce the number of page faults whenever you do these types of questions, it will always ask, hey, here's all the accesses, how many page faults are there given this algorithm? So you should know these algorithms. So we saw Optimal, which was replace the page that's used the furthest in the future and it is Optimal, it's good for comparison sake, but it's not going to be realistic to implement because we are not fortune tellers. Realistically, you will not know what happens in the future. Then there's Random, which actually works surprisingly well, it actually works better than FIFO because it avoids the worst case and you would think that wouldn't be the case, but just actually just doing random stuff is actually pretty good in this case. There's FIFO, it's easy to implement, but has that weird paradox that anomaly we saw where we had fewer page frames and we saw fewer page faults, which was kind of weird. Then we saw LRU, which gets close to Optimal, but it's expensive to implement. Yep, yeah, everything would take too long. There's some implementation, we'll see one next lecture, but yeah, it's fairly expensive or awful. All right, any other questions for today? Oh, and lab, no, quiz to the grading, apparently it should be done on Wednesday. No, I didn't finish my sentence. All right, yeah. Like, yeah, it's like, like, I don't know. So, Corkus, one of the questions the answer was wrong in the bank and so it doesn't, if you update it, it doesn't regrade it. So, the quiz summary just shows like zero for everything. So, well, which is good, because it was wrong, so if it's zero, then it's at least greater than zero. So, I have no idea what it is, but hopefully it's not too bad. All right, any other questions? Other than that, free time, so just remember, I'm pulling for you. We're all in this together.


I thought he was bigger than life because at the time uh be easy All those jams they they they haven't good success the till has some hits So so when you first uh, uh, uh, so you get down to Atlanta Uh, when did you start to to really get serious about music? We're gonna go there. Okay When did when did you start to really get serious about the music? Uh, I was serious Uh before you left. Yes. Yes before I left when I got to Atlanta it really Uh changed my mind state and showed me that it was real Yeah, because uh, I had started a rap group in Atlanta. What was the name of it money? Y'all got anything on the internet? No But what was the name? What was money money high money high like a Money high. Okay. Yeah. Yes. Uh money high and uh, it was with it was actually with ti la cousin Okay, and and so what's ti la cousin name? Uh mon rest in peace man. My power. He passed away mon What type of dude was mon? Uh a lot why? Oh, so he was he wanted me gonna get to yes. I always was he from bankhead Yes, no, he was from uh, mccannivill. Okay, but because I know His grandma was in bankhead. Uh shawty lo see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, don't boy. Yeah, shawty lo say he really was over there But and he said I was though they had a little cut back and forth about that Yeah, man little bro little bro from mccannivill and mccannivill and um at that point of time we uh We had started doing work with tomb Okay, tomb shall I tomb? Yeah, I've seen him. He been doing his round Maybe one day we'll get him down here to texas. Oh, yeah, man. That's the og man Okay, so what happened with with tomb like this the beat making nigga, right? Yes. Yes So the nigga makes beats and and and and be on it like he got a real good name with him and ti Him and ti had some real, uh, uh, flamboyant moments. No, I'm gonna change the language up a little bit But but they had some some nigga we hear moments, you know, I'm saying they came hard and and and and you you didn't He wasn't that when you met him Meaning like in your mind, he was just a cat you were going to the thing with or you thought he was big No, I thought he was big. Okay. Let's talk about that. I thought he was bigger than life because at the time, uh, be easy All those jams they they they having good success the till has some hits I had to tell me I had a round me to be on this I'm not for to go there Acting like this. It was a young ti.  Yeah, you roll for that, but he good But so so you see the uh, did you get to meet uh ti during them times when this was going on? No No, I mean we we seen each other during passing, but we never actually spoke spoken. Yeah So tomb was uh, do you and this you and tomb y'all still know each other Okay, so when when when you and you and tomb doing y'all thing What did y'all what what what was something that stuck out about the way that he done because you done seen a lot Doing music now. Yes. What sticks out to you about the way he done His process to doing the the the beats and and being in the studio man His process was so crazy because his work ethic was like no other like We didn't stand there all day, bro. Yes, we were being there all day like we tomb tomb will come get us at 8 9 in the morning We go with him And he had a he had a setup to where he had a keyboard and mp here He had an mp here and then he had like two three keyboards here And he would just sit in the middle of all three of those sections smoking and making beats He'd be making one be here turn Make another be here, but he got a different joint or blunt at each section So he had turned put that block down turn make making another beat here Smoking the joint boom boom put that down turn this way making a whole another track over here And then smoking a whole But he's doing that right there within the hour and he and that's all day all day all day And by the time we leave he didn't pump that 9 10 beats So I thought process was we got to catch up Yeah, we on boss talk one on one


Welcome friends to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins bringing you something that I think will really help a lot of artists who want to paint in soft pastel. I recently discovered a really neat way to use a block of watercolor paper to create my own homemade pastel surface. Now there's a couple of neat things about this watercolor paper that made this painting lay flat and just come out like many professional sanded pastel papers. So get ready to have some fun saving money. And if you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page, no, you're not seeing double. This video is of the same subject matter. I did a full live stream of the same flower painting for my patrons on my Patreon page. They got the full live stream content, all of my pastels that I used. But what you'll be seeing in this video today is the little study that I did before the live stream. So patrons, if you're watching, keep watching because you're gonna learn something new. And on that note, if you would like to become a patron of mine on my Patreon page and support this channel, it's really easy and real affordable. It's five dollars a month and you can cancel at any time and you get lots of extra content. So come join the family. We would love to have you. Also, if you would go ahead and like this video, I'd really appreciate it. Subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and click that bell icon to be notified. Of future videos. The product you'll see me using in this lesson is fluid 100 300 pound watercolor paper and it is on what's called a block. Some of you may know that I've used watercolor paper in the past to make my own soft pastel painting surfaces. But there's something special about this paper that makes it my favorite. So stay tuned. I'm gonna be talking about that. It comes in multiple sizes and it's quite affordable. The reference image is from a flower farm. This is their Facebook page called Juniper Canyon Flower Farm. They're in Helix, Oregon. And one of my patrons had shared some of their photos and I contacted them. I loved their photos and asked if I could use some of their photos for references and someone got back in touch with me and said yes. So yippee. I'm gonna be sure to share the final painting with them. And the reference image I'm using is Delphiniums. I think that's what these are called. And I am very grateful to this farm that allowed me to use it. For this homemade pastel surface technique, you'll need the watercolor block. You'll need some water and a paintbrush. There's another product you'll also need. I'll talk about later. It's called Clear Gesso. Now I did a little sketch and I'm gonna speed this up a bit because it's super basic. All I did was get in the horizon line, just a general kind of curving horizon line. I got in the basic flower shapes and I wanted to keep them very gestural and lively. And I only got in the ones that were very evident, the large flowers. And as I paint with pastels, I can add the smaller ones later. And what I'm going to be doing is creating an underpainting. It's called. It's like a painting under a painting. It's a nice road map to get started. Because this is watercolor paper, I can wet it. Now, sometimes I actually do a watercolor painting as an underpainting. Again, because it's watercolor paper, I can. But I also sometimes will use soft pastel. This whole painting will be only soft pastel. A lot of people don't realize that soft pastel is paint. It's just in a dry form. So when you add water to it, you liquefy it. Now, in my full live stream tutorial for my patrons on the larger version of this painting, I go over the whole process in real time, of course, live. And I had my patrons chatting with me and it was a lot of fun. It was my first, I guess, official live stream. And I'm going to be doing that more often for my patrons. It was really great. So I describe, you know, the technique that I'm doing here. But I'm basically just getting in a warm background for just some earthy colors in the background. And now I'm going to liquefy or turn the pastels into paint. Again, it's watercolor paper. So it works great. Now, here's what's neat about this 300 pound paper. I had never bought 300 pound paper. I had only used 140 pound watercolor paper. And I had heard that 300 pound paper, that's like a tongue twister, doesn't buckle as much. It's thicker and it takes more water so you don't get the buckling. Now, because this is on a block, I'll be talking about that more if you don't know what a block is. I'll tell you all about it. But because it's on a block, it doesn't curl. You know how a lot of people you tape your watercolor paper down or you wet it to stretch it because of this block and that it's 300 pound paper, it stays so nice and flat. And I'm pretty heavy-handed with my water, typically. So you're going to really love the fact that your final pastel painting won't be all warped like past times I've tried to use watercolor paper. Now, I left the flowers blank because I could have done the whole under painting with just all of that warm color. It's kind of a gradation from top to bottom, from lightest values to darkest values in a real peachy earthy color. The reason I left some of the flowers blank is because I wanted them to be very bright and luminescent. So I kind of wanted a little bit of that white of the paper showing through. And I decided to do it in sections like I'm doing because I didn't want the peach color to blend too much with the blue. So I decided just to do the flowers to liquefy them with water after the fact. So that's why I did two phases of the water application to the pastels. And I'm keeping these very nice and loose. Some of them leaned a little more blue, some leaned purple, and some were a combination of both. Again, I'm just getting the largest shapes, not worrying about the little details. I can layer those with pastels later. And then I'm going to add the water to this. And I'm going to try and keep the, it's going to blend a little bit with the pastels. I have already liquefied the peachy color, but I'm going to rinse my brush out and kind of keep those flowers, the blue and purple flowers, not contaminated with the other background I already laid down. And now with a clean brush, I'm going to liquefy the pastels here. And again, it doesn't matter if they blend a little bit with some of that peach color, but I'm trying to keep them brighter with the white of the paper. Now, why would I do this? Why would I even do an underpainting or liquefy them? And the reason I wet the pastels, you could also use alcohol, like drugstore alcohol, is because you see how it really filled up the tooth of the watercolor paper or the texture. And I don't have as much of that bumpy white surface showing through. Again, the pastels literally turn into paint. And so you get to paint with them, and you get a nice smooth application rather than that bumpy, textural application. And once this is dry, we can't really just apply soft pastels to this paper because they won't stick. Pastels need a little bit of texture. And this product, Clear Gesso is excellent for that. And I don't use regular Gesso. First of all, it's white. It would totally paint over white over your underpainting. And also regular Gesso that's often used for prepping canvases. It doesn't have the little texture in it for some reason. I don't know why, but the Clear Gesso has little bits of sand or grit to it, and it's clear. So it will dry and you'll be able to see through to your underpainting. So it's just a marvelous product for being able to make your own homemade pastel surfaces. Now some of you watching may be thinking, Susan, I've seen you do this technique so many times before. What's different about this? Again, I'm going to talk to you about that very soon. And if you have tried the water paper Clear Gesso technique of making your own surface, give me a shout out in the comments and let me know if you've tried it before. And I bet you you will like this product even more for the reasons I will share in just a minute. Now this is back to real time. Now the Clear Gesso is dry. I have my underpainting. It doesn't look like much, does it? But believe it or not, there are some benefits to this underpainting that will really make your painting easier to paint. Actually, it's like a little roadmap to get started. It will also create a more painterly style to your work. And because the underpainting is nice and warm, it'll really make some of those greens pop. There are so many beautiful benefits to underpaintings. And actually, it's better if they're very loose like this. We're not trying to get detailed. We want it loose, gestural and free. And what I'm doing now is getting more of the warm tones that's a dark. I know those are deep grasses. And if I just start putting green down right now, it's going to look a little flat and a little dead. So I'd like to get some darks in that are going to contrast with the greens and give them also a nice value to rest some of the lighter greens upon. Now I love this color here. It's kind of like a magenta. And it also leans a little warm, not as warm as like the orange or peachy colors I put down, but I thought it would be a neat little pop of color behind some of the grasses and some of the other distant flowers and stems reaching up. So I'm creating this environment, if you want to think of it that way, for my flowers and my grasses to be able to just say, Hey, look at me. And if I did all of the colors, just the same as what I see in the reference photo, that wouldn't happen. So now this is kind of an orangey. Oh, I switched it. Did I know this is kind of an orangey reddish color. And I'm putting this notice my values. Let me pause on that for a minute. Notice my values from the lower part going up are going darker to lighter. Value just means the degree of lightness to darkness. So typically things in the foreground are darker in value, especially things that are deep in grasses like these. So I put down my darkest value first in the foreground, then I'm gradually getting lighter as things are reaching up. Then the lightest thing, of course, is the sky. So I'm just gradually getting my values lighter. I'm also getting them cooler. And notice that that pink pinkish color that is a cooler color than the orange, meaning it doesn't have as much yellow in it. And I'm just kind of scumbling. That means just kind of little short random strokes, scumbling in between the flowers purposely trying to keep this loose and energetic and free. I'm not trying to create a photograph here. I'm trying to create a painting. I realized I wanted a few more darks in just some strategic areas. If you squint your eyes and look at this photograph or any photograph, you can more accurately determine lights and darks. And what you're basically doing when you squint your eyes, you're making a little filter. You're blocking out the light. And that really allows you to see, it kind of takes the middle values away. You're able to see what's really light and what's really dark. And I noticed the areas that I'm doing here were where there were some obviously deeper grasses and things. And this is going to give you the impression that these flowers are closer to you. Again, things get darker in the foreground, lighter in the background. An obvious example of this, it's like mountains. You notice in the distant mountains, they look pale and they also look cooler. Like I said, things get cooler in the distance. But things in the foreground are typically darker and warmer depending on your subject matter. And now what I'm going to do is I have the clear gesso applied and it's working great. But I'm actually going to get a paint brush and I'm just going to kind of knock down some of the texture off of a little bit of this pastel that I've applied. So now I'm painting with the pastels dry before I was painting with them. I was turning them into paint by using water. And by the way, I'm working flat. I actually prefer just artistically to work at an easel. There's one benefit to this multiple, but one of them is that your pastels fall down because of gravity. But I also like standing because I can back up and look at things. But I work flat for the benefit of filming. When I'm creating a tutorial, it allows my camera to be right overhead with a nice overall lighting that helps you guys to see a little bit better. So this paint brush technique actually works quite well when it's flat because I can blend and move the pastel around that's still laying onto the surface. Now this might look a little dark right now, but I'm getting in some colors for the sky. Now, skies typically are darker up high way up in the heavens. You know, it gets dark up in space, right? So think of that as you get higher, things get darker. As you get down closer to the horizon line, things get lighter. I happen to think that a sky in this case would be pretty if it had more of a cyan, a little warmer blues, a cyan is a warmer blue. And the reason was because the flowers tended to be a bit cooler. So I thought if I had a cool blue sky and cool blue flowers, that's not going to be as interesting. So I do pop a little bit of that teal cyan blue into the the flowers as well, not much a little bit so that it is harmonious with the sky. But again, I wanted some color interest. So that's why the colors that I'm using for the sky lean a little bit warmer. And you'll probably notice, like I said, I'm gradually getting my colors lighter as they get closer to the horizon line. Be become a student of nature too. Next time you're out and about looking at your surroundings, take a look at the sky, become a sky watcher. And I think you'll see this really does happen in nature. Now I'm just using a pastel to actually blend some of my sky. Now the more layers that you add with soft pastels, the more they will start to blend themselves. And they get smoother and less bumpy and textural. But there are some tools that you can use to blend them out to soften them up a bit. And I typically only use those things at the beginning stages of a painting. I feel that if you over blend, you're going to muddy your colors and lose that fresh vibrancy that's inherent to soft pastels. They really are the most brilliant in color of any medium. Now what I've been doing now is sneaking in more of that pretty warm color between and around the flowers. It's called negative painting. I wanted to kind of get that background just a little bit muted or neutral. This is more of a neutral pastel here. And it was just a little bit too bright. That's another thing that happens with color in the distance. Things get more neutral. If you notice a flower that's really, say it's a bright beautiful blue flower really close to you, you'll see it's brilliant color. But the further those flowers are in the distance, they start to pale out. They start to, first of all, get lighter in value, cooler in color in general. And they get duller in color or more neutral. Now I am back to talking about blending. I am using a little packing peanut. You know those little things that you get in packages to protect your packages? I have found these work great on certain pastel surfaces. This one of course, this homemade pastel surface with clear gesso. The packing peanuts just blend beautifully. But they don't work great with any professional pastel paper that has a lot of tooth. They're literally like sandpaper like UART, Fisher, Sennelier, of course. And they're almost just two texturals.  You can't even really blend with it. But it works great on this. It works great on pastel matte, color fix, and lots of other surfaces. But my purpose for this is I want that sky to appear far away. And I didn't want it to steal the show from the flowers. Now sometimes I do like a textural sky with with some clouds. But in this case, I felt like the flowers didn't need any competition. I wanted them to be the star of the show. And now I'm going to start developing some of the darker values in the flowers. If you squint your eyes again, you can see which flowers have darker values. You can also determine where the sun is. Even though you can't see the sun in this photo, you can tell that what's a very important thing to do when you begin a painting as it will make your painting more believable. And in this case, I could tell that the sun was coming definitely more from the right. I could see on some of those flowers that the darker values were more on the left side. And then of course, darker values are as they get deeper into the grasses as well. And I love the fact in this photo that some of them were purple, some of them were blue. And often many blue flowers, whatever those flower varieties are, they actually typically have a little bit of blue and purple in them. But I really just thought this image was so lovely. And then in the distance, there were some that were further away, that were a little bit of a lavender. Again, they're getting lighter because they're getting further away from the viewer. And now I'm going to start scumbling in some of the other flower shapes that I see. I say flower shapes because I'm not trying to recreate a botanically accurate flower that I could put in a flower encyclopedia. I'm creating a painting and that means suggesting things. And also too, by suggesting certain things, you allow other elements that have a bit more detail to remain the star of the show. The bigger flowers are most obviously going to be the focal point. And that is one focal point strategy, which is size. And the smaller flowers that are buried deeper, and I want some of them to be buried too. I'm going to put grasses on top of them. I don't want all of the flowers just sitting on top of the grasses. That won't look very believable. Now, here's where I was saying, isn't this a pretty blue? It's like a teal blue. And here's where I was saying, I'm connecting the sky a little bit because I am adding a little bit of that warmer blue to the flowers. So we've got a combination of cool blues, warm blues, and cool and warm purples as well. And what I'm doing, again, back to suggesting, I can see, I talked about this a lot in my live stream, I can see the way that these flowers grow from the reference image. They're not, well, first of all, they, they're almost like these long stems with lots of little bouquets on them, flowers that are circling around the stem. And so they're, what's the word? Spiraling. That's the word I'm looking for. They're spiraling, like from the base, larger, getting smaller as they're going up. So try to avoid putting each one, just like a little pattern on each side, like flower on right, flower on left, flower on right, flower on left, because some of them are turning, you're not going to see them all forward facing.  And before you know it, you've really given the impression of that particular flower variety. You will also notice that these flowers have darker centers.  So I am going to get a darker pastel. They won't all stay this dark, but that's, that's really kind of one of the ways we work with soft pastel. We typically put down our darker values first, and then we can layer and lighten them up. It's opposite of watercolor. Watercolor, you want to preserve the light. So I'm still scumbling in some other colors, and I'm trying to keep the edges nice and loose and to have a feeling of motion and gesture. But now I'm going to start adding the dark centers. And again, I want to take those centers and spiral them. I've already kind of given the indication of where the flower shapes are, but I can kind of see where the centers will be as well. And I'm, I'm not making an exact circle. I'm not making all of them the same size. And I'm certainly not trying to make an exact pattern.  Again, it's going to make your painting look very amateurish. If you have everything samey samey or patterned everywhere, we were going for the way nature really works. And that's not how nature works. Even though so many elements in nature have patterns, and I'm fascinated by something called the Fibonacci sequence, there's literally a mathematical formula for many of the patterns in nature. But even though much of nature has a pattern, there's also this beautiful sense of spontaneity. And I always think of elements in nature like music.  Dissonance in music is where there's a little note that's almost a little off or a little minor or something. And it actually adds such beauty to songs when everything, again, it's not samey samey. Can you imagine if there was a song where all the notes were just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot? It'd be so boring. So I equate music and art together a lot. I think there's a lot of similarities. So now I'm going to some of my lighter values. What I'm doing is I'm building the flower from the depths of the flower out to where the petals are catching the light. And keep in mind that things that are in to the stem are darker. So we get our darker values down first, again, to be able to have something to contrast the light on.  Once again, keeping in mind the location of the sun, because in this case, the lighter values on the flowers will be on the right sides of the flowers. And that's really going to give that feeling. You can kind of see it in the field, too. The light is coming from the right side. It was interesting that I chose a blue based on the color and the value. This one that's in my hand right now. I knew I needed some of these petals on these flowers to pop with value because the sun was catching them. And I just grabbed this color. I thought, Oh, this is good. This is a nice periwinkle lighter blue. And I didn't notice until later, I think this is the one, but there's one that I grabbed that's actually an iridescent pastel, iridescent meaning it shimmers and shines. I think this is the one. But I was like, You know what? And I like iridescent pastels. I don't use them a lot. They're kind of fun. But in this case, I thought it was so fun. And the painting, the final painting actually does shimmer. By the way, if you're curious of where I get my iridescent pastels, there's numerous companies that make them. But I'm very blessed. I live in the Tampa, Florida area. And the pastel company Mount Vision Soft Pastels is manufactured. Their plant is here in Tampa area. I actually did a tour of their facility. It's a video here on Monet Cafe of how pastels are made. The owner, Carl Kelly, gave me the tour and actually showed me how they're made. It was so cool. But while I was there, back to my story, he showed me his iridescent pastels. And they have, I think two sets, a regular set and a dark set. And I went ahead and got both sets. I think maybe it's 12 in total, something like that. And they're really a lot of fun. And again, this little final painting was shimmery and sparkly. And you are going to see at the end, I know the part of the topic of this video is that it's kind of a new discovery of mine. It's the same technique with watercolor paper, underpainting, then clear gesso to get your pastels to stick. But it's a better result because of this watercolor block and because of it being 300 pound. You're going to see at the end of this video where I take it off of the watercolor block. It's really super easy. And you can't believe how flat I couldn't believe how flat the surface was. Once again, if you guys have ever tried this, I'm able to get pretty good results. But almost always there's a little bit of warping. After it dries, it usually flattens out pretty good. But while you're painting is what's challenging is the watercolor paper can warp and curl and you're kind of working around some of the bumps. And this stayed totally flat the entire time. So that's really the new discovery of this particular video topic. And I love it. I'm going to do this again. I'm going to buy more of this watercolor paper. It comes in many sizes and totally do this technique again. I actually, I must admit, I liked the, I'll talk about what I'm doing in just a second. I liked the final painting on this watercolor surface, this homemade DIY watercolor surface with clear gesso better than my live stream video. I liked my live stream video painting. It was on Luxe Archival, by the way, a pastel paper, a professional paper that's sanded and a lot more expensive than watercolor paper. But I liked my little painting on the watercolor paper better. So, you know, you really can get good results with this. Now I'm using a harder pastel here. This is a Prismacolor new pastel spelled in you pastel. And I'm using it to scumble in some of the stems. You see some of the stems on the flowers, even though they're mostly covered with flowers. And you can, and I used it for some of the grasses. Now I'm using the same strategy that I mentioned before, darker values to lighter values. I got in my darkest greens, some of that cool dark green I was using for the stems. And now I'm just suggesting, that's my favorite word for painting, I'm just suggesting some of the lighter, I would say medium green values, warmer values for some of these leaves. I don't have to have them all perfect. All I'm doing is looking for shapes and sizes and values. I got my medium value now, I've already gotten my darks in. And I'm just kind of zoning out and looking at the general shape of the leaf and scumbling them in. A little gestural mark, a little, and by the way, your painting will be more lively and painterly and impressionistic. If you keep your marks rather quick and gestural, rather than slow and mechanical and pressing down very hard. If you make a quick little gestural mark with a light touch, you can press if you need it darker in some areas and then lighten up your pressure. You're going to have a much painterly final painting, if that's your goal, if that's your style. I know a lot of people love realism, so I do too. I'm fascinated by that, but totally my favorite is impressionistic painting.   Again, I don't want them so patterned. I'm keeping them random. Do you see those pinks peeking through now? Those vibrant pinks, some of them are warmer, like orangy, and some of them are pink. Look at the life that brings the painting. To me, that's fun. We're artists. We can have color fun. We don't have to paint exactly what we see, as long as we follow the rules in general. I like the expression, once you know the rules, you can break them. So in general, you don't want to get too crazy. And you'll notice that I will still gradually get lighter. If you examine the reference image, by the way, if you're a patron of mine, you will get a copy of this reference image. And also, once again, credit to the Juniper Flower Farm in Oregon for their lovely photo. But I have the reference image. If you're not a patron of mine, I've got it in the top corner here. I know it's a little small, but you can probably squint your eyes and see that there are some areas on these leaves that the sun was just catching them, where they were pretty bright green. I don't want that everywhere. Or it becomes just monotonous and nothing stands out. But I'm again, just getting the general shape of the leaf with a light touch. I can't stress that enough. Oh my goodness. It took me years to develop a light touch. I was so heavy-handed and a light touch is really going to help your painting stay painterly and allow you to get more layering. If you're finding that your painting is getting muddy looking or you can't get many layers and you're like, why is this happening? It's probably because you're pressing too hard. Now, you can have some hard strokes with heavy pressure, but only your final marks.  They're the icing on the cake. And you know, you're not going to be putting more layers on them. And often too, those final marks, you're going to find they're brighter. They apply better if they're some of the better, very soft pastels. The way the layering process works with pastels is harder pastels work great when there's not a lot of layers. You can get harder pastels once you've got, you know, two, three layers. But as soon as you start getting more and more layers, you go to put one of those harder pastels down and you're just not going to see them very great. And they don't have the color vibrancy as the softies. So while I say you don't have to have this regiment, oh, I've got to use a hard pastel right now. I'm on a first layer. I've got to use a soft pastel now. You don't have to do that. But you'll just notice it'll become an instinct that you know the softer ones are really going to give you that pop of color towards the final layers. So this one in my hand, for example, is a Terry Ludwig, very soft, very wonderful. I love their company. It's a U.S. company. The people there are awesome. And it's just a great product. But the ones that are kind of rectangular and large, those are Terry Ludwigs. And I break my pastels a lot just for them to be more manageable. Some other softies that I love are Sennelier. Oh my goodness. Sennelier still, I think to this day, still has one of the best buys on Amazon for 120 half sticks. It's like $130. Don't quote me on that because the price may have changed. But that's amazing.  So if you're getting started or have gotten started and you know you kind of like this pastel painting journey, that's a really good set. Another good set. Look at all this information I'm giving you in this one video. I can't be quiet. Another good set is the Paul Rubens. I've been pleasantly surprised by this company. They sell their sets on Amazon. They have a 36 set and a 40 set. And those pastels are very similar to Sennelier that are very professional. So Paul Rubens on Amazon, soft pastels, not their oil pastels. And they're going to be coming out with a 72 set. I'm going to be getting that one soon. So I'll be sharing that as well. So those are some good buys if you're just getting started in pastels. My very first set of soft pastels was Rembrandt's. I would say they are a medium softness to hardness ratio. And they're great. I had to get it because of budget. I could not afford the soft pastels that were more expensive. And at first I didn't know any better. Well, let me go back. The first pastels I got were from a craft store. And oh my gosh, don't do that. Most craft stores don't have quality pastels. They have student grade pastels. And I got so frustrated I almost stopped painting with pastels. I was looking at the results I was seeing. And no matter how I tried, I couldn't get those results. And I didn't know it was because I was using products that you literally couldn't get those results. No, I had a lot to learn too. It wasn't all that great. But I am so passionate about what I do because I have learned everything the wrong way and the hard way. But I am not a quitter. And when I started learning things, I thought I got to tell other people about this. So I hope you've enjoyed my journey. And again, I hope you subscribe to this channel and consider becoming a patron. I've got over, oh my gosh, hundreds. I know I've got over 400 free videos here on Monet Café over the years. And the beautiful thing is that there are people all over the world sending me messages saying, I could have never learned what I'm learning if it hadn't been for this YouTube channel. Because not only did they not have the money for lessons or the time, a lot of people have kids, you don't have time to go find real life, you know, workshops and things. But also there are some people in countries where literally there are no other resources. So I just love the fact that people all over the world are learning and it just feels like this wonderful family. That's why I named it Monet Café, because I love impressionism Monet. And Café just feels like you're hanging out with people with a cup of coffee. And so man, I'm just really rambling on. I've been painting a lot today and real quiet and just painting. I painted for a few hours over the past few days. And so maybe I'm just a jabberbox because I've been quiet for so long. Anyway, I'm glad you guys tolerate me. All right. So look at all that color. I'm sorry, I moved my painting a little bit out of the scene here. I'll pull it back down in just a minute, but I'm using this Prismacolor New Pastel again to get in some of these wispy gestural grasses. I love things that are reaching up into the sky. And I haven't applied so many layers that I can't get these strokes of hard pastel on here. Remember how I said sometimes if you have so many layers, you can't even see the harder pastels? Well, that shows you how good this clear gesso works. It really does allow you to get quite a few layers. Okay. In just a second, I'm going to move the painting down so you can see it better. I'm also going to go ahead and zoom in to the painting so you can get a little bit more of a clear view of some of the colors and values and also these iridescent pastels. Now, I know you can't tell how iridescent they are from this angle, but really when I take them into, I have this little part of my home studio. I call it the roundabout. It's this little area between my bedrooms and my bathroom. And I have my shelves and everything on the wall where I have all of my paintings where I can store them. I have all the paintings for my Etsy shop in there. And the lighting in that little area is, I don't know what it is about that lighting, but when I move my paintings that have iridescent pastels in there, oh my gosh, they just shimmer and sparkle is so cool. So that's the one, I don't know if it was the one I was talking about before, but that is the iridescent pastel. Now I'm just going to sign it with this pretty magenta fuchsia type of color. And now for what I've been saying the whole time about this video, what's so cool about this new technique is because it's on this block, a block is literally watercolor paper glued together. And the reason it's awesome for watercolor painting is because it keeps it from buckling. Well, that's why it's good for this homemade pastel surface as well. Because now the neat thing about this one is it's open, some watercolor blocks only have this little sliver that's open. This one is open at the top and the bottom. So what I have here is a palette knife. You could use a butter knife, but now I'm going to turn it upside down because the bottom section is also open. There's a space. So in other words, it's only glued on two sides. Because of that, because of it being glued, it stayed nice and flat the whole time. So you do have to give kind of firm pressure here. And you just press and remove that top sheet from the block. Once again, it's 300 pound paper, so it doesn't warp at all really because of that. And I'll definitely be using this product a lot for pastel painting. Now I did take it in my little roundabout area, I call it. And here you can kind of see the shimmer. If I move it in the light, isn't that cool? The lighting's not great in here. By the way, that coffee cup painting is the next tutorial.  This was from my Patreon live video. You can see it's larger. It was on Luxe Archival paper. It also has the shimmers. But you can see compared to professional soft pastel paper, the little watercolor block works just great. I hope you guys learned a lot. Please like this video, leave me a comment, join my Patreon family. If you like, we'd love to have you. And as always, God bless and happy painting.


you know I got accused by some of these people on one of these shows about oh you know he's raising all this people want to donate to him and they tried to say that like we had auto donate where it keeps going every month he's got about 200 million dollars he's going to have about 200 million probably by the time of the election he's got 125 people giving money to these people by the way son made a good point for folks who aren't familiar what a lot of these these apps and websites do is you click to give once and it actually finds you up to recurringly give we do not do that in my mind you donate fine you can click a button to make it auto we do not do that auto because we don't want people to have these charges and then some of these media went and they said wait a minute he's not doing that so they were lying about that but we would never do automatic unless you personally as the contributor press that button and so I think it's very important particularly as republicans when you're raising money amongst your own people that you're doing that in a way that that that has honesty and


There are hundreds of different styles of kung fu, but it's not uncommon to hear them categorize as either northern or southern style. Now this raises the obvious question, why do we have this division and what are the differences between them? The truth is there are many different ways you can categorize the Chinese martial arts. You have internal, external energy, region, lineage, spirituality. It all depends on where you want to draw the lines. However, grouping them by north and south has become a common demarcation. While this is still a generality at best, I think it provides an important study on how the geographic location can have such a profound impact on how an art develops as well as understand how that evolution spreads in history to create all the other arts that we enjoy today. We're going to look at the observable differences between the two, how geography and physiology shape those differences, and how this helped influence the evolution of karate. At the end of this video, we'll be using praying mantis as an example of how the same art can vary in the two regions. Spoiler alert, they're actually not the same at all, and we'll show you why. Don't think I didn't feel you reaching for those keyboards. Two quick disclaimers. First, I apologize for my pronunciation. I do not speak Chinese, so if I mispronounce something, just give me a good ol' kick in the pants in the comment section. Second, the technically correct term for Chinese martial arts is zhuangou wuxu. Now the term kung fu simply refers to achieving skill through hard work, though we will be using it in this episode for familiarity and mercy on my mouthwords. Northern style kung fu is characterized by its emphasis on long-range techniques, dynamic stepping, and acrobatic movements. Practitioners often employ wide stances, expansive hand motions, and footwork to maintain distance and control in combat. The long, sweeping movements of northern kung fu reflect the open landscapes of the northern regions, where practitioners had ample space to maneuver and evade opponents. Additionally, northern kung fu styles often incorporate a diverse array of kicks, spins, and jumps, showcasing the agility and athleticism of its practitioners. Some of the well-known northern styles include sheng shuang or long fists, northern praying mantis, igu claw, shing yi shuan, northern Shaolin, shi ai jiao, ba gua zhang, and tai ji shuan. Each of these styles embodies the distinctive characteristics and techniques associated with northern kung fu, such as rapid strikes, evasive footwork, and elaborate forms. Training often involves repetitive drills, sparring, and conditioning exercises to build endurance and coordination. Usage of long-range weapons such as spears and long swords are also evident in this training. In talu, which is the Chinese counterpart to Japanese kata, it can be observed that northern forms often combine hand and foot movements in unison and can cover a wider range of ground. Southern kung fu, on the other hand, is characterized by its focus on close-range combat, compact movements, and rooted stances. Practitioners often employ lower gates, powerful strikes, and subtle hand techniques to deliver devastating blows at close quarters. The compact, effective movements of southern kung fu reflect the dense and rugged terrain of the southern regions, where practitioners had to adapt to confined spaces and urban environments. Additionally, southern kung fu styles often emphasize internal energy cultivation, joint locks, and grappling techniques. Training can involve partner drills, sensitivity exercises, and practice to develop timing, reflexes, and adaptability in close combat situations. Their forms and contrasts will often isolate the hand and foot motions from each other. Examples of southern kung fu styles include Wing Chun, Hong Ga, Chou Le Fu, Bak Mei, Fujian White Crane, and Southern Prane Mantis. Each of these styles embodies the distinctive characteristics and techniques associated with solid stances, powerful strikes, and intricate hand techniques. If you like our content and you want us to keep developing more episodes like this, then please help us out by visiting artofonedojo.com. We have a store with exclusive shirts that feature various martial arts styles and grandmasters. And for a limited time, you can use the code WUSHU2024 to get 10% off of any t-shirt. This is our way of thanking you for being a part of our dojo family, and you can fashionably represent your art. So what is the dividing line between the north and the south, and what is it about these regions that cultivates such different flavors of martial arts? Northern kung fu evolved in the vast plains and plateaus of northern China, while southern kung fu developed in the subtropical landscapes of the south. These regional differences in terrain, climate, and cultural influences shaped the development of kung fu styles, giving rise to unique characteristics and techniques. During times of conflict, the north was a better host for large-scale battlefields, while the southern regions after resorted to urban combat. The traditional boundary separating northern and southern Chinese martial arts lies along the Yangtze River. Northern China, with its severe winters, necessitates the use of thick layers of clothing for warmth, hindering the evolution and execution of snapping kicks due to the heavy leggings. Consequently, practitioners adapted by employing higher straight leg kicks, resulting in wide, sweeping motions and floor rolls executed with extended legs. Northern Chinese individuals, typically taller with longer limbs, owe their physique partly to a diet rich in grains and meat. They share a lot of genetic relation to other northern Asian people, such as the Mongols. This stature naturally led to extended reach and the development of long-range fighting techniques. In contrast, southern Chinese individuals, often shorter in satchel, inhabited regions featuring densely packed cities and restricted mobility. Confrontations typically occurred in confined spaces, such as narrow alleyways or streets surrounded by buildings. Acrobatic maneuvers were limited, promoting southern styles to emphasize close combat techniques tailored for such environments. Additionally, activities aboard Chinese junk ships necessitated sturdy stances to maintain balance amid the vessel's motion. Many arts like Wing Chong emphasized this balance, and this could be seen in a very fun way in Itman 2, when they were fighting on the Wobbly Table. It's not at all realistic, but it's an entertaining way to visualize the focus on this balance. So, southern styles prioritized close-quarter combat, employing firm footwork to generate powerful hand techniques. Emphasis is placed on utilizing the entire body, with practitioners executing short, forceful movements that blend offense and defense seamlessly. Strikes were designed to maximize power with minimal motion, reflecting the philosophy centered on efficiency and economizing movement. By harnessing full-body power, smaller individuals can overcome larger opponents, countering the physiological differences of the two regions. It's not hard to see the differences in geography and how genetics could alter the growth of a martial art. Now, if we take it a step further and look at how these methods spread, we can see the roots that grew into karate. Between the 1400s and late 1800s, Okinawa was part of a larger kingdom of islands known as the Ryukyu Kingdom. We talked about this history in more depth in our What Is Karate episode. However, this is where modern-day karate began. Maritime trade networks were established between China and the Ryukyu Kingdom, and it wasn't just goods that were exchanged. Martial influences were shared, and a lot of Chinese kung fu found its way to the Okinawa and mixed with their own local fighting systems. Three major forms of karate developed, shurite, nahate, and tamari tei, each to rename for the city of their primary origin. Now, if you look at the movements and forms of early karate styles, you can see a lot of physical similarity with kung fu, specifically southern-style kung fu. Karate adopted the shorter sances, the close-range grappling, and powerful upper-body striking. Fujian and Waikarein is widely accepted as being one of the more prominent forms of kung fu to share this influence. Now, if you continue to look at the evolution of karate as it spread, you can see that it continued to change based on geographical and even cultural needs. Shurite, or Shorenryu, became the basis of shoutokan, a Japanese adaptation that placed more emphasis on teaching larger groups of students, deeper stances, longer linear techniques, and more competition in its Okinawan counterpart. Shoutokan is also the foundation for tanksudo and taekwondo in Korea. So if you look at Korea, that also has a lot of mountainous terrain, so perhaps their emphasis on powerful high kicking mirrors the development that we see in northern China. Though without requiring the thick warm clothing, practitioners can chamber the kicks and give us those crisp and sharp snapping kicks that have become the signature of the Korean arts. So to exemplify the differences between northern and southern styles of kung fu, let's look at an actual example, northern and southern-style praying mantis, both very popular in common styles practiced today. Despite their names, they are actually two completely different arts. Both employ motions similar to the praying mantis, although if I'm correct it's more prominent in the north. I have also heard speculation that southern praying mantis might have been named as such so that people would assume it was simply a variation of the north and keep the true training a secret. I will leave that to scholars who are more educated than I am, but I find the idea very intriguing. So how do the two mantis systems compare side by side? Northern praying mantis is characterized by its long-range techniques, rapid strikes, dynamic footwork including circular steps, pivots and evasive maneuvers. Practitioners focus on maintaining distance, creating angles of attack and capitalizing on opponent's movements. Southern praying mantis by its powerful strikes and rooted stances. Practitioners focus on controlling the centerline, absorbing and redirecting force and maintaining balance in close combat. When it comes to talu, northern praying mantis practitioners often practice long flowing forms that emphasize fluidity and agility. Training methods may include solo forms practice, partner drills and sparring sessions to develop timing, reflexes and adaptability. The southern students often practice shorter, more compact forms that emphasize power and stability. Training methods may include stance training, striking drills and sensitivity exercises to develop strength, endurance and resilience. You can see a lot of this overlap in other southern styles such as wing chong and their practice of qi sao or sticky hands. These are just a handful of observations to highlight the differences and will likely take more comprehensive looks in future episodes. There are many ways you can classify Chinese martial arts. I mean there are literally thousands of years worth of history there and I think that the fighting between northern and southern styles is interesting because it's so broad and allows us to see the contrast on a larger canvas. Truthfully though, each art is unique and should be judged on its own merits. Now as requested, we have been putting a lot of time and effort into developing more art history episodes. We have several more coming soon and if we see invested interest then we'll do some deep dives including interviews with experts in those arts. For example, we took a thorough tour through the history, philosophies and training methods of xing yi shun with the help of sifu jonathan blues scene. This will provide you with a much closer look at the attributes that can be found in this widely practiced northern kung fu style including the very unique animal styles and employs. I think alligator style is one of my favorites. Check it out, let me know what yours is.


Oh What's good Josh you brought Ross back again with another video But before we get into this reaction this video is sponsored by the good folks at GLD man GLD was founded on the idea that everyone should be able to afford high quality jewelry pieces that deliver on confidence and help complete your look GLD is made with real gold that's built to last their manufacturing process and attention to detail is the best in the game That's why they offer a lifetime guarantee on all purchases if there are any issues with your jewelry GLD has you covered man so y'all know the football season is already upon us and I gotta support my Houston, Texas man You see the chain that I got right here. It is the Houston Texans pendant with the 4mm rope chain man And the cool thing about this is you can support all your favorite teams baseball Basketball football they all have them on the GLD shop right now Check out the teams in their different pendants and you can definitely rock them with your feet You see right now. I have on the Texans pendant with the shirt made in Houston. It matches perfectly I love this. I'm aware this pendant even though my team is not that good right now I'm still gonna rock it out and show people my support and I've gotten a good compliment. Oh, yo I like that pendant man. Where'd you get it from and I let them know I got it from GLD, man So this is one of those things where if you're big into your sports teams Doesn't matter what sport team it is and you want to rock something other than the traditional hat or the traditional shirt Repping your sport team you want to get some custom jewelry for your team. Go ahead hit them up They have plenty of pendants that I think you guys will enjoy and appreciate So if you want to be able to get a pendant just like this and get 33% off your GLD order Click the link down below in the description box It will also be pinned as the first comment in the video as well Once again, 33% off all you have to do is click the link down below in the description box The link will also be the first comment pinned in this video. Thanks to GLD for sponsoring this video now Let's get back into the reaction Yo, it's your boy rocket man Ross here and a happy Halloween to everyone You're probably wondering why the change of clothes. Well the intro GLD ad I filmed that I want to say a week and a half ago. So I'm filming this reaction on Halloween day, man And it only makes sense that I come out here with the festivities Rocket man Ross here to travel the stars and explore the universe, you know, I'm saying in my Rocket man gear you feel me It only makes sense to so hopefully you guys are enjoying your Halloween man And once again, check out GLD link down below to have some dope jewelry so check them out for me Appreciate that but we're gonna get into this pro wrestling trying not to wince or look away challenge number seven This is gonna be a tough one I don't think I've ever passed any of these challenges, but I'm gonna give it my best shot appreciate all love support Road to a honey cane. Let's see if I can try not to lint wintz or look away It's gonna be a tough one man. Oh No, it's like you over rotate it I Think I just failed I think I failed. I think I did win. I think I literally Bro, we only 20 seconds in I already failed damn it See if I can fail no more Oh He's gonna try to take advantage of the ring before I remember it was a six-man tag team match Oh no, the red Jack runs over there. That's the real Hurts against the steel Oh That was a huge drop kick into the bean.  He's out. He's done for it. Probably ain't probably can't have kids on one. Oh This looks like it's about to hurt My god Oh Right to the bar bar steel chair This is insane right now.  Oh my god That was really Oh Yeah, you gotta check on my man's for suplex here.  Oh my god Oh On to his own need she sold it not the thumbtacks not the thumbtacks. Don't do it Watch out. Oh, oh Jesus Geez gonna take another but stat lander play awesome.   Oh Yeah, nice woman Oh Even have to throw up a X for them they hit the coffin and it's just explosions just Explosions both were sent to the upper room Ain't enough say they they were both sent to the upper room together in that casket or in that coffin All right All right Oh Wristlock Oh The kick to the midsection taking down the notes. Oh Oh, oh Oh Taking down No Through the door Oh my god, stop it That was brutal Wait, what is that? What is that?  Oh Yeah Wait a minute wait wait wait, holy I've seen this cutter before a million times on Twitter Oh, he's sold that I know that hurt Build like 20 seconds into the video. I may have failed another time, but I know for a fact I definitely ended up cringing like 20 seconds into this video. Let me know down below Which part you cringe that you fail that let me know down below Yeah, this was a these videos always give me I don't think I've ever passed. I think the only time I passed is the video Part I think it was part five, but you guys never saw it because I never was I never I didn't realize I wasn't recording So I did I passed on that one. I didn't even fail you guys never saw it. So Yeah, man, I don't know these these the series is insane But I appreciate all the love and support make sure you go hit the gld shop link down in the description Will be pinned in the first comment down below. Happy Halloween to everyone. Appreciate y'all kicking with me. See y'all next one


This is Jerry Bain at the Coalition for Networked Information Spring 2023 meeting, and I'm joined today by Mary Emma Graham, Founding Director of the History of Black Writing and the Black Book Interactive Project at the University of Kansas, and James Shulman, Vice President of the American Council on Learned Societies. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having us here. Great to be here. I'll start with you, James. What is the American Council of Learned Societies, and what does it do? The American Council of Learned Societies has been around for 103 years. We were founded, brought together by a number of the Learned Societies, academic societies, with whom we work closely. So now we work with 79 of them support their work from logistics and practical matters to reframing their intellectual fields. At the same time, we're widely known for a set of fellowship programs, some that we fund ourselves, others that we carry out on behalf of other foundations, touching all sorts of stages of a scholar's career. Recently, we've been doing a lot of work around institutional change in the humanities, and this work, this commission, grows out of that interest. Great. Could you please describe the work of the ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship? Why was it convened and what's the mandate? It really grew out of impulses from Patricia Sway and Don Waters at the Mellon Foundation and Brett Bobly at NEH, where they were just concerned about the well-being of digital projects and resources that they'd funded over the years. And as we worked with them to develop the projects, this project, a project on how to make sure these projects were stable and taken care of and since they're widely depended on, we also realized that at this time and given what's been happening in our society, focusing on issues of racial and social justice made the project much more interesting rather than less interesting. So it's still about how to care for and sustain these projects, but with a real intense interest in fields that have been understudied, people who haven't had opportunities and inequities that affect some institutions and some scholars more than others. Can you talk about your involvement? Yes, so I've had a relationship with a long-standing relationship with NEH and more recently with Mellon through the history of black writing. So we are not quite as old as ACLS, only 40 years old, but in fact it has been very much involved in the same issues for these 40 years. We were a collection development group that wanted to identify and recover a lot of lost and understudied text, black literature in particular. I was a graduate student at the time and I realized that my passion was to continue that work and so we went from collection development or recovery work to preservation and that of course included the digital mandate that was really the best way to keep from losing these texts yet again. So it was really important for me to be a member of the commission that was formed because I had lots of thoughts, lots of experiences up and down, we've had tremendous success, but HBW has been at the forefront of these kinds of inclusion efforts and has been very public about the importance of the work and has been actively engaged in building a community of scholars who think in the same vein. So I'm really glad that I had this opportunity as my career began to phase into retirement. So this was a great way to think about with other people what it means to be doing this work, what works well, what do we need to continue to do. Great and speaking of the commission, who are some of the commissioners serving on the body and how was this makeup determined? We spoke with a lot of people about who would be most insightful and wise and creative and strong-minded about looking at the wide range of issues that this project unfolds. So the commissioners range from probably of the 21, they're probably 12 or 13 scholars who've built things. There are some who have built things of great and enduring value and others who are still earlier in their career. We have some representation from different types of institutions. Joanne Wu comes from a community college and where she says the community is the college. And so there isn't the same tension of town-gown relationships. So we were lucky to have people who bring the practice of digital work into all of the questions that surround how to build these things, how to sustain them, why they matter, how they build fields. And so we have a set of scholars, we have some people from publishing from libraries, some people who've worked on trans institutional efforts. So it's really, there are many more people we could have had because there are a lot of people who've really planted the fence posts that we're trying to connect in this kind of work. But it's been a pretty extraordinary group. And this is for either of you. Can you talk about some of the commission's key findings so far? Well, I want to start because I think James has given a really good overview of that. We're going to be talking about the commission. But one of the concerns is that there's a large digital community out there. But there's this concept called the digital divide. So it's an uneven community. Many elements of the community are well developed, really clear about what the work is and the work that has been done, the work that needs to be done. Other elements of that community are sadly in need of greater resources or dissatisfied with the kind of work they have been doing either individually or collaboratively. We have been involved primarily in a collaborative effort and recognize both sides of that. We see really great work being done. We see the unevenness of work. And therefore, for me, it's a long-term effort to say, okay, we know what we've done. Let's figure out how to do it better. And if we have to do this again, let's get it right. Is there anything you want to add to that, James? Well, there's so much to do. As Mariamma said, the inequities throughout the system are clear to anyone who's done this work because it's so hard to do. It's forging new ground in everything. I mean, when Mariamma started her project in 1983, she had to figure everything out. And that's how it is for scholars today. You have to figure out if you're going to be doing oral histories, you have to figure out the mechanisms and the systems for capturing the data and for cataloging it. You have to figure out the data ethics of working with living people or recent generations. You have to deal with the politics of working outside of the academy. You have to figure out how to maintain these and how to make them available. You have to be able to market the product or the project and market yourself. And you have to do all that while building a traditional career and doing everything that you must do on your daily life of traditional scholarship and teaching and service. So there's so much to do. And as Mariamma says, for institutions that haven't been able to support this work, it's not just a matter of rebuilding all the infrastructure that you will find in a University of Texas or a University of Kansas or a Princeton because that's not going to happen. So there's a really need for some collective solutions if we want to bring other scholars and other people at other institutions into this work. And the complexity is all cited so that if you began a project and you're using systems and platforms, you recognize were created without the work that you do in mind. So you have to then figure out and you're not the specialist in the area. You're not the engineer or the technician. So you need to go to the people to find out, say, this doesn't work for us and explain to them why it doesn't work. And together try to figure out what systems work better for the capturing, the preserving, the descriptive metadata. All of those things have to in effect be reinvented to fit a particular body of information. And this is historical. So it's not just what happens in this particular area of work. It is ongoing. So each time we peel off a layer, in a sense, there's something else there to be changed or revised. So the work is difficult in its long term. And it requires a lot of people and a lot of funding. When can we expect to hear more about the commission's finding and recommendations? The report and the products of the commission will be out this year. So we these are busy folks. We can't keep pulling them together. They like being together, but they've got other things to do. So we're what's been really powerful is the sense on the part of the committee that, yes, there will be a report. Yes, there will be recommendations. Recommendations will both be near term and long term because this work isn't going to be we're still in early days. I mean, we're as a collective system. We're making choices now that will affect how robust this work will be 20 years from now. On the other hand, people and organizations are looking for guidance on what they can do to improve things now. So they'll be near term and long term. But the other thing that the commission has been really forthright about is it can't just be a report and every commission says, oh, we don't want to just have a white paper. But one of the things that will end up coming out of this in the near term is a sense of the networks that are in place that networks that aren't in place, the networks that need to be bolstered, and the networks that need to be brought together. And that's actual work. I mean, that's and that's what CNI is so important as an oasis to bring together people who do like things and people who do very different things. But that kind of collective fabric is underdeveloped. And so some of these collisions of networks are going to start happening soon. Did you want to say? Well, I was going to say, I do think that this could not have been done any earlier. For instance, we have been doing the sort of training for digital scholarship and research now for about eight to 10 years. And so there is a larger community that has experienced what it is that needs to be done and can give us some sound advice about what they can do. So we have networks, you're right, the network aspect of it is crucial. We would not have had that kind of network. We would have been trying to figure it out, you know, but the network is critical. So having this at this moment is, I think, absolutely right. And the and you're not doing it yourself. You really are involving other people who are both users and researchers. We know much more about that before it wasn't as clear who are the users. We now recognize that we do the work we do. We're part of that community, but it's much larger when that's just the librarians, community organizations, early career professionals, senior professionals who are shifting careers. So we have to think about how the community responds and helps us in guiding the way forward. And hopefully you don't have to redo it over and over again, because in many instances, we've paid attention to this before. We thought we had it right. We thought we were making we made some progress, but there wasn't enough of a community to recognize or to identify what some of the weak areas are the areas that needed to be significantly strengthened so that they could be more effective. Speaking of community, the last question I'll ask you is people doing this work, should they get in touch with you? Should they get involved? And if so, how? We're going to be holding a few more focus groups. We've had over 24 with librarians, three with publishers and platforms, department chairs in history and English, deans of humanities, clear fellows, HBCU librarians, branches from various programs at ACLS and at Mellon. So we're interested in, very interested in hearing from people in the community who are have something both to contribute and also to that. I mean, we're going to be sharing this work widely before we release it. Obviously, we don't want to miss anything big. So yes, stay tuned. Draft of report in the next few months and then a full report at some point this year. Thank you both for your time. Very much appreciate it. Great. Thank you. Thank you.