 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm happy you're here with me today where I will share how sometimes I have disappointments and I often have to renew a pastel painting. I'm calling this painting renewal. I literally was frustrated last night. I had created a painting after watching a Karen Margulis video and her strokes are just always so perfect but I was not happy with it. I went to bed not happy. So what did I do this morning? I got me a bristle brush and I brushed it all off. So I want you to join me in this journey because I know everybody has disappointments in their artwork where I create one painting and recreate it for a renewed fresher painting I was happier with. Now I'm going to share with you the process of the first painting. I did turn on my video camera while I worked on this one last night in hopes that I would love it. And the neat thing about videotaping yourself. I highly recommend you do this. I mean not necessarily for sharing but just to go back and watch yourself paint. There's many times in my videos where I wish I had stopped sooner. It had a fresher I don't know more painterly feel before overworking it. That's one of my personal goals for 2020 is to step back more often and don't overwork and have more of a purpose. A lot of times I just paint. I love the painting process and I just get in and I start going and sometimes I need to step back and take a breath you know and hopefully not get to the point where I'm not happy with the painting. But it is nice to know the point of this video that we can a lot of times you think a pastel painting. Oh my gosh I messed up that whole expensive piece of you art paper or whatever it is you're working on. But there is hope. You can do the process that I'll be sharing in a minute. Like right now I liked I kind of was liking this phase where I was at and then I just over did it. Of course one thing that didn't help was I think I might have broken my foot yesterday. I'm not sure. I need an x-ray. I'm actually not sure if it's my big toe or part of my foot because it kind of goes up into my foot. Oh my goodness it's so swollen and it's really hurting. But what happened is I was running and I tripped and fell. Fortunately I did a roll so as not to harm this old lady too much. I think I'd learned that from gymnastics years ago so I just kind of went with it and rolled. But I had kicked my foot really hard on a tree trunk prior to falling. So maybe just being on my foot last night I was a little frustrated while I was painting. This is the point to where it's getting a bit too overworked and also it's starting to get too busy. Too much going on. Not a lot of rhyme or reason. And have you ever been there where you just you keep going, you keep going, you keep going. And so finally you'll see at the end of this this is the end result and it is really too contrasty and in too many places and I sort of lost color harmony with too much going on. So here's what I did this morning. I got this brush. I've done this before but this I think it's the kind of brushes you use for stenciling and they're very coarse and the bristles are really tight together. So it works great. Look at all that pastel dust falling off. I mean it's just falling off. As you can see it kind of collecting on the bottom of the UART paper because this is one of those pieces that kind of had curled up a little bit. But now I sped it up there of course. But after and again try not to breathe this too much. Brush some of it. Walk away. I have a little piece of aluminum foil underneath that catches it. So you know if you do it and kind of you know just get out of the room for a little bit. People always worry about the safety of pastels. I have never had a problem but I think some people just are more allergic or more sensitive but you know that's going to be based on you. Now of course I have a great underpainting now because I just brushed it off. I mean it's kind of like an easy do-over you know. But I'm kind of doing the same thing. I've sped this up just a little bit and I just have a new pastel same kind of process as before. Alright but I'm going to share with you what I did differently. I'm just getting in my darker values with this new pastel. New pastel is spelled in you. Not any W pastel. They're harder pastels. They're good for sketching. They're good for little details. Good for grasses. To give some interest and invite the viewer into the painting. I'm just giving a little idea of a trail or a path and it gets kind of those dark roots down. That do kind of get covered up but they kind of stay there very subtly. Now I'm getting some other dark values in. I've got this big tree. The reference photo by the way is from pmp-art.com. It's a great site for copyright free photos if you don't have a lot of your own reference images. My life is so busy. I try so hard to I have a lot of my own reference images but sometimes I just need to just grab something and what I do is I get on to that site and other sites and I just take a few hours and find a whole lot that I like and save them in little files. So if I want to paint a field I just go to my field section and I start looking through them all and I've already taken the time to pick them out so I don't waste all my painting energy on looking at all these photos. Now I'm dulling out these trees in the background and decreasing the value. That one everything does need a little darkness first darker to lighter with pastels but you'll notice how I'm going to start paling out neutralizing and cooling off these trees in the distance. It's going to make them appear further away. You can see it already just did that right and then I sneak in a little bit behind some of these trees to where you kind of get the idea that there's distance beyond the trees that are the foreground trees. So enjoy this process here. I'm going to jump back in towards the end where I give some commentary on what I did differently. But right now watch the painting to one of my favorite songs in the whole world. I have to be careful by the way I have a lot of people ask about my music and give me recommendations or tell me when it was too annoying and I know sometimes some of the songs can get monotonous YouTube only allows when you have a like a professional channel like this or you have your channel monetized it's called they only allow non copy written songs on your channel and they have a little audio library that you can choose from and the songs are usually just less than three minutes and so you get if you have a long span of me playing music you get the same thing over and over and over and it starts to get on your nerves. But this is a song I pray I don't get in trouble from YouTube for it. I believe it's a does not have a copyright issue because when music is so much older you can use it like some Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and but this is a song called Adagio for Strings. It has the most beautiful emotional. Oh my goodness I just I feel at peace and sad when I listen to this song. I know that sounds kind of weird but it was the theme music played in the movie The Elephant Man. I don't know if anyone seen that from so long ago. Anthony Hopkins was in it. It was amazing. All right now here I'm not even playing the song after all. I'm showing the colors that I'm using in the Maggie Price Terry Ludwig set. I showed you those pastels to show I'm using all of those cooler greens. I love how that set has them arranged according to value and color. They have the color families and all dark to light. So I'm just using that whole strip I showed you across the cooler greens going dark to light. Now I'm just working dark to light. This is kind of a neat way to work. That's kind of why this set is again. I like it a lot because you could just use it that way. It's already there for you. You know to use that darker one and gradually work down to the lighter one. So that was the darkest green. Now I went to the next green. I'm getting some of those in the grasses and in the trees. I know that those darker greens are going to be more in the shadowy areas or where things are deeper in the grasses or in the trees that are closer to the foreground. Okay, so now I'm still using I think I'm darkening up some of the roots down kind of underneath that tree. Okay, now I will put on that beautiful song Adagio for Strings and just pay attention in this one to my strokes are more purposeful and I don't just get so crazy putting colors and values everywhere. I definitely took my time more and I actually really enjoyed this too. I was feeling good about it. So all right, enjoy this lovely song. Now towards this point, I was feeling more satisfied than I was the night before. I do feel that the second painting had a softness to it and again it felt more peaceful. I also meant to mention before that you may have noticed that if you see the reference photo in the bottom corner there that I still have the same similar values going on but I chose kind of a different color palette. I chose more cooler color palette and that once you learn value you have the artistic license to do that. All right, so it's time to sign this one before I overwork this one and I'm going to show you the comparison of both of the paintings. So here again is the first one loud and crazy. Here's the second one softer more subtle. So I was really happy with that and I shared this video right here on the Monet Cafe channel but if you'd like to become a patron of mine where you get extra content just click that little patron link at the end of this video and you can help support this channel support me as an artist and bless me. So, all right guys, happy painting.