 Welcome to Monet Café! I'm artist Susan Jenkins. Today we're going to be painting a rooster continuing with the farm theme. The reference image is from Pixabay.com and my patrons on my Patreon page will have access to this photo. And if you haven't yet subscribed I hope you will and click that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. Hello and welcome to Monet Café! I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm bringing you another farm related painting of some chickens each month in the Monet Café art group on Facebook. We have a theme and this month it happens to be the farm. It can be anything farm related from barns to gardens to farm animals. And today I look forward to teaching on painting chickens and or perhaps a rooster. So it should be fun. So let's get started. Oh and I'm once again wearing a love-in-faith t-shirt. These have become my go-to t-shirts because they're so comfortable and they have these great messages of hope. So if you would like to get one I have a link in the description section along with a 20% off coupon code. Okay now we can paint. Some of you know that I'm working away from my home studio still in the basement of my parents' home since my mother passed away. And I am using a set of Sennelier pastels. I love this 120 half-stick set. It's called the Paris collection. I use primarily those pastels but I think I grab a couple more to work on this painting. Now here is the surface that I'm working on Sennelier La Carte pastel card. It comes in pads like this. This is the price on Dick Blick but I also have my Amazon shop where I organize a lot of the products from my videos. Be sure to double check though if you can get a price better in other places. Sometimes it's cheaper on Amazon and sometimes it's cheaper on Dick Blick or other art retailers. So be sure you check but it's a neat way. You can check out my Amazon shop. I've seen many of the products neatly organized that you can check out. I even have some of my studio tools so you can check that out if you like. Now often when I get started with a painting I like to do some sort of a sketch and for this rooster it was primarily just to get that gestural quality. I really wanted him to look like he was just crowing his heart out. I just used a charcoal pencil on some newsprint and then I transferred a similar sketch onto my Sennelier La Carte pastel card. Now I'll talk about the surface more as I paint and unfortunately I missed a little bit of the beginning footage. I really have a lot going on right now being away from my studio but I think you will be able to see enough to get the idea. Now here's where I want to talk about this surface and I love using the Sennelier pastels on the Sennelier La Carte pastel card being from the same company being manufactured from the same company. They just work together so beautifully but I also love all kinds of other pastels used on this surface. Now what is interesting about the surface? Oh first of all this is from one of the pads. The 12 by 16 I think is the size of the pad and it is kind of like a really pale blue gray color. It comes with various colors within the pad but what I like I have sped this video up slightly just to be able to get it uploaded. I didn't want it to be too long and what I like about this surface is well first of all it's a sanded pastel paper. If you're brand new to pastels there are sanded papers that actually really are great for the pastel medium. Now you can work on unsanded papers. My previous two or three videos in this farm theme month have been on unsanded papers so you can work on unsanded paper but this Sennelier pastel La Carte is sanded and the texture I find to be so wonderful for getting nice even strokes with a nice consistency. Also too it's called pastel card because it's more like cardstock. It's thicker than some other pastel papers. So I'll talk a little bit more about this paper perhaps but let me talk a little bit about the painting process. Basically I find that this surface is great for painting animals even portraits and landscapes but one of the reasons I like it for animals is I find that the layering ability you can really use in your favor. Sanded papers give you the opportunity to create quite a few layers unlike unsanded papers and I find the layering ability is such a benefit with animal fur or animal feathers. You're going to see me creating these feathers and I'm going to talk about that but the reason is because often with pastels we can work dark to light. We typically not always lay down darker values and then lighter values on top of it and with these feathers you're going to see me doing just that. You'll probably notice that I reserve my lightest values such as some of those bright feathers on his neck and on his tail towards the end. Like you can see I'm getting down kind of a dark brick reddish color for his neck. Oh I wanted to go ahead and get this beak in. Now this to me was important to get that little gestural quality to his beak so I'm trying to make a little lively stroke here so that it really looks like he's crowing and again I'm using kind of the brick red color and then I'm going on top of it and layering some of the other colors. What that does is it gives a contrast for the feathers to lay on top of it. If I just went in there and used just the color that I see it would look very segmented and it wouldn't have a lot of depth to it. So you'll notice as I work that that's the typical method of operation is to get some dark values down specifically on his body and where his feathers are and then gradually work the lighter values on top of it to get that differentiation between colors and values. I also want to mention the pressure that I'm using here. Often we think when we're first starting with soft pastels I'm talking to myself here because this is what I did that we really want to get a solid application of color so we press rather hard and what that can do is it can decrease your ability to get more layers down and also cause your painting to look rather flat or muddied. So even though when we're first starting out I have a lot of comments from just the YouTube channel and even from some of my patrons on my Patreon page of my pastels aren't applying very smoothly or solidly on the surface. Look at his chest for example you see how I have a little bit of that dark down and you can really see a lot of the paper behind it. That's okay. Embrace that. Don't feel the need to just press so hard and get that color all down because they gradually start to layer themselves. I'm sorry I got my head in the way. I was trying to get a little idea of where his eye is. Now there are a couple of areas here where I do give a bit more pressure and get it darker but that's because if you look at the reference image it is dark. I'm not going to be needing to put many layers over that particular section. So just keep that in mind. Reserve the ability to layer by decreasing the amount of pressure that you give. A light touch is the right touch. I think many artists have said that. I've heard Karen Margulis say it and others but who knows who originates these comments but we all share together as artists that's the great thing. I am now focusing on getting some of the darker values in. By the way I think this is a very small sliver of a Terry Ludwig eggplant color. It's a really dark deep purple and like an eggplant you know it looks black but it's really got some purple to it and I'm specifically working in areas where I see dark values. A great trick to be able to do this is just to squint your eyes and you can see where all the dark areas are. I loved his tail how it had a combination of blues and greens and teals. It was so gorgeous but I wanted to get those shadowy undersides of the feathers in first before I add any of those blues. And you know the same thing with underneath where his legs are you can see that's that's like totally dark down there. It's in shadow and I think the feathers are probably black. So you know this all kind of creates a little roadmap for you to know how to apply things. Now I'm using a purple here because this portion of his chest is not quite as dark as that front side of his chest and so I'm giving a little bit of a lighter value. I often say value is king what's the expression value is king but color gets the glory something like that. But basically the good news is that you don't have to have the largest selection of soft pastel colors. If you get the value right you can be a little creative with color. You know that wasn't the exact color I needed that purple but it was pretty close in the value that I was looking for. Now as I often say when I have a pastel in my hand I like to go ahead and use it somewhere else where I see a similar value. Keep in mind I'm not necessarily looking at colors often early on as much as I am value. I know now that even though this looks a little dark for that underside of his neck I need some darker values for contrast. I know I'm going to lay those feathers in directional strokes so they look like feathers on top of this and it needs some contrast for the feathers to show up otherwise they're going to look very flat. And here's where you can see I've got the purple down and now I'm just giving some little directional strokes really just looking at how his feathers are. And I know I'm going to get a little bit brighter color on top of that but keep in mind working dark to light. This is that was actually kind of close to what the color and the value is from the reference image. Here's where I actually am getting a little bit lighter value just maybe where the sun is kind of hitting some of those upper feathers that are cascading down his neck. And by the way one of the reasons I chose to work with this Sennelier Paris Collection soft pastel set is because it has such an amazing assortment of reds and oranges and golds and I thought it would be a great set to work with for this particular painting. And like I said I was working on Sennelier Le Carte pastel card so I knew that would be a beautiful combination. I think I used primarily this the set of pastels and just so you know the Sennelier Paris Collection is a half stick set. You get 120 pastels in half of their normal size and I always recommend this to beginner artists because you get double the colors for your money until you get you know a lot of experience and you know the colors you like. Sometimes you're just experimenting with colors so why not get more and that just gives you more options. Now you can see how I am adding a little bit of those teal kind of colors. Right now I got a kind of a neutral bluish teal and I'm getting a little bit more darks. You see how I layered it over some of the Terry Ludwig egg plant color and I also am layering it a little bit over some of that purple. And now you might see what I mean where when you just keep a light touch and you continue to layer gradually you don't see the surface of the paper anymore and it's okay if sometimes you do still see the surface of the paper. I think that lends towards the painterly effect. So I'm just making sure I have the right values down now to be accurate and to be able to get some of the feathers layered on top. I really did like that little subtle bit of greenish bluish color on his chest. It was still very dark but it was just such a beautiful color. It almost looks iridescent. You'll also see me in a bit adding a little bit of blues and I sort of juxtapose the blues and the grains next to each other because they they create almost a new color and seem almost to vibrate a little when they're next to each other. I have a video that I am in the process of creating that I'm excited to share where I discuss that with soft pastels often we say we can't mix soft pastel colors like you can with oil acrylic or watercolor and that's true. We don't like combine them and mix them up. They're not in liquid form but to say that we can't get new color combinations with pastels is not true. We actually can. We can do it by layering soft layering. We can do it by layering colors next to each other. Little strokes or lines kind of like I've been doing with the feathers. So it is kind of neat and fun to know that with soft pastels we can have some fun with color and get some interesting combinations based on how we apply them. The video I have just prior to this one was on how you can create neutral colors with pastels even if you don't have a neutral pastel stick you basically can layer two complementary colors. Those are just colors opposite on the color wheel and with a light stroke and it will even if they're bold colors it will neutralize them and then you can add white if you want to lighten it up. So we can get new color combinations by using soft pastels but still you know we really do want every color under the sun. We can't help that and I get that me too. Now thus far this has only been sped up slightly but to make this video a little shorter I am going to speed it up a little bit more here and add some music but I wanted to mention I like to talk about my patrons just to brag on them and thank them. I'm so grateful for those of you who have become patrons of mine from my Patreon page patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. It's five dollars a month to support this channel. You get extra content and I also get to see your works. My patrons have a homework album where they can submit their paintings from these lessons for me and the other patrons to see and I just feel so blessed to be able to see what other artists are creating from my lessons so I just love that and we have lots of other benefits to becoming a patron as well. So anyway bless you patrons thank you I can't wait to see this rooster. I loved your last farmhouse paintings from that lesson oh and the duck lesson and the piggy lesson and oh it's really blessed me so much since losing my mama I know if many of you have followed this channel you know this has been really hard. I know a lot of you guys have shared with me your stories too and so we press on and art is healing and it does bless us through these trials and this grief so and your paintings have definitely been blessing me. It's given me just a bright spot in my world so god bless you all. All right now I am going to speed this up to music. I want you to stay tuned to the end though. I'm going to have more commentary at the end of course you get to see the grand finish and enjoy this music while I speed it up a little more and I'll be back soon. Okay so this is a legless chicken so we got to fix that and I have basically learned and I'm still learning I'm always still learning that with birds legs and feet we don't want to draw too much attention to them or unless you know there's something in their claws or you're trying to bring attention purposely to it but I find that often if we overwork them or make them too thick or too stiff they look artificial and so I like to try to still give them a little bit of delicacy and make them not too awfully thick or too awfully detailed so what I'm doing I'm just giving using some cooler colors to give a little bit of shadow to the back side of the leg and also a little bit of shadow underneath the toes and I did use a little bit of a lighter pastel to kind of give it those little ringlets that are in the feet of chickens and roosters but I'm doing it very delicately because once again I don't want the feet to draw so much attention that it pulls you away from the beautiful feathers and from his gesture of crowing given a shadow underneath him like in the reference photo but I'm going to be adding remember how we work darker to lighter I'm going to be adding some lighter highlights of that hay that's kind of sticking up in places very randomly as I was painting I realized he looked like the star of the barnyard and it almost like he was in a spotlight like he's singing as the lead singer in an opera or something so I guess I just kind of personify things a lot and while I am adding some interest to the foreground with the indication of hay or straw I want to be careful to keep it very subtle loose and not to draw the viewer's eye to the bottom of the painting so we want the viewer to go right in and up to that rooster's head which is the obvious main focal point you may have noticed as I was doing the background with that barn I started to get in the some of the more of the details of the shadows that were on the left hand side in the background and I realized it was detracting from the rooster so that's why I decided to really soften it and simplify it that's a better word and just kind of keep it you know non-descript it's just some sort of a barn in the background that adds interest but doesn't steal the show we want the rooster to steal the show I also want to mention that these reds were so darn vibrant and I mean that in a good way that I found that my camera had a hard time accommodating for the brilliance of the red and the video of it actually showed more accurate colors than a photograph and once again I'm away from my home studio I don't have the lighting that I normally have so you just work with what you have that's what I'm always telling you guys so now I did work a little bit more on the head I had not given him much personality yet I felt like his eye was a little undeveloped and too small but I had somebody come visit me while I was painting and I should have stopped painting and I feel like I got his head a little bit too large or something but anyway here he is in all of his crowing glory you can see a little bit more the close-up of the feathers and just some of the brilliance of the colors once again I love the Sennelier set the Sennelier pastel card there I am in the reflection so I hope you learned something God bless you all I'm so grateful for those of you who are subscribers here to my patrons and to all of those in Momay Cafe Art Group on Facebook Happy painting!