 Welcome artists, visitors, and subscribers to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and you're hearing those little bird tweets. That means we're doing a bird painting tutorial of a sweet little chickadee. I've been on a bird kick lately because it is the theme in our Monet Café art group on Facebook. So this will be the first video featuring the chickadee you saw at the beginning of this video. But I'm gonna be bringing some bird sketches, whimsical bird, pastel paintings, and it should be a lot of fun. All right, we're getting started now with the first little chickadee painting. I'll share a whole lot in here, but first here's my little studio mascot. He gets a little bored sometimes while I'm painting, so I have to take him out and throw the ball quite often. First, let's talk about my reference photos. I got all of the chickadee reference material from PMP-art.com. It used to be called Paint My Photo, but they changed their website to PMP-art.com. I encourage you, if you need good reference material to go ahead and check out that site, also find me. You can follow people just like friends on Facebook, and I have a lot of albums already saved like my bird album. I have marshes and landscapes, and so you can find other people and you know, use their material because these are photos from individuals who have allowed artists to share this. Now, I can't share the reference of the image while I paint. It's one of their rules. So I'm going to provide in the link of this video the actual link to PMP and the reference I'm using. So you could just go there and look at it while I'm painting. So all right now my materials. I had these extra sheets of U-art paper. It's the letter U-art, and it's a pre-made sanded pastel paper. That's awesome. Sanded papers are great for pastel painting. I had these cut up from a previous painting demonstration. Now I'm going to mount each painting that I do on this little black foam core board. You get these boards from the dollar store for a dollar, the big boards that you see it resting on there. So that's a really good price. All right, so now I'm just going to tape down my piece of U-art paper with some black artist tape. It's archival, which means it doesn't have any acid in it. And I got my artist tape from Amazon. I have a lot of people ask me about that too. But I want to share that U-art paper is water friendly, and even though it's a sanded surface, you can paint on it with watercolor, with gouache, with acrylic, acrylic inks, so many different things that you can do with U-art paper. It's a very substantial pastel paper. It's a little pricey, which is why I often share how to create your own pastel surfaces, because I know a lot of beginner artists, and if you're like me when I first started my art career, buying these art supplies was a challenge for me, because I was, well I won't go into that story. But I do recommend doing a sketch prior to committing to your pastel painting. It's just a good idea. You work out any issues, especially if you're not real familiar with sketching birds. And I will give some sketching tips in an upcoming video. All right, it's time to get started. I'm using a piece of vine charcoal here, sometimes called willow charcoal to sketch. Charcoal, or vine charcoal, is a similar product to pastels, and it works really well with pastels. You can brush it off, use a kneaded eraser if you need to correct anything, and pastels apply very nicely on top of it. The pencil I have above there, I realized, I did not want to use that. If you use a regular pencil, there's something about the graphite and the lead that your pastels don't adhere to it. Well, it results in a shiny surface, so try not to use regular pencil with pastels. Now, I'll tell you right away at the get go, I drew my little birdie too tall, or too high, or too much towards the top of the paper, so I end up changing that and reworking it. So I really should have taken my own advice. I did do a sketch, but I should have planned it out a little better. It ends up working out fine at the end, but I'm just telling you guys to maybe take your time in your placement of where you want your image to be, and don't do what I just did. But hey, on this channel, I'm going to share warts and all, because we all make mistakes, right? All right, so now I've kind of got it sketched in a little bit. I did add a little bit of the dark pastel. I'm going to show you something here not to do. I forgot that I was using York paper, so I grabbed my little chamois cloth, and I forgot it doesn't blend well. If you want to blend some pastels, it gets stuck to the sanded surface. It works great on pastel matte and watercolor paper, but I end up using a pipe foam insulation later that I'll talk about. That's a better blending tool if you're going to do blending on a piece of UART paper. UART paper is pretty sanded. It's pretty gritty, and that's what makes it so awesome, and makes the pastel the ability to layer pastels. All right, so now I'm just getting in the general color palette. Again, I'm not sharing the reference photo here, but you can go to the clickable link in the description of this video if you want to see the actual photo. My patrons, however, will get the photo. I can share it in that group as an attachment there, because it's not like going out all over the YouTube world. If you would like to support this channel, it's only $5 a month on my Patreon page. Not only are you supporting this channel to bring art to people all over the world who may not be able to get any art lessons, I get the greatest feedback from people all the time about, oh my gosh, thank you so much, you know, because we're not all blessed to have so many resources or the financial resources that a lot of people in America take for granted. So I love that. I always say it. That's my heart about Monet Cafe is helping to bring art instruction to people who may not be able to get it. So if you support this channel on Patreon, again, $5 a month, you can cancel it anytime. But the neat thing is, if you want a little extra instruction, that's what my patrons get. We have a great time. It's a lot of fun. I treat it very much like art school or school, and we have story time, we have homework, we have PE lessons, patron education, and a lot of fun. I'm starting to do a little critiques that will help people get better. So anyway, I've only sped this up slightly, just so you know, you can still see what I'm doing, but it takes the file size down so I can actually upload it to YouTube. So typically the way I work here, you see my pastels, I'm using dark, the darker values first, and layering the light on tops. Mediums, oh that was my dog just snoring in the floor. The medium of pastels is similar to, even though it's a dry medium, it's similar to acrylic and oil and even gouache to a degree. In that, we can work dark to light. Now I'm not saying that's a hard, fast rule. You can certainly apply light down first, but in general you have the ability to layer. And because it's an opaque medium, you can put other colors on top of it or values on top of it and have it show up. I can put down a dark and then layer some lighter feathers on top. And so that's why often we can work with darker colors. Plus it gives the light something to contrast. Without contrast, color is just flat and values are flat. So I'm also working to, I know that this chickadee is more in the shadows at the under parts of his belly there, so that's why underneath, down at the bottom of his little belly there, I put some blue. And now I'm adding a little bit of this mauve, dull, kind of neutral magenta. Because even though his black parts on his head and under his beak are black, I mean, they're very dark, I shouldn't say they're black, black is relative, but I actually used a really, really dark purple for that. But I noticed at the top of his head and just under his beak there, there was some, like the sun was hitting it. So there was a little bit of warmth. So that's why I added that purple there. Now I'm kind of shaping out the chickadee at this point. I have found that I, I draw thinking about shapes and spaces. So often I'm kind of carving rather than sketching. I do, I like sketching and, you know, I'll do a basic sketch like I did with this chickadee before I start, especially if it's a subject matter like this, like a person or an animal that you need to get specific. But I don't do a detailed sketch because I do a lot of my painting focusing on big shapes and negative shapes. And so I'm, I'm more carving than I am drawing or doing individual lines. We just had a lesson not too long ago in my Patreon group about line versus edge. We, I encouraged them for their homework to do a painting that focused more online. Like if I would, I was to lift the pastel up and almost draw with it like a pencil versus edge, which is using it on its flat side, which gives a more painterly feel. Now you do use a little bit of both when you're painting, but it's definitely something that I like to do is more of an edge and a shape rendering versus a line render, rendering when I'm painting, especially at the early stages. Blocking in is a kind of a term that some of you might be familiar with in what I'm describing. So you're, you're blocking in the big shapes. I didn't worry about blocking in the background right away with this because I definitely wanted to get the general shape of that chickadee done to begin with. All right. So now I'm just keeping a really light touch. I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do the background. The reference photo really just had a, one of those out of focus blurry backgrounds, which is neat, but I knew I didn't want it to be totally boring. And so I thought I'd go ahead and get this background covered. Now that's the piece of pipe foam insulation I was talking about. I just had to clean it off and had a little bit of residue on it. I've heard you can put these in the washer and just wash them off. But I'm using that to blend with and see how it just softens it up and covers all of that, that lighter surface of the UART paper. So it really sets a mood and starts to feel more like a painting, you know, rather than just something so standalone like the chickadee just sitting there. All right. So now I feel better. I got the paper covered and I do advise that. So now I'm going to start working a little bit more on making sure I have things rendered correctly with regard to the shape of this chickadee. Now here's where I'm going to talk a little bit. I'll continue this conversation when I do a video on sketching birds and bird, correct bird anatomy. And I'll preface it by saying, I'm not a bird expert. I love painting little birds. I just get a kick sometimes and I feel like I got to, I got to paint some birds, but I need to study the more I need to do more bird painting. But I will share with you guys some of the things that I've learned personally about drawing and painting birds. They have such a delicate little shape and sometimes I know I used to do this early on. I had a way of drawing or painting them too stiff, too stiffly. And I lost that, should I say buoyancy? I know that's in water, but in the air they're so light and they are so gently formed. And if we sketch or have too many hard lines, we lose that. Notice the blues and the purples that I've already added, some of them, but I'll be adding more. And there are, even though that section of his head and under his body is, or under his belly kind of area is lighter, there are still shadowy areas. And blues and purples are excellent colors to use to represent shadows. Also too, with the chickadee, notice that, well you're not looking at the reference photo, but if you go there and you look at it, their eye, it's black within black or darkest value within the darkest value. And you really can only distinguish their eye in many chickadee reference photos by the little reflection on their eye. There's a little bit of a, sometimes a lighter area around their eye that you can kind of differentiate between the eye and the black feathers around it. But for the most part, don't try to overdraw the eye or it's going to look unrealistic. Their eyes really are just dark in dark. For most, like I said, many of the chickadee reference photos that I've been working with, I've noticed the same thing. All right, so again, I've added some of the purples and it looks rather, I don't know, blocky at this stage, kind of or chunky at this stage. And that don't feel bad if that's how your painting looks to begin with, because sometimes it just takes a while. And try to resist the urge to over blend. Now again, I've blended the background because I kind of wanted to get started with that little covering up of the whole surface and get an idea of mood and value. But I'm not going to blend the bird. I don't think I, before this painting is over, I don't think I blend anything on the bird, because I let the pastels do the blending. If you first start layering down pastels, they look, you see the texture of the paper and you feel like, oh, it looks all, you know, unfinished. And so you have this tendency to get something out and blend, but just don't do it. Resist the urge. And the more you practice this, the more you know when to blend and when not to blend, because the pastels really will, after you get enough layers down, they start to blend themselves. Now I noticed again, with the black on the top of the head, again, there was this shimmer, like the sun was hitting it, and it almost had that blue that I'm using, this really almost ultramarine blue. And I have one of a common question I get from people all the time on the YouTube channel and various sources is, how do you know to use those colors? Because you don't necessarily see them in the reference photo. However, if you know some of the rules of how color behaves, this is why we talk about color a lot. Actually, in our Patreon group right now, I'm going through a book in our storytime. We have storytime every Wednesdays when I read from a book. And we're actually on color theory right now. That's a lesson I'll be actually doing tomorrow for them. But when you know the rules of color and value, you can stretch the boundaries of what you see in your photo. I know for a fact that black things, often when light hits them, they'll have a shimmery, I mean, it can reflect as a warm color, but often a really black object can have a blue or deep blue kind of shimmer, especially in birds that have those iridescent feathers and as I was seeing on this chickadee. And sometimes I think I know other artists must do the same thing that I do here, but I think we train our eyes and maybe we paint enough to start seeing things that may not be obvious in a reference photo. When I looked at that reference photo, I just felt like there should be blue there on the top of his head, even though I couldn't really see it, but I might just barely see it. So, all right, let me move on here. Now with bird's feet, I'm still trying to get my bird feet the way I want them to be in general. They are, I don't even think I'm going to draw them in here. I wanted to get an idea of where they were, but when I get to it, I'm going to talk a little bit more about it. They are so delicate and they have a, oh, I am kind of sketching them in, they have a real gestural stroke. And if you have your stroke on your bird's feet too hard, too stiff or too mechanical, is that the word? They won't look realistic. Their legs and their feet are so delicate and gestural is the best word that I can think of. So take a light touch and an easy hand when you're doing the bird feet. And I'll talk about that more maybe in one of the upcoming videos. Now at this point is where, if you're watching this on the Monet Cafe, the YouTube channel, you will see the sped up version from this point forward. We're about at 17 minutes into the video, so there's been lots of great content. Well, I hope you think it's great content and I hope you'll try it and always feel free to join the Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook. You can get so many questions answered there. We pride ourselves in that group. I don't like the word pride normally, but we pride ourselves on really making the beginner feel comfortable. And if you're a beginner, you can ask almost any question and you will get such great advice from artists of every level. So it's another great free resource just like these videos. But from this point forward is where Monet Cafe will see the sped up version. But my patrons, I'm going to give a little extra content for my patrons. And also, my patrons will get the reference photo and be able to provide their results in our private Patreon group as well. So Monet Cafe, hang in there, keep watching because you learn a lot by watching. Even I like watching speed videos. Actually, when you've painted a little while, I prefer watching a speed video because I'm already past some of the other things that I'm just watching at the color and the composition and some of the things the artist is doing. So keep watching and do me a favor, comment on this video. Let me know what you think. Your comments not only mean a lot to me. I love reading your comments. Also, it helps with my YouTube ranking. So if you comment, it's just going to make my videos get to more people who may be looking for art instruction videos. YouTube suggests those videos more often when the videos have a lot of comments. So there's my cheap little plug to get you guys to comment and watch the video to the end. Oh, also watch the video to the end because that's where I will have a photo or video portion of all of the pastels I used. I actually marked them out on a card so that you can see every color that was used for this painting. All right, guys, enjoy the music until I'm back at the end to go over my color selections. You can see here how I made the background more colorful and here is where I'm going to go ahead and just mark down all of the pastels. I know sometimes with computers, our color perception is not always the same based on your monitor. But basically I have like three darks. I really only needed two of the darks. I think it's the Terry Ludwig egg plant, kind of a mauve color. Like you see there are a couple of purples, a neutral pink. Now I've got some of these greens, some a little warmer, a little lighter, and then one of them is a cooler green. You can see that second one down. Now I've got some blues, that brighter, bolder blue, more of the periwinkle blue, a lighter periwinkle blue, and a really light blue. Now you see that light blue? That was the white and it appears very white on the painting. But as I always say, color and value is relative. Now of course some of those orangy brown colors down there, more peachy tones that were in the feathers and more of a gold that was on the outside edges where that backlighting happened, a little neutral colors there and a little bit more yellowy and a little bit of a lighter peachy tone there. I did add a few turquoise at the end when I brightened it up. But here's the final with a few of the brighter colors applied and I like the crop in Photoshop of the circle. As I said before, stay tuned because the next bird tutorial will be the same chickadee where I use a different color palette, which should be a lot of fun. All right guys, I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you learned something and always remember it's never too late to be an artist. Happy painting!