 Welcome to Monet Café, artistic friends and visitors. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm excited about what we're going to learn today and if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button to keep more video tutorials coming your way. This was a little pastel sketch I did as a preliminary for a larger commission painting and I'm going to share with you in this video all of the pastels I used but also a neat new complementary underpainting technique that I did just on regular sketch paper using ink tense blocks. So I hope you learn a lot in this tutorial and let's get started. I created my reference image in Photoshop by altering another photograph to accommodate the client's desires for what she wanted me to paint. I then did something in Photoshop I've never tried before but it's literally the same thing as taking a pocket color wheel and looking at the local color of your scene and just picking the color that's opposite on the color wheel. I basically broke down the image into its most basic shapes and then converted it to the complement of that color which resulted in this image that you see here. Now this would be considered the complementary color to my original photograph. Now before you ask the question I know you're going to ask why would I do this and the reason is that the complement to the color that will be the final color usually results in some color energy and creates a more beautiful effect. It gives the ending color something to rest upon that's going to give it interest and life. So now let's get started with the supplies and the techniques I used to achieve this. First I'm going to do a sketch with some charcoal pencils. I'm using a little mat, a pre cut mat and my final painting would have been on you art paper that I showed you just there but I ended up just working this preliminary sketch and painting on this Kanson mixed media paper. Oh and of course it's Monet cafe gotta have you a beverage and I had some coffee. So these little mats are handy for just marking off a five by seven and I'm speeding up the sketch more than the rest of this just to kind of give you an idea of the fact that I did a preliminary sketch and sometimes I do just the sketch and then I work the painting separately larger but in this case because it was a preliminary painting altogether I decided just to paint right on top of the sketch and to create my complimentary underpainting I'm using these ink tents blocks made by Derwent. I use these often they're really great. Alright so here is my complimentary underpainting reference image and these ink tents blocks are literally compressed ink. They go on similarly to like crayons and they don't look very vibrant or bold until you add water and that's when the magic happens and I really love using this technique as an underpainting. So now I'm going to share with you how I add water and you'll be able to see the vibrancy of these ink tents blocks and once again I'm just using regular mixed media paper but these ink tents blocks can be applied to watercolor paper and I'm talking about a final pastel painting at the end. You can layer pastels on top of these other surfaces besides just sanded paper but you can also use the ink tents blocks on regular sanded paper like UART paper, pastel matte, you know the sky's the limit, not on Sennelier La Carte pastel cart that's not a water friendly surface. So the colors that I've chosen are similar to the ones in my converted image but you don't have to worry if you don't have the exact color as long as you get the value right the lightness or the darkness but what I see in the image that I converted to the complementary colors is teals. I see some teals in the sky that are more neutral to the upper right. I see purple basically the landscape is more of a bluish purple so mine's a little bit more blue here and notice how I change my brush direction for different directional strokes. The marsh grasses are growing up and down they're going to have a little bit more of a vertical stroke rather than the grasses that are in the background. They get more of a horizontal not as much texture not as much detail but once again this is just the underpainting and I could have I actually for this commission piece we ended up going with a different reference theme all together but I could have gone ahead and used this little preliminary final painting as my guide for a larger painting that I could have done on you art sanded paper watercolor paper pastel matte you know whatever I chose but this is kind of neat that you will be able to see my technique here how you really can just use regular paper and get a final pastel painting out of it. For the rest of this underpainting portion I'm going to speed it up a bit add some music but don't go anywhere I will be back when I add the application that will give me the ability to apply my pastels and have them have some layering capability all right I'll be back here I am finishing up with the underpainting and once again note that you may not have all of the exact colors but as long as the values are correct here's my concoction that I use often to turn a non-sanded paper into basically a sanded paper what I'm sorry for my camera shaking what I use is clear gesso two parts to one part marble dust now I'll share with you both of those in a picture here so you can see what they are but I do feel after I've been using this quite a bit that just the clear gesso is fine I've been using that technique for so many years and it works just great just clear gesso along now clear gesso is important not the regular gesso clear because you can see through it otherwise you'd cover up your whole painting and it also has a little bit of grit to it like a little bit of sand in it I've made marks all around here of the pastels that I'm using but I will show all of the pastels at the end of this video so you see in the upper right hand corner the darks that I'm using darks are typically for the vertical elements in a painting they receive light differently flat surfaces obviously reflect the light more and when something's upright or tall or perpendicular to the landscape it is darker in value so therefore you can see my trees my grasses in the foreground beside the marshy areas are all going to be darker in value I'm not sure if I used all those darks that I put up there but it's sometimes nice to have a combination of darks a little bit of a warm maybe burgundy more of a purple sometimes a really deep green and it just gives more interest to your darks now I'll talk a little bit here as I'm working but once again this was just a preliminary to work out any issues and also see if this was the direction my client wanted to go in she had mentioned she loved little streams great sunsets we ended up finalizing on a floral painting with a little stream and a great sunset so this is a great idea if you're doing a commission piece to not commit to a big painting before you know if your client likes that concept or that idea and it's also I love that I filmed it because I am able to share with you guys that you can do these little studies and things fully with pastels on just regular mixed media paper now keep in mind mixed media paper is a little bit thicker and I think receives water a little bit better than the thinner papers but watercolor paper I have so many videos where I use watercolor paper with soft pastels and often using the different underpainting techniques like you see here this one with the Derwent ink tents blocks sometimes I'll do a watercolor underpainting sometimes I'll use the pastels in a video not too long before this one and do an alcohol wash blending the pastels as an underpainting and one of my videos the past couple of videos I actually have on why do we do an underpainting that's a question that I get a lot but let me let me address that a little bit here the reason the underpainting with a complementary concept like I've done here works is because notice that uh like that burgundy color I've put down that reddish kind of magenta my hands in the way now but on top of the purple it's so much more interesting than if I'd have just had the whole painting toned even gray you know I mean it just gives some color excitement and fun so I really really do love using an underpainting strategy now you may have seen some of my videos where you can use an underpainting that's just one tone oh now I'm using my piece I'll get back to that point in a minute I'm using my piece of chamois cloth it works as an excellent blending tool on surfaces that aren't too awfully sanded as in this case I found they don't work great on you art paper which is really sanded but it works great on this surface my homemade surface on pastel matte and I find it works really well now back again to toning your paper just one color in a recent video I did of a snow family I toned the whole surface I believe I used pastel matte in that one I toned it all a cool teal color that I thought would work really well with the snow scene and the reference image so you can do an underpainting that's less complicated than this one and I often do that as well so this one was just kind of fun and I I did like the end result with the compliments to each particular color area once again I used just the big shapes I didn't get so tedious as to deal with anything that was too specific so now you can see kind of how some of the pinks going on top of that warm blue is more exciting and I'm adding even a little bit more of the turquoise and just having fun with this really so the main point of this video was taking a reference image breaking it down into big shapes and converting those big shapes into their compliments and I found it was really a neat approach so lots of ways to do all these things though and hopefully you learned a lot more as well so I'm going to add some music it is literally almost Christmas time at the making of this video and I'm looking forward to the world rejoicing and celebrating the birth of our savior so you guys enjoy this I will be back at the end as always if you haven't subscribed to this channel I really appreciate it I'm excited about the growth lately on YouTube so many new people are subscribing it's it's a lot of fun it's exciting for me so like share and comment I love your comments all right enjoy to music and I'll be back at the end it was nearly finished at this point and here is the final painting with all of the pastels surrounding it like a rainbow and I really hope you enjoyed that Merry Christmas to everyone I pray you have a Christmas full of blessings and love as always happy painting