 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm happy to bring you part four finally in the pastel painting course. I call it pastel painting 101 and we have previously seen parts one, two and three. One is the birth of a painting. I talk about the importance of a value sketch. Part two is crucial first steps. It's this planning stage where it really does help us to plan on our painting and to have a successful end result. Part three is called what lies beneath and I go over lots about what's called the underpainting. I get so many questions about this and this particular video covers a lot of the important information about under paintings and now we are in part four called the painting comes to life. You can find links to the previous portions of this series in the description of this video. Also would you take a moment like subscribe and hit the bell icon to be notified of future videos. This really does help the standing of my YouTube channel and to make sure this video gets seen by lots of others. Also if you would like to become a patron of mine on my Patreon page that helps to support this channel for only $5 a month and you get extra goodies. I would also like to give credit to the photographer of this reference image. I got it from unsplash.com. It is a great site for copyright free reference images and thank you Guseppe Fomiani. He is from Italy and it's just a lovely photo. All right. Here we go. As a recap here are real quickly I'm speeding this up. Some of the colors that I used for the under painting. Now I typically talk about under paintings liking to use warm tones. Sorry for my shaky easel. And the reason I do that is warm tones are usually a complimentary color to a lot of landscapes that have a lot of blues and a lot of greens and grasses. Now this wheat field had a lot of golds in it. So I decided not to go with a typical gold color I like to use for an under painting and I went more with the cooler pink tones. Now I am choosing some of my pastels. This set is the Terry Ludwig Maggie Price set. I love Terry Ludwig pastels. They are soft. They're vibrant and gorgeous in color. Sometimes I do break my pastels. I find they're a little bit more manageable when they're smaller pieces. I don't always do that. But I'm just kind of contemplating my color palette here. And if you've been on my channel long or seen my work much you know I love to punch up color. That's what I call it punching up color. I like to kind of exaggerate color. And so the photo a gorgeous photo. I loved it really I was drawn to the composition the clouds and the energy of the blowing wind that appeared in the wheat field. I want to exaggerate that as well. And I want to exaggerate the color. The reference photo had a lot of kind of a neutral brown. The sky you know you can interpret it as as blue if you know the cliche blue sky. But I want to give this some vibrancy. And so I'm going to talk a little bit more about that as I paint. I typically get started with a general color palette. And then I add as I work giving it some color interest and pizzazz. Now I did go I missed a little footage. I added a little bit more of that dark Terry Ludwig eggplant color it's called you see a little bit of like a dark dark purple down there. And what I've done is in the underpainting I've established a roadmap. I already have my value set in place. And I'm just going to follow the general value roadmap that I have. And I'm going to start having fun with color. Now as I paint I am so sorry by the way for my head and my crazy you know just scraggly hair sticking out. Does anybody else you know you get a little older and your hair start just going all over the place. But sometimes I just get up in the mornings and I start painting and I'm I feel myself and I forget to look at myself in the mirror. Maybe that's a good thing. Right now I've grabbed another one of these kind of rusty color Terry Ludwig pastels. And what I'm doing I have a super light touch now it has taken me years to develop focusing on and now a little bit by habit using a really light touch. I actually in this painting drop my pastels I think like three or four times. But what I'm doing is I'm scumbling color. I'm not laying down hard swatches or thick layers of pastel. I'm just letting it dance and play with each other. Think of your colors as playing and you're not always in a scene going to have the same colors everywhere. So a lot of times you just consider how nature really works and then you can start becoming the orchestrator of your own painting and you don't necessarily have to follow the color that's in your reference image. For example what I've been doing with these rusty colors notice how I got a little lighter. I went from a deep dark burgundy to a medium and now to a lighter kind of rusty color. Oh hold on I want to make a comment here. I changed my strokes before they were vertical like tall grasses in the foreground. Notice how I've changed them to horizontal bands. That's because when grasses and things in a distant field get far away you can't see those vertical strokes anymore. They literally become like a blanket and I'm doing the same thing here and notice I've lightened the value. I've got the Sun peeking over that hill and so we're going to get lighter values on those hill tops and a little bit lighter value on the foreground grasses. But once again I did lighten the grasses as they got to the tops even in the foreground. Now I've got my, this is darker than it's going to end up being, but I've got my Terry Ludwig eggplant color. I can't remember if the Maggie Price set comes with one of these eggplant colors, but I'm using it to establish just some of these heads of the wheat that are almost like a song you know playing throughout the field like notes in a song. Sorry I get imaginative with my words when I'm trying to describe this and these little heads of the wheat are giving me an idea of how I want them to flow along the top of the field and I often try to make my flowers or my grasses almost everything reaching to my focal point. It's actually a focal point strategy. It's a directional way to direct your strokes in a way where you want the viewer's eyes to go and so I don't want them all the same. I think that's one of the things with art that you can quickly identify that paintings that seem beginner or you know inexperienced I should say and it's a lot of times all the strokes are the same. They're the same direction. They're the same thickness. They don't have enough variety so make sure you think about like I said just like the rules of nature a item that's closer to the foreground is going to be bigger. They're going to be smaller far away. If you've got wind blowing they're going to be turning and moving in different directions. Now you've seen that I've gone in and scumbled some color in between these. I've used some greens but I'm not using anything that is too light in value yet. Those will be reserved more towards the end and they will just be on the tops of those grasses and I'm trying to keep the roots I always call it the roots like deep down especially in the foreground is where you can actually see down between some of the whether it's grasses or a grouping of flowers and that's why you usually need those darks in the foreground and values are typically darker closer to you anyway. Now I am getting in some of the sky I really did like the underpainting oopsie there I go again with the super light touch like I said I dropped like three pastels during this fortunately two of them fell not far right to where I kind of have my pastels but one fell on the ground and did break so that's just how it goes sometimes but I want you to notice that I'm adding this blue it is kind of a pretty sky blue I would say it's a medium value blue and I am not pressing really hard there's a tendency early on to think oh look at this it's kind of splotchy I mean you could look at that and say that's pretty splotchy oh back to my point before I really did like the sky of the underpainting keep in mind I I worked the underpainting I blended it that's why it looks smooth but as I'm adding these colors I am not pressing very hard and I'm I've been painting long enough to where I know that it's okay that it looks this way right now and I didn't have that confidence when I first started I would have tried to really fill in all those spaces by adding more pastel or I may have even blended it I do like blending initial layer sometimes to kind of you know get the paper where it's not showing through but a lot of times when I'm painting towards the end I let the pastels blend themselves they start to do that now I'm adding I am gonna go back and talk about that little turquoise blue that I added but right now I wanted to point out this is a Mount Vision pastel they are pretty large pastel they're round they don't sell them in half sticks so I do break mine and I broke mine I wanted to put them in three different locations so I broke them into thirds because they're kind of a long stick and I use a cigar cutter it makes a nice clean round cut and so these pastels are great this particular set is called thunderstorm gray kind of a perfect name for a color that's kind of this gray it's almost like a purple gray very neutral and so I knew some of those clouds and areas there were a little bit darker almost like they had rain in them oh gosh sometimes when I do a voiceover with my videos I have to look back at my old face so I'll try to avoid that old lady that I keep seeing and focus on this tutorial but let me talk again about that turquoise that I added as you see me using this Mount Vision in other places usually in the sky cooler colors are up more towards the heavens and colors get a little warmer as they come down so turquoise and teals are a little warmer than like an ultramarine blue now I've got a little bit of a darker pastel here it's also from the Mount Vision set and all I'm doing is looking at the reference image it's not rocket science I'm literally just looking at the values and I'm comparing what's lighter what's darker and I'm squinting my eyes a lot when you squint your eyes you're able to filter out the light and you can more clearly see that sounds funny to say squint your eyes so you can see more clearly but you really can clearly see values better you can see where the lights are and where the darks are more easily and if you squint your eyes and look at the reference image the most obvious dark are the background trees and some of the little wheat things in the front in the foreground and the whole general foreground or the land is darker obviously than the sky but in the sky that area of blue is actually darker than the clouds so that's something that I had to work on a little bit with this I think I had it too light for a little while but then of course you can see all of those gray areas that make the shapes they make some interesting shapes and that's a neat thing that will help you really with rendering drawing and painting and rendering things accurately is learning to zone out what the thing is quit telling yourself these are clouds and look at some of those shapes you know how we do when we're kids and we look at oh that looks like a giraffe or that looks like a dog but really even before getting too specific with some of those general cloud shapes the best thing to do is to focus on the big shapes and that's why in lesson number one I believe it was where we were doing some of the exercises to help us see the big shapes and the values we want to simplify it especially in the beginning portions of a painting and that's why I wanted to break this down into a well at least a four-part series which it ended up being is because sometimes it's almost too much to teach in one thirty minute or even our video and it is a process so don't cut yourself short by trying to jump ahead and just create a masterpiece it doesn't work that way you have to go through the baby steps and some of these core principles before it all starts coming together and this is all real time by the way I decided to keep this last video of what's called the final painting all real time so you can literally just examine what I'm doing I can take my time and talk to you guys and I think too you'll be able to see that the pastels are indeed starting to blend themselves I didn't have to come in with a blending tool or I didn't have to rub so hard to make the background not show through as a matter of fact I don't want to cover up the entire background that's one of the points of an underpainting sometimes we can cover our whole underpainting but I still do think it has a little bit of an influence on the color but the lighter touch you keep and the more you learn not to overwork your painting you get to see that beautiful underpainting showing through now I grabbed a pastel that at that point I thought wasn't it was too light or what in the right spot so what I'm doing now with this kind of a tan colored pastel I know that the light coming from it's kind of like the Sun is behind those clouds but the light is still reflecting down on the top areas of those hills and so I'm just glazing this pastel sometimes it'll like there it'll hit in an area you don't want it to go but don't worry about that and now I'm adding a little bit there's little bits of that turquoise kind of peeking through some of the background clouds I know the reference image I have here if you're looking at it on a phone you probably can't see it at all but I could see that little influence of color back there now as artist we have the license to be able to go hmm I know some of that sky is peeking through I want to use the correct value the lightness or darkness of it I want to get that right but I can make it a little bit of a higher saturated color as long as the values right and that to me is what is fun about art we don't have to stick to the color that's in the scene and as long as we follow the rules of value and general rules of color theory we can have a lot of fun with color and I think that's what makes paintings exciting another thing I've learned over the years is to work the hole sometimes you do have to kind of focus on an area a little bit but move on get your painting kind of working all together before you get too caught up on any one particular area and I find what happens when you do that is your paintings gonna have more harmony you're not gonna get as frustrated it's going to be more painterly and loose and what I consider to be more impressionistic and beautiful I'm going to keep this real time and now I'm going to add some music for you to just kind of relax watch the process uninterrupted by me and my voice and pay attention to the things I've already talked about and watch how the painting comes to life as I paint and actually before I add the music I want to mention to you that I did make a color guide I tried to take every color that I was using I thought about it a little bit after the fact with this you see I did the under under painting colors above and now I'm adding the colors that I've used thus far and I try to give them a little labeling system a lot of them were from the Maggie price set but some of them were like I said from the Mount vision set so I will make this color chart available typically a lot of my little things like that are extras that I only put on my patreon page for my patrons that pay the five dollars a month not only do they get the extra goodies but it really does help me to keep making these free videos for Monet cafe but in this case I will provide a link in the description of this video for this color guide so you can take a look at my notes and see some of the colors that I used I thought that would be helpful and now here's the music enjoy and I'll be back when I add some of the white or it's not really white it's a lighter highlight in the clouds all right enjoy with most of the values in the sky in place I'm going to address my focal point which is a light pastel that I'm using to kind of get like that silver lining they call it around clouds that's what's going to really make this one like gray cloud that has an interesting shape really stand out or some of these little negative spaces in between and actually I say this often when I'm doing a voiceover for my videos there are phases before I got to this point that I really liked I could have left the sky with more of the underpainting showing through I was still very happy with the final but I love to be able to see the different stages that's an advantage of rewatching a video of yourself painting I recommend you do that I mean even if you don't want to share it with anybody it's good to go back and watch yourself paint you'll be able to see oh wow I really did have something going there and you'll learn from you know you're a student of yourself basically all right so we're getting some of these highlights in and that's where I dropped the pastel I actually dropped you can see it actually fell onto the painting there's little white marks in the foreground and now I'm going to be adding this it's kind of a coral color and I got some comments when people saw this painting about fluorescent colors and how they're not as resilient to light they fade more quickly than some other colors do and I wouldn't necessarily call some of these a fluorescent I may have grabbed one or two before I'm done that are more fluorescent than this but I paint for the joy of it and for the beauty of it and I don't get so caught up in oh wait I can't use this color I do want to use archival materials which means they are considered the best and they are not going to yellow with time especially papers and things archival pastels will hold their color more but as long as it's an archival type of pastel I'm gonna have fun with the color you know I'll use a fluorescent as long as it's archival so anyway they were kind of my punchy colors I had a little fun with the pinks and the coral colors in this and I had that beautiful pinkish underpainting showing through but you'll see as I'm using these colors they're they're what I would consider my punchy color and they definitely helped to develop that focal point and all I'm doing is looking at the reference photo and looking at little areas where something with that same value might be peeking through the clouds and also as a student of nature that's what we should be as artists we should be looking at nature all the time and I am so blessed to live in a place a home I'm calling it my home it's a temporary home we are still four years after my house flooded in 2017 still living in a temporary home my husband right now is working really hard at helping us be able to move on a place where we really would like to live so it's been a long journey but in this temporary place you know there's blessings in everything we happen to have a field behind our house it's these wide open spaces where I see a sunset and a sunrise all the way from the sun rising in the east until it's setting in the west and we have the most glorious views of the sky so I'm able to look at the sky all the time and see you know when there is a little sun behind the clouds either it's coming up or going down you can see how it filters through the clouds and how even little bits of that pink can slip through some of the spaces in clouds and hit way up high on some clouds that are even higher so be sure to pay attention to these things and it's only gonna make your painting better now I did just finally add some green to those trees they're still gonna stay quite dark but I had a very dark green that I added just to some of the tops of those trees the trees are kind of silhouetted so they're not gonna have a lot of green because the sun's behind them but I wanted to warm them up just a little bit and now it was like there was a little bit of trees trailing off to the back so I got a little bit of a lighter green just to not make that edge so abrupt and I'm using some of this green even though the field was mostly golden wheat grasses I decided to add some of this green in there and have some fun with that as well plus I needed to cover up that white from my pastel falling so it's starting to come to life now and I'll once again add a little music for you to enjoy the process and learn obviously while you're watching and I will be back when I actually add a little bit of fixative to the lower portion of the painting so that I can add some more of those grasses I zoomed in here a little bit so you can see how I'm kind of filtering the lighter values down through the grasses and now I am using it's a round pastel I think this it might be a Rembrandt I've recently been doing some Rembrandt tutorials and it's a nice pastel it's a little harder for rolling and getting some grasses all right here's that point where I'm adding some Blair low odor fixative to the foreground I was getting a decent amount of layering in the front where I didn't want it to get muddy down wanted some fresh color on top I also love to spray it purposely to get some of those little spatters I may have overdone it here but I think it makes it real artistic-looking and it's gonna allow me to get some fresh color on some of these foreground grasses I know it looks a little dark and funny right now but it comes together and I'm just getting in some shapes on these tops to the wheat heads to identify them a little bit more as wheat and even though in the reference image I didn't see any of the wheat poking up over the horizon line but I thought it would create much more interest along with that directional element of leading you to the focal point it almost looks like the heads of wheat are sticking up trying to see the sunset themselves like reach up as high as you can to see that glorious sunset so those are some of the other things you can use your artistic license for now I am just using this this is a Terry Ludwig pasta I think this is one in the Maggie Price set I think I'm not positive but I'm just glazing gently turning it sometimes on its corner to get a just an idea of little glints of light that might be reaching down onto some of those grasses and I really hope you've enjoyed this tutorial this is the final and I hope you've enjoyed the series please leave me a comment to let me know what you thought if you learned something I hope you did and if you haven't already we have a group on Facebook the Monet cafe art group where lots of the artists are gathered together I think we're nearly or over 15,000 members there now I also have of course my Patreon page I get to spend a little bit more time with my patrons they get to share their work with me and we have a lot of fun also follow me on all those platforms there and as always God bless and happy painting