 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and in today's lesson I'll be sharing a really fun and vibrant way to begin a pastel painting. I'll be sharing lots about products and painting instruction and we're gonna have fun. I would love it if you would go ahead and like this video and subscribe to this channel if you haven't already. Click the bell icon to be notified of future videos. Also if you'd like a little more instruction consider becoming a patron of mine on my patreon page. It's only $5 a month. You help keep these free lessons coming to artistically hungry people all over the world. I want you to enjoy this free video but if you are a patron of mine these are the extra goodies you'll be getting in your version. Reference image, pastel color guide, ink tense block color guide, lots of extra commentary and real time. So are you ready to have some fun? Let's get to it. Now let's talk about these products. The soft pastels that I use for this lesson are the 36 set of Paul Rubens pastels. You guys know I've done a few tutorials on those and given some prizes away. I also used the 40 set of Paul Rubens pastels. Now I love these two sets because the quality is really outstanding very much like Sennelier pastels and each set is less than $50. One of them's like 30 something and one's 40. The surface I'm using is Luxe archival sanded paper. I've been loving this paper lately. This particular pad has 10 sheets in it and it comes in different sizes. It's sanded, it takes water, you'll see beautifully and I found it at its best price on Jerry's Arterama and here is the product that I use to make such a fun and vibrant beginning to this painting. I love Derwent ink tense blocks. These are little, they're called blocks, they're just sticks of compressed ink and they just explode with color when you add water. One of the colors that I used you can get a little 12 stick set on Amazon. Currently it's around $37 on Amazon. You can get it cheaper on Jerry's Arterama but there's like a $10 shipping and it makes it about the same as Amazon so whichever works best for you. The main color that you'll see me use for the underpainting is fuchsia and it is in the 12 stick set so that might be a fun way for you to get to get 12 sticks of these and have some fun but you can also buy individual sticks for around two or three dollars. The color is fuchsia and it's $700. You will see me using some other Derwent colors as I work and if you're a patron of mine you'll get that full list but this is the main color. So there you go. I definitely sped that part up right but here's where the fun starts. Adding just plain water to this makes this color explode and as I stated before the Luxe archival takes water beautifully. The paper doesn't buckle very much and I'm loving this paper lately. I really do like it. It's similar to UART but it doesn't curl and I find that the Paul Rubens Pastels apply just like butter to this surface. Now I use this stick just for some general sketching. I want to talk to you guys a little bit about sunflowers in general. Obviously the center of the flower is quite large so what I'm doing is I'm just getting in conceptually some of the centers of the flowers. By the way the reference image is from unsplash.com and there will be a link to this image in the description of this video. What I'm doing is you see the shapes are or the flowers are shaped and turned a little differently. Some are a little more downward facing. Some are turned a little differently so I'm trying to draw some circles emulating that and then I just go ahead and get in the general horizon line. It had a little bit of a slope to it. I kind of liked that and notice I'm not worrying about yet the shape of the flower petals. Now I'm just turning my little Derwent Inktense block on the side. You can see here I like to break mine. I find that the full stick would be really hard to block in the trees like this because you're working with a whole stick. So I really do this with most of my pastels is break them up a little bit. So I'm just getting in some of the darker values here. You can see the distant trees and the centers of the sunflowers are the darkest value. I know I say this like a broken record but trees are often some of the darkest thing in a reference image or in a painting, especially trees that are close to you. And as you can see I'm going ahead and filling in the centers to the sunflowers. I'm hoping this lesson just really breaks it down and makes it super easy to follow. I thought this was fun. Sunflowers are just happy and fun anyway, right? So just getting a few of these shapes and all this is is very basic at this point. I added a few more shapes including one that's peaking up over the horizon line. I usually like to do that to have one random fun fella or gal saying hey look at me. Now I do this often where when I add water or alcohol or whatever I'm adding to liquefy pastels or in this case the ink blocks I turn it upside down. I let gravity work in my favor and you can see it's kind of dripping and therefore when you turn it the other way it really makes some neat tree shapes but look at that color. That violet color is just gorgeous. I thought it was just dynamic with the fuchsia and again just getting in some of the sunflower shapes and really just having fun with this not getting too crazy and it's fine if something drips you know you can kind of blot it out and that one at the bottom it's shaped more like an oval kind of a wide oval because that one flower is facing downwards and after I finished with this violet color I am going to be adding a couple of other colors of the Derwent Inktense blocks. Oh yeah and I decided just to randomly spatter a little bit of the color that was still on my brush just to break it up a little bit have some fun you know let this thing be painterly and energetic. I add two more colors of the Derwent Inktense blocks I believe this one was called bright blue and you'll see me use another one that's called turquoise and I'm using these colors I know that there's gonna be a lot of warmth in the sunflower painting a lot of golds for the sunflowers a lot of greens for the grasses and these are like shadowy colors and they look so pretty with this fuchsia pink so I'm just kind of working in some of these colors for the shadows of the deep grasses and then this turquoise for some of the middle grasses and distant fields. I went ahead and gave a little bit of that turquoise to the distant trees I love to make things layers of levels of interest in a painting so I decided I'm gonna make those trees feel like they're further away so now here we go again having fun with the water I do horizontal strokes when things are in the distance like grasses and flowers things flatten out when they're far away and then as they get closer they gradually get more vertical so that's why I start making wider vertical strokes in the foreground and this just really creates what's happening here's I'm creating a value study of sorts with just dynamic gorgeous color and it makes such a vibrant underpainting I thought these colors would work well with the greens and the golden colors of the sunflowers plus it was just a lot of fun you know I I preach that a lot here on Monique cafe and to my patrons we just need to take off our serious hat and put on our four-year-old hat where we used to paint and have fun now yes that was a black that I grabbed that black is out of the 40 Paul Rubens set and I recently did have someone ask me about the fact that they couldn't get in their country I believe it was Australia she got back in touch with me I mentioned this before in another video she said thank you that was me about how she could not get the dark color we talk about all the time the Terry Ludwig eggplant color it's a great dark it looks kind of purplish it's V as in Victor 100 is the color of that one but I told her in the last video that that darks can you can use black even though I don't use black very often I think this black worked really well with this because I'm keeping a light touch and it actually does end up looking kind of like the Terry Ludwig eggplant color because I have that kind of purplish base so you've got those kind of two colors working and and I thought it worked out just fine so now I know a lot of these centers of the receding sunflowers are going to get lighter in the distance but at this point it doesn't matter I've got a lot of layering capability with this Luxe archival paper it because it's a sanded surface it layers great now look at that gorgeous color this color is similar to the bright blue that I had put down before it has a little bit of a blue and a little bit of a turquoise feel so what I'm doing here is you know I like to have fun with color we could just make our sunflowers the traditional dark reddish brownish really dark almost black center and then just standard typical cliche golden colors radiating out from it but we don't always have to use those colors if we get our values right we can punch up the color and have fun with it so I thought the turquoise in the center of some of these flowers would make a neat base for some of the other colors that I'll lay on top later it just we're artists right we don't have to represent nature exactly like we see it and it's as I always say if you get your value right you can have fun with color now you'll see me grab this paper to make color marks on it that's what actually my patrons get to see all of the colors that I use for the painting I'm just using a Prisma color new pastel these are harder pastels that don't take up a lot of tooth of the paper they work well for sketching I mean you paint with them too I often break them as well and use them on their side but as you can see I'm just getting the general oval shape around shape of the sunflowers is there any doubt as to what the focal point is in this image it's of course that flower the main flower one of the focal point strategies that's working for it is it's larger it's also in a really great position for good composition in general I've talked in many videos about the rule of thirds there's just something about the number three it's really fascinating I want to make a whole video on that I'm just fascinated by these things but for some reason when we have things in a third quadrant where our eyes are attracted to them we're drawn to that and so basically this main flower in the front is in a lower left third of the painting it's not quite centered horizontally or vertically so it's very interesting and I'm making these same shapes around the other sunflowers kind of paying attention to the general oval shape of them some of them are not they're not all just circles they're facing different ways and don't think you have to get everyone exactly right just make sure that you vary them that they're not all the same that's the main thing you do not want samey samey flowers that really will make your work look a little more amateurish and not painterly I love it if you guys would let me know too I've been doing this same filming strategy for quite some time now where I have my camera overhead and I'm trying to keep it zoomed out enough to where you can somewhat see my pastels I'd like to know if you guys are able to see things okay and follow along sometimes I will zoom in to get a little bit more of a close up view for you guys so I love your feedback alright so I've gotten most of these little shapes in here as we know things get smaller in the distance and now I'm going to start focusing on some of the values so I forgot that one guy sticking up back there I'm going to start focusing on some of the petals of the sunflowers and focusing also to on the values that I'm going to be using now let's think about something right now that's very important where is the light in this image I'm pulling two pastels I believe these are both from the 40 set instead of the 36 the 40 set had some beautiful rusty and golden colors in it but I'm thinking about where the sun is because that's going to determine what colors I use for the petals of these flowers and for me it looked like the sun was coming coming sort of from upper behind the flowers a little bit not totally behind them upper right so they're going to have a little shadow down below the bottoms those are the two colors now you can see where I used it from if you have the 40 set you can find these I'm hoping this is going to be a great step-by-step follow along for you now here is the other color that I chose notice I'm not going super bright and gold yet it's gonna look pretty gold right here because I don't have anything lighter next to it it's one of the lightest values it is the lightest value of everything in this painting so far notice I'm not even doing individual petals I'm just trying to give strokes that have some of the energy some of the general shape of the flower and I know I'm gonna be layering some things now notice in this distant flower I'm getting that darker color down at the bottom where the sun would not be hitting it and the golden color up top giving just a general shape to some of the the petals of the sunflower this one's drooping down the sun's not quite hitting those petals that I made in rust so I made almost all of those that rusty color now I'm just gonna do the same thing with all of these flowers in general the bottom parts are going to be a little bit more of the darker rusty and the top parts are gonna be catching the light a little bit more because it's kind of the lightest to the upper right of the painting so just kind of doing the same technique and strategy throughout now you're not going to get quite as much of this rusty color in the distance and it definitely gets smaller so I just give some little little dabs of that color as a painterly kind of indication I'm going back in with some of the more golden color this color was so pretty and again just using the reference image as a guide I'm looking at just how the shapes of the petals are and that's a great thing to keep in mind is don't think of yourself this sounds weird I always say this though don't think of yourself as painting flowers think of yourself as painting shapes and this happens with lots of things not just flowers try to zone out and forget that you're painting flowers so now I'm just paying attention to where maybe a few more of these little golden petals are hitting and capturing their general essence and shape and now I do need to get a little bit more darks in this image so I'm actually going to use that turquoise color that I used for the centers of the flowers kind of the top centers that kind of cool off the centers a little bit and it's going to connect my painting and give it harmony by using this color in other places and it is darker than the inktense block that I liquefied because I liquefied it you know it's going to dilute the color a little bit and the darkest part of the grasses is going to be the foreground for a couple of reasons values get darker in the four in the foreground also we've got the deep roots of some of these grasses and leaves going on now I am going to just subtly slightly lightly I should say layer a little bit of this color over the background of those Derwent colors and you don't want a hard touch for multiple reasons but one is you don't want to cover up that beautiful purple we already had down now I just went ahead and grabbed a little bit lighter turquoise I believe this one was that yeah that was from the 36 set and instantly this is going to make some of those trees just feel a little bit further away but I still kept a little of that purple intense showing through and some of the other turquoise that was a little darker now I'm doing what's called a blocking stage here if you notice I'm I'm not getting too fussy on any one thing I'm trying to get the overall layer of pastels down to cover the surface with a light very light touch because I do not want to lose the influence of that gorgeous underpainting color so I'm just using this beautiful blue a little bit of a cool blue there it is I keep trying to remember to mark the color down right after I use it it's kind of a lot of work to do these videos but every time I do I'm thinking of you I'm thinking of the viewer and like you'd want to go hey what pastel was that so this was kind of a nice grayish color in the 36 set and then another one that was a little bit brighter the bright one might have been from the 40 set I'm not sure so you'll see me use these first I'm getting want the one down that's a little more neutral and I know this is we're focusing on neutrals this month and this is not a neutral tutorial obviously but I had quite a few paintings that I did and I had the footage of these Paul Rubin's pastels that I wanted to really bring out and edit and focus on for beginners specifically these two sets I've been so excited about them because the quality is so good and the price is so great a beginner can get started with these two sets under $100 maybe like for $75 and that's just outstanding so now I'm adding let's see what am I doing here adding a little bit more of this one color that's a little bit lighter now why would I do that well it's really interesting how in nature this really happens a lot of times at the tree line behind the trees where the horizon you know kind of there's the horizon line there's the trees and then just above the trees often in a day scene even sometimes in a night scene it's a little bit lighter just above the tree line now I don't want to do this light color everywhere because I'm trying to enhance my focal point that big sunflower of course is my focal main focal point and then it leads the viewer I know I'm showing my pastels now back up into the right and that lighter sky helps to draw the eye back there so now I got another kind of pretty I love this neutral gray blue turquoise it's just so pretty so I love these sets too because they they have not only brights I'm talking about both and I would definitely recommend both of these sets for beginners now this is the end of the commentary for the Monet cafe free version you'll be able to see me working and continuing to add and develop this painting I'm gonna speed it up slightly if you're a patron of mine your version will have almost the whole thing's real time with the exception of a little bit sped up at the beginning so God bless you patrons if you'd like to become a patron it's patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins only $5 a month you get lots of extra content I love to communicate we have a happy family you have private groups and ways to share your work and have little critique sessions sometimes I'm having one this month and so it's really a lot of fun but you can always get plenty of free content here on Monet cafe and I'm going to speed it up right now add some music and I will be back at the end though all right enjoy so I hope you really enjoyed this tutorial that definitely had a bright and bold beginning I think when I add a beautiful brightly colored underpainting it helps me to just have fun while I'm painting and I do get that question a lot about how well how do you know what color to paint and underpainting and often I say it's just my mood and I like to have fun and not be always so set to certain rules so definitely this Derwent Inktense underpainting was a lot of fun and I enjoyed this painting process immensely I added a little bit more of that really pretty blue to some of the centers of the sunflowers I thought it connected the painting it was the same color similar to one of the Derwent Inktense blocks I used at the beginning and I just thought it really gave a nice harmony to it so if you're a patron of mine and you followed along with this you know you can share it in our Patreon homework album exclusive to my patrons if you're not a patron of mine and you share it on social media on Instagram please tag me at Susan Jenkins artist and on Facebook at the art of Susan Jenkins leave me a comment if you have any suggestions or any questions I love to hear from you guys all right God bless and happy painting