 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I'm excited to bring you this painting I'm calling Hin at Sunset, and we're gonna have a lot of learning and a lot of fun here Oh, and if you haven't subscribed yet to this channel, I would love it if you would and I think you would love it, too Be sure to hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos I also wanted to mention that this is an all-real-time Tutorial. I sometimes reserve that just for my Patreon page, but every so often I like to bring a real-time video for a free viewing here on Monet Cafe So I hope you enjoy. And if you would like to become a patron of mine to support Monet Cafe and get extra content It's only $5 a month, and it's easy to find. Patreon.com, Susan Jenkins. Alright, here's my setup I'm literally just using a piece of drawing paper I'll talk about that in more in a minute on my iPad holder there, and I'm going to be using a combination of pastels And here is the toned gray drawing paper made by Strathmore I've been enjoying using this paper for my last few tutorials proving you can paint with pastels on unsanded paper Which is a lot less expensive than some of the other sanded surfaces Well, now it may look like I was telling a fib about all real-time, but I did speed up the sketch here Often I will start the painting process as far as the video tutorial with the sketch already completed But I thought I'd show you guys real quickly how I just got in a general sketch using a piece of willow charcoal Which is really nice. You can erase it real easily and one of the main things you want to do with this is keep that Form of the hen correct. They have some interesting things about the way they're shaped that I'll talk about more during the painting tutorial And now I am beginning with some new pastel spelt in you pastels It's they're made by Prismacolor. I bought the 96 set and I love them They're a little bit harder or quite a bit harder than some of the real softies Like Sennelier and unison, but I find they're very practical. They're good for sketching. They're good for getting in under paintings and Typically I use what's called a spruce blue to get some Sketching in to begin with sometimes to lay down my dark values I am actually thinking this one has a little bit too much blue in it It might be spruce blue or it might be another like a darker kind of teal blue But what I'm doing is literally just looking at my reference photo, which was from pixabay.com I'm pretty sure it's either pixabay.com or unsplash.com I will make sure I put that in the description section of this video if you'd like to find the reference image and Those are two great sources or resources for getting copyright free reference material You know, you could literally paint anything you want from the internet but don't try to share it or claim it as your work and so it's best to either paint from photos You've taken yourself or Ones that you know are from a site where there is no copyright You're not going to have any problem if you share it But it is common courtesy in the art world Even if it's a copyright free image to give credit like I'm doing in this video to the site and the photographer So let me do that right now. So the photo was from unsplash.com the photographer is Linda Robert What a lovely photo by the way, I'm on unsplash.com as Susan Jenkins I think my username is Susan Jenkins artist if you want to find me you can find all of my collections that I've saved Now you may be wondering why my last few videos were chickens and Farm houses and pigs and ducks. Well, it's because it was farm theme for the month of July in the Monet cafe art group on Facebook You can join Monet cafe art group on Facebook by just answering a few questions If you would like to gather with a lot of other awesome artists of every level begin or to advance But feel free to find my collections on here. Follow me if you like I haven't been on unsplash that long But I'm enjoying making some collections and sharing them with you guys and now back to the tutorial I am continuing to use the new pastel just to get in values what I'm doing is looking at the photo and I'm looking you can I'm not going to pop the photo up here like I do Sometimes you can look at it on unsplash or you can kind of see a little bit of it to the left there If where I'm working, but what I'm doing is I'm looking at the photo and I'm looking for the darkest values When you are painting it's best to get in big shapes first and Values so that's what I'm doing and there is a lot of dark kind of behind this chicken One of the reasons I love this photo is it's got backlighting on the chicken. So even though the chicken is white I'm not going to use just white or white colors to To paint this chicken and now what I'm doing is I'm using my fingers just to soften some areas Not only to soften them, but I don't always use my fingers to blend But I found on this unsanded Strathmore drawing paper. It works pretty well for the Initial layers you'll notice that towards the painting as it progresses. I don't use my fingers quite as much Oh my gosh, I literally just saw a cowbird Jump out of a tree. I'm at my parents property and land right outside my window and catch a frog So I couldn't help it I had to sneak out here and see if I could catch it the footage But actually he had already eaten the frog there were about three of them out here and this is the beautiful view I have outside of the basement of my mom and dad's home where I've been working many of you know My mom passed away. I've been staying with my dad I brought my art studio on the go Monet cafe on the go and here they go flying out To the beautiful property here at my parents home in Florida. Oh, what a beautiful view Okay, sorry for that tangent now back to the lesson. I really think I missed my calling as a nature photographer I left off talking about using my fingers to blend and how I don't often do that but once again only with the initial layers and now as I mentioned before I Want you to take a look at that chicken that you can kind of see in the left side there And our brain tells us that chicken is white now Of course the chicken is white if there is a bright light or it's in good lighting if it's Backlit like this by backlit lighting. I mean the source of light is behind the subject matter and it results often in a little halo effect or a little light Edge around whatever object it is that's backlit and with this chicken one of the things that's backlit and kind of see-through a little bit is his her little Red part under her chin. I know the top part is called a comb If any of you guys know and want to make a comment of what is that underneath part called of the chicken But you can see the Sun is shining through it I think that's one of the things that drew me to this particular reference photo is it had a strong focal point and I'll talk about that a little bit more and how to develop that but right now you can see I've added some blue Why would I pick blue? All right? I know that the chicken is white in direct light, but in Backlighting situations, we're not going to have the whites as vibrant and often they will be cooler It's on the shadow side. So it's actually a lot more blue than you would imagine Okay, here's another tangent, but this one does apply to art now what I have here I've put this chicken in photo shop and I've got what's called a color picker You see maybe you can't see if your screen's too little I have a little it looks like an eyedropper where I can click it and see what the color is over on the right You see where that triangle looks red. I'm going to click it Do you see how that went to blue and now that you know what you're looking for? Let me do another little area I'm going to click right there kind of underneath the neck and once again back in that triangle area You can actually see that it has a hint of blue Now around some of the outer edges of the chicken It's going to get a little warmer. We've got some of the sunlight shining through like in the tail Also, there's some light being reflected up off of the rock So it's a little warmer underneath and of course that little thing under her neck there is red You can see that went to red But I find that's very interesting and very revealing of how color can be a bit tricky But you can learn the rules once again I like to say that think of it of how you cool off when you're in the shadows Well color cools off as well making it bluer And purple in those tones So that's why I chose to do this initial layer on the chicken of kind of a light blue You can see I added a little bit of those browns under there too because I knew those areas were warmer I even saw on the little color picker in photoshop that they were indeed warmer areas towards the outer edges of the hen The more you can learn these little things. I do think sometimes my Just graphic design in general background. I majored in graphic design many years ago. Trust me young kids today Know a whole lot more than I do But I got some foundation of really kind of using like the color picker and seeing how color can be tricky You got to really pay attention to those subtle little differences and but it really does help with painting So hopefully that little example helped some of you guys I also wanted to mention that so far all I've used have been the prismacolor new pastel So I'm just getting in some neutral kind of taupe colors. And now this is a gray. It's a Lighter value gray, but it looks even lighter next to the dark value color and value is relative It looks different. It actually looks darker in my hand than when I apply it on the surface I don't know if you can see that with whatever device you're looking on But the reason is because next to the dark. It's going to look lighter I I love those Illusions and those tricks that happen with color and value and it's a lot of fun. Once again when you learn these things Your artistic painting skills are just going to get better and better And what I'm doing here is basically just getting that lighter value that is going to be on the perimeter of the chicken I'm also paying attention while I'm doing this at the beginning of this video. I mentioned Getting that form correct for the chicken It really has almost a little geometric shape to the The way the back of the neck curves down into the shoulder area and a little hump and then back up to the tail And so I'm trying to really get that correct. It's very Revealing of a chicken or very Signature is a better word of a chicken and how their their backs and their bodies have that contour So I've been purposely trying to get better at noticing these little things and also creating that gesture Gesture just means like a lively stroke and a little bit of energy to it rather than a a stiff or a rigid stroke I'm also focusing a lot in this painting One of my goals has been to create art that has more lost edges And what that means is your edges don't have it's not a line It's an edge and it's very soft and by lost it kind of comes and goes You've got some some areas that have a little bit more of an edge or contrast and then some edges are a little less Um dramatic or less noticeable and to me what this does is it creates focal point And it allows the artist to add that edge where they think there is some importance That little hump like right behind the tail. I thought um Had a little bit more impact than some of the other the feathers. I wanted them softer So I'm going to keep those edges very soft. That's the area. I'm talking about right in there I wanted to make sure I I got that so that's where I'm going to have more of the edge And then the tail I'm also kind of shaping it too to where I can remember where I want to make some of these Adjustments, but the tail will be softer and fluffy. We don't want any hard edges where the tail will be I noticed my head was a little short in the reference image I kind of visually measured and I could tell the the head is Taller than the tail and I had them a little too close So we can make these little adjustments and that's one advantage of keeping everything very loose And not a lot of hard edges as you paint and once again, I'm kind of Measuring I'm looking at the reference image making sure I have Where the chest comes in and I didn't have it coming in quite far enough And so I make some adjustments and this is actually what's called negative painting I just kind of carved in by the outside edge rather than drawing something on the actual subject matter I also wanted to mention that back to the photoshop example I don't want anybody thinking. Oh, well, I can't learn those things. I don't have photoshop But trust me, I do not go into photoshop when I start painting Those are just little examples that have helped me to understand how color works And again, once you learn those rules, it's once you do it a few times. It's like anything else It just becomes habit and you don't have to think so hard about it So don't get frustrated with that just practice and try it and before you know it You'll be doing it automatically Once again, I'm wanting to make sure I get this form of this chicken right So I'm just making myself some little notes so that as I paint I have it correct And now I'm just making a little mark a little general idea of where the beak is I know I'll be developing that with color and value I also noticed if you look at the chicken's head that you can see in the photo to the left of my hand The head the eye the part underneath the eye is all quite dark So you'll see me developing that with some darker values But right now I'm still making sure I get the the shapes right and I'm just kind of making marks to To kind of get it Shaped in correctly and then I'm going to go in and add some darker values And to get in the darker areas I'm once again using the new pastel that I used initially to get in the darker values So I'm just creating shapes I often say that if you can learn to Kind of tune out as to what it is your painting and just look at the shapes sometimes we Assume too much when we're painting our brain says a chicken looks like this And it may not look like that in this reference image so try to just look at the shapes and the forms And create those rather than looking at the element or the thing that you're drawing and say it has to look like a chicken just Zone out and and get those shapes in correctly And typically that's really going to be a better bet than trying to draw what your brain says is a chicken That might sound weird, but it actually works And thus far I think all that I've used here have been the prismacolor new pastels The little set that you saw at the beginning just so you know the reason they're so little So teeny is they're my little travel set and I brought them with me because I knew that after my mom passed away that Of course, I couldn't paint it all right away But um, I knew that I would want to stay with my dad a while and I needed to have some of my supplies And this little travel set works great. Um, it's compact and but the sticks are normally Oh, gosh, I don't know maybe about four inches long Or maybe a little larger and I often break my pastels usually not this small Like I said, this my little travel set But I often break them because I like to turn them on the side and make strokes But you can also do like I'm doing now and turning it on its edge to create smaller marks So it's a very practical size for me when I break my pastels But I really like how these new pastels work for initial layers like I've mentioned before And they also work quite nicely on unsanded paper now on that note. Let me mention this unsanded paper I've been talking about this a little bit in the last few videos That unsanded paper is a lot less expensive. This is just drawing paper Oh now I'm working on that background that this one another one of the things that drew me to this reference photo Was that beautiful orange glow and how it is shining through that little red part underneath her her beak there So anyway, I'm trying to capture that right now But with unsanded papers, they are less expensive the strathmore drawing paper You can get a pad of it. I think it's 25 sheets 11 by 14 for under $10 So if you're wanting to practice Or you want to do a full painting like I've been doing here It can be done You don't get quite as much layering as you do with the sanded pastel papers, which are more expensive But I find that It forces me to be a bit more careful and More intentional with my mark making because with sanded papers You can almost get a little bit I'm maybe I'm just talking to myself here a little bit lazy You know, you've got got some room for correction. You can layer things But what that does is it takes away the freshness of your work I am striving as an artist to make every mark Purposeful intentional and effective and efficient and I call that I don't know if anybody else has ever used this term to my knowledge It's something that I made up because it made sense to me I call it efficiency of stroke and to me some of the best artists Their work just looked like not one single stroke was wasted. It was all intentional and purposeful And I'm not there, but I'm trying to get there. All right So now you can see how I've developed by using the darks the shape of the The area around the eye and again, it's darker than you would initially think But what happens is when you get darks down It allows you to layer some lighter values on top with pastels We typically kind of like with oil and acrylic we can work dark to light You can lay down darker layers and lay some light highlights on top of it It creates contrast and it makes your lights show up better A light does not look light if I just marked it on the gray of the paper there But it would look a lot lighter if I made like a white highlight in his eye right there where it's dark It's going to pop it's going to show up because of contrast and that's what creates focal point focal point Our brains our eyes the way they're designed by our amazing creator is to notice Contrast one of the main things we noticed is a light juxtaposed to a dark value Our eyes are just going to go to that as a contrast versus something that is Pale color next to another pale color We're not going to go there as quickly as we will to a high contrast area Like with lights and darks So that's one of the reasons that I'm going to be developing the the chicken's face the hen's face With um the dark and then that little light like I said underneath her Her neck area there or her beak area with that red or that orangey color. I'm going to develop She's going to have some darks in her tail But I don't want that to be the first place that the eye goes So I'm going to keep them soft and subtle and I'm not going to have any hard edges there That's another focal point strategy of an edge or a strong linear mark Is going to draw your eye there versus something that's softer Or not as rigid looking All right, I hope that's been some good commentary for you so far But I am going to add some music at this point. I am going to be back And I want to give a quick little mention here I've been trying to say this in my past few videos It really helps my videos on youtube To get more traction if you like the video give it a thumbs up if you make a comment Plus I love to hear from you. That's awesome. Share it if you like of course, but uh, and of course subscribe I would absolutely love that So um keep an eye out for some of the things I've talked about thus far Also, you're going to notice me developing right here some of the darkest values I originally got down my general dark value with that new pastel But I knew there were some areas that were darker You can see here where I'm going underneath the chicken's breast If you look in the reference photo when my hand's not in the way That's one of the darkest darks is under there And I also used it to once again do some negative painting there And it creates that edge versus a line notice. I don't have many lines here I have some of my little charcoal pencil lines just to give me some direction But for the most part, we don't have a lot of lines going on here. There are more shapes and edges So I wanted to mention that this dark that I'm using here along with some of the other pastels You'll see me use are obviously not the prismacolor new pastels notice it's larger and um, this is part of I think almost all of the pastels I use in combination with the prismacolor pastels from this point on Are from the senelier. I love senelier pastels Paris collection. It's a half set of senelier pastels a half stick set I should say the the sticks are not the full sticks the full sticks of senelier are I don't know. They're probably also about four inches And I love to recommend getting half stick sets, especially for beginner artists But I love half stick sets too. They're already about the same size that I normally use Oh, I just sped up this blending part. That was it. I used my finger to blend a little bit back to real time now But they're half sticks are already about the size that I like to work with so I don't have to break them Plus you get double the color for your money So in this paris collection set, it's 120 Pastels that if you bought 120 of the full sticks, it would probably be about twice the price I haven't really checked that out, but you're definitely getting more color for your money when you get the half sticks I'm not going to put a picture of the paris collection set up here in this video But I will try to remember to put a link to that set in the about section or the description of this video You're watching here also too I have an amazon shop that I always have a link to that in the description of my videos And what I like about that is I was very thankful that amazon Gave me the privilege of being able to be what's it called an influencer And one of the ways you can get an amazon shop is if you have a youtube channel that has so many subscribers or whatever So I was very thankful that I was allowed by amazon to have an amazon shop But what I like about that is not that you necessarily have to click on the things within my amazon shop to buy them You can go to some other retailer if you want often the amazon Is comparable to other retailers plus if you have amazon prime like I do you get free shipping So sometimes I will buy from amazon even if it's a few dollars more than another site Because I get free shipping with amazon prime, but that's another topic But anyway, I love the amazon shop because I can let you guys peruse and browse a lot of the materials and supplies that I talk about in my videos you can just Look around even if you're just using it for a resource to see some of the Pastels the papers. I even have one of the sections I have is on studio tools It's just some of the practical things I use in my studio, but in the section of Pastels and products or something like that pastels and painting products I have the paris collection Of senelia pastels that you can check out or take a look at okay. Did I say I was going to add some music? I always do that. I said that I had music and then I talked for 15 more minutes. All right. I am going to add some music I'm going to try to play something relaxing a lot of you people ask Where what's that song? Where'd you get it from? I use a lot of music from the youtube audio library It's a way I can be sure I won't get some kind of strike on youtube because i'm using music that has a copyright It's safe for me to use so enjoy and know that I will be back with more commentary soon I hope you've enjoyed this so far and I wanted to mention that I have purposely been trying to just keep this very loose and painterly and I hope you can see that the strokes are Pretty fresh still and once again, I think that's because this unsanded paper I can't really overlay or if I add too many layers. It's going to get muddy very quickly But once again, I kind of like that about unsanded papers And this is again one of the pastels from the paris collection. Sorry my crazy hairs in the way And here I'm just developing the beak and I had gotten down a color that I can't remember it's like more neutral a little darker and now I'm adding I added that kind of orangey color And now I'm adding just that little highlight You can sort of see it in the reference image And now I'm going to zoom in a little bit more so you can watch me develop the head a little bit more I knew that I needed to get a little bit more dark kind of around the eye and Like I've mentioned before I know that the contrast there Um is going to create interest and it's definitely the hen's face that I wanted that now I'm using this red. Isn't that a gorgeous reddish orange? It's going to be a little warmer because of the sun coming through it now This is the last part. I am speeding this up just to keep this video under an hour But this was really towards the end of the painting and all I was doing was developing some of the greens Some of the warmer greens where the sunlight from that sunset that's coming Over that hill or behind those trees is just catching some of the foliage there and here's the final painting Hopefully you liked this video and you learned something and enjoyed it I hope you'll subscribe if you'd like to become a patron. I would really appreciate that and god bless and happy painting