 Welcome, artists and creative people to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and today I'm bringing you a lesson in pastel painting where I discuss the power of a neutral palette. Now this is part three. There are two previous videos that discuss this more, but it's not necessary to see those videos. This is an all-inclusive video in itself of this particular painting. However, I like to add Bible verses to my paintings. However, if you would like to see the other two, the very first one called the power of a neutral palette is exclusive to my Patreon page. It is part one, and if you would like to become a member of my Patreon page, there's the website there. In that particular video, I go more into the color theory behind neutrals, how you can make them yourselves with pastels. Also, I use Photoshop to really get a little deeper with color and value and neutrals. Now part two is also the power of a neutral palette where I create this little mini painting with the same neutral palette that I use for this painting, and I also teach about doing a value sketch. And they don't have to be this large, but it's really for you guys who have been asking more about just some basic drawing tips and techniques. So check out part two if you're interested in that. Now also two, I do sell prints and products of my work. Of course, the originals are available. If anybody's ever interested, you can contact me. I have my contact info at the end of the video, but I found out today, if I get this video posted in time, I'll put the date up here, that prints and products are actually shipped free today. So if you would like a canvas print, a regular print, a coffee mug, a pillow, a tote bag, whatever with any of my products, you can check it out and get free shipping today only. All right, I think it's time to paint, right? So here's the lovely photo of a field behind my house where I decided to paint a neutral palette. Okay, it's time to begin our larger version of the neutral palette painting. And I've chosen for this particular larger version to use UART sanded paper, actually have some right here that I can show you. UART paper, the 400 grade, I know a lot of pastel artists talk about this a lot. It's a really versatile paper. You can put water on it, you can wash it off. One challenge to UART though is especially in humid climates, it will curl. And I have not found any way to prevent this, especially living in the Tampa, Florida area. Even when I've bought it, I've put it under books. I've tried to keep it in the coolest place, but lo and behold, I still get curling. But I have a quick little fix for that. I did have another video where I shared how you can actually iron it. And I give tips on that, but I found another neat new little way to fix UART paper. I'm going to make another video on that. So I got it nice and flat. This piece was all curled up. And I got it nice and flat with that technique. So there's a teaser for you. But anyway, we've got our sketch done, our value sketch done. We've got our mini painting done with the palette. And I've zoomed in a little bit to show you this palette of neutral colors with a bolder, more highly saturated color intensity for the underpaint. All right, so my setup is basically, I usually keep the camera on this side because I'm left-handed. Sometimes I'll use my right hand if it's more convenient. But I have my iPad over to my right. And sometimes I'll work from a photo. Sometimes I'll work from my iPad. But I wanted to have my value sketch up here to refer to my mini painting and the actual image of the field. And by the way, the field that I took the picture of is literally right out that window for that beautiful foggy morning when I saw it. And it was bathed in neutral color because of the fog and because of the early morning light. Okay, so it's time to get started. I've got my pastels. Only thing I've got to do now is grab my coffee, my water, and put on some soothing, peaceful music. All right, let's paint. Now I've zoomed in here to show you the color choices. These are the actual ones that I used for the mini demo. I may have grabbed one or two other neutrals. My neutral palette is literally right next to me and put them back in their spot, but not many. And surprisingly, not many pastels were needed for this particular painting. These, again, are the underpainting selections to give it that nice warm. These are going to be our bowls underneath the neutral palette. And sorry if this keeps focusing on my hand. And so those obviously I have in varying degrees of value. Darkest, next to darkest, medium, medium to light and light. So if you have anything that's these five values that is in the magenta, I mean you could even do this with reds and oranges and yellows, but just some warmer tones. And that's really all you need for the underpainting selection. Now notice other than that, all of these are really more neutral colors. You don't see any really bold colors jumping out at you. These are my green choices. They all look kind of like dead greens. Nothing is really like that bright, vibrant green. And again, darkest value down to lightest value. Some of these are a little cooler, like maybe that one. And actually, this one over here is a lighter value. This one's actually got some green in it. It could actually go down here. And then I've got some cooler blues. Some have a little more green in it than others, but again, according to value. And then I've got a purple that I use sparingly. And then I've just got kind of a, this is more of a dulled out brown, kind of a taupe color. And then some lighter versions of that. So that's our neutral palette with our bold underpainting, which really has a neat effect. All right, time to paint. Okay, so I have my UART paper taped down flat. And these are the charcoal pencils that I used, actually not this one, for the value study and getting in basically just a general sketch. But for this one, I really, I could block all this in just with the pastels, but I think I will just sketch in. I'll use this lightest of the charcoal pencils to kind of get an idea in. Now, I had talked about doing more drawing instruction for Monet Cafe videos for beginner lessons. And while I won't go into a lot of detail with this one, I will go over some of the basics of how I approach things. Landscapes are not as tedious for drawing as say a person or an animal, but you still want to get things right. I know a lot of times people think you don't have to draw that well to paint, but I disagree with that. I think if you improve your drawing skills, it's such a great foundation for a good painting. Now notice what I did. I didn't break out a ruler. I just marked this off. I know it's approximately an 8x10. 8x10 is also, that's a little crooked, 8x10 is also a standard size. So if you work in standard sizes and a client wants to buy it, they can easily find frames, premade frames, instead of having to get custom frames. So sometimes that's good, but I don't like to stay bound by the size, standard size. So I leave myself a little room. I may want to stretch this out a little bit. Hey Jackson. So anyway, I just kind of divide things out into quadrants and I've learned to see things proportionately. You can see in my sketch here that I kind of did the same thing here. I know typically you don't want to put a horizon line like right in the middle, but this composition was such that I thought it worked well, especially since some of these trees back here were a little bit higher. That's really the horizon line back there. This is just the base of this tree. All right. So I kind of just look at my, and I did this from the photo. So I kind of get ideas with that. And then I noticed things like, I don't know if you can see how far I am over here. I noticed in the photo that kind of down the middle where the tree was, the tree was, didn't come all the way to the center, but pretty darn close. How far did it come from the top? It left a little bit of space up top. So it's an exercise in looking at positive and negative shapes. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. So I'm just going to sketch in here a little bit and keep those things in mind when you're drawing is looking at where things are in relation to other things. That's really, to me, one of the strengths in, or a good habit for drawing that will help you a lot. Okay. Now there's a gauge of just sort of getting things in, in general. And now all I need to do is get in these values with the bolder color selections that I showed early on. Now this is going to be one of my Patreon goals when I get to a certain amount of members is to definitely buy some new pastels. I am seriously in need of more pastels. I really haven't bought that many since the flooding of our home and I tried to save as much things as I could, but I have a, I have a pretty limited amount of pastels embarrassingly. But I really hope to replenish my supply and your Patreon support would really help me do that. Now this is really, I don't need to get too specific about this. This is more just getting the darks in down here. I can get the general location of where these grasses are and how they're growing once I get my values in. But I am going to add a little bit. That was the darkest dark. I am going to add a little bit of this other lighter value in this as well. And this is just kind of scumbling. I'm just getting, I'm not drawing here. I'm just getting in this because I'm going to, I'm going to scrub it in to get a, get a value study going. All right. Now I know another one of the darkest things. This tree actually isn't as dark as the foreground because it's in fog and it's a little further away. But I am going to go ahead and get, get it in with a darker value and I will lighten it as I work. And I'm running out of this pastel as I, as I'm talking here. UR paper is taking it down to nothing. I hope I can finish this underpainting. It's hard to hold even. All right. So now again, I'm going to add a little bit of this value here. This is going to give it some interest and I'm not pressing real hard just so you know. This is just a gently kind of scumbling this around. I'm also going to add a little bit more of this lighter value. I kind of want to lighten this tree up a little bit. See, I've got the three, the three values working with each other here. Now I do know that this area right in here, there's a base of the tree where, where these weeds kind of were growing. I'm going to try to hold this where I can work with it. They were darker. So let's get those in. They came up kind of high right here and then they tapered off and there was a few ones growing right in there. All right. And that's really it for the darkest values. The rest of them are going to be more of the mediums. Now let's see. We've got our darkest here, dark. This is also dark and then this is the next in line for dark. So now let's start working with this value. This is the next one. This is the third one down from darkest to lightest. And we've got this little area back in here kind of behind these trees. It's another thing of bushes or something back there. I can't remember. I could look out my window and see. And then also too, this is closer to the foreground. So it's fairly dark but it is like I explained in the little mini painting. It is bathed in fog and so it's going to be even a little bit lighter. This is that area where that fence is right here. Okay. And it's a little darker actually than this little valley right here. It's close to the same but I'm going to distinguish that a little bit more. I think I will darken this up a tad, this little fence row here with a little bit of this next value. And now these trees in the distance here, I'm going to give them the third value down and then I'm going to lighten them up with the next lighter value because right now these two values are just kind of blending together. Now this tree was a little darker than some of the other things. So I'm going to take that second value. It's like a tree that was just kind of out in the middle of the field. I wasn't sure if I was going to leave it in when I did it but I decided to do it. Okay. And now like I said, I'm going to lighten these up because they're further away and I've got this nice little peachy tone. I'm still not at my lightest value yet. You see this is going to give that illusion that these trees are further in the distance. And then when you do the painting you know you sneak some of these colors behind there. And below here actually is getting a little bit lighter in value. There's like that foggy fogginess on the field. I don't know if I need it quite this light. And usually things that are flat are lighter in value than things that are vertical. So let me add a little bit more of this dark in here to kind of separate that from that foggy field. All right. You see all these bright colors and we're going to cover it in neutral when we're done. All right. So we've got our general idea here except for the sky. And I'm going to get this lighter pink. I actually, I might even use a little bit of this. No, I won't because that's a really light sky. So let me get this lighter kind of pink color and nothing too specific other than just coating the whole thing. I also keep saying I'm going to fix my easel so it doesn't shake so much. And I keep forgetting that. And I kind of do like a little bit of this light of the paper showing through. We don't have to cover this so, so much like overly overwork it or anything. All right. So there is our value study. Now what I'm going to do before I start applying the other pastels is I'm going to grab my pipe foam insulation. And again, always a thank you. I don't, I'm not sure if Karen Margolis, I always say her name, Karen Margolis discovered this from another artist or someone suggested to her or she discovered it herself. I'm always very thankful for this because this pipe foam insulation you can get at any hardware store is an excellent tool for blending. I have found some other ones that work well too, but I happen to always have this right near me. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just scrubbing all this in, getting this value study. And all this is doing is covering the surface of the UR paper, kind of blending it into the sanded surface. And also it's taking it down a notch, so you actually will get a little bit more layering. And I sometimes tend to work in sections, dark to light or light to dark, but light to dark is actually really good if you've already got your your thing kind of clean because now then you wouldn't drag all the the dark colors. Oh, I heard a neat and other little thing the other day is that supposedly you can wash these like in maybe the washer. That would be interesting, huh? All right, so this is actually kind of scrubbing it off of my board a lot, but that's okay. Still got our general values in here. Okay, now I'm just going to kind of wipe this off on a paper towel before I go on to the next areas. And by the way, I have sometimes people ask, oh, is it okay if I share? I recreated your painting. Is it okay if I share it in the Monet Cafe art group on Facebook or of course in our Patreon group? I totally encourage you to share. But yes, always that's the point of these. You can take this and emulate it exactly as close as you can get and share it. That's why I paint. I don't paint to enter my art in shows. I don't get all hung up over having to be in this art association or that art, even though it's great. I mean, that's awesome. But my I love to teach and I love it because now I'm going to get the sky and I'm wiping it off. I love it because I didn't have any formal art training other than a few art classes, majoring in graphic design. I just always loved it. And I so many years ago was forced to try to learn this pastel medium all by myself. And there weren't as many online resources back then. So it was quite frustrating. And and I felt like I had the scratch and claw to learn about pastel painting. And so I think this is just my way to give back. And I love it. I love providing lessons. And that's what that's what it's all about here in Monet Cafe. I love that people are all over the world. And they're learning and everybody's helping each other. So that's really cool. And that's also why I thank you for your support on my Patreon page, because it is allowing me giving me some more time to be able to paint and to provide more lessons. And I have a goal, hopefully, to be able to get an assistant to help me because I'm a one woman show right now with the filming, the painting, the editing, the marketing and everything. So I'd love to get an assistant. So but thank you patrons for your support. You've helped me more than you know. All right. So here's our basic little value study underpainting done with only five warm colored pastels warm color family pastels. And that is it for bold color. The rest is going to be neutral. And if you're one of my patrons, you've had access to the first part of this video, which is on the power of neutrals. I go into more of some of the scientific and and reasoning as to what makes a neutral, you know, as far as the color wheel and and the real definition of a neutral and how they're achieved. So if you want to see that video, that's only for my patrons, but you can see it if you become a patron for $5 a month. Otherwise, all of this is free on Monet Cafe. I'll never stop bringing free videos to Monet Cafe. All right, it's time to get started with this. And I'm excited. All right, now that we have this very highly saturated warm underpainting, it's time to apply the pastels with a neutral palette and neutrals only. It's a similar technique that I did when I did this painting here. It was actually I got a lot of feedback. I used an oil paint underpainting and did the same thing where I applied more warm undertones with the oil paint and put neutral pastels on top and see the vibrancy it creates. Still kind of a muted feel, but you've got that little bit of color fun because of the underpainting and a couple little pops of color, you know, with some of the the teals that I added in the background. So I do have another video I'm going to be making where I do an oil painting underpainting and fix something that could be an issue down the road with longevity. So I heard a lot of you guys and I appreciate your feedback and I've got a solution for that. So hopefully another video upcoming soon. Okay, so let's start painting here. I'm going to, at first, again refer back to the little palette that I showed you. Other than these, I'm done with the bold colors. It's all neutrals from here forward. I am going to speed up the rest of the painting process from this point on, but I will add some music for your listening pleasure and I'm not speeding it up so fast that you can't still see what I'm doing. I just try to keep my video time around an hour or less because it really does help with my upload speed because I have pretty slow Wi-Fi where I am out in the country, but do enjoy and I will pop back in. I have a few more comments I like to make during this as to give a little more description as to what I'm doing and I hope you guys are enjoying this. I know I'm enjoying working with neutrals. I'm definitely going to do this technique again. For some reason, this little tree was bothering me in this painting. I think it was perhaps maybe a little too far over to the right or too large or I don't know, I just felt like it was distracting. So yes, you can actually take a stiff brush. That was one where the handle had broken off and kind of brush off the majority of the pastel and still have some layers to work with here. I also thought I'd mentioned too that I kind of re-established that brilliant bold pink that was originally underneath and the underpainting. I also added a little bit more of the warm tones to the background trees. I did reintroduce some of those warmer tones because I kind of wanted those background trees to glow and I added a little more pink to the sky. If I did this painting over again, I would not overwork it as much as I did. I think I would use broader strokes, fewer strokes, and keep it even more loose and free. Kind of like the first little painting. If you didn't see part two of this series, go back and watch that one. It just had a real spontaneity about it. I got pulled away from this painting quite a few times and sometimes that breaks your rhythm and you come back and sometimes you get a little frustrated. But all in all, I was happy with the painting as an end result and it definitely was a great exercise. I do think I will use this technique more where I do a more brilliant underpainting with neutrals primarily on top. I think it's a neat effect. All right, more painting. I'm finishing this up at this point, getting close anyway. And again, I really enjoyed this. Now I'm very motivated to buy more neutrals. I think I mentioned in the previous lesson part two that I've got my eye on Blue Earth Pastels. They're made by Dakota Pastels and I do believe they have a little, I'll have to share with you guys on my Patreon page. I think they have a little discount on their set that I want to get called the Nomad set. It's got some nice neutrals in it. So I hope you guys enjoyed this. Here's the final and as always, happy painting and also thank you. Thank you. Thank you to my patrons from my Patreon page. You guys are really helping me to create more videos and special content for my patrons, but also just to keep these free videos coming to Monet Cafe. So everybody should thank my patrons. Thanks guys so much. Happy painting and blessings.