 Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe! I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're gonna have some fun today and if you're new here please subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. Today's lesson will be on painting whimsical birds in pastel. I've done some more bird paintings that were a little more detailed and serious but these are whimsical, cute, fun and pretty easy. So let's get started. For this lesson you can basically use what you have. I'll be using some gray drawing paper and various pastels. The reference material I'm using is from pmp-art.com and they have so many wonderful reference images and I've saved a whole photo album of birds, a lot of chickadees and I'm going to show you right now how to access my photo album within pmp-art.com. If you'd like to access some of my birds that I've already chosen. Here I am on the pmp site and you'll have to create a profile before you can access any of this but it's free and you'll need to do a search for me. If you want to find my profile type in Susan Jenkins, click search then you'll have a lot of information that shows up but if you look under profiles right there to the right click that and then you can follow me and access my photos and images. I don't think I have a lot of my paintings in there but I do have a few bird paintings. The way it works is you attach your painting to the image that you used. So the photographer gets to see your work. Here's another little bird sketch that I did and you get to share with them what you've created. So it's really fun and a great resource for artists. You may even have some of your own photography that you would like to share for other artists to use. Now let me show you really quickly how you access my photo album. See right there? Up top you'll see photo album. If you click it it will take you to my already pre-saved albums that I've saved and most of my albums down a few pages. I have seven pages of albums. The bird photography is on page seven just so you know so you don't have to search through all of my pages. Now I only share this in case you want to see some of the images that I've saved but I encourage you if you use this resource go ahead and make some of your own albums. Look through all of the reference images and save them yourself to albums that you will create the headings for. And I find these albums are very handy because sometimes we don't want to search for a lot of images to do a painting and when we've pre-saved them we can jump in there and find images that we already know that we like. Usually it's a good idea to do a little warm-up. I found a little birdie that I liked and if you the chickadees are kind of neat because they're pretty round you know they've got some distinction between their head and their body but this little guy is already pretty plump and round. So I basically start working and then I kind of alter things as I see they they need it. I don't feel like I have to get a perfect linear drawing because I kind of like it to be sketchy. So I alter things as I work and I'm constantly comparing spatial relationships. I saw that the bottom of that bird needed to be a little bit bigger. I had him a little too squatty. And so I encourage you to find maybe like I did a lot of images and just start sketching. Do lots of these and it doesn't matter if they're great at first and as a matter of fact they're not going to be until you do more of them. And before you know it you start to learn the anatomy of the bird by just playing around and doing some sketches. And the more that you do the more you understand where things are on that bird and then with other reference images they'll just come so much easier for you to recreate more accurately. I used to find that birds were a little bit difficult. I kind of had a hard time creating their delicacy and that too is something that just gets better the more that you do and it really does have to do with the anatomy of the bird. When you get it right you really can get that gentle delicate quality of the bird. Also too in a minute you'll see in the photo he just had one foot showing the other one was probably beneath his feathers. But typically I draw the branch to match the feet instead of the feet to match the branch because what if you have your branch too low. So I usually do the branch after I have the bird kind of sitting where I want him to be. Then I can guarantee it's in the right place. Now I'm not applying color over the pencil sketch I already did. Once again that was just a warm up. I'm showing you how with a pretty chunky pastel I can get it in some basic shapes to start this bird. So I used a medium value pastel to get those first larger marks of the belly and the head. And now a darker pastel to represent kind of that shadowy area where a wing would be. Even though I don't necessarily see a wing there. And now I'm just using lighter value pastels to basically do a value study in color. I see that that front part of his belly is really bright. Kind of goes right under his middle part of his body and underneath towards the branch. And now I'm going to get my darker pastel and just start basically blocking in some areas where I see dark. Of course under his little neck that's kind of standard and typical of a chickadee. Then he has a little bit of that other wing kind of showing on the other side. And now I'll get his beak and the black area on the top of his head. And one of my goals with this was to try to create a whimsical bird with as few strokes as possible. I wanted it really simple, very basic and fun. I know sometimes myself we can get a little too serious about art and often it's fun just to play. So all you saw up till now was real time. I've sped it up just a little to get through. But what I am focusing on now is really just getting my shapes accurate and my values. Color as you can see is interpretive. As long as you're getting the value right you can make these little birds whatever color you want. You'll see with the next one that I do that I go with. I can't remember like greens and purples. So these are for your creation and whatever you want to do. And as long as you get the form, the values and shapes correctly you know there you go you've got a whimsical fun little bird. So I thought these might be neat. I'm going to do more of these just they're kind of like a neat way to relax. And also I'd like to do some different types of birds. And I think I got his eye a little angry looking. It's funny eyes are so expressive for how you draw them. If you just angle them down like a little eyebrow that looks angry a little bit it's amazing how quickly you can make an eye have a different expression just based on the general positioning and shape of it. So I can't remember if I make him look a little happy or not. Now I'm just using a charcoal pencil again and just reinforcing some of the darks and the feathers. And then once I get him where I think he should be I give him some little feet. And like I said before I draw the branch in after I draw the feet in so I don't have to try to match the bird to the branch. And there you go you got it he is still kind of angry looking but that's okay. You got a little squatty cute bird you can make him whatever color you want. And now I'm going to do another one. Here is one of the chickadees from my PMP-art.com album. And I'm doing all of these just on this same piece of gray drawing paper. Once again you can use whatever you want because these are fun and you're not to get too serious about it. You don't have to worry about using expensive materials. I also encourage, I mean this might sound crazy what I'm about to say, but draw with the understanding that it's okay to throw it away. I can't tell you how many things that I create and I learn from it and I don't keep everything that I do as precious you know. I mean unless I really like it I might save it and give it to somebody but I do a lot of things just for the joy of it and just for the fun of it. And I don't know maybe my mentality is a little that way because of the flooding of our property and realizing we all have too many things in general anyway. So you know I try to keep it light-hearted and enjoy the journey. That's probably the best way to put it. Okay so this one is actually more of pinks and blues and I'm doing the same thing. I'm getting in shapes and values. My color is interpretive whatever I want as long as I get the value right and as you can see I kind of develop the shape of the bird as I go. And artists will have their different ways of doing this but once again I don't like to draw in a perfect line drawing because then I feel kind of bound by it and sometimes I like to work the shapes as I go. I apologize that for this bird my hand gets in the way a lot so I hope you can see how I'm kind of shaping things. But again the typical chickadee markings and anatomy and it's interesting I mentioned the flooding of our property that was actually three years ago in September next month according to when I'm making this video because the flooding was a result of Hurricane Irma and right now we have two hurricanes brewing in the Gulf and even though they're not going to hit us we've got some serious wind as a result and things are just kicking up and branches are blowing all over and my little dog just ran in here while I'm making this video and oh I'm thankful we're not having a full-fledged hurricane coming our way but I bet there's not a lot of little birdies in the tree right now they're probably all hunkered down somewhere staying safe. I think it's amazing how nature knows what to do with all these things and people sometimes aren't as smart. All right let me finish this one up. Now as this little birdie evolves as I'm working I think you'll see how I'm adding and shaping him as I go and also how working on regular drawing paper works. I've been doing quite a bit of artwork lately pastel artwork on regular drawing paper it's a good idea to keep a light touch so that you get a little bit of layering capability because if you have a touch that's or mark making that's too heavy-handed you're going to very quickly lose your ability to get any layering. Now also with chickadees I noticed their eyes are as black as their head often so sometimes you don't even see the eye you just barely see the reflection and when I add at the end the little reflection in the eye that's all it takes really just to understand that okay there's an eye embedded down in there somewhere and as you see I just shaped him a little more with some of the lighter value and sometimes I see oh he needs to be a little chunkier or I need a darker value here or there so and you may not work this way you might actually choose to get a more serious drawing in and work from that but everybody has their own unique way of doing things that's one thing I've learned as I've journeyed down my painting career is how beautiful it is that we're not all the same oh I decided to give him kind of a crazy leg I've seen birds sometimes whether the legs are actually kind of awkward looking which is rather cute to me now I'm going to add in that little reflection and this is really something you just get better at in time is learning where that pastel is actually going to land on the on the surface especially when it's big and chunky like that you kind of learn to feel your way the more that you work with them and that's just a practice thing you know it does get better now I'm going to start another one and I'm going to just let you watch this one to music and think about the things I've spoken about and also it's okay if your bird doesn't look exactly like the bird in the photograph as long as you've got a bird that you're happy with and you had fun doing it then it was a success all right so enjoy the music while I create this little birdie and also stay tuned to the very end because after this one I'm going to do another little bird actually in gouache paint I haven't worked with gouache paint much rather than just to combine it with like a mixed media with other mediums but this time I did a complete gouache painting for a little teeny teeny weenie bird painting so stay tuned for that one well those certainly were a lot of fun and now I'm going to show you my little gouache painting I actually have done a little review video I haven't shared it or posted it yet on some gouache paint that Arteza sent me a whole 60 set of gouache paint and then they sent me this empty watercolor container that you can use for gouache as well where I could choose out of the colors to how I wanted to make my own gouache palette so if you'd like to see a full video on that I'll be happy to make it so just let me know on this one I did go ahead and do a linear drawing because once again I am not the gouache expert but one thing that's neat about gouache if you've got some experience with pastel and maybe you've had a little trouble with water color pastel and watercolor behave very differently in the way you put down your darks and lights whereas gouache can work very similarly to pastel in that you can kind of get some darks in first and lay lights on top of it you'll notice here but it also behaves very much like watercolor because it's a it's a water based medium and you can control how thick or thin the gouache paint is based on how much water you add to it so you can have it behave a little bit more like an acrylic if you add less water or more like watercolor if you add more water I'm gonna try to provide a link to a free resource to someone an artist I love her gouache work and she has a free downloadable gouache guide and it's fantastic so I'll try to remember to put in the link or this video in the about section of this video in case you're interested in gouache paint let me know I'd love to hear your feedback because I'm I'm really coming to enjoy gouache painting a lot and I would love to do some more tutorials as I learn so let me know what you think about that because you know my original concept for Monet cafe was not to be so heavy on the pastel it just happens to be my favorite medium on the pastel medium but to incorporate other types of mediums as well which I do a lot of mixed media work but anyway so I like to give you guys what you want I have edited out a little bit of this so as not to have it so long and it's not about this gouache tutorial I just wanted to introduce it and oh also show you look at this doing the little background with this kind of segmented brush was kind of fun and again I wanted to kind of introduce this as a little teaser and see if you guys would like more gouache tutorials and thanks to one of my patrons who reminded me about this video I had promised to bring and actually forgot I had the footage so give me some feedback guys like this video feel free to become a patron if you like be blessed in this crazy world and as always happy painting