 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I am so happy to bring you this tutorial on how to paint a wildflower meadow. Now this is going to be considered an easy lesson with lots of instruction and here's a little intro message from me. Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I am happy to bring you this painting tutorial of some lovely wild flowers in a meadow in some beautiful mountains. Oh my mama would love this image and I am focusing in this tutorial on loosening up. It's the theme this month in the Monet Cafe art group on Facebook and for my patrons on my Patreon page and for the general lessons that I share here on YouTube this month. And I will be sharing with you how to do that, how to loosen up your artwork. I know many artists aspire for an impressionistic look and a painterly feel. So that's kind of the focus of this tutorial. I'll be introducing some products to you that I love. I love this set of pastels and I do love this surface too. So you're going to get all of that in this video and if you're a patron of mine I'll also be sharing with you on your Patreon page, my Patreon page, our Patreon page, my color guide. I did a little differently this time, a little more detailed and you should be able to find the colors you need to go along with this lesson. So here we go. Let's get started. And I would really appreciate it if you would take a moment right now to like, subscribe and hit that bell icon to get notified of future videos. It really does help this video get seen by many others who need free art instruction. Also a shout out to my patrons on my Patreon page. It's because of their support of $5 a month. I'm able to keep these free videos coming to Monet Cafe. I'd like to give credit to the reference photo. It's from unsplash.com and I have a profile on unsplash.com where I gather all kinds of different albums of different subject matter. You're welcome to follow me on there and use any of the photos that I've gathered together. This is my Flowers album and here's the photo that I'm using. The profile name for this photo is Nature Uninterrupted Photography. So thank you for this lovely reference photo. Alright, here we go. The surface I'll be using is called Pastel Matte. It's by Claire Fontaine and it's a wonderful water-friendly surface. I'll be talking about this more as I paint and I've just taped it to my easel and also I'm going to be using these Arteza Metallic gouache. I've never used these before. It's a product that they sent me to do a product review and I wasn't even sure what to expect. But many of you know I like to do an underpainting when I start a pastel painting and you certainly don't need this product. You can do an underpainting with pastels. You can do it with watercolor but because this was Pastel Matte and a water-friendly surface I thought, you know what, let me just give it a try. I like to just experiment and find out what's in my studio I can use and often you have really exciting results. Now I will share with you that it's called Metallic gouache. Gouache is pronounced like squash, okay, and it's a water-friendly medium and it is opaque rather than translucent. It's semi-opaque. Watercolor is considered translucent. And here I'm zooming in to show you my Princeton Brush Company watercolor brush which works obviously with gouache. It is the 40-50 round and I believe this is the size 16. It's a pretty large brush. I like using the largest brush I possibly can. Now let me talk about this gouache. I really liked this gold color and I thought this would make a nice underpainting color for all of the grasses. And so I'm loosely adding my stroke work to emulate those grasses reaching up and it's controlled similar to watercolor depending on the amount of water that you add. It controls how dark or light it's going to be. And with an underpainting it is great to be able to keep loose strokes. We're really developing that impressionism underneath our painting and we're giving ourselves a roadmap to follow and also just some interesting color. In this case kind of a complementary color. Now I did find out pretty much immediately that the gouache didn't seem metallic at all. Maybe it does on different surfaces but I wasn't really seeing a metallic finish but I didn't care. Again you could do this with a pastel that's a similar color. You would literally just lay it on its side and brush, do some stroke work, not brush work, stroke work and then you can later get a brush and add some water to it or alcohol but just keep your strokes loose and free. Now this was fun. It was kind of this minty green-blue color and I am using this to get this expression of the tree line. And like I said before we're just giving ourselves a little fun underpainting with some very basic and loose shapes. Now I add a little bit of blue to that. It's kind of like a cyan blue and again this is just that little tree line in the back and when we learn to think of things just as shapes, kind of zone out and forget your painting trees. Just look at those shapes and really it becomes a whole lot easier than when our brains overthink things and we're trying to produce branches and leaves and at this point we're not doing that at all. And I'm calling this a simple pastel lesson because really this one didn't take all that long and our focus this month is called Loosen Up and so we're loosening up our strokes and my patrons on my Patreon page we have all kind of goals that we've set for ourselves of things we're going to try gave them a little idealist of things we can try to loosen up and get more of that impressionistic and painterly feel to our work. I thought I'd add a little bit of this blue or blue green down into the grasses as well and now I'm going to add a little bit of purple to those distant mountains. You can kind of see something behind the trees especially in the reference photo over to the right. It looked like mountains to me. It could be clouds but it doesn't really matter and you know I get questions all the time about how do you know what color to paint and underpainting. Well I do have some basic rules and by the way I have a video I uploaded recently actually a series of videos called Pastel 101. It's a four-part free course here on Monet Cafe where I break down the whole process of pastel paintings and video number three is specifically about under paintings but really a lot of times my rule is just to use a color that I think is going to enhance the final color that I'm laying down or sometimes just to give myself a little value study. Again just some creative colorful energy to lay down to get started. Now that was a combination I think of that blue and that white and here are the soft pastels I'll be using. It's the Schminke 120 half stick set. These pastels are very soft and they just go on like a dream. Sadly I don't think they even offer the 120 half stick set anymore and as I often say I certainly couldn't start out with these types of pastels. When I first started painting I couldn't afford the quality pastels so use what you have to emulate the colors and do your best but it's not necessary to go out and buy all these expensive pastels. You should be able to find some basic sets to find colors that will be somewhat close and I used primarily the Schminke pastels but I did use a few others of different brands. This is just kind of my little setup on my desk and also if you're a patron of mine this is one of the perks from being a patron. Like I said it's only $5 a month and you often get extra goodies. I made a color guide for my patrons. I literally numbered every color as I used them in succession. I also made little notes as references to which type of pastel it was and what subject matter I used the particular color for. Alright now back to that. This would be number one patrons on your color guide list. So I use kind of a sagey green to get started with these background trees. Now here's a little tip for pastel painting. If you're beginning we have a tendency to feel like we have to color like a coloring book where we put down solid hard pressure color to cover the whole surface. Not so with soft pastel. Keep your strokes light and gestural and know that the colors play with each other. They interact and if we press too hard or put down too much of a solid application of color we're gonna lose or squelch that beautiful aspect about soft pastels. You can see now that I'm keeping my strokes soft and gestural and you can still see a little bit of that little minty green showing through. Not that that will you know continue throughout the whole painting but that's the general idea of how you want to paint. I'm also holding my pastel not totally on the side. You learn to kind of control whether you hold it flat or lift up to a point. I have a video called 12 soft pastel techniques. I think it's called it's been a real successful little video because I think a lot of people don't realize how many different types of strokes we can do and it will really bring life and excitement to your paintings when you learn to vary your strokes. All right you see I got a little basic tree line also ever green trees. They typically have a little bit of a zig-zaggy pattern. You'll see more of that as I add other colors to the tree line. Now with this background mountains often sometimes too it does help to be able to be ambidextrous. Use both your hands. In that case I did switch back to my left hand which I'm left-handed. I decided on this blue. The other blue was a little bit too drab. I wanted to get a rich pretty blue in there and just to start the general layout of the mountains and I'm just kind of really subtly gradually working in between the trees the negative spaces but I'm not so worried about perfection at this point. And back to that concept of colors playing with each other. This purple on top of the blue is going to create some nice color energy. Also too things in the distance do cool off in color temperature so that's why a lot of times you do see mountains have a little blue-purplish tone to it. Now my paper this was a scrap piece of pastel matte. I had used the other side of it for a larger painting and so I just you know I grabbed it and said hey let's paint something. And I didn't notice when I first got started the upper right hand corner here had a little bend in the paper. I do something to rectify that towards the end so I was able to salvage that. Now the colors I used in the sky before this very beautiful periwinkle light color I had put a little bit of that blue that was a little darker up in the corners of the sky. The skies are typically a little darker at the horizon but just so you know I didn't want to overwork the sky at all. This image was not about the sky it was about these flowers. Now what I'm using here is what's called a Terry Ludwig egg plant color. Terry Ludwig is a manufacturer of soft pastels. They make luscious gorgeous pastels but they have a dark that is a lot of artists favorites and it really is great. It looks black right here putting it down especially the replaying the image but it's really a dark dark purple. I rarely rarely almost never use black just the color that you would perceive as black. It's just very lifeless you can use other darks that are just so much more interesting with color. And speaking of Terry Ludwig pastels they have two sets that are called darks. Darks set one and dark set two and they just have some absolutely beautiful darks. Now I'm sprinkling in some of these darks in the foreground. I know these flowers if you look at the reference image down there squint your eyes especially the lower right hand side you can see some really dark darks but the foreground typically is a little darker and also I know I've got these roots of these flowers going down into shadow and now I'm having a really light touch and I'm just glazing over that that pretty gold color. So that's really the first stage right there. Again the underpainting was very simple the first layering of color big shapes and just getting in some of your basic color. Now I wanted to kind of scumble in some of the scumble just means to kind of varying strokes this way and that way as you cover a surface and I'm scumbling in some of this blue I think it's a maybe a little bit of a different blue it might be the same blue I put down originally and I'm just kind of blending the color. The colors start to blend themselves you don't have to worry about too many blending tools although I'm gonna show you a neat blending tool pretty soon. Now this kind of almost neutral gray color is believe it or not going to be one of those flowers that's peeking up that's what interested me in this particular reference image. These flowers that will reach way up over the horizon line even over into the over the mountains into the sky and I decided to call this painting I lift my eyes very soon after I created it I heard a Christian song it's called I lift my eyes and it says I lift my eyes to the heavens you are there I lift my eyes to the mountains you are there and I was like wow that's what it feels like these flowers are doing it just seems like creation is in an act of worship for our amazing creator as artist we we definitely have a propensity to admire our beautiful earth. I used that sagey green to put in some of the other flower heads they're kind of like smaller flowers or ones that just have buds up above the horizon line and into the sky and I'm also using the terry Ludwig dark here again to get a few more little accents of darks in there and I wanted to mention real quickly that neutral kind of gray color that I put up in the sky that is a white flower but it's not going to appear white because the sun is it's in shadow the sun is coming from the other side so those are little things to keep in mind pay attention to the values in your reference image and it's going to really give you a guide as to where the light is and how to make things appear more accurate if I had put that as white up in the sky for one it'd be light like the sky you wouldn't get any contrast and it wouldn't be how the flower really is represented or should be represented in value according to the where the light is coming from hope that makes sense all right I'll talk a little more about those purple flowers but right now I'm putting in it's a little bit more of a teal color and I'm just sneaking it behind some of these evergreens to give some neat negative spaces and also it gives the illusion of maybe some other trees real far away back there maybe on the mountain side I'm putting in a little bit more of this blue carving in some negative shapes negative shapes are like the spaces between the branches of the trees you're not painting the branches positively you're painting you're carving them out negatively now there's that purple that I added you will notice in the final when you see the final painting I purposely kept those out of focus I want them to look blurry kind of like one of those photographs well it is like the photograph was the photograph had its focus on more of the other flowers in the middle ground area the foreground flowers were a little bit more out of focus and I wanted to accentuate that I thought it made for a more interesting composition and it's a focal point strategy you don't want the detail everywhere you want to keep it more in the area of your focal point so the eye doesn't get hung up on something initially stopping it from going to where you want it to go to all right now is this creative blending tool I mentioned earlier this looks like an eye shadow applicator and you could use an eye shadow applicator it's a little applicator used with pastels that are called pan pastels I really do need to do more tutorials on pan pastels I like them I just I sometimes forget to use them but it worked really great to just gently blend in some of those mountains and I was trying to fix that little break in the paper with this and it did work so it's often the mountains a bit I don't want to over blend when you over blend whether you use whatever blending tool you use you actually end up crushing the little crystals that are like in pastels and you're if you have ever wondered why does it look muddy well for one you've kind of muddied the colors but you've crushed the pastels as well now I softened that edge of the mountain to you can see I did that with the little applicator now I zoomed in so I could go in and show you how I'm putting some of the light on the trees they were just kind of dark I had a few layers of color remember that initial sage green then the eggplant and now this it's a little bit darker than that first sage green I think it might even be the same color but it makes for nice lights on the trees or highlights from the sun they're still not going to be very dark but now you can see a little bit of that kind of zigzaggy pattern of the evergreens another neat trick oh I added a little dark to that tree I wanted it to be more of the focal point than the other ones and another thing to keep in mind is with trees with flowers it's better it's more artistically pleasing to have things not equally spaced some I've heard some artists say like soldiers and aligned you want them to have that poetic flow you know where they're not all exactly the same now I'm just dotting in some I'm doing the same concept here that I just mentioned I don't want all these little blue flowers to be all in a row I'm making little clusters kind of leading the eye in up and around everything I want to come and bring kind of up to that flower over the horizon the reference photo already had a lot going for it sometimes I will improvise and go my own direction to give a better focal point strategy but this photo was already so great now this blue it most of these have been from the schmincke 120 half sticks set you can tell they're the ones that are I love half sticks for one oh that's a terry Ludwig okay that was compared to a schmincke terry Ludwigs are rectangular and have little edges on them you can use and the schmincke along with Sennelier mount vision they're all round and they each have their advantages but you can kind of tell the schmincke pastels as I'm working because they're the ones that are round they're a little shorter like this back to the half sticks though I like half sticks because they are shorter and I can layer things better they're not just this long kind of chunky stick or or awkward it becomes awkward when it's too long to lay down and get some little strokes of color the half sticks are perfect for that and also half sticks you get more color for your money with a half stick set you can get double the color for about the same price as the whole stick so that's good now I wanted to get in some earthy colors I felt like I didn't have enough warmth I did have that underpainting of the gold but I felt I needed a little more color interest before laying on some of these grasses I believe this pastel I'm using here I'm not even sure what that pastel is it's not one of the schminckas though but again the warmth and the tone first of all dirt is the color that's usually warm it's usually leans a little bit more towards a reddish brownish goldish color and so it just made more complementary interest complementary colors are colors that are opposite on the color wheel I really am excited to do another color theory kind of educating on the color wheel video coming up soon I've got a neat way I want to explain it I think it'll really help but complementary colors work well together in art and complements are red and green so that's why the warm colors underneath look good with grasses now I'm using my little blending tool again I wanted to soften a little bit of some of the trees I want the flowers to be the focus so the trees had a little bit too much of hard edges so I just softened them just a bit once again don't over blend sorry for my shaky easel here I'm working on my little tabletop easel here now this is a Sennelier pastel Sennelier is another wonderful soft professional grade pastel and it's from the Paris collection many of my patrons on my patreon page have gotten the Paris collection I've been doing a lot of videos using almost exclusively that set it has a lot of great colors it's another 120 half stick set and it was on sale on amazon for a really good price you might still be able to go to my amazon shop I have a link in the description of every recent video anyway and I have things categorized in idealist for you to find things easily and you'll see one of the idealist has pastels and painting products I think and you'll be able to find this the Sennelier set unfortunately like I said the Schmincke set I don't even think they offer this 120 set but that Paris collection set is awesome you could do this painting using that as well so I did add a little bit of that pretty pink of the Sennelier that I had onto that flower in the foreground the pink one but again keeping it really out of focus so I'm I'm dotting in some of these other pinks once again getting myself a little flow to keep things harmonious and you know nature does this so beautifully without even trying you know like I said it's God's gorgeous creation by how the wind blows by how flowers grow and it it just has always equate it to a song or dance and it's just so beautifully orchestrated and often as artists as humans we sometimes have a tendency to pattern things and it's good when we can learn we have to break out of that habit to put everything in a row and we can learn to emulate nature how it's so spontaneously creates harmony and so it's it's a trick and the more you do it the better you get now the one other great thing about these Schmincke pastels look it has that nice round edge I like to roll my pastel often to make grasses they're much more interesting than doing just a straight line because that's how nature does nature has broken lines and and bends and curves and things that aren't just so uniformed or patterned so I just started rolling some around and once again I'm calling this an easy pastel lesson because there's really not a whole lot of layering it was really just the initial underpainting getting in some of the darks for the trees the mountain and the sky I didn't do much to that and the rest was a little bit of grass layering and sprinkling in some flowers so you know you should be able to give this a try as long as you have values that are close that means the lights and the darks you don't necessarily even have to have the same color so try to focus on the value how light or dark the color is now I love these blues I've got a lot of questions about these gotten a lot of question about these blues when I did one particular tutorial I think the painting was called my blue heaven it had all these gorgeous blue flowers in them and I got a lot of question asking which blues they were and it was a combination of the one big rectangular terry Ludwig you saw and some Sennelier blues that I had and they are in that Paris collection the blues I'm referring to in that Sennelier set so still just getting in some of these flowers now I didn't want to get I wasn't sure if I was going to do this or not but I sprayed a little bit of fixative on the foreground you can see now it's a little darker I didn't get the footage of me spraying it but I wanted to get the foreground a little darker so I purposely used the fixative to do that and I wanted to layer in some more grasses and what can happen if you layer now I didn't overlay or this I probably didn't even need to use the fixative and you don't either but if you have too many layers going on when you go to add another one they they look kind of muddied the color doesn't show up as good so if you can just add a little bit of fixative in the foreground it it actually gives a little bit more texture it darkens it just a tad and it gives more grit to the paper so you can get a few more fresh layers down that's probably the best way to put it I wanted my layers to look fresh so you definitely don't have to do that if you recreate from this tutorial but I want to mention that I did use that so now you can see I'm getting some grasses over it and I do have that feeling that there are roots down deep in the in the grasses in the foreground there and I'm getting close to being done here now notice this beautiful warm green I believe this is a Sennelier pastel and again if you're a patron of mine you'll get my color notes you'll know what all these colors are I don't have the specific color numbers but I will have the brand and kind of an idea of where I used it this one will say foreground grasses or something but notice how this green is more mossy green it's more of a yellow green and I wanted to use those more towards the tops where the sunlight would be hitting adding a few more of these little blue flowers I don't want to overdo the flowers but there were a lot of flowers in this reference photo I think that's what drew me to it they and they the colors were so neat now I am going to be adding in a few just a few minutes here the flowers that I think made the final punch most of you know if you're a subscriber here I talk about punching up color well sometimes you can just add color as an accent a little punch of color that is going to just make make interest in your painting and for me it was the reds at the end now I really love this purple too you know it's kind of a warm purple I believe that's a maybe a Rembrandt or that had had broke I dropped my pastels one time so the reds that I'm going to add are going to really make a little neat expression of color and now I'm just adding a little bit more just creating color interest it's like I mentioned at the beginning color I'm letting the colors play there's so much more interesting than if I just used one pink and it just creates these little vibrations of color and now let's get to those red flowers that are going to make everything pop I know that one's a shminka it's kind of a burgundy it's darker now why did I put the darker one down before I put the lighter one you'll see me do it again darker lighter just a little bit on top I'm not covering up all of the like that burgundy color but the reason you do that is you need some color interest like I mentioned with the pink flowers but also you need a little contrast you need something light doesn't show up as light unless it's next to something dark and our eyes go to things with high contrast and I wouldn't call these high contrast but I wanted to give some contrast so that these red flowers really showed up better and again I'm kind of strategically and harmoniously placing them to create a pleasing composition overall I wanted to mention one other thing about the fixative one of the most common questions I get on my comments on the youtube videos is how do you protect your final painting and often people will say do you spray a fixative and I never spray a final fixative at the end of a painting because of what I just mentioned before it darkens the image you don't want to darken your whole painting and you really don't need to spray a fixative to protect a pastel painting I use clear bags I get them from clearbags.com I have a specific link that could take you right to the exact bags I use often I paint in standard sizes so I can buy my clear bags just a little bit larger than standard sizes and I insert my painting in the clear bag with a piece of foam core board cut to fit I usually use black foam core board and when you have it nicely packaged like that in clear bag people can handle it you can look at it I can store my work I store all of my paintings before they get shipped off when I make sales on my Etsy shop and I ship them in the clear bags with another little sandwich of foam core to protect it during shipping so I find that's a great way to protect them also in a tablet of tracing paper if you buy a tablet of tracing paper and you want to protect your paintings prior to framing or whatever you can put your paintings in between the individual sheets I would tape them into place you see I have my tape on my board here basically it's a piece of tape on the back of the surface facing forward with another piece of tape on the front to hold it and that way you don't touch any of the painting with the tape I'm zooming in more closely here so you can see my little rolling technique this is one of the Schmincke pastels and that was not quite the lightest that I'll use this one's a little more neutral and I'm using the neutrals down a little deeper into the grasses you're not going to get as many highlights there and also notice how some of the flowers are buried that's what happens in nature they're not all going to be pasted on the top thus adding the grasses or more of the grasses at the end will give that feeling of hidden flowers buried down deep and I'm pretty much done at this point and even though I've sped this up slightly in some areas I think the final painting took me maybe less than an hour and I really enjoyed this one it was just so free and happy my mama would have loved this painting we're all from the mountains of North Carolina and we just love it there and lately I've really been enjoying when you tag me on Instagram if you recreate from this tutorial or any of my tutorials and you tag me at Susan Jenkins Artist so follow me on Instagram and tag me and then I can see your recreations of course if you're a patron of mine I'll see what you do in our homework album and our other private sharing groups this original piece is available in my Etsy shop I'll have a link in the description of this video and once again please hit the like button for this video it really does help leave me a comment I love the hearing what you have to say questions you have comments you have that's how this channel keeps getting better god bless everyone I have more tutorials on the way and happy painting