 Welcome artistic visitors and subscribers for this lesson where I'm going to be painting the night and it's going to include my technique for painting fireflies and even stars so it's kind of fun. Now I'm going to show you some of my supplies that I used. I used a majority of great American pastels and I've had this set actually for months but with a lot going on my life I have not been able to use them until this particular painting and I'm going to be oh here's the box top. It is the Richard McDaniels Plenair Gallery. I really liked this set because it was it had such a nice assortment of colors and I love the way it was arranged with the values. Now a lot of pastel sets come with a piece of paper like Terry Ludwig's where you can actually mark the color of your pastels next to the number in case you run out of a color and you don't remember the number. Now great Americans did not have that sheet so all I did is I took a picture of the open box I printed it out and I just made a little mark you could see there to the left side of the pastels by each one to get a reference of the color. Now I'm using Sennelier LaCarte pastel card. I often forget how much I, there's a piece of UART paper in there, I forget how much I love the surface. It's a very gritty surface. This particular pad comes in all kinds of different colors, four to six different colors. I wanted to use this charcoal gray because I was doing a night scene anyway and just a note this surface will not take water so don't apply water color or any kind of water-based medium to this. And now I've just got my, I think this was a 7 by 9 inch and I have my little iPad holder here. A lot of people have inquired about this holder. It's really neat because it just hangs right over your easel or you know something you know whether it's an easel or a drawing table like this and it also sits nicely on a table for sketching or whatever. Now here's my little hinge system I often use where I just put a piece of tape on the back of the surface I'm working on and have it sticking out of the top and then I just put a piece of tape on the top. That keeps me from having to put tape around the edges of my surface. I also like to share my little homemade pastel dust catcher. It's nothing but some aluminum foil made into a trough. Now here's the photograph. I took a bunch of pictures in my own backyard at the new property. My husband and I just got, oh there's a deer that visit my backyard and I'm just choosing what I want to do here. And none of the compositions were quite what I wanted. So this is a time when you improvise and you kind of learn how to create a composition on your own. So I'm really moving a lot of elements around and I'm kind of seeing in my mind kind of what I wanted to do. My backyard scene was really flat. All I really saw was trees and sky and so I decided I wanted a little more interest. So you'll kind of see as it develops but this is just kind of a little idea value study composition. I often do a little sketch kind of just to get an idea of where I'm gonna head with the painting. So basically the painting served as a reference for color and value for me more than the composition. But these are the great American pastels that I chose. Of course it's a night scene. Lots of cooler colors in the evening. You don't have sunshine and the warm tones. But I'm gonna have a few warm purples and that little mauve color there. And I am gonna have some darker greens. They're gonna be muted and dull because there's not a lot of light. Now the moon is the source of light and I decided to make a little bit of a warmer moon. I am gonna put down the darker yellow there first and then kind of lighten it up with the other values on the top of that. And you can pretty much ignore that little colorful sketch that I did there. I quickly realized that the great Americans are so soft. They don't work well on that paper that I have. You may see I like to cover my sketch board or easel with a type of you know just a cheap paper because I often clean my pastels a lot and sketch on it while I'm working. But they did not work that well for the the colorful pastel sketch there. So just don't even pay any attention to it. I'm going to sketch this out. I just have a little pastel pencil. Again I'm still just getting basic composition with this. But let me go ahead and speed this up and you can kind of see where it heads. And some of you may recall that often in my videos I'll put the reference image up in the screen here usually to the right so that you can kind of see what I'm working from. But this was so interpretive. I was literally just using the image for the color, the value, maybe some of the shapes of the trees. But I was kind of reinventing it. So there's not a lot of purpose in putting the reference photo up there. I might stick it up there a minute. But at this point I was still exploring. I've got a general idea of composition. But at this point I was going to have mostly trees in the front and try to push back some trees in the distance. I love depth in a painting. I mean that's really what we're doing is taking a three-dimensional world and putting it on a two-dimensional surface. So why not maximize that by having a place where your eye can go way deep into the painting or see some interesting elements behind. And this is kind of how I started. But the neat thing is that the more you paint, the more you look at the world. I highly encourage study the world, study how trees grow, how reflections behave, how light behaves, and learn rules of perspective. And then you can start to basically change your painting to what you see as artistically beautiful rather than what is necessarily in the photograph. And you'll see as this evolves that I even change it from here. I decide later that I thought it'd be much more interesting to have some water and reflection underneath there for interest than just the trees and the sky and maybe some distant trees. Pardon my head. I often forget that I'm filming and I stick my big old head in the way. This is a place I wanted to mention something also. Notice I didn't draw, I mean I did with my little pastel pencil, a little circle for the moon. But I'm not making a line with that pastel. I'm really just kind of blocking it in. And there's something that makes art look more painterly and beautiful called lost edges. You really don't want any sharp lines. That is unless you're trying to really accentuate a little particular area in a painting. But for the most part it's much more free and impressionistic if your edges are just kind of lost between the outside edge and the inside edge. They're more edges than they are lines. So also too, of course the moon is a source of light in a night scene. So usually there's going to be lighter values around the moon. So I'm kind of overdoing that right now. And later I don't make it quite as drastic. But basically we're just kind of blocking things in at this stage and getting correct color and value. And in this particular clip I'm using a piece of the pipe foam insulation that a lot of you may be familiar with that actually a lot of pastel artists use this now. And it's just a cheap little easy way to blend. And you don't want to over blend because your painting can lose its color and get kind of muddy. But there are certain areas that you want to push back and less detail makes something look further away. And so I wanted that sky to be a little bit more blended. Now this is the point where I'm still playing around with maybe having almost like a little opening where there's some distant trees. And I'm going to kind of carve those in. I'm painting rather negatively now. Negative painting is when you're you're painting in the holes rather than painting like the leaves of the tree. So I'm carving in those those trees by the negative shapes that I'm painting around it. And still kind of having fun at this point and just seeing where I'm going to go with this. And I can't remember the point where I start I realized hey I want to add some water but I'm going to just paint a while and let you listen to some music now. I thought I'd mention here how the light has changed. I literally was painting before it was evening and I had my studio lights on. And now this is the next day during the daylight. And the lighting is so much different. So it's amazing how much just your external lighting can affect so much of your painting and your colors. Now I'm just comparing some values there. Again now you can see I have added that water reflection and I've mentioned in other videos that you want to reflect whatever's happening in the sky into the water. And of course reflections and shadows and things that are happening above. So I'm playing around with some of these greens right here for the background. And I later realized they're all too light that I really needed to keep that really dark background trees there. That's just too light. So I'm going to fix that in a little while. I thought I'd mentioned here that of course you see I had dark and some things up but reflections are going to work the same way at night as they do in the daytime. So I'm using the pipe foam insulation there to pull those shadows down from those distant trees. And then I'll add the water reflections on top of that. It's going to make it much more believable if I have those reflections down in the water. And I just happen to love some of these purples back there in the background there. So this is a new pastel. It's a harder pastel in you pastel not any W and they're great little harder pastels to have for things such as actually blending you can do with a harder pastel like this. I often just break them and take them on their side to blend if anything's kind of chunky or maybe a bit too textured and and they're just they're very versatile. So I like to have a combination of soft and some harder pastels. Now I'm just adding some again what's in the sky is going to be reflected in the water and I'm measuring kind of where those purples are going to be based on where the trees are. So again you can kind of see it come into life and how it's starting to be more believable as water and I'm continuing to work here. I was going to kind of blend in some of that sky. There's kind of a stark transition from one blue to the purple. So I'm just basically getting it to be a little bit more consistent and again putting the same blue that I'm putting in the sky into the water. Now a lot of times you'll have a painting you're doing where you have the sun or a moon like this to where you'll actually see the moon's reflection in the water. In this particular composition the moon is a bit too high in the sky. If the painting was longer if I had more painting down at the bottom there you would actually be able to see the the moon in the water. But in this case that wouldn't be correct to put it in there but you will get still some of that light that's going to be a hint down towards the bottom right hand side of where that water is. Now you can see how I'm using the pastels themselves to kind of blend those colors in. And I you know I kind of I have the advantage of being able to look back at my painting when I record it like this. I recommend if you have the opportunity to do that. It's a big help because often you can look back like I'm doing now and say wow there's certain places that I really liked it. I kind of liked that sky chunky like that. And I I think I end up blending it more at the end. I liked the final but sometimes I like the I'd say about 70 complete phase. I'm going to speed this up a little bit. I've had most of the I know you guys like real time and I've had this mostly at only two times sped up which is plenty slow enough to be able to see what's happening. And but I want to get to some of the points at the end. So I'm going to speed this up maybe four times and you got to get the idea. See what I'm doing here and then I'm going to pop back in for a few other comments. I wanted to point out here that I use this little tool that is actually a makeup brush. My son and daughter-in-law sell these makeup brushes. They actually had their own product designed and they sell them. They they're really great for makeup. I just don't wear makeup a lot. They're they're really good for blending especially foundations and but I had this idea one time to just try them for blending my pastels and low and behold I really like it. Especially this little one is I think it's meant for eyebrows but it works great for small spaces. If you're interested it's the company is ovelbeauty.com. It's O V E L beauty.com not O V A L and again they come in four sizes and I I've really had them work quite well for me. Now I'm kind of measuring some things again here. I already spoke about how the moon is not going to show up in this in the water because I would have need needed more paper down at the bottom there. So I think I'm actually talking there but I decided to do a voiceover instead and I've you know like I put a little note before I'm playing around a lot with this because I'm doing it from imagination and the good thing is I'm kind of pulling the shadows down again with that little makeup brush and it's brushing off a lot of the pastel so it's still allowing me to have grit to the paper. The end goal is to get all the reflections correct and then I'm going to lay that water down on top of it and then it'll be more believable as water. So that's that's the goal. I wanted to zoom in the camera a little bit here so you could get a little bit more of a close-up as to just to see a little bit better about where the pastels are and and how I'm using them and now you can see how I got that water. Now I'm carving in kind of sky holes right now with that purple but now you can see how I got the reflections right of the trees where the darks are and I did a little sideways not what I'm doing now but in the water when I move my hand you'll see how I kind of glazed over the water with some of the colors that are in the sky and see how it really gives that impression of water at night. So again just a little carving here and there. I love the carving part I think it's so fun carving out the trees and how they just literally come to life it's very cool. So again playing around with the water a little bit more and pretty soon here I'm going to show you how I get the fireflies. I'll give you a little heads up. I end up not keeping too many of the stars or the fireflies. I felt like they were overkill. It kind of was just too much. I almost looked tacky so but I'm going to show you real quick. Let me speed this up and we're about to wrap up here and I'll show you the firefly star technique. Okay so the tools that you're going to need to be able to make the stars or fireflies is the first time I ever tried it with fireflies. It's a grater. I typically have one that's smaller than this big one but I'm kind of in between houses and places right now so but I just got some of the colors that I wanted to use for either the stars or the fireflies. The fireflies are going to be a little bit more of the the yellowy and the stars are going to be a little lighter. Like I said I end up not keeping as many of them but what I'm doing is I'm using the grater to just grate some very sizes of pastel dust and I'm breaking them up a little bit. I find out that you want a combination of a little bit big and a little bit small because obviously perspective applies for fireflies just like it does with anything else in a painting so I'm just you know kind of getting me some good chunks of pastel to work with and sometimes I'll actually for stars is grate it on top of the painting but I wanted a little bit more of a strategy here and I wanted to control the placement a little bit better so I'm actually using some little tweezers to just go ahead and put the stars and the fireflies where I want them and then I do end up sprinkling some with my fingers later to get a little bit more of that random feel but stars and fireflies are going to be much like I've talked about with anytime you're painting things such as flowers in a field you don't want too much consistency it makes your painting look amateurish if things are placed in a pattern like you know you want a variance you know and I just think that's amazing how nature has this neat way of having so much order but at times it has the spontaneity that's it's almost like a beautiful dance I I often often compare it to music there's something in music called dissonance and it's like you'll be hearing the song I think Moonlight Sonata has it I love that song where it's just sounding this one particular way and then all of a sudden there's this note or this part that almost sounds a little off but it is so beautiful it's almost that little randomness makes the song and the composition even more beautiful so I'm trying to create randomness with my placements of these again I end up some of them are just too big but this is more so that you can see them and see the technique I do calm them down a little bit later so you get the idea I'll go ahead and speed this up a little bit and show you now these are going to obviously fall right off the paper if I lift it up obviously I have this laying down and so what are we going to do to make these stay in place and I'm going to show you right now all right so what I've done is I've gotten a piece of glassine it's a product that you can use to actually protect your pastel paintings but I don't see why you couldn't just use a piece of wax paper I think I have used wax paper before for this and I didn't have a roller like you'd roll cookie dough with again I've sort of moved out of this house where my studio is so I'm kind of limited with some of my regular household supplies but this is just a big decorative bottle I had and it worked it was a big flat surface so I'm just pressing kind of hard where those stars and fireflies are and what it's going to do is especially because this Sennelier Lecart paper is so gritty it's going to hold some of these like I said some of these pieces were too big you see how I'm blowing and mostly they're staying but I go back and I kind of revise and and fix it up a little bit sorry for the shakiness there but you can kind of see if I if I pick it up those are going to stay in place and so that's how you can do it you can either do it right on the painting if you want to just have some real randomness or you can kind of play some like I did too but hey there you go stars and fireflies with a neat little technique so I hope you guys enjoyed this I enjoyed doing this painting I encourage you to just try some kind of night painting and join our Monet Cafe art group on Facebook you'll get so many tips techniques and just a lot of really cool warm loving people so anyway guys love you and I can't wait to be painting more and sharing more please subscribe happy painting bye