 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm excited to bring you this video where I will teach you how to make your own pastel travel journal and I will also be giving you a step-by-step real-time all-raw footage of me creating this painting here. I'm gonna share with you different ways you can make a travel journal and also ways to protect them. So lots of fun in store in this lesson and here we go. But first would you take a moment to like this video, subscribe to my channel if you haven't already and click the bell icon. That'll notify you of any new videos that I create. If you have enjoyed many of the free lessons that I have here on my YouTube channel, which you consider becoming a patron, it's only $5 a month. It keeps me able to do this and I am so grateful for all of the support. Plus you get extra goodies. I've made travel journals from many different types of surfaces. I recently shared this video. I was excited about this Kansan XL sand grain. I wanted to mention quickly that in that video I mentioned it on Amazon. Each pad was $21. Well because of my subscribers, you guys shared with me that you can find it for about $8 on dickblick.com. When choosing surfaces to make a travel notebook for pastel painting, I love to use books that have a spiral binding. It makes it so much easier just to turn the pages. Now sometimes I will paint directly on the pages depending on the type of surface and I protect the pages with tracing paper, just regular tracing paper. This is a pad I get from Dick Blick and I cut it to size and adhere it with some artist tape. Now sometimes I like to make more of a sanded surface. The technique I'll be showing you very soon is one that could be used in a watercolor notebook or even on this Kansan XL sand grain which I found was water-friendly enough to do this method in this notebook. These are some of the paintings that I did recently when I was traveling with my husband and my middle son and his wife and I think of these as more like studies and fun. You could also make notes on the back of each page as to where you were and what motivated you and it's just such a nice little thing to have to remember some of your special moments in life. First I'm going to show you my technique for creating my own sanded surface on this Kansan sand grain. Now it's called sand grain but it's not a sanded surface it literally just has kind of a texture of sand so I like to add the clear gesso to give me a little bit more of that textural sanded surface where you can get more layers. But as I so often do I don't like really working on a white or in this case a cream colored surface. So I often will just tone my surface one color. Sometimes I'll do an underpainting with the basic big shapes of whatever the subject matter is. But I find this is just so easy. So what I'm doing is I'm just laying down some pastel and I'm liquefying it. Many don't realize that when you wet soft pastels they become like paint and you can literally paint with them. And while this particular surface isn't really advertised as water friendly I found it worked for these purposes just fine. I like to I'm anxious so I like to blow dry my pages. This blue didn't come out as vibrant as I had hoped but you'll see me do a few other pages. I'll speed up this process after I show you it in real time. And the pages can curl a little bit with this process. This will also happen with watercolor paper if you choose that. But I have found that well there's one trick you can do. You can actually wet the back of the paper with water and blow it dry and it kind of flattens it out. But I have found that when you close the notebook and keep it closed over time all of my pages really flatten out quite nicely. And now let's talk about this product Liquitex Clear Gesso that has some grit or texture to it. It has little bits of almost like sand in it. And make sure you use the clear gesso. And we're going to coat it on these colored pages. I'm going to use a foam brush to coat it with. But you could use a paintbrush too. Let me show you very quickly why I use the clear gesso versus regular gesso. Pardon my hands moving. This is from a different video clip and I'm doing a voiceover. So this is the clear and this is the regular gesso. Regular gesso is white and you would just totally cover up all that beautiful color you just laid down. And the regular gesso does not have the sanded texture. I had somebody say they thought it did and I checked it and it does not. And now on all of the pages that I have toned with colors I've chosen. I am going to add the clear gesso. I've just put it in a little Styrofoam plate to the left of me there. But eventually I started just squeezing it onto all of the pages. So I just kind of rinsed out my foam brush a little bit, squeezed out the water. And I'm just making a smooth application. I do some horizontal strokes and then I do some vertical strokes. I just make sure I get a decent coating on it. I've had people ask me if doing one coat, letting it dry and doing a second coat of clear gesso gives you more texture. And I've tried that maybe slightly. But again for these purposes these notebooks are for travel and fun and really just expressing myself and maybe creating a special moment while I'm on a trip. So one coat is just fine. And I'll be starting the all real time, all raw footage with no voiceover of me painting. But first I'm just showing you some of the other colors that I did. And that's where I was just squeezing the gesso right on the pages. Now you'll see how it curls up in fast motion there. So I tape it down and when I'm finished, I tape my notebook closed. And like I said, once it's dried and flattened out, it pretty much stays flat. Let me give you a little bit of a backstory. I was literally doing this minutes before we were scheduled to leave to go on this little camping trip with my son and his wife. My husband was in the shower. And when he's ready to go, he's ready to go. So I was frantically packing up my supplies, took a few pastel sets that I just taped up so they wouldn't open. And I also wanted to recommend, I like this little bamboo holder. I got it from Ikea and it's called VivVala, V-I-V-A-L-L-A. And it's just such a versatile little bamboo stand. I use it for my iPad like you can see here. I use it just to sit on the counter. But it's also neat that you can hang it over like a bar in this kitchen. You can hang it over your easel, you know, like your backing board. And it's just so versatile. The great thing is it's very affordable. Look at that. It's only $12.99. And I will use this little stand with a piece of foam core board as a support for my painting surface. I also will take my iPad and now I'm packing up a few more pastels. I was like, I don't have enough pinks and purples and some of those little new pastels for fine grasses. So I literally just wrapped them up in a paper towel really snugly. And then I taped them up with artist tape. That's the first time I ever tried this. Now I wouldn't recommend this if you were going on a long trip or whatever, but we were just going in our little conversion van. And I knew I could keep my bag really safe. And by the way, I did get everything ready by the time my husband was ready to go. But now I'm going to give you the raw real footage of a painting that I did prior to leaving. I was testing this method out and it worked great. For the rest of this, I'm only speeding up this section. So you guys don't have to watch me do the whole process again. I don't know why I just thought a purple underpainting would be nice. You can see there how it curled. I wet the back and see how it flattened out. Now I'm adding the gesso and I'm ready to go. So enjoy this real time very raw painting demonstration. Alright, so there's not much to this composition. Let me get a charcoal pencil to just give you an idea. This is just a light Derwent charcoal pencil. I like using charcoal because it's similar to the pastel product. And you know what? I've been liking recently to mark me off a little area rather than going to the edges. And this is a nice wide landscape. So I'm just gonna go like to hear on edges and like right about in here about that. Okay, so we've got about a third of the way down. Gonna bother me. About a third of the way down is the horizon line. Yep, pretty much that. Okay, and we've got a nice I love this flower peeking up here, but it's a little too much in the center. I gotta figure out a better spot for that. I think I'll put that right there. I've got a tree line back here. And I find that tree lines. I don't like them rounded. I like them a little more geometrical. Now I'm gonna cover this up with pastel. It looks like we've got some trees that are a little closer here also like giving levels. This is gonna be my trees that are closest. Okay, the next one are they're further away. They don't necessarily have to be lighter. Often that's a little technique or strategy. I don't want them the same shape as this. So let's do something a little different. Okay, and then let's do let's give a little gap. I always like to have a little gap and sometimes have the trees leaning in and then we've got some that are really maybe further away back there sneaking behind there. We might have a little bit going on back there too. Okay, so there's our, there's our trees. This is already feeling really great. And you know, really, the rest is all just putting in some big shakes. Oh, I'm thinking this is going to do quite well because I've done this with the jesso before and look, this paper did great with the jesso. It's really nice. All right, so let's see, I'm gonna go, I just grabbed a couple of sets. This is the Sennelier 40 half stick set. This is the Jack Richardson landscape set. And I see the darkest dark that I have in this. Well, this one has black and a really dark green. I don't normally like using black, although I did in the last on this on the gray paper of this, I limited myself to just a few pastels and I was forced to use black and it came out okay. So I think I'm gonna use this for the tree line and it's often good, you know, I might tape that down so that I'm not wrestling with it the whole time. I have my artist tape here and I hope I have this in the frame. I'm gonna move it up a little bit. That's one thing that you have to do when you're making videos. You have to make sure people can see what you're doing and I have done it the wrong way so many times. Alright, that should help that right there. I'll keep it nice and taught. Alright, so what I'm gonna do is I'm just getting I'm not even worrying about getting these in perfectly because I'm gonna come back later with the with the sky and I'm gonna carve the the shapes into the trees. So there's a few trees right there. That's all we need and then I've got my other I'm gonna go ahead and put these in. I'm not pressing quite as hard. I'm gonna go ahead and put these in and I'm gonna give them different values to make them look further away later. Now, I'm gonna get this in here. I'm kind of lifting up on my pastel a little bit so that it's not getting the whole thing but it's okay if some of it gets on the paper and then we've got some distant trees back in here. I'm gonna sneak some in here and maybe here to look further away. I think I'm gonna raise these up a little bit too so they're just going out of the frame there. Okay, so now I think I'm gonna get in a base of stuff before I get on any color. We've got some this foreground area is really light green and I like that. I have a tendency to go too dark so I'm gonna just be very gentle. I'm looking there are some darks in the grasses back here. I like to lay down the darks first. It gives me a little guide a little roadmap, a little value study to go by and then I can add in the other colors. I want to keep when I work on this paper, I want to try to keep things very fast very simple and very loose. I also have a tendency to overwork things a lot so we're just gonna keep it simple. Alright, so now I've recently been enjoying using the pan pastel blending tools. I love the people at Pan Pastels. They have been so nice to give me some supplies. I've done a video or two on their products. I need to do more. I just forget to break them out but they're really great but these are the little blending tools and I often forget how nicely these blend. Look at that. It just gives such a soft look and I can come back and reestablish some of these darks. Look how this blue is looking on top of this lavender color. Oh my goodness. Isn't that gorgeous? And again, I'm just now I'm gonna just dab, dab, dab, dab, little tree shapes. Gosh, that's not like Bob Ross right now, don't I? Tree shapes, little tree, happy little trees. And again, I wanted this a little different shape kind of coming in and then we'll sneak those in with some different values back there. So there we've got some tree shapes and now I can go ahead and start blending in some of these dark shapes in here. We're just kind of giving an idea of these grasses. I've got some really light greens that are going to be in here. I normally like to do a little bit of a trail. I'm trying to think probably something a little bit like this. I don't want my paintings to always be cliche so I don't want to do this all the time but it's kind of a nice theme. It pulls the viewer's eye in to the painting and helps to establish a strong composition. So there we go. There's that and maybe a little bit of some regret. I use this often when I'm blending and I've got just a little bit left on my whatever tool I'm using. This is the nice area for light right there. I go ahead and use it to my advantage and sneak it in in some other places. Alright so there we go and I will lighten this up. I think I do want to add a little bit more of that uh like this coming around here. A little bit of darker right in here. Right in here. I'm kind of following the photograph here. I like it just like it's a little trail that's kind of coming up. Maybe it's just going here. I don't know. Good enough. Now I'm going to get this a little darker here because this is my my first bank of trees and values are darker in the foreground. Okay now that's what I've used. That's all I've used so far. Now I think I'm going to go ahead and get in some of these pretty greens. I'm going with local color here. Look at these greens. Oh my goodness. This is the Diane Townsend greens and uh man I love the set. I find these greens are very unique. Um well that's a T6 12 greens and um so I'm going to play with some of these greens to get this in and then I'll work on the sky. Big shapes right? Nothing hard. This is easy. Easy peasy. I think I want to get in um maybe some of these. We're going to have some greens deeper grasses that are um there's some sneaking in back through here that are darker and um a little cooler. This one's cooler than this one. You see that? That's a little it's a little darker, a little cooler and uh let's see here. I'm squinting my eyes. Also too you want to keep your interest not always on the edges so I'm going to reserve my lights to be um more in areas that will leave the eye. I'm going to get my lighter highlights there. There's a lot of light green here. I'm keeping a super light touch here. All right so there's some of those greens. Just run them along that little path. There we go and now let's see here. These are this is an example. I'm going to kind of lose my trail. This is an example of grasses that grow really tall. The person who took this photo was way down in the grass. So let's see that's pretty light but it's my best choice here. So let's go ahead and go for it. I'm just gonna lay it down. How about that? It's peeking in up and around all of this. Uh these flowers are so small that I'm not worried about getting them in just yet. I'll start uh I'll start adding them in. I'm gonna go real light over these uh background. I like that little lavender showing through. I was kind of second guessing myself wondering if that lavender was the right choice because there are lavender flowers in it but um maybe. Now I might go ahead and blend a little bit because there's a lot of that lavender showing through. So let me get uh right here. Let's do this. I know I think I want to blend back here. I want these grasses. Now because I'm working flat I'm going to have a lot of this um pastel just kind of sitting on top. I want some of it to be a little flat back here but I wanted it to soften up and not quite show all of that lavender. I'm gonna have to go um see how my dark color is getting here? That's because I'm working flat. If you're working on an elevated surface which is what I prefer um then you won't have to worry about that. However I find my filming is better for you guys when I work flat. So often I have to just go take out my my um pad or whatever I'm working on. I've recently started attaching my surface to a a foam core board and um that makes it easy for me just to take the whole thing out and tap the pastel off of it. Alrighty there we go. It does make it a little harder on me but oh well it helps you guys so there you go. Alright so now I'm going to take it out dump it off and I'll be back. Alright I'm back. Let me taper down then I'm gonna wipe my hands off. Now I don't like to do a lot of blending with my fingers but I don't like all that directional stuff so I'm just gonna soften it up like that. Alright so now I'm gonna get some of this dark green here. This is from the Snellier set. Oh see that and that pretty. I'm adding this is my my trees that are closest. I'm gonna probably make those a little further away. So I'm just adding some greens in there like that. I'll add some highlights of greens to that as well. And I think that's it for that green other than maybe sneaking in a little bit of it. That is really dark isn't it but it's okay. It'll blend in when I add some of those other grasses on top and it's nice and warm. That is such a nice warm green. I like it. I kind of lost my path but that's okay. Alright so now let's go ahead and start getting so this is another green that's really nice. This is good for like whatever the where the sun is. Like I said I want some sun shining here so it's going to kind of catch a little bit on this tree. Let's make this like a little bush down here. It's catching on a little bit. Sometimes you have clumps of branches that are sticking out and they're going to catch the light and deeper ones are going to be darker. So there we go with that and that was from the Jack Richardson landscape set. Now I want to push these trees back a little bit so what am I going to do? I'm going to cool it off, lighten it up a bit. This is probably good right here. This is the Diane Townsend Greens. I'm going to carve in some more shapes with with the sky holes but yeah that definitely push those back. Sometimes I like to sneak a little bit back in here like it's kind of going behind there. That's good. This one I want to make it a little closer so let me, let me, let me, let me make it just a little darker here. Let me bring it down a little bit. A little darker. I mean this is still, no that's not that, that's a blue. I love that blue. This is the darkest dark blue that I used before. So this one's kind of, this one's closer. All right it's cooler that I'm not going to add that much green to it. These rules I talk about them all the time. Darker values are usually in the foreground. Warmer values are in the foreground and things get cooler and lighter as they go back into the distance. Now let's um, let's address that tree right there with a little bit of this cool blue. Maybe just a little bit down in here. Makes it feel further away just, just by cooling it off a little bit and now we've got some, I might put a little bit of this as the highlight on this tree because it's just a little further away than the other one. I need to bring this one down further. It feels like it's at the same level of that. So I'm going to sneak this in um, down into these grasses a little bit. Ooh that color is really a pretty blue, isn't it? Okay now let's add a little bit more of this green and a little bit of areas. Then we'll let the grasses kind of just pop up over everything. Easy. All right now what about these trees that are real far away? Well look at this pretty blue from the Jack Richardson set. It might be a little too light so what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this one here that was kind of the color of that tree. I'm going to pretend like there's a tree way back there. Let's put one back in here and then I'm going to push it back. Look at that. There it goes. Bye bye. It's going way back into the distance. I'm going to have a little bit back behind that one somewhere. See that? All of a sudden you got one, two, three, four levels of trees. All right now let's see here. I think I really still need kind of a darker green even. This is the one I used on the trees. That's the one that looks so dark there. So let me see. Let's get some of this cooler because you know when we have grasses buried they're going to be cooler in the shadows. I always say things cool off when it's shady. We cool off when it's shady so why wouldn't grasses you know or anything that's in the shade? I'm putting down a little bit more of this in here because I'm going to layer some of those greens on top of it. Pull some of this down and then I'm going to layer light greens on top of this with flowers. There we go and I'm getting also two to where I'm getting a little more pastel dust on here but that's okay. All right let me go ahead before I get too crazy and get some of the sky and this sky is such a pretty blue. It's almost like a periwinkle blue so I've got a few colors that might work. This is the blue I used for the trees. I'm going to go ahead and get this in a pie. Colors in a sky are darker in the heavens and then they grow. Think of it as up in space and then they get lighter as they come down to earth because we've got the sun lighting our earth. I'm going to let some of this purple just peek through. Look at that. I'm liking this underpainting choice and I'm going really light here. I'm going to add some lighter of this but I'm going to do it just right here. I'm leaving this loose. Loose, loose, loose. That's what I want you to do if you get this paper. Force yourself to say this is my loose and impressionistic paper choice or pad so that you know that it's mixing with some of that other color making an interesting color. Look at it. It looks minty. That's okay because you know colors um they get warmer as they get down to the horizon so they get lighter and they get warmer so that's kind of fun. I don't want to over do this light because I like the idea of it just being isolated not everywhere. It's everywhere it's nowhere. I think the first artist I heard say that was Marla Pagetta. It's everywhere it's nowhere. Now it's not going to look right if I put that light back there so I'm just going to sneak some of this back in here. I could even go a little darker like this blue here because what happens when color is behind elements like trees and things. I'm thinking there might be some areas where the like the space is behind the trunks of the trees. That's the word I'm looking for but when light is filtered through things like this it's the color is going to be a little darker and it's going to be a little cooler usually like in here. See how that that color looks better than if I had used this color. Watch what happens here. Look at that. That just doesn't even look natural so that's not that's no good. So we'll just pop in a little bit of this. I'm squinting my eyes because I'm kind of doing this from imagination. I'm thinking about where there might be some little groupings of things just hinting at it. That's good. That's too dark there but this this one right here I need a better transition and I've got a little bit of something on there a little bit of blue from the tree. All right so let's get in some of these flowers. We got sky we got earth and now we need flowers. I've got to put the flowers in now because I'm going to add some grasses and I want to bury those flowers. So let's see what we've got here. I want to get in oh this pink is there are some pinks that bright but I need to get in some dark flowers. Now what did I want to do? I want to pop this one up. It is way over the horizon but like I said it's right in the middle. I want to make it reaching into the sky. I've already moved my sky up higher. Kind of like right in here okay it's reaching up and we've got another few like this. I want to avoid a pattern. I always do that. I end up pattern giving patterns to things. We're going to put one over here. It's going to stay nice and dark. Things usually have this little musical lyrical kind of rhythm to flowers and things. Let's make one kind of bigger here. Got to avoid a pattern. This one I need to make it closer. I'm going to make it darker too and turn your turn your flowers in different directions. There we go. I'm getting a little little rhythm going there and I need kind of like a dark purple. Not quite like an eggplant purple but let's see what I can find. Oh these purples from the Terry Ludwig dark set. Oh my goodness they're so gorgeous. So gorgeous. Okay so I'm going to get some of that in there. When we get darks in it allows there to be contrast with the color, color contrast. Okay so that's from the Terry Ludwig dark. I'm going to go a little lighter. Maybe this one here. Believe it or not that's a little lighter. I'm going to put a little bit here on this one and then I'll add pink on top of it. Okay so we've got some other little pink flowers. Some of them going off in different directions now. I'm going to keep mine that are the main focal point kind in here and then I'm going to lighten my touch and bring a few of them. They're going to get much lighter over the tops of the trees there. Now we do have some flowers in here that are kind of large. They're buried though and they're they've got that fuzzy look like you do with the when you set your aperture on a camera to make it all fuzzy. Okay there's that. Now these are going to be a lot lighter so I don't want to use those anymore. Okay I want some pinks that are kind of neutral. I want some that are kind of bright and I want some that are just lighter and so let's give those a try. So this one right here I think is going to be good for some of these petals and we don't have to spell everything out with this. I'm losing a little bit of layering ability already but that's okay. This one I want dark enough because it's it's contrasting to the sky. Let's put a few more. Now some of these don't have the dark background because I want them to be second fiddle. Now I'm just popping in a few kind of where I see them. This is my next darkest value and we're going to have maybe a few reaching up here maybe one right there. Now I want to get in some of these that are they're buried. Like I said they're so fuzzy and out of focus we're going to put some grasses over top of them and not even worry about them being like flower shapes. I do like there's a little grouping here, there's open spaces. Now let's get this brighter color and let's put some of that in a few areas. Maybe some yeah look at that. We've got light hitting kind of the back side of some of these petals. It's like there's some petals in front of these and I don't want this everywhere but I am going to use this to pop little flowers kind of growing far away. He's still out there. Okay now let's lighten this up a bit. We've got some this is really light that are just these little light flowers picking up some of them. I'm turning my pastel to get different um directions to things. Also too you can do kind of horizontal strokes. That music was cool huh. A lot of people ask where I get my music. I get a lot of it from the YouTube Audio Library. It guarantees that I use music that doesn't have a copyright so I thought that was really relaxing. I'm adding a few more of the deeper shadows just in little areas. I want to give the feeling of deep grasses and I love this blue. I'll often do this towards the end of a painting. I'll find kind of a punchy color for some background trees. We know that things cool off in the distance and I also like to incorporate it in other areas. Almost always if I have a color that's kind of like a an accent color I'll find some strategic places to place it so that it makes a harmony for the painting as a whole and I'm just kind of scumbling it across some of the tops of the other trees. I really enjoyed this experience. This was so relaxing for me. I think that's why I quit talking during part of it. I was just kind of getting into it. Now these are Prismacolor new pastels. They're spelled N-U pastels not N-E-W and I like to turn them kind of on their edge. They're nice little rectangular shapes and I try to give a gestural line. We're talking a lot about gesture in my Patreon group and I feel that's really one of the keys to having things look artistic. Things in nature are gestural. They have that liveliness to them. I also try to make my strokes for grasses varying direction. You don't want them all in the same direction and you want them to be broken lines often. Different thicknesses so keep those things in mind. You try to really avoid things all being very samey samey. That's why I was talking about resisting the tendency we have to create patterns. That's going to make your art look a little bit more amateurish if all of your flowers have a similar pattern. They're positioned the same. They're like a pattern distance apart. Now I'm just adding some of these really my brightest pink. I think that bright pink I have. I think there's another one that might not be in the screen. Anyway I think it was a Sennelier pastel. They have some really nice bright pinks. Now I'm just getting in some of these pretty pink flowers. I'm lightening things up a bit and I'm keeping my lighter flowers on the tops because that's if the sun is shining up there that's where we're going to get our lightest lights. That doesn't mean light flowers can't be buried but they're going to be a little bit darker. That's why I switched to this purple. You see how that is giving the feeling that there's still maybe light pink like white light white but they're not quite directly in the sun and that gives a real believability when you're creating flower while flower field landscapes. A few more finishing marks. I think another neat thing I like about these notebooks is I'm going to paint in them just for enjoyment not even if I'm traveling because I find that when you create on a homemade surface or in a dedicated journal like this that's kind of dedicated to relaxation. I find that your work, my work anyway, is more loose and I don't overwork things. I'm more satisfied with just stopping and enjoying that real loose feel. You can always see it with color better when I take a photograph versus the overhead camera. So and again I did the same paper with no clear gesso coating, no color on the background. I used this particular journal because it was a gray tone rather than cream. It's the XL sand grain gray I think it's called surface. You definitely don't get as much layering when you work on just the plain paper alone but I still enjoy this process. So I'll try to have a tutorial of that painting too coming soon. Let me know if you liked this. Let me know also if you liked the raw footage I'm calling it where I'm not editing it. I'm just talking as I'm painting and also go ahead and subscribe to this channel, support me on Patreon if you can, and god bless and happy painting.