 Welcome to Monet Café! I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm happy to bring you this tutorial where I will be painting light. I really loved the sense of light in this painting. I'll be using matte medium and watercolor paper, but you don't necessarily have to follow this technique in order to follow along with this tutorial. And if you haven't become part of the Monet Café family here on YouTube, I would love for you to subscribe. And now let's get started. Hello and welcome to Monet Café! I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'd like to bring you a lesson on a, I shouldn't say it's a new technique that I've been using, but it's one I forgot to use. Another artist had shared it with me. Thank you, Linda, from gosh, it might have been years now. I'm sure this fly doesn't it. But it's a neat technique to use for an underpainting with pastels that I just think works brilliantly. And it's really pretty easy too. Don't you love it when that happens? So I'm going to be sharing that with you along with a painting demonstration. And I'll share with you that I've done four paintings over the last, oh, just few days. And I'll be sharing tutorials on those paintings as well with a similar format. So let me talk a little bit about the supplies and what you'll need to get started. And this should be lots of fun. By the way, the t-shirt I'm wearing is one I designed myself. It says Van Gogh, Van Gogh, Van Gaan. You can find this in other Monet Café merchandise below each video. Now let's talk a little bit about these products that I'll be using for this tutorial. The surface will be just a piece of watercolor paper, just plain old watercolor paper. And I've been really enjoying doing these four and a half inch by nine inch formats for the painting. I love a long format, whether it's vertical or horizontal. At the past three, this will be the fourth painting I do have all been this size using this technique. The next thing that you will need, of course, will be some pastels. This demo will be all pastels. Sometimes I do an underpainting that is watercolor or acrylic ink. It's all pastels, which is why I'm sharing this product, the Matte Medium, made by Liquitex, that just blends these pastels so beautifully. They kind of come alive with color and they have a real painterly feel to them. It really gets you inspired to paint. So this is what I'll be using to do the underpainting on the watercolor paper with pastels laid down first. I'll talk about it as I paint. To blend this in, you can use a paintbrush if you want. You know, once you have the pastels down, paintbrush with the Matte Medium. But I've been using this little scrubby, I got these at the Dollar Store. There's like what you would scrub your dishes with. And you'll see me using this to, I actually just put the Matte Medium right there on it and I blend. And I'll talk about how I do that. So that gets a nice underpainting that you've got with your pastels. Very vibrant and beautiful. Now we have to do something to get the pastels to stick, okay? We're gonna paint pastels over our underpainting. I talk about this product a lot. It's great to make your own homemade pastel surface. It's Liquitex, another Liquitex product. Clear Gesso, not regular Gesso. Regular Gesso is white. You would just cover up your whole underpainting. This is clear. It also has a little grit, like a little sand in it. And that's what when you apply it, that's what causes the pastels to adhere to it. You can get some layering out of it. I will be applying it with just a foam brush, okay? So if you would like a foam brush, you could use a paintbrush too. But this gives a little bit more of a smooth application. Now, what are we gonna be painting? And then I'm gonna talk a little bit more. I'm gonna be painting from a painting. I recently did this watercolor painting over here. I was inspired by another watercolor artist and I tried this technique using a different reference photo of the sunlight shining through so brightly. So I'm going to try to do that in pastel. Alright, so once we have our surface ready, we've made our underpainting, we've put our clear Gesso on it, then we're gonna start painting with pastels. Now, I've had a few people say or I've heard it on some of our art groups that they have a hard time with the clear Gesso getting a smooth application. So that's why I'm also sharing my little technique of blending. I always like to do the first layer when I'm working on a surface prepared with clear Gesso. I always like to blend it. And I've been using these little chamois claws like you dry your cars with to blend the first layer. It really just knocks down some of that gritty look and makes a smooth underpainting. So it's a lot of fun. It's a neat technique. These things are always great. It's good to experiment as artists, right? So, alright, I think I've got it covered. Oh, you might need a pencil to get your little sketch in and maybe some tape to tape your board down. I just have this, by the way, on a little iPad holder. I've got a piece of tinfoil to catch my pastel dust right here. I've got my dirty iPad holder. People ask me all the time about that. And that way you don't get, with this little trough here, you don't get pastel everywhere. So that's all we're doing. We're gonna get ready and get to it. Here we go. I think I'll use the textured side of the watercolor paper. And often I'll just do like a little type of hinge system with my tape. This is just artist tape. I love my artist tape dispenser made by Lynn. This is such a great and practical tape dispenser. So, what I do is I put a piece on the back. So the sticky parts facing forward, just about halfway down. Let me go a little higher. Give myself some room here. And then I just put a piece on the top. The more you do this, the better you get at it. So, I've got a nice little hinge where I can just lift it up. And sometimes I will, if the paper warps at all, I'll put a little water on the back and it flattens it right back out again. Alright, so let's go ahead and get a little sketch in. And then I'll choose the pastel colors to do for the underpainting, which should be fun. I'm not yet sure if I want to do. I think I'll just do local color with this one. Alright, so here we go. Now, how am I gonna convert this to a long format? Well, first of all, I know my main point of interest is right in here with these poppies, okay? And I don't want this right in the middle. It's almost in the middle in this image. So, I think I want my sun light part. I'm gonna keep the paper pretty much white here. I'm gonna see if I can do this. This is, I should not be experimenting so much with a video, right? Or I should have at least tried this first. Alright, so let's get a little sketch in here. I think I do want these poppies kind of high. I don't want it totally off the paper here. But I like the size of these poppies. And I like kind of the shapes of them. So, just some poppies in here like this. I do like some, I'm limited in how much I can do here because of the format. We're gonna have the sun like right here shining through. I'll make a lot, a nice light little line, maybe a little lower because it's right there. Let's do the sun kind of right in here, okay? Right in this area. I'll keep it really light. Alright, I know now I want my mountains kind of in a back third. So, I'm gonna pull, I want a little bit more sky and sun. So, let me pull my, or mountains or trees. It doesn't matter which one these are. I kind of like the hill kind of coming up a little bit too. So, let's get some of these, these trees, mountains or whatever they are in on sides like that. This doesn't have to be specific at all, okay? And then let's get in. I do like this little guy peeking up here kind of tall, but I also like this one little flower here. And it may end up being kind of in front of one of these mountains here. Yeah, maybe like right in here for this poppy, okay? And then maybe this little guy kind of coming up and maybe like right in here and like that, okay? And let's get a few more of these poppies in here. They're kind of just dancing around. Everything kind of reaching up to the sun. Like this is the star over here and everybody's looking towards the sun. They're all kind of reaching that way. And I may want another little seed head maybe a few more down in here looking up. And now we're gonna have some that are smaller back in here. So I'm just drawing some of my larger poppies. I did like how this one down here is gonna have the center showing something like this. And then maybe just a few more. I think I had this one with a little center. So we're kind of coming in and around with a few. I'll make some of these more focal than others. All right, let's see here. That's probably good for now. I don't want to get it too busy. I'm gonna kind of bury some of these. But I may have another little one like maybe just down in here. I'm trying to avoid a pattern. I might lose this one. All right, so that's that's a general idea of the little sketch, okay? Now all we have to do is put some pastel down. I do think I might make this one. I feel these are kind of touching. I just kind of stepped away and I could see it. And I think I want this one up even a little higher. I'm gonna make kind of the base to this one here. Make it up even higher. That feels better. Okay, they were a little too close together. All right, so now we're just going to add a little filler in there as I work. Now we're just going to get some pastels in here. I think I am going to do local color for this. I think if I tried to keep the light of the sky and I do some kind of complementary color, it would be a little rough. So what I'm going to do is grab, I gotta get my tissue to clean my pastels. I had someone mention on, I don't know, Instagram somewhere where I had done an image of some of my pastels. And they were like, how did you keep your pastels so clean? But I clean them as I work. It's just become a habit of using a box of tissue. And if it's dirty, I clean it. Let's just get some color here. I'm going to try to avoid this area right in here. I want the sun. Where was it? Right in here. Okay, so I'm going to get some blue in here. It almost makes kind of a V. I think I might even keep. Okay, and let's get a little bit of a kind of like a golden color. Maybe more like this might be too dark. Let's see. Let's check that a little later. I'm going to get a little bit of a reddish pink. Let's see what we've got here. This is a little dark something along that family, maybe like this one. The pastels I'm using over here is just my, I always call it my in between box. It's a little storage system I made just for putting my pastels when I'm done with a painting. And I end up using this little set all the time because obviously it has colors in it that work. All right, so we're going to get a little bit of this color down in here. We've got really, really kind of a light. It's like a light yellow like this. This is kind of a really light color. Now it's not as light as you think. Sometimes you're like, you think it is and then it's not. Maybe this one's better right here. That's where the sunlight is. Okay, so those are the colors that I've used so far. And I think I'm going to go ahead and do some of my matte medium technique before I add any color to the flowers because I don't want it to contaminate. So this is the first time I'm trying it segmented like this. I wanted to address a question that one of my patrons had about whether or not we could actually, instead of using the matte medium at this stage, could we use clear liquid gesso and thus avoid having to apply the gesso later? And I thought that was a really neat suggestion. I haven't tried it yet, but it probably would work. You may have a little bit more of a textured feel or you could use that to your advantage by doing like I do here, which is rather like painting. So if anybody wants to try that and let me know that would be neat. But at this point I'll be using the matte medium. Like I said, it's kind of like painting with this little scrubby. And then I'll use the clear gesso after all of the matte medium blending is done to apply a layer of clear gesso to be able to add the pastel. You know, the clear gesso adds the grit that the pastel can hang on to. So thanks to, I can't remember who it was, whoever made that suggestion. And notice here too how I am turning the little scrubby to get a clean area to be able to blend the next color. And it's okay if they blend a little bit into each other as you can see here. And I just love that painterly feel that this little scrubby gives when using the matte medium. Now I'll let that dry. But while that's drying I'm going to start working on the grasses down here. I think I'm going to get me kind of a nice deep green here for the deeper grasses. I'll kind of work around with poppies a little bit. Okay and then we'll get a more of a, let me keep these over here, we'll get more of a little bit of a medium warm green in here. And now what's going to happen is the sunlight that's coming through here is going to make this all very very bright green. Okay so I'm going to get this kind of, maybe even, let me start with this one. This green right here and I'm going to work it kind of in here and it'll come up along the sides because the sun's not going to hit those as much. And then I'm going to get an even lighter green, this one's a little more yellowy. I'm going to use a little bit of this one right in here. It's coming like shining down through here. Then I'm going to get an even lighter green, this one's pretty light, for way back in here where the sun is meeting the horizon line. And by the way this matte medium, it dries pretty fast. That's already almost dry. All right so there's our, there's our base for our greens. I'm going to get that in and then I'll get our poppies in. This guy looks a little light now but we're going to shape it up with pastels. So let's get these greens in. I'm going to start at the top part and work my way down because I want to keep the light part uncontaminated. So here we go. I'm just going to dab it on here. Let's scrub it around like grasses. Isn't that fun? Now you can see the other color was a kind of light so but now you can see with this color how it really brings it to life and how the scrubby you can turn it and get a real painterly feel with this. Isn't that neat? I've covered up a lot of my flowers but I can totally re-establish them. We're going to add pastels anyway. You can even take a quarter and come up and add some more in there. Turn it a little and then at some point this is going to kind of start drying so you don't want to overwork it. Alright so we've got a base down. Now we'll wait for that to dry and add the poppies and I still have a few more corners I can use here. I can use the other side if you don't mind getting your hands all yucky. Alright guess what I forgot. I had already blended in the sky. I forgot about the mountains so I'm going to see if I can do this. I most likely can do this right over the map medium. So what I'm going to do with the mountains is I'm going to grab me kind of a darker purple medium purple for the sides further away from the sun and then I'm going to do a lighter one. Yeah this works actually. It kind of gives some neat texture because of the map medium on it. So they're kind of like a hill and then the ones coming in a little closer. I'm going to add a little bit of this lighter. I might even go three. Do more of this a little bit of a periwinkle too. So let's see here. Maybe add a little lighter in here. Periwinkle. I'm barely going to be able and I can kind of correct a lot of this with pastel as I start painting but alright that's probably good. Okay so let me go ahead now let's get some of these poppies in. Now here's what's going to be interesting about the poppies. I want them to appear translucent. It worked pretty well with watercolor paint because it has that inherent quality of the medium where you can just put down a light coat and you see the white of the paper through it. So I'm going to have to think about this. I think I'm going to go ahead and give an undertone to this poppy very golden and very light because I want this this is the area where the sun is. I want it to be, let's do this one like this color. I want it to be like just so see-through. Like that bright sun is just fading it out so much like in you can't see here but in the upper poppies in this one. So let's I think I'll grab this color again and we'll make the corner of this poppy. I can still sort of see it and let me add just a little bit of this golden to the other side of this one. Okay and then this one here. I'm going to go ahead and give actually some golden tips to most of them because the sun's kind of peeking over and they're catching some of that highlight and then I'm going to give some of these really really light pretty. I want these colors to be vibrant. Here's kind of a little brighter kind of a golden yellow in here. These sides here. Like I said we're putting matte medium on these and we can we're going to layer pastels on top of them like this one kind of reaching this way and these are going to get start getting deeper with some reddish colors. Orangey reds. Some pretty orangey reds. This is a gorgeous red right here. Let's get one of these ones. It's got a little bit more orange. I need one. You know what? I probably need my, oh let's see here. Is it the unison pastels that has some really, oh yeah here they are. Oh look at this color right there. That's so gorgeous. Okay so let's get some of these in here. Yeah it's pretty. Then they're getting deeper. We won't have as much of that color. Okay and then here's another nice unison. Nice pretty orange. Look at that. Oh that's so pretty. And these are okay if they're painterly. This is the underpainting. We will eventually add some reds but I think I'm going to leave the reds out until, oh this was my big one, until I get to the final layer of pastels. Let's do this one reaching out kind of this way. These can be reshapen. That's nice. Okay so I used a couple of unisons. That'll be a red that I use later. And I didn't even use that orange. Let me leave that one over here. Ooh I probably end up using these reds later. Oh my goodness down here. They're pretty. Okay so now let's, oh I forgot that little guy. Let's get that alright. Matte medium. Let's do the mountains and the poppies. I think I'll do the poppies first. And I'm gonna do these light ones first. I have a little much on that. I'm gonna wipe some off. Okay so I'm gonna get this light, actually this lightest one in first. Oh yeah you see that's gonna be like the sun's just shining right through that one. Now this one's reaching up. Painting so fun isn't it awesome? Got this one on top of that one. They were a little too segmented. Look at that. You see what I mean about the color coming alive? Got a little bit of color there. Gonna keep this one super light and reserve that for later. Alright so now let's get that mountain in. I feel like I gotta cover that in. Alright mountain time. And I didn't even get that little seed head in but maybe I can do it later. Okay let's grab this guy in here. That's cool. I'm gonna have to lighten that up a bit too. But there we go. There's some general underpainting in. See how I can almost paint with it? You just grab a color and just play around with it. Alright and now I want to show you some of this texture that you can see. We're using that little scrubby really gives a really neat textured surface. Isn't that cool? Alright and now it's time to add the clear gesso. It is dry and actually these end up drying quite flat. Okay so but you can always if your paper curls up a bit. My matte medium got stuck. You can brush a little water on the back of this watercolor paper and usually it'll flatten it right out. But I'm gonna do the clear gesso now. I'm gonna apply it with the foam brush and I'm gonna do like I did with the matte medium. I've been especially if it's a small painting I've been just applying it to the foam brush. It cuts out a step of finding a container. And then I usually just work top to bottom with a generous coat. Alright now can you see how clear that dried? And just listen. There's a little bit of a sanded surface to it. Now I am going to take and go ahead and adhere my painting. It's kind of sticking up a little bit there. So I'm gonna do the same thing I did with the top. Just press it down with the sticky side up. And now I love this technique because it allows you to paint to the edges. Alright? Instead of putting the tape over your painting. The final pastel application for this tutorial will be available in all real time on my Patreon page. And if you're curious about what a patron is on my Patreon page, it's a way that you can support this channel Monet Cafe and get extra content for just $5 a month. You can cancel at any time. But it's also a neat way for me to communicate with you guys and see your work. I love it. We have a great family of artists on my Patreon page. But don't worry Monet Cafe. You've gotten lots of content thus far. And you will see the remaining portion of this as a sped up version but not so sped up that you can't follow along. So you should be able to recreate this painting as well. And if you do recreate this painting, feel free to share it anywhere. I don't have a lot of restrictions. I do appreciate it if you mention this channel. Tag me. And you can tag me on Instagram at Susan Jenkins Artist. Please follow me as well. And on Facebook you can find my page and follow it at the art of Susan Jenkins. Alright enjoy this tutorial. I will be back. Please like and comment on this video. It really does help. So enjoy to the music and I'll be back at the end. I'm getting close to finishing here and you may notice I added a little glow on those mountains or trees, whatever they are in the distance. It doesn't really matter. And I actually, I think I ended up adding more blue. I really liked it better at this stage with that. Because when bright sunlight is back there it will affect the background trees. So you'll notice you're about to see the final in a minute. I did give it a spray of fixative in the foreground. I kind of wanted to darken that foreground, which I did. And I liked that. I added some more grasses. By the way, a question I get all the time is do you fix your paintings at the end? Do you spray them to protect them? No I don't, but sometimes I'll do a little fixative to give some of that little texture that almost like the little flecks there. And here you can see where I added more blue. I liked it kind of before. But I did like the final. I hope you liked this. I hope you learned. Look at that sense of light behind those flowers. That's what I was striving to achieve. So please like this video. Leave me a comment. I love to hear from you guys. And as always, happy and blessed painting.