 Hello beautiful artist and welcome into the studio. Why would you use an old beat up kind of tattered paintbrush with soft pastel painting? Well it's a technique I've been using for years and I think you're gonna be enchanted and love the fact that it's affordable it's easy and the results are so painterly and impressionistic. So it seems there is a value to old things after all. I grabbed my husband Todd and he said I didn't think I was that old. Me either. All right let's start this lesson. The surface I'll be using is pastel premier. It's a wonderful sanded pastel paper that is water-friendly and I have the full sheet taped to my board. It's 12 inches by 16 inches. I chose an initial palette of soft pastels with some very warm colors. You'll see why in a minute when I show you the reference image and I'm also now gonna show you this underpainting technique using this old tattered brush and one of my favorite products to use with soft pastel painting is acrylic inks and here's that beautiful reference image. It's from unsplash.com and I just loved the light shining through those trees. That's what I'm gonna try to capture. Before I use my old tattered brush technique I'm first going to get in just an initial value study and the pastel you just saw me showing is actually one that's been discontinued. It's a Prismacolor new pastel. I love their pastels. Not all of them are discontinued but this spruce blue color is. You could use anything you have. You could even use charcoal for this but I'm just blocking in some of the shapes from this reference image. I'm also using my fingers to just pull out some of the color to give that gesture of some of those shadows that are being cast from that beautiful sunset beyond the trees and this works quite well actually. Now I'm just getting in a little bit more value. This is gonna help me. When I use my brush technique it's gonna help me just kind of already know where things are and I don't have to think quite as much. So now I'm getting in a little bit more value with the Prismacolor new pastel. Notice the darkest things in the reference image are the trees and the foreground. Now I want to try to remove a lot of that white of the paper and I'm using a tool that's fortunately also very affordable. It is a piece of pipe foam insulation. Some people have said you could even use a pool noodle. It's kind of the same consistency but this is literally the foam that they use to insulate pipes like in the winter to keep them from freezing. You can get it at any hardware store and I just cut off a piece and use it for blending. You can throw these in the washer too or the sink and wash them off and reuse them. I also like using it for a painting tool of sorts. I grabbed some of the pastel that is still on the foam to just move into other places on the painting like I did in the sky there and now I'm just getting a few more darks for my foreground tree. That's the darkest element. Now let's have fun with this De La Rowney acrylic ink. This color is called Indigo and it's kind of the same color as the spruce blue pastel that I used and if you don't have an old paintbrush it doesn't have to be all that old as long as the end is kind of tattered and a rough texture. These are on Amazon quite affordable. You can get 24 of them for only $12. They do come wider as well. The brush I'm using is very similar to the one I just showed. You'll also need some water and I love to keep paper towels near me to control the flow of water. Now I dipped my brush in some water already and dabbed it off a little bit because I'm not going to be using this full strength everywhere for the painting or the underpainting I should say. So I have a little water on my brush not too much and I just dab it to the edge of the acrylic ink I put in my little dish and I pull a little bit of it up. I don't want to get water all into the whole dish. I might be using some of it full strength and now you should be able to see why an old and kind of frayed brush is great because it gives such a textural effect that really works great for landscape paintings. I have used in the past and I've seen other pastel artists use a fan brush for a technique like this and a fan brush is great as well but I find I just really like these old brushes like this or a new one that has the same texture to it. And so I'm just kind of going over my same value study but I'm getting in a bit more of the the texture of the grasses and it just makes for such a loose beginning that gets you off to a start where you already feel like you've got this foundation that your landscape painting has begun and you've got this great value study to begin with. Now here's a word of caution. Acrylic ink is not like watercolor it dries permanently so if you get an area down that's pretty dark like I did in one section. Once it dries you can't like add water and lighten it up. I wasn't that worried you see that little dark place down at the base of the tree. I wasn't that worried because I know I'm going to be adding pastels on top of this and darkening things up a bit anyway. And to have a little bit of value in the sky already from the Prismacolor new pastel but I diluted the ink a little bit more and I want to add some energy and some fun and dynamic mark making into the sky and I think you should be able to see that with one acrylic ink color you have a value study that's already so textural and loose to begin with. By the way you could do this with just the acrylic ink you don't have to do that Prismacolor or charcoal or whatever color you use for the underpainting at first. You could just totally do this with acrylic ink. I like to have a little roadmap before I start though. Alright now it's time for soft pastels. I first started focusing on that gorgeous golden glow in that little area that little focal area between the large tree and the middle tree there. And so I'm getting in some of my golden colors and I'm resisting the urge to go too light too soon. Often when we see something like this that has a source of light, a sun, we go for our lightest color. It's typically best with soft pastel painting to get in your darker richer values first and then add your brights afterwards in the highlighted areas. I'm going to zoom in a bit in just a second so you can see a little more clearly. So I'm literally just following the color and the value at this point in the reference image. It was already such a beautifully composed reference image to begin with. But you can see the lightest values other than the light in the sky is the sunset beyond the trees and where it's casting that light across the grasses. Actually you'll see that highlight on the grasses really take effect or take shape towards the end of this tutorial. As I mentioned earlier, this surface is a sanded pastel paper and I do like this pastel premier surface. It's not my favorite. It doesn't take quite as many layers but I really do like it a lot. Now if you are brand new to pastel painting you're like what the heck are you talking about? Yes when I say a sanded paper it is sanded like a hardware store sandpaper but you can get it in different textures or grits and you usually want them a little smoother than hardware store sandpaper and it's professional. It's not going to yellow over time. It's what's called archival. But as I always say use what you have. If you've been on my channel long you know I have all kinds of homemade ways to make your own soft pastel paper using clear gesso and also you can do things on unsanded paper as well. You just won't get the ability to layer quite as much. So with that said I wanted to make mention that I know that I'm going to be able to get a few layers with this. So my initial color and value applications are ones with that in mind. I'm getting in some color for these trees. I know these two distant trees as they recede into the distance. They're going to get lighter in value. That's what happens with value in real life. But as most pastel artists and even oil and acrylic artists work we typically with an opaque medium like this we get our darker values in first and we gradually add the light as we go. That's not like a hard and fast rule but it really is a good general rule to follow. And so now I'm using this kind of a magenta brownish magenta color to get in some of these shadowy areas in the grasses. And this month's theme in Monet Café is I was calling it what did I call it hello hot stuff and we were working from I say were because we're almost at the end of September working from the warm side of the color wheel. And I find that I don't work a lot on that side of the color wheel. I mean I'll pop in some sunflowers gold flowers but I don't usually use browns and some of the colors that I'm using here. So it was a good exercise for me to use some of those earthy colors that I don't often use. So that was one of the reasons I picked this reference image as well. I've sped this section up considerably because I'm just working with this green pastel to really block in some of that value in the grasses. And the rest of the video is sped up but not so fast that you can't follow along or if you can't you can always choose that gear icon on the YouTube screen. I think it's the lower right and you can choose your speed. You can slow this down watch it at your own leisure. Turn the volume down because I'll sound very strange. Put you on some nice music and then you can paint at a slower pace. So you can see I'm getting in these colors for the sky now and this stage of painting what I'm working on now is what's called blocking in. I'm literally getting in my general value. Values are usually your first priority and color in initially to kind of cover up the surface. I've got my under painting with my nice textural brush and now I'm getting in some of the basic sky colors and I'm primarily now focusing on getting in the values that I think will work well in the sky and also the energy the drama. I do exaggerate mine a little bit more than in the reference image but I love that kind of really fun and energetic mark making. And now I'm working a little bit more on where I see these pretty red and orangey colors and I'm sneaking them in back behind some of the trees. And if you like an impressionistic style like I do then using these chunky pastels actually works in your favor. I remember when I first started painting I created all these fine lines and details and my painting looked tight and uptight and it made me feel uptight because I was wanting to get that loose and painterly style that I saw in so many other artists. So when you make your marks don't worry about them being just so precise. Get the general liveliness of the the element that you're painting and a lot of it too is just your gestural and directional strokes. As you can see I'm not creating leaves right now. I'm just looking at where some of the values are and scumbling in some shapes. Now I did use a paint brush to brush out an area that I felt like there wasn't a branch to that tree there. So you can actually I wouldn't call it a racing pastel but you can brush off some of the pastel so that you can layer more on top of it if you see an area that you want to correct. And now a quick station break. If you've been enjoying this video I'd love it if you'd like it. Comment. I'd love to hear from you and subscribe to this channel. Become part of the family. Also if you would like the extra content I'm always talking about or just to support this channel I'd love for you to become a patron on my Patreon page. It's only $5 a month. It's a beautiful family of artists and I get to see your work. Now I'm just putting in some greens with a more horizontal stroke to some of these grasses that are further away and as I move forward my strokes become more vertical. That's how it works in real life too. You don't see vertical grasses way far in the distance. They look flat and horizontal. So now I'm really using this light source and its location as my guide. I'm following the photo but I'm also following my instinct to know that how things behave in the pathway of light. I know that the elements closer to the sun are going to be warmer. That's why some of those distant trees back there I made them almost a little magenta brownish because the sun is warming them up. Now I'm going to add a little bit of that lighter value. Remember how I said I got my darker orangey colors in first and then I add my lighter value on top and I wasn't trying to make a perfect circle with the sun. I just like to make a glow a shape that looks like a glowing sun. I wanted to add some more warmth to the sky. Notice to begin with I put in like some lavenders and kind of bluish colors as well. That was to really give the coolness part of the sky that's kind of beyond the clouds. Now I'm getting in some of the highlights underneath the clouds that will be warmer. Now when they're closer to the sun they're going to be lighter and warmer like those yellows I used. When they're further away from the sun they start to cool off. So what's a cooler, it might sound funny, a cooler yellow you're going to get more into your peachy tones and then finally as you get further away into your pink tones. So start to examine this in nature. The more you become a student of nature the more it's going to help you as an artist. Now I use my pipe foam insulation here. Because this paper was white and there was still a lot of it showing through I just wanted to soften things up and fill in some of that blank area and the pipe foam insulation worked well for that. I'm using this pretty magenta color to get in some of the sides of the the little valley ways. In the photo I couldn't tell were these just little valleys in the grass or was it a road. So I decided just to make it a road. So now I wanted to get fun with color, added a really bright red and again behind this tree I've got some darker values for shadows but I went with a pretty magenta. And now I've got a little orangy color I'm sneaking in. This part is fun. You'll also see me develop these trees as I go along with what's called sky holes. Rather than trying to paint the trees perfectly with their branches and the spaces between them I kind of paint my trees more as shapes or blobs and then I carve the sky in behind them. And when you do that keep in mind what is behind it. If there's a far bank of trees behind it you're going to use that color to carve in the shapes. If it's a sky you'll use those colors behind that part of the tree. You'll see me do that as I go along. Now I did want to lighten this tree up a little bit so I got kind of a pretty green. Put a little bit of it on that middle tree. A little bit of it on this foreground tree. Not too much because this tree is darker and is a bit more in shadow, quite a bit more in shadow than the one that we're seeing there. The one I'm working on there. So I'm just using this pastel. Again I'm not painting leaves I'm just kind of moving my pastel around with little directional strokes to kind of give the illusion or suggestion of foliage catching the light from the sun. Again consider the source of light. The things on our side of the trees is going to be darker and often a little cooler. This scene was very warm anyway so I resisted the urge to go with some of those cooler tones that I use or colors that I use. I often love purples and teals and so again this was a great lesson for me to work from the warm side of the color palette and try to focus more on those earthy warm colors. Now I decided to give a little bit of distant sunlight on a field way far back. Now this is a little bit of a teal kind of a neutral blue-green and because it's in the foreground here we've got some shadow. I really wanted to give that feeling of some shadow down into the grasses and I typically just try to look anywhere else in the painting that color might work. I might not necessarily see it in the reference image but if I know that value will work somewhere else and the color makes sense then I'll use it and what that does is it causes your painting to feel very harmonious. It's called color echoing where you have some of the similar colors throughout your painting so it feels very connected and it just has a pleasing and soothing feel to it and so I'm still using that little teal color there and it works. So I wanted to soften up some of my mark-making in the sky. I noticed this pastel premiere it's a little textural so I had to blend a little bit more than I normally do. I may be going crazy with this red but I'm like what the heck this is supposed to be a dramatic sunset so I'm going for it. I used a little gray to just kind of lighten up a color. I think I realized I lightened it too much so I got a little bit more of that brownish color in there and now here's a little bit more of that carving I talked about carving in in between the spaces of the tree like the the trunks and things like that. You'll see me do that just as the painting progresses and there we go right there. I'm putting in some of those little negative spaces. In other words it's the light that's shining through the tree foliage and the trunks. Now I've got a little bit of this pretty light yellow and you don't want to take it all the way up into the sky because it it starts to get darker in value as it goes up into the sky. I mean light has so far that it will travel before it starts to get a little darker and a little cooler. Because I have so much warmth in that glow of the sun and the red down on the land you'll see me later even more than I'm doing now or right now. Start to warm up the sky a little bit more. It was a little bit too cool it felt very disconnected from some of the warm colors I had in the land and the sun. So I'm using a little bit of a pink it's kind of a peachy pink and towards the end of the painting I realized I needed to warm it up even more. You'll see me do that with a pretty peachy color. All right now I want to work on this road like I said I decided to make it a road. Some roads will be like a almost like a peach color because it's a clay road like in Georgia they're red clay. But this I wanted it to give the feeling of almost like a gravel road and gravel roads are usually a little bit more gray you know blueish tones and so I gave a little bit of a light value. I'm trying to be careful here. I know the road's not going to be super light especially when it gets down where the shadowy areas are. Add a little bit of lavender just giving some color fun to this because there are going to be shadows even if it's a gravel road and some of the areas will be a little cooler in the shadow. Resist the urge just like with the leaves on the trees to feel like you got to paint gravel or draw gravel or whatever you want to call it because you're not going to see individual pebbles of gravel. You're just going to give the influence of it or the suggestion of it. Suggestion is a great word with painting if you want an impressionistic look. Don't spell everything out just suggest it. I knew that there was some dramatic shadows going on back there with sunlight so there's going to be some deeper shadows in this foreground and foregrounds typically have the darkest values anyway. As I said before values get lighter in the distance and they're usually darker and colors are usually richer in the foreground. So that's why I got that pretty. Oh my gosh I love that magenta color I used. Now I'm getting some of these greens and I'm making my trail or my road more broken. I don't want it to have a hard line. That was another mistake I made early on. I made my roads to where they almost had a line or curve just exactly with nothing you know kind of meandering into the road or the path and that's not how it works especially with gravel roads like this. You got little weeds and grasses growing amongst things. So I used the reference image as a guide to get most of those shadows in in the foreground I just did. Now here I'm carving in some more negative spaces and by the way there's a little clump right there to the the left of my hand there now it's to the right of my hand that little clump of a tree or weeds or something growing. I decided to lose that later in the painting. It just was bothering me so I brushed it out with a paint brush and just made that all field. So you have a lot of flexibility with soft pastel painting and it certainly is a lot of fun. I want to say thank you to all of those of you who have made comments letting me know that you're trying soft pastels you never even thought about trying this medium and you've been watching my videos and way to go because I tell you what I fell in love with this medium. I got started when my kids had gotten a bit older I mean they were still doing things like football and all that but I got a little bit more time and I almost quit pastel painting because I could not find lessons. They didn't have lessons on YouTube like they do now. I mean they probably had some but I didn't know about them. So I had to learn everything that I know online and that's how Monet Café started. I started sharing these things as I learned them. Now you might be wondering why am I putting this red on the grasses. It's not going to be quite that. I'm going to add some greens but I wanted that little bit of glow on the land that was kind of filtering through some of those spaces in the trees. You'll see me add some greens on top of that in a little while. This green was almost a little bit too strong. I think I used a little bit of it and realized yeah it's it's almost just doesn't work with the color palette. So I layer over it a bit later I think. All right still working with some of these beautiful just almost fall colors with the oranges and it's really getting that sense of distance and you know it's like I don't even know what kind of tree lines I painted back there. I just used values that give the suggestion of different levels of trees receding into the distance. Now's where I'm getting a little bit of those lighter values on some of the tops of the grasses and of course there are some grasses growing on the middle portion of that road. Now here's where I mentioned I'm just glazing over some of that red that I put down before. So I have an influence of the red light but it's not you know too harsh and now I'm warming up the green. Colors get warmer are warmer typically in the foreground and get cooler in the distance. Now in this case we've got this distant sunset glow so we obviously have warm colors in the distance. When you have a really direct source of light like that obviously there's going to be warm colors around it but in general that's how colors behave in a landscape in life. I'm turning these pastels kind of on their little side where they have the little ridge and making some little suggestions of grasses and I still have quite a bit of that texture showing through in the foreground. You can see the influence of that just that really textured brush that I used to create my underpainting and even though much of this painting gets covered up that underpainting still does have an influence and it's really a great way to start. Just sneaking in some little negative shapes behind that one tree. I needed some more value in the sky it was too light. We kind of want an ellipse if you if you're familiar with what an ellipse is in a photo or a painting. It's where the edges of something are darker and with painting often it's good to have like my focal areas that sunlight and have the edges of my painting a little bit darker not too light on the edges in other words. So that's why I added some of these darker colors and now's where I'm going to start adding some of these kind of peachy colors and I think I even get a little bit warmer with a little bit more orange. You can see the sky is still kind of broken and very textural which I kind of like but it was stealing a little attention away from some other things so I soften it up a little bit before the final painting and this is the stage of the painting where it's just kind of fun. I'm sneaking in some negative spaces in these tree shapes and if you have a hard time with that don't worry I did too. It takes you know just a lot of practice to get the feel for these negative painting between the tree shapes you know or behind the tree shapes. So now I'm really speeding this part up this is when I was I was making my final marks adding some of the highlights on the grasses and having fun at this point. This is when I'm just really seeing where I want to add my pops of color and really establish that focal point. There's where I kind of darkened the sky made it a bit more dramatic and now I'm going to show you the final and I decided to call this painting Psalm 113 which says from the rising of the sun to its setting the Lord is to be praised. I pray you learned a lot from this lesson I hope you'll leave me a comment give this video a thumbs up subscribe to this channel and I'd love it if you'd become a patron of mine on my Patreon page. We have such a beautiful family of artists you get extra content you support this channel and I get to see your work. Alright everyone god bless and happy painting.