 Welcome to Monet Café. I am so happy to bring you this tutorial with so much instruction of this lovely flower shop. It's more of a flower barn set in the midst of all of these wild flowers. I think the painting came out so bright because of a watercolor underpainting and believe it or not I used only one set of pastels so stay tuned to find out what set I used. If you haven't subscribed please do. I think you'll love it here. Also if you'd like to become a patron of mine on my Patreon page it's only $5 a month. It supports this channel to keep the free videos coming and you get extra goodies and I get to see your work. Alright let's get started. Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm happy you've joined me here today. It feels so good to be back in my studio. I've been away a little while. Some of you if you're a patron of mine for my Patreon page you know some of the challenges that my husband and I have been going through but it feels really good to be back and we have such a fun theme this month. It's called The Market. I was inspired when we were traveling to Mississippi by a farmer's market that was just so amazing. It's October as of the making of this video and it means a lot of places in the United States anyway. Not necessarily here in Florida so much but we're experiencing some of the changes in the weather and it's refreshing and so I thought this market was so beautiful with produce and handmade goods and kind of like a little street scene with people gathered around and pumpkins. So I thought what a neat theme to do produce stands, farmers market, fish market, bakery, any kind of a market. It could be the scene or it could also be individual items. So it should be a lot of fun and I think it's important that we stretch each other and ourselves artistically and in life. Goodness knows we've had a lot of things that have caused us to stretch ourselves and be confronted with change in 2020 and in my case in 2021 with the loss of my mother and my mother-in-law with her terminal illness. So the wonderful thing though is that I came up with this thought if nothing changes nothing changes. So think about that for a minute. So often these challenges and things that happen in life are a way to stretch us and grow us. So I'm often doing that to myself artistically and even this theme is going to do that for me. So I'm going to choose some market themed artwork or reference material to paint and I hope you'll come along with me for the fun this month. Alright here we go. Oh I almost forgot once again I'm wearing a t-shirt from Love in Faith. I love this company. Their t-shirts are so great and they have the most hopeful wonderful messages on them that the world definitely needs. Now this one says amazing grace how sweet the sound hallelujah. So if you would like one of these t-shirts or another one of your t-shirts I'll have a link in the description of this video where you can click it and also a coupon code. Because I know you guys sometimes like to see behind the scenes I thought I'd zoom out a bit and not only show you my products but kind of my setup and how I'm working. I'll be working I believe it or not in my small studio I have three stations where I paint with pastels or whatever I'm painting with and this is one of them it's on a large it's like a craft table but unfortunately it's discontinued I love this table and I am using a little table easel this is one that I got at Hobby Lobby I have all kinds of oh I even have some pliers back here I love this because it's easy to transport and it just sits here on my table I can move it if I need the space for cutting or anything I'll be working today from a piece of Fisher 400 sanded pastel paper I love the Fisher paper I think it's virtually literally like you are paper it behaves exactly the same way but it doesn't curl so I have found that it's better for me in Florida because my you are papers been curling a lot so I love this and I'll share everything on where to get it in the description of this video now I often like to go ahead and print out a reference image even though a lot of times I'll look at it on my iPad I'll print it out as well and sometimes I'll do a size that's equivalent to my surface I don't always do that but this size that I printed out over here is the same proportions and the same size as my surface here now what I did which I recommend a lot is to if I can get this off of here is to do a little small kind of like a little sample I did it first in just charcoal often I'll just do a little charcoal sketch or a value study which is also called a notan and I decided to add a little color to this one what I liked about this is how bright and sunny this building is everything really looks bright and sunny it almost looks like somebody's put a photo filter on this and this is from unsplash.com copyright free keep in mind if you paint from copyright free images I mean you can paint from them you can share them you can sell them but a lot of times shows don't allow if you're any kind of competition they want it to be your photograph so just a little hint on that but anyway it looks like they might have applied a little filter to it an antique filter or something or sepia so I liked the reference image but I decided to add to this I just had laying around sometimes you know you're like oh what's your strategy sometimes my strategy is what can I grab the fastest so I had these Arteza they sent me these watercolor pencils a while ago I don't use watercolor pencils a lot but I thought it's kind of a neat way to do a little color study so it's just on an index card and it even worked but my goal was to keep it light and bright and with that in mind this will be a pastel painting because I mean this is a pastel surface but I'm going to do it made me realize I want to do a watercolor under painting because I want to preserve that luminosity now this is not a white surface I actually really like working on a white surface for watercolor painting and one that you can do that with is pastel matte I love pastel matte and they have it in white so usually I'll do a watercolor painting on that but this kind of creamy color works just fine too so I think I'm gonna do a watercolor under painting with a bright concept in mind and then I will add pastels and then I'll talk about my pastel choices as well also to I'm gonna try once again to see if I can get this cat ride this camera second camera set up in all kinds of different ways so I got this new arm to hold my second camera and I'm gonna see if I can let you guys see my choices as I'm doing watercolor and pastel all right same part for me here we go oh yeah and if you saw over there that's Bob Ross and Leonardo has been attacking him a lot lately so Bob is learning he's got a back elbow some of you may you probably don't know I have a martial arts background I used to own a karate school so Leonardo has been really giving it to Bob and Bob's decided he's gotten smart he's using his palate as a defense so I'm so strange so you literally never know what you're gonna get on Monet cafe but it keeps things exciting right here I'm just showing you some of my watercolors that I will be using I have watercolor different watercolor products these are the Kotman watercolors made by Windsor Newton I find they're pretty affordable and these were some colors that I needed or wanted and I'm gonna be adding them to my little porcelain palette this isn't always how I work but I I keep my watercolor paints in a little box and I use these little porcelain palettes I think they were they were really affordable I believe I have these on my Amazon shop as well and what's neat about them is because they're porcelain they clean beautifully another color I'm adding to my palette is by M. Graham I love these watercolors and that's a Lizarin crimson it's a really nice red to have in your watercolor palette and one of my favorite colors I talk about a lot I I get it in different mediums is quinacridone gold this was by Da Vinci you see I've already had three different brands of watercolors it's just over the years I found different colors or brands that I've tried and so you know you can kind of mix things together so as I always say whatever you have so I'm re-establishing some color this is another color that I love it is quinacridone violet also by M. Graham it's just a nice magenta color and you can mix some really great purples by adding different blues and I also like the sap green made by Da Vinci as well all right I'm gonna speed up the watercolor portion because this video would be way too long if I had everything real time so let's get started with the watercolor let me first explain that I began using this watercolor brush I love it's called a Chinese watercolor brush I quickly switched though to this wider brush you see me using right now so I decided to use the wide flat brush because the Chinese watercolor brush while I love it on watercolor paper it was catching on the sanded surface and it was not behaving correctly behave watercolor brush so this large flat brush was perfect you'll see me switch to a brush it's a little smaller as I add some of the flowers now let me talk a little bit about watercolor underpainting on the surface really all I'm doing is getting in my big shapes you can see I gave a general sketch of the building because with something architectural you want to get your measurements right you've got to perspective to get things in correctly so just loose and I recommend using a charcoal pencil rather than a regular pencil for this pastel doesn't cover regular pencil very well here I am just getting in some of the flowers again just as a guide as to where things are and I do kind of want to preserve the light in a lot of this and that's why I chose to do the watercolor underpainting and I also added in another watercolor which is Pains Gray this makes a nice dark and in this image this flower barn there were dark areas one was the sign above right here two were the chalkboards that were on the open doors you'll see me paint those in just a minute but the other dark area is the opening in that barn the doors are opened up and you're seeing in obviously it's going to be dark and I later you'll see when I add the pastels it's so dark you can't really see what's in it I was having a hard time even in the reference image but I decided to add some little shelves and some flowers I had to keep it very subdued because it's dark so you'll see me do that later now I had a little heckler come around my studio that's my husband he's kind of sticking this new gadget he bought in my face and then he has to get Bob Ross to come in and interrupt me so he he really kind of frustrated me because I messed up some of my lines on my my chalkboards I fix it later I'm going to show you a little trick to kind of line things up perspective Lee okay now that might just look like a big mess so far but believe it or not it's exactly what you need an underpainting should be loose expressionistic and really just get in some of your big shapes and your values once again I want this light and bright also the shadows are going to be very important in this painting I'll talk about that in a bit I added some purple to that pains gray too just so you know and now it is time for pastels here's the exciting part I used only one set of soft pastels it is the Richard McKinley set of Terry Ludwig pastels you know I noticed on Dick Blick it's called the landscape set Richard McKinley and on Dakota pastels it's called the workshop set I looked at the colors on both and it looks like it's the same set maybe named differently if anybody knows contrary to that let me know but it is on my sheet called the Richard McKinley landscape set and currently I think it's a little cheaper on Dakota pastels as I always say though you don't have to have this set of pastels you can use what you have and just use some similar values and colors and you could actually recreate from this lesson with the medium of your choice pastels behave so similarly to acrylics and oils and gouache with respect to color and value now I wanted to go ahead and get in my light parts of this painting which is obviously that flower barn I'm calling it you'll see me occasionally correcting some of the angles even though my watercolor portion was very loose and painterly when you get right down to the nitty gritty with something like a structure I'm not going to over detail it but I've got to get some of these angles right so I come in later and I will show you how I do that with a metal ruler now you see I've plopped in my little second camera down there that shows the Richard McKinley set and you can see some of my color choices my elbow gets in the way I keep trying to find the best way to position this camera and it's definitely a bit of a challenge but I think you get the idea also to my patrons I'm speeding up this portion let me stop for a second I'm using a paper towel I use a lot of different blending tools even though I only blend usually at the beginning stages but a paper towel works really great as well okay now back to this Richard McKinley set my patrons will be getting a product guide to go along with this video it will show all of my water colors a picture of the palette also will show all of the colors that I used out of this Richard McKinley set all right now back to the painting this is the Terry Ludwig eggplant color it's called it's part of the Terry Ludwig Richard McKinley set once again using the paper towel to soften things now one thing you may have noticed from the reference photo and you can find this reference photo on unsplash.com I'll have a link in the description of this video but do you see the shadow that's on the top where you can see it obviously on the white siding the shadow is going to be cooler but there's also a shadow on that sign that you know blackish colored sign and so I have to make the bottom part of the sign lighter and I'm doing that by glazing some of that really pretty purple color in this set now I noticed these little chalkboards that are on the barn doors and I'll reiterate this these are barn doors that are open you're seeing the insides of these doors the chalk boards were rather dull probably from the Sun hitting them all the time so I didn't want to make them quite as dark and they're in the sunshine once again kind of blending them a little bit trying to make them look a little bit like a chalkboard and then I'm going to also add a little bit of that dark I noticed the frames of the chalkboards were darker so you'll see me continuing to work on these I don't want them to be just that purple color so you'll see me adding other colors that's the beauty about pastel and other mediums where you can layer is that you can get new color combinations you actually blend your colors rather than mixing colors on a palette you mix them right on your surface so now I'm adding a little bit of that pretty blue that's in the Terry Ludwig set and you start to see how the color of that chalkboard starts to become more interesting and I think it looked really chalkboard-ish by the time it's done now you have to stay tuned you're actually going to get to see me do the hand lettering on the chalkboards and the sign I also show you in Photoshop I changed the name on the reference image the name was look like some kind of family name and flowery and I changed it to happy acre farm and again I'll do a little quick Photoshop rendition of how I did that so lots in this video like I said at the beginning here I'm blending I wanted to get a little dark on this chalkboard on certain edges parts of the chalkboard also to I will be this is only sped up slightly here the painting took me probably I'd say probably a little over three hours I did it in I think a two-day period and I worked on it a bit then I had some other things I have to do oh my goodness the the things you have to do when you have a YouTube channel and a Patreon page and a lot of it if you're an artist who who has that if you're watching you know exactly what I'm talking about it is it's a lot of marketing a lot of social media every time I create a painting I have a certain process steps I go through you know you got to put it on your Etsy shop I put it on my fine art America shop this is available by the way as long as it is available in my Etsy shop and as the original and then I have a fine art America account where this will be available as a print they make excellent prints by the way I like their canvas prints because they're already ready to hang on the wall I always recommend getting the matte finish not the glossy finish so anyway I I'd like their products I like to order them myself so now I'm working you could see on the inside of that barn in the interior I put a little indication of a window I am at the end of this painting going to subtly put some things in the barn they have to be subtle because it's dark inside and I had to use my imagination because the inside of the barn was so dark in the photo now I'm establishing continuing to check angles and things making sure I get those right and I'm getting some of these shadows in the shadows that's what's going to make this barn pop I will put in what appears to be shadows that are too dark at first but as you've already seen the capability of layering I will continue to lighten them a bit by using some of the lighter color blues and lavenders I was trying to get in some of those Z patterns on the door you'll see me towards the end of the video getting that more established because of the actual painting time for this particular painting being a bit longer I am speeding this section up so I'm going to add some music but keep in mind let me share this this is a little blending tool looks like you could actually use like something you put your eye makeup on with an applicator but this is from the Pan pastel one of their applicators Pan pastel I gotta do another Pan pastel video but much of the stuff that I've talked about so far I shouldn't say stuff many of the techniques I've talked about thus far are ones that I'm continuing to use for this portion you can always slow this video up if you like and follow along that way you can pause it so enjoy to music now I'm going to be back at a portion where I'm talking a little bit more about using my metal ruler to establish angles so I'll be back enjoy the music more work on correcting some of the angles with my ruler technique my metal ruler from way back when I was in college in graphic design it's old like me it's a little bent but but anyway basically I just go along the edges get the angle that I need and take a pastel usually I do it like like say for example I need to make this edge lower here like the black part I actually wouldn't do it here on this side I'd come here and go a little bit underneath it so my black pass it's not black this eggplant pastel is within the the black area and sometimes these pastels are so thick you have to come down a little lower than you would think and just run along that way you can kind of correct some of your angles it's really a neat little technique now another thing that I do let me get a tissue and kind of clean this off so you can just do this with any straight edge another thing is I noticed there are I kind of made a little mark where some of the boards this is like a a board and baton or just a vertical siding on the building so what I did is I decided I wanted to have very subtly some of these vertical marks I do not want this overdone so I'm not going to get like a pastel and do it I'm getting a little pushpin basically what I'm doing is knocking off some of the pastel all right so all I'm going to do is take this ruler and put it I'm looking at kind of where this one is it's a little in from the chalkboard like right about here hold it down take my hope you can see take my little pushpin and just have to do a lot all it's doing is knocking off some pastel and it will make a real subtle little line see I don't want anything too strong this building is an interest point obviously it's big in the painting but I don't want to take too much away from the flowers that are going to be in the foreground and if I just keep adding detail upon detail that's going to detract from some of the other focal areas so now what I'm going to be doing is really trying to figure out this photo was hard to see you're probably getting a glare these are doors right here they're not the side of the building thus why the angles of these little chalkboards on the insides of the doors may appear off perspective Lee but it's because they're on the doors so I do need to give a little subtle indication of the little Z patterns I think yeah like a Z pattern on these doors which will help distinguish that just very subtly it's not a big deal and then finally after that I'm going to get to the actual flowers and foliage that's the fun part it's going to be all downhill after this much easier here is how I did the hand lettering I used a one of these great German made sharpeners I can't remember the name I'll put a link to it in the description and a white charcoal pencil and I kind of enjoy this hand lettering now I'm left-handed and I usually write that weird upside-down left-handed way so what I'm doing and what I often do when I have to keep my hand steady is I'm using my pinky you can kind of see there to balance or stabilize my hand and I'm just trying to kind of get in the chalkboard hand lettering doesn't have to be so perfect because it's like somebody just wrote this with chalk you know so it's not like it's a font or typed letters and now you can see it a little better alright here I am in Photoshop and this is not going to be a Photoshop lesson but I was basically wanting to change the name of the flower barn I had to adjust angles and change fonts I found some an idea of little flowers I would add underneath and as I said before my patrons you're going to get a downloadable version of this altered image with happy acre farms on it so that should be helpful to you who are recreating it oh and I can't wait to see what you do patrons I love to see your work in our homework album alright so here I go again I'm making sure I have my angles right using my push pin and my metal ruler I am gonna speed up this sign portion once again just to kind of get this video on going so it's not like three hours long and I'll get back to the portion where I do the background that's the fun part I have to mention that I did use some pastel pencils these are Geoconda a set of 48 pastel pencils I've had these for years because I don't use them often you could use regular pastels for this you don't even have to do anything as detailed as I did here so I wanted to make sure I mentioned that I did use these because I didn't say that early on and after I finish up the sign I need to do one more chalkboard I really did have fun with this painting and I loved the end result it felt bright and happy and boy was I thankful to be able to get to landscape painting it really is a lot easier to me than architectural types of drawings because you just really have to be careful like I mentioned before about getting your angles and your perspective correct and when you paint a tree a bush and there's a lot more freedom I mean you still do have you know some basic rules and things you have to follow but this part was a lot of fun now I'm using this darkest Terry Ludwig in the set the darkest green I should say it has a really nice set of cool greens if you see me doing areas that look kind of like branches I'm just using that edge of the pastel now I'm using my paper towel again to blend that's all I used to blend in this whole video it works really great but notice how this building all of a sudden pops right now do you know why well it's a focal point strategy your eye goes to things that are highest contrast which is something really dark next to something really light now where's the darkest dark and the lightest light those background trees and that light building so it really does make the building stand out I add a few more darks there were flowers growing up below that's just showing you right there some of the flower colors in this Terry Ludwig set it had some really beautiful coral colors and I'm using kind of the darkest one of those colors now and then I just gradually use the lighter values to layer on top that's typically that a good flower strategy back to contrast you've got to have something dark to put something light on or it's not going to show up so I just gradually lighten my values as I work on the flowers and this is one pastel right there the only other pastel I use that wasn't in the set and you wouldn't even have to it's a lighter Terry Ludwig pastel and it's from the Maggie price set and it is number R 460 Terry Ludwig R460 again you wouldn't even have to use that I I just grabbed it to get a little bit lighter now I wanted to add some pink in those flowers below to vary up the color a little bit and all of that was in that Richard McKinley set and I'm just popping in a few other little flowers a little randomness to it I wanted some golds as well and over here I don't want too much interest in this lower corner can anybody think about why well we don't want to pull the eye out of the painting we want to keep the eye in the painting and moving around the painting and if you have things too much detail on the edges it's it's just not a good focal point strategy so try to keep things subtle on the edges and not too much detail not too much contrast and that's usually a good way to operate now I used a little bit of the purple that was in the set popped in a little bit of I wish I this set had a more of a medium to dark purple so but the neat thing about this set I haven't used this set exclusively like this before I remember looking at it and thinking wow I'm surprised at how many light values are in the set it does have some good darks but in middle range to light values and I was hesitant to use it but here's what's neat about if you use a set and I know a lot of you guys are beginning you may not even have a whole decent set of pastels but this is for artists who maybe have purchased a set I would highly recommend trying to work from that set just to stretch yourself you will find yourself using colors and maybe values you haven't used before and now I also do recommend that once you've gotten enough oh these are the Prisma color new pastels I'm using for the stems let me make a note about this first and then I'll talk about pastel sets again this is real time and I'm using the edge of this pastel often I like to find out where I want the stem to end and to get an idea before I just haphazardly start drawing it or sketching it you want a real gestural feel your line can be broken and notice that I switched colors when I went to that flower that's on the left why do you think I would do that well once I make a mark you'll probably be able to see because it shows up if I had used that dark color on that dark background it wouldn't have shown up so typically your stems are going to be lighter when it's over a dark area and darker when it's over a light area if you want them to show up now I'm going to make some other random little grasses and leaves and things growing up and at first of course get the stems of many of the flower heads so they're not floating and back to pastel sets though if you are just starting often you start with a few sets and you can keep them in your sets for a while but when you get enough pastels it is a good idea to establish a workshop palette and later once you have a good palette sometimes you can keep your sets individual like I had now all I'm doing here I added some sky holes to those trees I'm just softening them a little bit with my finger and I'm really wrapping it up at this point except I wanted to share with you how I knew that it was so dark in the reference image in the inside of that barn that it was kind of just boring I didn't want a big black hole there so I decided to make some little shelves and some little very subdued little flower pots sitting on the shelves now why do you think I'm working with such dark values right now it's because it's inside and it's dark if I was to put a really light little pot of violets or a little pot of sunflowers and it would stand out like a sore thumb it would look like popcorn on a chalkboard that's the only thing I get to go so I'm using purposely dark values now this is the color that I chose for some flowers that are yellow like sunflowers and you see how it looks like the the shadows inside have dulled out the yellow color actually I learned something neat years ago I was like why can't you find a dark yellow a really dark yellow it just doesn't exist well brown is a dark yellow so isn't that neat this painting it was a lot of work with the perspective and the barn getting it correct but it was a lot of fun and it indeed felt happy to me it is very bright and cheery and I think that's what the world needs right now this painting is available on my Etsy shop and along with other paintings that I have on there I also have it available as prints and products if you happen to be one of my wonderful patrons for my patreon page you will get this edited image along with a patreon only product guide one of the perks for being a patron of mine also if you haven't found me on Instagram and Facebook please do so and if you recreate from my tutorials please tag me I love to see your work I hope you learned something new had fun and as always happy painting