 Welcome my very special friends in Monet Cafe. Join me today for this painting I call Peaceful Journey. I'm going to be featuring blue earth pastels. I love these pastels and using a limited palette. This is a great lesson for beginners. This is the resulting painting and I'm going to be sharing lots of tips, techniques and also some special announcements. And for your listening pleasure please enjoy this beautiful music by Hannah McFarland. You can find her on YouTube if you'd like to subscribe to her channel. Hello friends in Monet Cafe. Welcome to my home studio. Today I am doing a painting. I've got something very exciting to announce and I'm doing a painting based on a photograph from our member reference album that we have in our Facebook group, Monet Cafe Art Group. We have an album in our group. It's a private group but you can ask to join Monet Cafe Art Group and we have an album in there. Actually we're going to have to divide it up into multiple albums because there's so many photos in it where members can upload their own reference images to share with anyone who'd like to use them to paint from. So it's a nice free no copyright resource to get material to be able to paint from. Often it's very hard to find good reference images and we've got some artists in our group beginner to advanced all levels but that have some amazing photographic skills. So this is a photograph that was done by one of our members. So I'm using this one to do a little announcement, use it for painting, but I'm making an announcement about a new prize we have that we'll be able to give away for our winners in the Monet Cafe Art Group every month when we have our monthly painting challenge. So we're partnering with Dakota Pastels and many of you may know of Dakota Pastels. They are an amazing resource to be able to get pastel products, papers, pastels, storage for your pastels and their own brand Blue Earth Pastels. So I am officially announcing that we're going to be giving prizes from Dakota Pastels for the next for the six months starting in June. June through December and maybe even on after that and some more hopeful exciting news coming down the pike. I'll let you know about that. But for today I'm going to be featuring a little starter set that Dakota Pastels offers and sells and they provided one for me and I'm going to be using just this little 12 piece starter. I think it's 12. I have to check this little starter set just to show that you can get started with something small and and I'm going to be featuring their own Blue Earth Pastels. So I'm going to be using this reference photo on a piece of UART sanded paper. I talk about UART paper a lot. It's a great sandpaper. If you're not familiar with pastel paintings, sanded paper, you hear that, is the best to use for pastel painting. I've seen some amazing work on paper that doesn't have a grit or sand sanded surface and I do some homemade surfaces myself in my videos but you really get some great results with the sanded surface. So I'm going to do UART paper today and this is from a pack. This is my last sheet in here so I've got to wear some more. They come in various packs and various sizes but this is a 9 by 12. It has 10 sheets in it pack of paper and I don't always do the 9 by 12 size. I'll cut it up to the size I need but for today I'm going to be doing an 8 by 10 format from this particular reference photo. So let's get started and I'm going to show you the Blue Earth Pastels. All right so now here is the little 12 sampler set. It's called the Primary Sampler 12 from Blue Earth Pastels. This is Dakota Pastels own brand of pastels. I absolutely love the presentation of this. Now I have to admit I already opened the box and I decided oh I better close it all back up because I want to do like a product reveal. Okay so so I already opened the box and they have this nice little instruction sheet here about how to remove the packaging to get to the pastels and the reason they have that is because of what I like so much about their presentation. Once you remove this little foam piece here look at this. It looks very digital because most pastel companies display and package their pastels obviously laying out flat whereas Dakota Pastels puts theirs in upright like this. So it really makes for a neat appearance just seeing all the little squares very digital like I said. So what the instruction says is to peel back and remove top layer of foam to expose the pastels and I'll do a video edit here while I'll show this closer. All right so now all I'm doing is kind of pulling the foam back to expose the pastels just being kind of gentle with them and what I like about the way they have presented their pastels is that they have them in that neat they have them make sure I'm in the picture here they have them arranged according to value. The top row if you squint your eyes the top row is going to be your lightest values they're the lightest and brightest the middle is going to be your middle values and the bottom is going to be your darkest values okay so that's already a nice little way if you're using it right from this box to kind of know what your lights, middles and dark values are. If you're just getting started with pastels I would recommend that's one of the first things you focus on in painting even before color is learning to see values. Now I'm going to pull one of these out so you can kind of see what it looks like. I actually like pastels that aren't too long because I break mine anyway. This is such a nice little size it's very easy to use I wouldn't even have to break this one I love this size and I also like that notice how they have the the number of the pastel right there on it kind of like engraved in it which is really cool oh you can tell they're so soft look at it just coming off on my finger these are going to work so great but I also like that they don't have wrappers if you have bought many pastel sets before you may be like me in that it's really very tedious to take all of the wrappers off of the pastels so this is very convenient they're just they're ready to go like this okay I will most likely you know get more of these and incorporate them into my bigger workshop set of pastels by the way we have a lot of people in our facebook group who have I put out a little announcement about Dakota pastels or blue earth pastels and ask who had them oh we just got a plethora of positive responses of how people love these pastels so this is going to be a lot of fun all right so here's the up close of the packaging I love their little logo too the little turtle I think it's like a maybe like a sea turtle I'm pretty fond of turtles all right so it is the primary sampler 12 so let's get started on this painting and we will prove that you can start small and actually accomplish good things with pastels let's do it I wanted to also give you guys a little snippet while I'm visiting their website here I mean they truly are your pastel specialist I mean look at their all things pastel so if you're interested in this medium this is a great place to visit one neat thing they have to hear is some sampler sets all right so if you are just confused about what pastels are soft medium hard what brands do what this is a great way to not spend an arm and a leg and get to sample a lot of these all right so here are the actual pastel sampler sets there is a soft blue now these are your softer pastels and and now you may say all those 55 for just a little bit of pastels but I tell you what you will save in having rather than having to buy full sets of each one of these brands these are some of your really nice pastels here okay so you get various colors and various brands of soft pastels to try this happens to be you can look at them if you've been doing this a while and know that's a terry Ludwig pastel this looks like one of their very own brands Dakota's brand of pastels which is the blue earth pastels we got a unison I'm not going to name them all okay but you've got some really really awesome pastels here now they also have well let me go back real quick they have a dark soft dark green set and then they also have well that was called the soft sampler dark they also have medium consistencies there's not as soft they're medium to harder pastels I think this was neat they even have a pan pastel with an applicator for you to practice with okay it's got some new pastels in here Rembrandt so you get to play around with which ones are harder which ones were softer if you're going to do these I'd buy one of the softs and perhaps this this medium set too I use a combination of soft medium and hard pastels in my work so anyway I just think that's very neat and again they have a little bit of everything on this site they've even got books and videos that some of these books I have I have loved this book here oh my gosh if I keep going through all these we'll be here all day oh my gosh this Richard McKinley book is awesome oh my gosh Elizabeth Maori I love her work so anyway again Dakota art pastels truly has you hooked up if you need pastel supplies there is one other thing I wanted to share I promise I am going to paint at some point this is what I think it's called a pastel lineup it's a card that Dakota pastels makes showing you every brand of pastel it categorizes them whether they're soft medium or hard I always think of Goldilocks the story of the the beds too hard too soft but anyway this is such a valuable card to have if you're new in pastels I actually have this in our Monet Cafe art group on Facebook I have this card in our files section let me pull my hand down so you could see it but you can get this at Dakota pastels.com I think they might even send you one of these free don't hold me to that maybe but also I wanted to mention too this lovely painting you see here is by one of our artist I love her work Jennifer Evan House Evan Evan Hus I'm not even sure how to say her name but I love her work but anyway she is actually a member of our Monet Cafe art group in Facebook okay it is painting time now I'm speeding this up a bit here because this is just the sketch part and you may notice to the left of my left hand I have two little samples or sketches I did the one on the top I actually just did a value sketch with charcoal and then I went ahead and added some color to it the bottom one that was just on regular paper the bottom one I actually did on a piece of art spectrum sanded paper and I was just playing around with the Dakota sampler set and now I'm actually using the blue earth pastels 12-piece sampler set to just get in pretty much like a value study now let me mention here I am still speeding this up a bit because I mean you kind of get the idea I fell in love with these pastels oh my gosh they're buttery they're awesome but what I particularly love I often turn pastels on their side and a pet peeve of mine is when a pastel manufacturer doesn't have a smooth consistency to the pastel you end up with edges that are not consistent and solid when you go to make a mark these are manufactured so smoothly that when you make a mark you get the whole side or swatch of that pastel as you're as you're using it they're very very consistent and again I love the size it is really perfect for my mark making style yours might be different but you've got some nice edges too often you know with grasses or anything you need a finer line you can just turn them on their edge again you could turn them on the the little digital square side if you needed smaller like bands of color or marks now as you can see here I've put in the darkest blue of the sampler set for those trees that are in the shadow you can kind of look at the reference photo and get an idea where the darkest darks are the medium values are going to be some of those other trees I know everything is green in the scene but you can convert everything to value and not worry about the color here so I'm using that red there actually red this bright red that you see here bold colors can be confusing they're actually a little darker in value than you typically think so anyway now I'm getting in some of those middle values um the obviously the lightest value is the road and the sky the sky being the lightest value and then next would be the road then the flat grasses usually anything on a flat plane is going to be lighter in value than things on a vertical plane like trees are vertical now I'm just taking my little piece of handy dandy pipe foam insulation this is a teeny piece I have pipe foam insulation can be bought at any hardware store and it's just a great blending tool I kind of blend my things in sections because I don't want it to converge with everything else so often I have a paper towel in my hand below you can't see um when I go from one value to another I'm kind of wiping it off a little bit so I don't bring that dark blue like down into the road but as you can see here um emerging when you blend it in is really like a little value study of the uh reference image you you kind of squint your eyes and you get an idea even though it's done in colors that you wouldn't expect so my point here is if you've got three values you've got something to work with now here is where I start adding um some additional colors and again I don't think I had any more than 25 pastels for the entire painting um and and like you saw I basically just did a value study with the 12 piece sampler set oh please ignore my messy hair in this that's the advantage of being able to just get up have your studio in your home get up out of bed and uh not even brush your hair and just go to your easel that's so cool but don't film yourself if you care about what your hair looks like anyway um so now I'm adding colors on top of the basic value study I did with the 12 piece sampler set I love adding purples for shadows so I basically I think I had a a lighter value purple a meeting medium value purple and a little darker value purple and obviously um I use those as we talk about a lot darker values are typically more in the foreground lighter values in the back but in this case we do have some very dark shadow areas where those back trees are I mean that's common sense you can see that's dark um so I use them according to where they would be in the scene now I am using I pulled some greens I got more of a little darker value green a medium value green and a lighter value green so that was six more of the pastels I had and then I did get some cooler greens leaning a little more towards blue now I'm using those back there because those trees are further away I do bring that one that's in the shadow area it is probably the furthest away the one back at the end of the road there but they're still going to have some green in them I mean we talk a lot or I talk a lot my videos about you don't have to always do every color exactly like you see in the photo we have our artistic license to exaggerate things and in art we can make things appear we can make it more colorful and we can give that illusion of things being more in the distance by cooling them off so now I'm using some of my cooler greens that I got I got kind of a grassy cooler green for some of those grasses in the back and now I got a little bit of a darker now I keep switching so fast with this because it's a I sped it up but I've got some of my warmer greens for that little bushy area that's kind of in front of the trees to the left kind of in the left middle a little higher those are warmer greens now the greens are just going to keep getting warmer by warmer I mean more towards the yellow end of the color wheel as they come to the foreground warmer things in the foreground cooler things in the background now I wanted to even though my little samples I did to the left I didn't have them with a blue sky I just used even more of a limited palette with those I thought I'd go ahead and pull in a blue sky and typically what you want to do is this painting would look very segmented if I didn't incorporate some of those colors that I put in the blue sky and in the cooler areas of those trees I need to incorporate them throughout the painting somewhere so I actually use some of those blues in the road there's some lighter areas in the road if you squint your eyes and look at the reference image you can see there's kind of some lighter areas on the left side of the road a little bit more than the right side of the road but you know you just kind of keep squinting squint keep playing with color and before you know it it starts to look like something now I did kind of like how those warmer tones of the sampler set the yellows and the reds that I put down on the grassy parts they provide a good dirt colored foundation to lay your grasses on top of now I do have kind of a neutral purple right here neutrals are very good to use in your art so that not every color is screaming it just kind of is a a nice soothing way to just let the eye relax and the bolder colors you'd let the viewer you take the viewer where you want to go now this was a I wanted to reinforce the darks I felt it needed to be a little darker it's a little too dark here standing out so I do tone this down but it did reinforce the darks now you don't want your darks everywhere but in the reference photo I know that at the borders of some of those grasses even though it doesn't look real dark here there's little edges of darkness so that's why I kind of put them at the base of the grasses that's going to make that pull it forward and give that illusion of the things in the front are closer and the things in the back are further away all right I'm just going to keep painting here you guys get the idea I do hope you've learned a lot in this I'm going to pop back in at the end of the video so don't quit watching oh and by the way I always forget I know it's it would help my youtube channel if I would say these things more often please like this video it really does help with my youtube performance and just kind of in the youtube world your videos get shared more the more people like them please comment on them I love to respond to your questions comment I love when you love the painting but if you have questions ask me I try to answer them also feel free to share this video that also helps me a lot you guys know I don't charge for any of this I mean and I'll just be honest with you the little bit that you get from youtube you know if you're thinking of starting youtube channel and you really need to get hundreds of thousands of subscribers before you make any money if you monetize your video mine are monetized that's why you see a little a little ad at the beginning you really can watch it for a few seconds and skip it if you want but you're not going to make a killing on youtube unless you really have a whole bunch of subscribers but anyway it does help me if you like share and comment on these videos so keep watching and I'll pop back in soon well there you have it a painting created from the 12 piece sampler set from dakota pastels their blue earth pastels and only um more to make a total of about 25 pastels so you can create with small amounts of supplies and please again thanks for watching please subscribe like share and as always happy happy painting