 Hello friends and subscribers and first time visitors. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today I'm here in my studio that I call Monet Café, it's just my home studio, where I love to share with you guys. And the reason I have a passion for sharing videos like this is because I think there's a lot of you out there like me. I did not have a lot of art training other than majoring in graphic design and I learned literally everything I know about painting, pastel painting and in particular, even watercolor painting and acrylic painting, I have learned from videos and from websites and from other artists willing to share online. So that's why I love to share these. Now that I have had a lot of experience in this and I'm an artist now, I think, wow, I gotta give back. So that's why I love doing these videos for you guys. So today I'm going to be doing a pastel painting. I'm going to be doing it on a prepared surface, a homemade surface. And if you don't know how to do this, I have some other videos that you can go back and check out and how to make your own pastel surface. Otherwise, you can just use a pastel paper, a good sanded paper. So anyway, this is going to be a landscape. I've got a reference photo here that I'm going to be using that I like the composition for and the feel of it. And if you have seen some of my other work, you know, I love the loose impressionistic style. So I'm going to be keeping this one loose. And I'm just so glad you're here with me today. And I hope you learned something new. I'm going to keep some real time, maybe speed it up a little bit, but I know you guys like some of the real time footage where I give instruction along the way. So I'm going to try to do that today. So anyway, I'm so glad you're here. Let's have a good time doing this. All right, so the first thing that I'm going to be doing to my already prepared surface, again, check out the video if you want to know how to do this. Otherwise, you could just tone a piece of pastel paper to whatever mood you want to set in the background. I love an underpainting, it just really helps me. So what I'm going to be doing first is making just a quick and general sketch of the composition. Now, I already have a nice composition going here. I try to do that ahead of time in my photograph. If I don't like it, I try to, you know, find some kind of little app or software, something that I can manipulate to get the composition that I want. So I've got a nice little grouping of some pine trees in here. There's a lot of light showing through this. They go all the way up out of the top of the scene here. This might be a little lower. I like, we've talked in other videos about a good composition is to keep the rule of thirds in mind. In other words, I don't want this horizon line right smack dab in the middle. I try to keep it up a little bit and this back over here goes kind of up towards the top of the composition. So it's helping with that rule of thirds. I've got kind of the horizon line back here with a nice sky. And then I've got a grouping of some trees that are kind of off over here. Some of this changes as I go along, but this just gives me a general idea. So I'm gonna be quiet here and just work on this composition. Well, I'm already seeing this seems to happen even when there's not a road in the composition. I start to do the sketch and I just see where there should be a road. And it just feels like, and I don't think this should be a definite road, maybe more like a little trail or something. But I'm just seeing where it might be a neat little way to draw the eye kind of into this meandering around in here. We've got in general, one, two, four kind of groupings of trees here. The first one is gonna be these closest ones, these pines. I may bring them a little bit, maybe a little bit further down here. I'm not gonna be doing too much more with the sketch. I'll show you more when I start to get the values in. But we've got this grouping of trees here, which is these pines that the tops go all the way off. Then we've got this grouping of trees, which is a little bit further back in distance that are right in this area. The pines actually come in front of this back tree a little bit. Then we've got this is the next closest group. And then we've got this field that kind of the reference photo actually, it might not look great. We've got this horizon line back here and then it's lower here. I might make it a little more sloping here to make it consistent. Anyway, so four groupings of trees here, here, here and the furthest ones are back here. That's gonna create some interest because these back trees are gonna have the lightest value. And I'm already seeing how the way these grasses go and everything can just let the eye just kind of flip around in the painting and draw it in where you would like it to go. So that's as fast as you can do a sketch. You don't have to do a whole lot. You're getting the basics in. You don't wanna get too fussy and detailed with the sketch part. And now I'm gonna go ahead and lay in a value underpainting that I've done in some previous videos with this color fix primer. It's a terracotta fine tooth color fix primer. It's basically four pastels. And so what it does is it has a grit itself in it that really helps the pastels adhere to it. But it also works as a value underpainting. It's darker than this surface here. So let's get started with this and it's gonna be a lot of fun. All right, so now here we go with the color fix primer as an underpainting. So what I'm doing now is putting down the darkest values. Sometimes I'll use a brush with this and sometimes I'll use a little foam brush that I have for bigger areas to get in. But I also sometimes if I don't need the area too dark, I will dilute it a little bit with water and get it a little bit lighter. But for right now, I'm gonna go ahead and get in some of these darker trees that are in the background. And as always, we don't want things samey samey. This tree is a little taller. This one's, they're kinda clumped together. This one's a little shorter. And then we've got one a little lower here in front that's gonna have some highlights on it to distinguish it as in front. Obviously the ones in the front are going to be taller than the ones in the back. So now I've got this little grouping of trees. I'm not diluting this at all by the way because trees are always darker. And in pastels, we start dark and go lighter. You can always put your lights on afterwards. Okay, so we've got these trees that are kind of going around this hill. Again, this is just to get in the big shapes. Actually, I'm seeing something that's kind of neat. Over back here, there's this far, this is gonna create some interest too. Far distant trees, really far back here that's just kind of neat. I'm putting that in there just to remind me that they're back there. And now, let's see here, we've got this grouping of trees here that even though there's light in these trees, we're gonna get the lights later when we add what's called the sky holes to these. We don't have to worry about those little spots. Sometimes I'll just take my brush and hold it a different way to get more creative strokes. It's thicker and darker down where the trunks are, of course, and it gets to be where it's finally at the bottom, just like a big mass of where you got all the weeds and all that kind of stuff. Now, I'm keeping an eye on my reference photo because it's a good composition, it's a good photo. So I don't wanna get so carried away and forget what I'm doing here with some of these. And there's a tree back here, like I said, it's behind these other pine trees, but it's really gonna be pretty dark back there. I don't like the consistency here. It's always better to have things look a little more free than just too consistent. Then it just starts to look, I don't know, cliche is a word I think of, where you don't want it to look like just everything was so planned and so perfect because things don't really happen that way in nature. Now, I do see behind these front pines is like another little row of some kind of smaller trees back in here behind it. And we're just gonna kind of catch a glimpse of those through everything. And right now, again, I'm just getting values in. Now, we've got these, I'm gonna get this a little thinner. We've got these tree trunks of these pines growing in here. And I really like how some of them are kind of angled, not going straight up and down. Then there's some in the back that are going straight up and down. And again, a lot of this could change as we put the pastels in. Then there's kind of a big space, or not a big space. These are kind of grouped and then there's a space. And then there's another one that's kind of thicker right in here. That might be too thick, but I can correct that later. And then again, some more other little ones back in here. There's another one right here that's thinner. It looks like it might be far away. There's one coming up kind of right in here. So trying to get some variety in these distances between the trees. And the pine trees, they've got, they're little groupings of leaves kind of coming out from, you start to, when you're an artist, you become just a student of God's world. And you start finding yourself, even when people are trying to have a conversation with you, you're like looking at trees and the horizon lines and everything. It's pretty awesome actually. Sometimes I think it's much better to focus on the beauty in God's world and then little worries and stresses of life, you know? It's just great. Now I'm covering up some of these trunks right now with these values, but I can reestablish them later with whatever colors and things I lay down. Okay, so we've got the front pines, we've got the bushes here, something kind of going on behind there. These distant trees and then even some more distant trees. All right, so we've got that kind of going on. Now down at the base here below these pines, there is still a lot more dark that I'll probably establish with pastels, but I'm just getting an idea right here. Now again, I'm seeing some sort of a little trailer road. I'll see what happens with it when I get the pastels going, but I'm seeing something kind of, and again, the things are gonna be just less or smaller in the distance and a lot larger and broader and more free in the foreground. Again, I think I'm just gonna hold my brush a little bit more creatively where I can just get some kind of randomness to it. This is gonna be like a row of grasses and they're gradually gonna go back here and we're gonna have different little clumps. So this, that and the other. All right, so we're getting the basics in here. I think I'm just gonna work a little bit here and you guys can just observe. Now I'm using this foam brush again. I've learned to get a lighter value by adding some water to it. Notice I put the darkest down here. I added some water and I just started letting it run out of the foam while it worked its way back. So I noticed the value of this field in this area is gonna be the lightest of the field. Actually, back here is gonna be the lightest right there but I still have water in this little foam piece here. So you see how I'm kind of getting, it's gonna go from darker to lighter in the distance and also goes from larger, broad things like these grasses to smaller. And in roads, you don't want a definite line when you have roads. So you try to sometimes just break that up a little bit. Okay, again, getting lighter and lighter as we go back. There is a shadow. It looks like the light source is coming this way and there's a shadow that runs across here. I want that to hold here. Again, I'm gonna keep that lighter back there and maybe not do a whole lot more here because I like keeping that glow underneath there. Just really pretty. Okay, so again, you see how this is just one tone or one shade of color and we can use it in different lightnesses and darknesses to get the whole value underpainting kind of going for this. Again, there's gonna be the lightest thing is going to be the sky, almost always in a landscape. You're gonna have a light sky and then you're going to have the darkest thing or typically the trees and things in the foreground. So that's a really quick basic value study and I think I'm actually gonna do something fun. This is the first time for me is trying something I learned from another artist. There's a beautiful pastel artist. She's actually beautiful herself and her work is beautiful. Her name is Bethany Fields and she uses this acrylic ink to get her darkest darks in her painting. I've never used it, but I bought it a couple of months ago and I've never had a chance to use it but I've always been curious to try it. So I'm gonna give this a shot. This particular color is, let me find it on here. I actually wanted to get a purple that was a darker purple than this one. This one's called Velvet Violet. There's one, I think it's called Purple Lake. It's a darker purple and I love purples. My favorite color and I use it a lot for shadows and other things in paintings but that's not gonna be dark enough for these trees and those values. To get the darkest trees, I have another color here that I might try. This is just called Sepia and this one is called Burnt Umber. So you're gonna get to watch me try something first time here and I'll let you know what I think of it. So here we go, we're gonna put some of that down. All right, so the one that I determined had the darkest value was this one called Antelope Brown. And I did a little test with it. I also recommend keeping some sort of a paper or something where you can sample things on the side. I use just a piece of newsprint when I'm working to get my pastels clean. I just literally wipe them beside on the paper. And so it's also works well with this and that I can, I have sponges and all kinds of neat things to use. I just have a little piece of a sponge. I live near a place called Tarpon Springs and it's like the home of the sponges. They have the sponge docks there and I actually bought a big old bag of sponges there. So this has like a neat little random kind of a look to it. I'm probably gonna regret putting that there because that's where I like to wipe my pastels. But notice how dark that came out. So I'm going to attempt, let me get my reference photo pulled up again. I'm going to attempt to use this to get some of the darker values of these trees. Of course, the darkest ones are here and I'm just gonna kind of play around again, keeping it random and free. Yeah, I like the way this sponge has a neat effect to it. It doesn't look too perfect or anything. So getting those in and of course, the darkest dark is down here at the roots, the base. And that's giving me a nice dark value. Again, you just to establish these values early on is really gonna be the key to your work and helping you stay, keep colors correct, values correct, everything else as you go along in your painting. All right, those are nice. And these, even though they're further away, they do, let me rub this off a little bit, they do have a darker value too. Almost always trees that are vertical upright have darker values. And the neat thing is laying down a darker value. If you're doing a pastel painting, laying down, I might be in front of the work here, laying down darker values, you can always go back over and get them light. I got a little bit of that down too low. But again, that's all fixable. All right, so we're just getting that in there. We're keeping it kind of random. I'm gonna get some of these pine foliage that's going on up here. Again, it's the first time I've done this, but I think I will get to where I like it eventually. And most likely, as always, get better. I've got another color here that's more of a brown that I, yeah, that's what works pretty good too. As always, you kind of learn how things work and you establish new techniques as you go along. That's the joy of art, always learning. All right, so I've got some, a lot of darker values. I might spread that out a little bit to get it a little more random. I don't like fixed things. It's just, it's no fun when things are just so perfect and fixed. That's why sometimes it's actually good to work with your opposite hand. I'm left-handed and it's a real advantage for left-handed people because you're in a right-handed world and you tend to get good at right-handed things because you're forced to, you pretty much have to. Like for example, when I was a kid in school, they didn't have any left-handed scissors. So I had to learn to use right-handed scissors and a lot of other right-handed things. Okay, so again, I'm not liking some of this, the fixedness of everything. So this brush is breaking it up a little bit for me and giving me a little bit more of that looseness that I'm wanting. But I'm already, if I'm squinting my eyes, I'm seeing how I'm getting those values in and how that sky is gonna be coming through those trees. That's gonna be really neat. All right, I'm gonna get the sponge again. I think I need a little bit more. Actually, I'll use this other brown. Got a lighter brown here. Now, some of my darkest, dark, dark values are down in these grasses. Again, I'm kind of learning how this behaves and it seems like it dries pretty quickly, so I'm working fast. But I think you can start to see how you can actually start to get a little mini painting going on. Oh, my paper's falling. I hope I didn't run out of the, oh man, let me check it. So, let's get in some more of values. Then finally can get to the part I love, which is the color, the beautiful pastels. I like still letting that beautiful gold color shine through and not covering everything up too much because that's just something that keeps your painting consistent, having that beautiful underpainting kind of glow underneath it. Some of these grasses are just kind of, I liked this reference photo because things were just kind of flowing here, there, and everywhere. It's not like this perfectly moan field. You know, it's all kind of been left to grow wild, just kind of neat. This is fun. I think I am liking this product and I think I might use it again. There is a little bit of light coming in this area and it could be the reflection of the light coming from here, but I don't want to get it too dark. And these grasses that are growing here up are going to have some shadows on the back sides of them. Oh, the neat thing is this acrylic ink. You kind of smear it around a little bit. That's kind of fun. All right, well, we're getting somewhere. And I think I'm going to adhere this paper. It's sliding down on my easel. I don't want to get out of the frame. Don't like the line right there. I need to do something to kind of change that up. All right, now I think I will kind of let this go here and start establishing where everything is a little more correctly with the pastels. So what I do often is squint my eyes to see if my values are right. Another thing you can do is put your painting in low lighting. Low lighting is literally almost like squinting your eyes. So that will help you see, okay, what do I have my lightest lights and darkest darks and just compare it with your reference photo. And right now I'm just getting generalities and it's looking pretty good. I actually have a little bit of a darker in the sky right here, but I think I'm going to do that with the pastels and not with the acrylic inks. And I see my little doggy back here coming to visit me. You want to watch? Okay. All right, you can go up now. Bye. I have the value painting established for the most part and I'm going to be using a selection of pastels. I've already kind of analyzed the photo and come up with what I think might be a pleasing color palette. I want this to have mood. Obviously it already kind of does. Just, I like that dramatic, beautiful lighting and I think I'm going to try to keep this pretty dramatic in color and in mood. So first thing is we always work large to small. So we've already established value. We've established our big shapes. So now I'm going to start working on the bigger areas and getting the value consistent all over with the pastels. My light source, that's another very crucial thing in art is to determine where is your light? And it appears to me that the light source is coming from back behind here, almost like the sun has already set and some of the light is shining out this way. So we're going to go ahead and start establishing those colors in there, those values. This is just a harder pastel. It might be a Rembrandt or something. Also with pastels, you typically work your hardest pastels to your lightest, I mean, to your softest because the softer ones don't hold on as good unless you've got, or they fill up the tubes a lot. That's basically what they do and then you can't get anything else over it. So it doesn't always work that way because you don't always have a particular color in a hard or a soft. So you just kind of learn how to deal with it and everything gets easier as you go because you just have more experience. Sometimes it can seem like things are a little overwhelming at first. I don't think I want these lights over in here but as with everything, it just gets easier and easier. And beginning, eventually you get to where you don't even have to think about it anymore. I'm going to get a different value for that. It's a little bit too light, the one that I have. I've almost got some like an orangey colors going on in the sky, like a yellowy color. And yes, skies can be yellow. Skies can actually even be green if the light is right and there's a haze. So I'm getting some of this, more of an amber color, a goldeny color. It's not quite as red as that underpainting. So again, this is not to get anything just specific right here. I'm just getting the general idea of the feel. And if we get to where we work too much in one area, you get stuck on one spot, your painting is going to lose its harmony because it's just not going to be correctly balanced everywhere. I've got some darker blue sky color here but it's not quite that dark. See here, let me grab something else. Again, that's why I like this newsprint here. I can check my color and I can clean off my colors too. We've got some darker blues at the top of the skyline, perhaps not this dark, but we can gradually get it lighter as it comes down. Again, working on that dramatic color here. Whenever you do, I'm just adding these to check color. Whenever you do sky holes, the color is usually a little darker in the sky hole than it is on the surrounding sky, just a tad in value. Just see this color here, I love this color. This may seem a little dramatic right now but it's going to gradually come together. Now, as we're getting closer to this light source, those blues are gonna just keep getting lighter and lighter. Some of this is working from the photo and some of it's working from kind of instinct or imagination. And again, that stuff gets easier as you go. It's not something that happens immediately. You just start painting and painting and painting and painting and finally you're like, wow, you start to feel it. And that's pretty awesome. Okay, again, now I can start using this blue to kind of lighten up what's over here. Gonna add a little bit more of that dark, but I do like it. Bring it down into here a little more. It's almost like the sky is exploding out, you know? There's a little bit more of this darker, maybe not that dark along this. Sometimes your pastel is just rough and it's not a good spot to work with so you have to kind of play around, yeah. See now that's coming off much better. It's almost like some purples over in this distant sky over here. Again, you wanna get the right value. Sometimes these little fellows are hard to hold too. I drop them a lot. Yeah, I like that purple, that's nice. I'm working carefully though because you can get your colors muddy quickly. If you just aren't paying attention, you just keep laying and laying and laying color down, it can get kind of muddy looking. So I don't want that, I wanna keep them fresh. Oh yeah, I like that, I like that. Okay, I'm gonna get a little bit more of other values and colors established before I get too serious and with the sky, but I'm liking the mood so I'm gonna go on from there. Now, even though these trees are already dark from that ink I used, acrylic ink, I'm still gonna get the darkest darks in here down at the base. Again, there's variety to these. We don't want them all just reaching straight up and I'll give some more definition to these trees to give them, make them look a little more realistic when I add the sky holes in there. I'm just getting one back in there, I'll get that one later. And notice how when I do things I'm kind of what you might call scumbling is a technique that you're letting it go a little bit of every way this way and that way I need a little bit more branches and things down in here so that things don't look so specific. All right, so we're getting some of those in there now. I feel like I want some kind of reaching out a little bit more here. Yeah, I have enough endomness going on. That might be a little much. Okay, so instead of getting too fussing on that I'm gonna obey my own advice and get to working somewhere else. So again, just getting the darkest values established. And I think I'm seeing where, yeah, if you want this to be kind of like the idea of the road, almost where it goes off into nothing. Not to cover up all of that beautiful glow with the underpainting. Okay, I do still have some of these trees are still darker right in here. And I've got, I already see I've got my, this tree line coming down too low here. I'm going to raise it up when I do more pastels back there. Just smoothing that out a little bit. I don't like to blend with my fingers too much but that was a little dark. Okay, so I'm squinting my eyes and looking at the basic colors and tones here. Okay, and always behind shadowed areas, your colors, your greens are gonna be cooler rather than a warm green. And this is a cooler green that I have here. It's cooler and it's not as bright in value. Light in value, I should say. Try to get this to where it looks like it's kind of going back behind those trees a little bit. And remember there was a shadow coming off of that group of trees there. And I love to share constantly about keeping things as just a suggestion rather than a definite. And with grasses and things like that in the distance especially, it's just a suggestion or almost a blanket of things instead of individual blades of grasses. I'm wanting to harmonize the blues going on here with over here. You don't want your colors to not play off of each other in the scene. So some of these blues are going to be helpful with that sky. Keep it look kind of consistent. And same in here, some of these grasses down in here are going to have some of those blues. And maybe even on this side of the grasses coming up. Keeping it loose, keeping it loose, not getting specific yet. Right now, I want to think about how I want to do this this road idea. Let me first just kind of get it in with a more of a purplish color because it is going to be still somewhat shadowy. And I don't like to do roads with anything that's a line or edge, I should say. They kind of go in and out of the other grasses that are surrounding it. So see how it's just a hint and it kind of leads your eye down that way a little bit. All right, again, still playing around with the composition and everything. Now we're going to have some of the warmer greens wherever the light is shining. And so let me get some of these in here. We've got a little bit more light in here. Still it's not, it's kind of a medium value in here because we've still got some shadows. And that's going to be even lighter back in here. Let me get one of these. This is kind of a lighter value, cool green. It's lighter than the ones that we put back here. And still on some of these grasses over here, they're going to be a little cooler, lighter in value, but cooler in temperature. All right, I'm stepping back to think about this. I do a lot of pondering and thinking with these. All right, just going to paint a while and I'll chime in if I think something's important. Okay, so I'm analyzing at this point and I'm liking the value and the color palette that I've got going on here, loving these purples and magintas in the background. The sky I'm having to now step back and hold off on a bit because this being the homemade surface that I make, it doesn't seem to have as much tooth as the already pre-made pastel papers have, such as UART and Ampersand, other varieties of pastel papers. So I have to be careful. There's pros and cons about that. The con or the negative is that you can't put as many layers down. The positive is that it makes you a little bit more meticulous and have what I like to call efficiency of stroke. You're more careful and you sort of have to think it out more than just going crazy and starting to put color down. So that's why I'm being a little careful right now, especially with the sky. I've got a lot of layers down already. And I wanna keep this moved. So I'm being careful, I usually get to this point when I'm painting where I step back, I look, I'll even take a break from it, go get a cup of coffee or watch a movie or something just to get away from it. So, but now I think I'm gonna get back started on this and hopefully keep it in the direction that it's going, which I'm liking. Well, it's coming along, again, trying not to overwork this like sometimes happens. If you're not careful and take your time, like I said, sometimes just step back away from it and analyze. So right now what I'm looking at doing is getting a bit more definition in some of these distant trees. It's a little, I like it loose, but there's a fine line between loose and messy. And so I'm gonna work on that a little bit more. Of course, I don't have all this filled in, this I want to have really loose. And because this is the closest in the foreground, these will be the biggest blades of grasses or whatever else is going on here. And I used to in my work, I would focus on doing detail here as well. And after years of working and looking at other art, I've learned that there are things you want to leave to the imagination and not let the eye get stuck coming into painting by focusing on the detail here. So a lot of times in the immediate foreground, I will keep it really impressionistic so that you just kind of come in and wander around with your eye. So that's the goal, that's where I'm trying to head a little more definition and finish this up. And I really love the color palette. It has like a late evening feel to it and just those brilliant oranges that are in it. And the underpainting really helps a lot with that. So let me finish this up. If you hear a tractor in the background, that's my husband working outside. But it just adds to the ambiance. I'm kidding. All right, here I go. Okay, so this is a point where I just step away for a little while and I just let the painting be, take a break and I'll probably do a little bit more to it. So I am so glad you were here with me today. And I hope you learned something. That's the goal of this always. And subscribe if you like my channel and feel free to come back and check for more videos. Okay, thanks guys. Happy painting.