 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm bringing you this special painting tutorial and demonstration in honor of my mom. My mama's name is June, so is my middle name, and she passed away a year ago this month, the month of May. And I'm going to go stay with my dad for the anniversary of that date, which is May 15th. And I just wanted to share this painting that I created pretty shortly after she passed away. I was at their beautiful property, staying with my dad. And you know, even in the midst of the grieving, I could feel her presence in their beautiful property that she just loved so much. She was actually quite the photographer herself, but you can see this place is like a piece of heaven. And I am so grateful that I have the hope of heaven and seeing my beautiful mama again. Right after she passed away, I came to this beautiful field in front of her house and I snapped these photos. And the birds were singing and the sun was radiant and I just could feel her with me. I decided to try and paint this scene and I had brought some art supplies with me when I had stayed with my dad last year around this time for about three months. And all those paintings, this is their beautiful basement I created while I was there. And as I always say, art is truly healing, right? So I am going to provide a bit of a tutorial here for you, explaining some of my products and techniques. And again, this is an honor of my mom. So here we go. I used a surface I had never used before, Luxe Archival. I'll talk more about it as I paint. I also used this set of Arteza pastels. It's 72 pastels and they had asked me to do a little product review. It is two sections within the box. They have some really bright colors in one of the little trays that they have. And I decided it might be a good idea to try these as an underpainting. The reason being is because they're a little harder. I would say more equivalent to a Rembrandt pastel. And I decided to do a wet underpainting. The Luxe Archival surface is water friendly. And I thought because these are harder pastels, it might be fun. I have two of the largest brushes I had with me. One was my Chinese watercolor brush and just another flat brush. Now I had brought my little spritzer bottle of alcohol. I like to use alcohol to wet pastels. You can also use water. Alcohol dries faster. And I believe it makes the pastels behave a little differently. Now, if you've watched many of my videos, you know, I like to do underpaintings, especially when I'm working on a surface. Luxe Archival is kind of white as compared to UART or the paper I use often Fisher 400, which is almost just like UART. These are sanded surfaces. And while you can buy a lot of surfaces that have a tone already to them, they might be a nice blue or burgundy or beige. Papers like this, especially Luxe Archival being white. It's a good idea to get down some color to block in large shapes or either just to tone it all one color. So I decided to use this is just a darker new pastel that I had. It's a harder dark pastel that's made by Prisma color. So I got in my darkest darks. Now I just broke one of the dark Arteza pastels that's I'd say the color is similar to the eggplant color of Terry Ludwig. Now this one's kind of a dark bluish almost leaning a little towards lavender or purple. It's really pretty. So what am I doing and why am I doing this? Well, I talk a lot in my videos about underpaintings, but I like to get in my big shapes and my values and some fun color to lay down underneath. So I decided to go ahead because the grass is green and get some pretty underlying tones. Often I'll do a warm color as an underpainting that it would be a compliment to the greens. Often in landscapes there are so many greens. I decided to go ahead and use some local color in the sky. Local color just means the color that's natural to the scene. So I got in a little bit of blue and so I'm just kind of working in these big shapes. And then when I add the water, it's going to make it very dreamy and impressionistic. And here I am adding a little bit of this red to even warm it up more. I know the sun's shining on this field. So I thought that might be nice. Now, what am I doing? I decided I'd never done this before. I thought, you know, if I've got my spritzer bottle and I'm going to be wetting these pastels that are already down, let me use gravity to my advantage. I got my sky in first and then I sprayed these trees. Now look at that. Isn't that a neat technique? I've got to remember that. I thought it was really fun. Of course, the trees won't be dripping that up into the sky. When I'm finished, I'll carve in my sky shapes. But I thought it just made such a neat impressionistic feel. So I'm doing the same thing. You may have noticed that I switched rather quickly from my Chinese brush to my regular flat brush. The reason was because it was catching on the sanded surface. Now this is just a little kind of like a soft sponge tool that I was using to kind of scrub in some of the pastels I had laid down. And the reason I did that is I wanted some large strokes. Those grasses in the foreground were kind of large and wide strokes and it worked better than just using the brush that was not quite able to get that effect. Now what is this? Oh my goodness, this was a set of Schminke pastels. It's a 120 half stick set. I apologize. This set to my knowledge is not available anymore. I don't know if they'll bring it back. I bought this set from Dakota Pastels obviously over a year ago. But I I'll go ahead and let you know they worked beautifully on this Luxe archival. Now I'm just reinforcing my darks here. I used that little Prismacolor new pastel. If you don't know what they are, they're kind of long rectangular pastels that are they lean more towards the harder pastels in the soft pastel lineup if that makes sense. And I wanted to get almost always trees are your darkest element and they gradually get lighter as they move into the distance. But I often like to get in almost like a little trail underneath all of the grasses. Now this is just a paper towel. You see how you know you can use so many different tools and elements to blend with and I always encourage explore, have fun. I am certainly always experimenting maybe too much. I wanted to bring that tree line down a little further there. And now I'm starting with the Shminka pastels. See how now even though the trees dripped up into the sky, this is what's called negative painting. It's carving in the sky into the trees. And another term for this is called sky holes. It's when the sky literally you put it behind the tree, you carve it into it instead of drawing each branch or making the shapes around the sky, you work negatively, you carve the sky into the tree line and it results in a much more painterly and impressionistic feel. Now notice I got in some of my darker cloud shapes first with kind of like a neutral taupe lavender color. And then I gradually start working in all of these beautiful colors in the sky around it. I do apologize. I'm speeding this video up because I am going to be leaving in just a day or so to go be with my dad for this one year anniversary of my mom's passing and and some of my other family members. I've got a lot to catch up on but I really wanted to share this video before I left. So you can see I'm just those by the way, every time you see me use the paper towel, I use a clean section. I don't want to contaminate. If I blend from the trees, I don't want to take it up into the sky to blend so you can see you know how this works quite well and this Luxe archival paper takes a lot of layering. It's a wonderful surface and um it was again this was really good for me. Again, I didn't know if I would even be able to paint but it's just like I always preach. Art is healing and it really does get your mind to a place that is peaceful and I also play most often when I play music, I play praise and worship music and I tell you my painting experience is an act of worship and praise and sometimes in my videos I have to actually cut out me raising my hands or just praising the Lord while I'm painting because it it is more than the physical product. It's it's a it's a worship experience for me. So I'm just working in some colors to give that effect of the distant tree line and the field was very beautifully green. It had a really pretty green tone to it. Um still notice too how I'm trying to work the whole painting. I worked on the sky a bit then I came and worked to the trees then I started on the field then I went back to work on the sky. I'll come down to the field a little bit more pretty soon but I find when I work the hole it keeps the painting very painterly and loose and it makes my values more accurate. If you have you ever done this you get stuck on one little part of your painting and you work it and you work it and you work it. Well, first of all, you're gonna muddy those pastels. The color will become dull then when you move on to the rest of your painting somehow the values don't really gel. They they are disconnected and it doesn't feel real like what it was in the moment or in that uh uh or in your reference photo. Um so pardon my big head that got in the way a lot here um but hopefully you can still see. So I do apologize for the sped up version of this but hopefully you can still follow it. I will include the reference image if you're a patron of mine and I am so grateful for my Patreon support after my mom is passing not only you know was was that just so hard on my life to even be able to to work but I had lost my other business due to COVID. So the people who have supported me on I had a bookkeeping business that was affiliated with the school systems and um so I lost that business. I lost my mama and with my husband and I we lost his mama that was living with us with terminal cancer. So all of that not to be negative but to say thank you to my patrons. You are what kept me going. My husband and I both he lost his job due to COVID but you kept us going during a very dark and hard time in our lives. So I am very grateful. So my patrons will be getting the reference image to this and um perhaps some extra information in their Patreon post of this particular painting. So you can see this has a very soft feel and again the Luxe archival paper was so nice and textured but it has a really smooth texture and I can't believe I haven't used it again. I don't think I have but I definitely need to break it out and create another painting with this wonderful surface and now again with me speeding it up my head turning back and forth back and forth there was no way to really crop out my old face there. So hey it is what it is right but pay attention to the painting what was that anybody remember the Wizard of Oz pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. So just watch what I'm painting and I'm actually going to add some music here. My daughter-in-law my beautiful daughter-in-law Chelsea she is such a precious soul and she wrote a poem for my mama called Fields of June and if you knew my mom you would understand how perfect that title is but wait till you hear the poem my mom was just one of those people who just connected with nature and she knew so much about plants and farming and she came from an era in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina where that's what they did. If you wanted to eat you better plant and have a garden and she had so many talents and so many gifts and so Fields of June and this poem just so perfectly represents her and it's really what inspired this painting. I I had taken these pictures already and then when my daughter-in-law shared the poem I just knew I had to paint this particular painting. So I'm going to play some music and read this poem for you. It's not one of those poems that rhymes but it's more of a story poem and then I'll continue to play the music for the remainder of the tutorial except for the end. I will be back. I've got some things I want to share at the end so enjoy and I'll be back soon. Fields of June the sun seems to shine brighter now. Everything has new meaning. Whenever I want to see you again I close my eyes and see Fields of June. A flower is more than a flower now and anything that flies is your spirit. Seeing the reflection of the moon in a lake I return to the place called Fields of June. Wind on my skin is filled with power now. Breezy days bring joy. Sitting between the sycamore trees I talk to you in Fields of June. I see the sun coming up in the distance. Good to see you again this morning. I want to feel your touch again so I hold your grandson in Fields of June. Cracking an egg puts a smile on my face. You are good at that. No doubt you're everywhere. We live in Fields of June. I hope that song wasn't too sad but it's one of my favorite songs it's called Adagio for Strings and I heard it the first time in a movie if you haven't seen this movie it's a black and white movie even though it's I mean it's old but it's not so old that it would be black and white it was called The Elephant Man. I believe Anthony Hopkins is in it and I wanted to jump back in at this point because those flowers peeking up over the horizon line into the sky were the obvious focal point and when you put anything up in a light area like the sky you want to make sure you get down something dark first otherwise if you just add you know the flowers in your mind they're white but actually they're in shadow because the sun is on the opposite side of them so you want to make sure you give them enough contrast. Now the flowers that are in the field the ones I'm doing now just adding some light color they're really going to show up because they're on a darker background and you saw what I just did I don't want to make them all little dots because some of them were groupings of flowers and when you have groupings real far away you almost can lay down a little light blanket little horizontal bands that will emulate groupings of flowers in the distance and so now I'm just beginning to work some of the grasses notice I still have that large dark area in the foreground maybe that kind of makes sense now as to why I laid down that underpainting with those broad dark broad strokes with darker pastels and it's because I had the forethought that I'll be gently laying down some grasses I want it to be very impressionistic and painterly and I say this often in my videos I get to watch the video after I've painted it and often I like a stage kind of like this stage before completing it but I did work on it a bit more and I really enjoyed the process so I was happy with the final but I added more greenery to the foreground more flowers I brightened it up a bit so I hope you like it and I hope you not only like the tutorial but my dedication to my mama blessed you and especially that beautiful poem from my daughter-in-law so mama I know you love to cook and I think you're just getting the wedding supper of the lamb prepared for us before that great and glorious day that we're together again