 Hello, artistic friends, and welcome to Monet Café. This is artist Susan Jenkins, and today I'm painting small, not just for a small painting, but as a preliminary sketch for a larger piece I'll do later. I'm here in my temporary studio for now, and I'm going to be creating a painting from a beautiful reference image, and I wanted to show you first how I do a little preliminary painting. It's small, I find that it really gives you a great start to your painting, and it produces a better painting when you kind of work out some of the issues on a smaller, little mini painting. And the surface that I'm using here, I kind of like this nice gray-blue color. These are little, they're called A-C-E-O sizes, art cards, editions, and originals. I just call them artist trading cards, because they're almost the size of a business card, and these one, you can get, I think different companies make these, but these are by Art Spectrum Color Fix, and Color Fix is a really great sanded surface for pastel painting, and again I like these for just making little mini paintings, but also to get a good preliminary painting before you start a more serious piece. Alright, so let's get started on the little mini sketch. These aren't very detailed, by the way, they're just kind of a guide or road map. Alright, here we go. Now I am speeding this video up, and I didn't want it to be too long. It's less than five minutes. So a tiny video for a tiny painting, but I thought you guys might like to see just the general idea. The great thing about doing a preliminary mini painting before another painting is that you work out a lot of issues and things that, when you go to approach the bigger painting, you might save yourself some time, save yourself some layers on the pastel surface. You may realize you thought certain colors would work, and they didn't, so there are really a lot of advantages to do this, plus, if you like it when you're done, you've got a nice little mini painting that you can keep or give away, and I always find these as lots of fun. I really love these little things. So enjoy this little video of this little painting, and I am going to be having another... I don't think I'm going to record the process of this larger painting, but I already have another one in the work, so stay tuned, and I'll have another video coming up soon, while I will be comparing the differences between sanded pastel surfaces and working on non-sanded surfaces. So, stay tuned Monet Cafe Family, and don't forget, if you are loving pastel painting and you're wanting to learn more, or you're just getting started, please check out our Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook. Just look for Monet Cafe Art Group, ask to join, you just answer a couple of questions. Just say you heard about it on the YouTube channel, and you'll be accepted. Also, I do have a Patreon page for those of you who would like to support me in being able to continue these free videos. I think I'm probably close to 170 free videos now on my YouTube channel, and I'm very blessed that some of you guys want to support me, and help that to continue bringing art lessons literally all over the world, which is really cool. I am just so happy about that. Alright guys, enjoy this mini painting, and I'll be back with more videos soon. Happy painting! I also wanted to add that doing this little teeny figure was so hard, because it's already a little painting with a big old chunky pastel, so, but this was a lot of fun guys, please try it. And also, please try to find me also on Instagram, my Instagram name is right there. I'm trying to build up my Instagram following, so I'd appreciate it. Happy painting!