 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I think you're going to enjoy this tutorial of this cute little tree frog. It was sort of an unexpected painting from an unexpected little visitor. Isn't he cute? You're going to learn about a lot here. And if you haven't subscribed to this channel, I hope you will and click that bell icon to be notified of future videos. If you would like to become a patron of mine, it's a way you can support this channel to keep free videos coming. It's only $5 a month and it's easy to find. Patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. Now, this is Jeremiah. Anybody remember the song? Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Well, he's not a bullfrog. He's a tree frog and he really loved my dad. He jumped out of a pear tree and took a real liking to my dad. So I decided to do a little painting of him and I really enjoyed it. So come and join me as I give this painting demonstration and share with you some pastel painting products. I've really been enjoying working on unsanded surfaces. This painting was created on a piece of Canson Métant's pastel paper. This is the gray tones pad and I believe the color I chose was steel gray. And I thought this set of Diane Townsend greens would work beautifully for this frog. I just thought these are totally frog colors and they're really great for many other purposes such as landscape paintings. Anytime you want to have some greens for trees, etc. I love this set. The pastels are pretty chunky but I think they're neat. I'm speeding up the sketch faster than some of the other portions of this tutorial and I'm just using a little piece of willow charcoal. I like willow charcoal. It brushes off easily. I'm using a kneaded eraser. A kneaded eraser is really feels like a piece of clay. Looks like a piece of gray clay. And it's better than other erasers because it doesn't tear up your paper. And most of these products that I talk about in my videos are in my Amazon shop. I have a link to my shop in the about section of every video now. So it's just a neat way for you to find things that I talk about in my videos. Often I will add a direct link to these products. Out in the description of this video I'll add a link to the gray tones paper and to the Diane Townsend greens set. And speaking about those greens, let's get started. That's all I needed for the sketch. Just the general idea. You do want to get your proportions pretty accurate when you're painting people or animals and it's just going to make things a lot easier if you get in an accurate sketch or something close. So here are these big old chunky greens. Now I happen to really love this color. It's a cool green. It means it leans more towards blue than towards yellow. And I'm just looking at some of the areas that may have a little bit more of a shadowy color. It's not as bright green as everything else. And this is what happens when colors get in the shadows. They get cooler. So that's why I'm using a cool green. I often say, it's kind of my new thing I say all the time is if you get in the shade you cool off. So that's what happens to colors when they get in the shade or shadows. So I'm going to speed this up not so much that you can't tell what's happening. But I think this little guy took me a little while so I wanted to make sure it was not too long or too big of a file to upload. Let me talk a little bit about this painting surface. The Canson Métants. It's a French word. I used to butcher all of these words when I first started painting it. It was only because of friendly people here on the Monet Café channel who would give me comments and correct me. So I've actually learned a lot from you guys as well. Now this surface, the Canson Métants pastel paper. It is an unsanded paper. If you've worked with pastels long you probably know they make sanded papers that are literally kind of like sandpaper. Artist quality though. And you can really get a lot of great results with it but you can also get good results on unsanded paper and it is less expensive. Let me mention too that I am working on the backside I guess you would call it of this Canson paper. If you get a pad like I will show in this video or show it at the beginning. The very first pages, the front side of it, they're a little bit more textured. They're not sanded but they have a little more texture and sometimes when you paint that texture makes almost like a little pattern. Some people don't mind it. Some people don't like it at all and I decided to work on the backside which is more smooth. I've worked on both sides but I think I prefer the backside as well. So I'll talk a little bit more about the paper in a minute. Notice how I added that purple underneath him and you might think wow that that frog didn't really have purple under him but you learn to interpret these colors and once again I know it's cooler under his belly area and purple is often a very good shadow color and it's fun. It's a little more lively and you don't always have to paint the local color. Local color just means what is exactly in the reference image or what's exactly in the image or the scene that you're painting. We can get a little bit interpretive with color and using purple is a neat way to do that. So I do like this unsanded paper. I've been enjoying unsanded papers for the many of the past few tutorials. One that I've used, I think last month we had Farm Theme. I did almost every painting on Strathmore Grey Tone's drawing paper and I got a decent amount of layering and the same goes for this paper. Now I did have someone make a comment on this channel about how it seems a little frustrating maybe to work on an unsanded paper if you're still honing in or getting better at your drawing skills. Like I said this doesn't have a lot of room for error or for layering so you can't really cover up your mistakes a lot. So I'd say try unsanded paper if you're just starting. Maybe try some little exercises but you can also try some sanded paper even though it's a little more expensive. You can get a sampler set of different sanded pastel papers from a company called DakotaPastel.com. They have nice sampler sets of pastels and papers so you can play around and see which ones you like best before you commit to spending a lot of money. I always recommend the professional or artist quality pastels. The quality of the pastels makes a huge difference. Alright so I could tell right here his eye was a little off so I'm still kind of developing the eye. I wanted it to have that real bulbous feel and adding the reflection later really does that too and I think I brightened his eye up as well. I mentioned of course the Diane Townsend greens. You can see I've been using a decent amount of those probably like maybe two or three greens so far. Here's another green. This is actually kind of a yellow green and that's what I'm using. Pardon my head getting in the way all the time with my crazy silvery gray hair that's coming in all over the place. I decided to add a little red for a little color fun and interest and again back to the pastels. I'm using various pastels that I have sitting next to me for other colors for almost all the greens. It was that Diane Townsend set. If you see me use a little little kind of rectangular pastel it's what's called Prismacolor new pastels. They're harder and you can get a fine edge. Now I believe this is a Sennelier pastel and it is really really nice for getting down some really bright color. Now if you haven't been watching my videos long or any other pastel painting video tutorials it can sound overwhelming. Really any artistic medium can sound overwhelming when you're first learning but don't get frustrated. You don't have to have all these pastels that I'm using. I was just having fun. Like I said this was kind of an impromptu painting after I saw that cute little frog and I wanted to give it to my dad because my dad and I, again if you haven't been on my channel much, my last few videos I've shared, my mama passed away. It was a little bit unexpected. She had had some health issues but we certainly didn't anticipate the stroke that she had in her passing away. So it really just felt like this cute little frog. When I looked at him just looking up at my dad it was just precious and it really made him smile. So that's why I wanted to just paint this little frog that afternoon or evening and I thought it was really fun. It was good for me too. You may notice that I've added some pink even to this frog. Once again you can get interpretive with color. Often I kind of see hints of color in an image and I just go with it and make it perhaps a little bit more dramatic. A common question that I get is how do I get interpretive with color? How do you choose those colors that you don't see in the reference image? And I would say the greatest technique for learning how to do this is to understand that if you get the value right, that means the lightness or darkness, a scale. You know some values are kind of a middle value. If you have the value correct you can get a little bit crazy with color. I mean you don't want to break all the color rules but if you squint your eyes you can see where the darkest lightest and middle values are. And I recommend, I actually have a video on this, sometimes trying to paint in low light, get you a your set of pastels, whatever you're working with, dim your lights down to where you can just barely see enough, and have it where you're not sure what you're grabbing. And actually what happens is sometimes you feel like when the lights are low the painting works because the values are correct. You're choosing based on the lightness or darkness of the color. Then when you turn the lights on you're like wow I would have never picked red for that area or orange for that area. So it's really kind of fun and it's a lesson in learning that truly value is the primary thing you want to get correct. And color can be a bit fun and creative. I meant to share earlier that this video is coming kind of in the first little bit more than the first week of tree month. It is tree month here in Monet Cafe and for my patrons and my Patreon group and on the Monet Cafe art group on Facebook. Monet Cafe, I am just so grateful. It's really been growing. We just hit 50,000 subscribers here on this YouTube channel and it's all because of you guys, my awesome subscribers. But I meant to mention before that this is obviously not a tree painting since we're in tree month, but it's a tree frog. We're kind of close. But I do have the next tutorial that's coming. I've already created the painting and the footage is a cypress tree. I love cypress trees. So I do have another tree tutorial coming soon hopefully as soon as I can get it edited. Now look at this fun color. Adding some pink there. Isn't that neat? I do tone this down a bit I think. Alrighty I'm gonna add some music at this point. You guys enjoy. Don't go anywhere. It really does help if you watch the whole video or even if you fast forward a little bit. Also please like this video. Hit the like button. Make a comment. I love hearing from you and of course subscribe. Also too I always say if you recreate from this tutorial, you're always welcome to recreate from my tutorials. Then you can feel free to share it on social media but I do ask it would be really nice if you would tag me because I like to see what you create and it helps for Monet Cafe to grow and for other people to know that they can come to this channel and learn things too. On Instagram you can tag me at Susan Jenkins Artist. One word. And on Facebook my page you can follow me there is the art of Susan Jenkins and I have all of my little links always as a little in-screen at the end of every video if you would like to see that. So alright I'm gonna add some music you guys enjoy and I'll be back soon. I sure hope you've enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed painting it. This was a fun little guy and sometimes we just need to take a break not get so serious about things and paint some creative and fun subject matter. I ended up adding a background to this but I actually really liked it better at this stage. You know sometimes we notice these things in hindsight. So thank you Jeremiah for your little presence into our worlds and for the photo op so that I could get a cute little painting of you. Alright everyone happy painting. God bless and thank you so much for helping me to make 50,000 subscribers here on YouTube. Thank you subscribers.