 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm happy to bring you this lesson where yes I will be combining oil paint really with soft pastel. It's going to be a lot of fun. This is the reference photo. It's from pixabay.com. I really love the combination of some warmth behind those trees with the coolness and the photographer. I want to give him credit. He's got such a happy face and he's got some beautiful photographs on pixabay.com. Son, you serve? Does anybody know what language that is? And I'm going to be using a product. Once again the faithful company Arteza sent me these black acrylic pads. Oh my goodness. I'm going to be talking a lot more about the surface. It's water-friendly and it's made for acrylic or oil paint. And in this lesson I'll show you how you can also combine oil paint with soft pastel. Bob Ross is so happy. My son calls me Mom Ross. So in this lesson you will learn how to use this product in combination with the oil and the soft pastels to be able to get long-lasting and beautiful results. And I'm going to show you the oil paints once again from Arteza. I hope you guys don't get tired of me mentioning their products but they send them to me for free, you know, and they're good products. So these, you know what guys, if you've been on my channel long, I don't use oil paints often. But I really enjoy them. And I was happy to see that Arteza's oil paints are, the names are in the traditional names of paint colors. I'll talk about that more in a minute. Now what I'll use to blend them with and dilute them with is Gamsol. It's an odorless mineral spirit. I know a lot of you were worried about this. I used this in my last video to blend pastels. And I got some comments that be careful with it. It's flammable. So don't set it on fire and don't eat it, okay? So I think you guys can figure that out. And also too, they do make water soluble oil paints. I've used those before as well where you don't have to use a product like this. And you can use other things too that are all natural. Now this is the Gray Matters paper palette that I'm using. I love this. I love the fact that it's gray, which makes a nice neutral color or value surface for your colors. And also I love how this works great with acrylics and oils. It's just got a little waxy finish to it. So I use this often when painting with acrylics as well. Now these are the colors I'm using. Like I said, they're kind of the traditional color names. And you can read the names while I talk. But one thing great about oil paint and acrylic paint, you know how much I love pastel painting. But you can't combine colors with pastels not quite in the same way that you can with oil paints. Now notice I went from my lighter values, like the whites, went from warm to cool basically. And I'm not going to use all these colors for this wash that I'm doing just so you know, we're going to be doing an oil wash prior to applying pastels. And but I just wanted to give myself enough colors to choose from and have some fun. And I really do like oil painting as well. So here's my setup and I'm going to show you something and and I'm just using this round brush. You could really use whatever you have. I changed my approach because I made a mistake and I thought this would be a good opportunity to teach you guys a principle that I learned the hard way. I actually had someone tell me in one of my videos where I used some oil paint with pastels teach me a principle that I didn't know before. I learned so much from you guys too by the way. So what I did is I'm using the Gamsol product. But this is good for you to see how I'm using it. I'm diluting, you know, or kind of liquefying the oils to use to apply to this black paper. I love this paper. It works great. I already did an acrylic painting on it. It's awesome. But this shows you how beautifully the oil paints work on it. But when I first started this I forgot about a principle that's very important. You are going to see the right way by the way. That's why I'm speeding this up. It's called Fat Over Lean. I'm going to tell you all what it means. But here's the definition. The Fat Over Lean rule allows you to build a painting that is flexible. So over time they'll be less cracking to your painting. The under layers of a painting should be leaner. So not oil. You want the oil on top. Think of oil as fat. Oils are fatty. So the under layers should be leaner than the upper layers. Now do you recall at the beginning of this video where I showed a product that I applied to the black paper that's going to allow the pastel to stick? This is called Clear Gesso. It is acrylic based and it's water soluble. So you wouldn't want this on top of that oil wash that I just did. I realized, oh my gosh, I cannot put this Clear Gesso on top of the oil wash because I'm putting Lean Over Fat. I'm putting the leaner product that's water based over the oil product. So what's the solution to this? The solution is to put the Clear Gesso down first. And the reason, if you're brand new, you're probably overwhelmed. Oh my gosh, what the heck is she talking about? But if you've been on this channel and you know much about pastel painting and the way I make my homemade pastel surfaces, you know that this Clear Gesso is a way to take a unsanded surface and make it sanded. There's little bits of grit in this Clear Gesso which allows the pastels to stick. So what I'm doing, now this paper does kind of curl up because you're adding a wet product to it, but it flattens out when it dries just so you know. So I'm adding kind of like two coats of this Clear Gesso that has the grit. By the way, regular Gesso, the white kind that's not clear, does not have the sand in it. I don't know why, but make sure you use the Clear. But this product is going to give that little sanded surface to this black paper so that I can apply pastels as well. Now if you notice those little flecks in there, they're little bits of sand, I can just brush those right off. They come off very easily. And again, I'm blowing this dry, but the paper does flatten out. Now with all that preliminary education, now I can paint and describe to you more about the reason we apply things in the order that we do. I'm just doing a little sketch of this. It's basically just a road. I obviously cropped the reference image to be a square format. So I'm just making some general guidelines and then I'll start applying my oil wash. Now unfortunately, I missed some footage, probably with all the confusion I had at the beginning, but this is my little oil wash painting. I kept it very simple and very loose. Not to worry though, in my next tutorial I have all the footage for another painting I did. So now it has this nice sanded surface because the clear gesso is underneath and the oil is on top. Remember fat over lean. So that's why this works. I hope that makes sense. And now I can start applying pastel because I already have my sanded surface. By the way, this is a great way to preserve your oil paints or acrylics by just putting a little piece of saran wrap over them. I push down in the centers between the colors there. So and acrylics dry very quickly. These oil paints don't dry that quickly. And now we can start applying pastels. The set I'm using is the Terry Ludwig Richard McKinley set. If you haven't seen his work, he's an amazing pastel artist. I thought the cool, lighter values in this set would make a nice palette for this very cool scene, except for the warmth that's up above that tree there. And here you can quickly see. I didn't stick just to that one set. I do throw in a few other pastels. These were just kind of nice neutral blues and I liked keeping a lot of the things neutral to begin with. I usually try to add my punchy colors. I don't know if that's a real way to describe brilliant or vibrant colors with pastels, but I've been using it for years. So hey, it's my word. So I usually reserve doing those a little more towards the end. Now this is one of the pastels from the Richard McKinley set. Notice it's a little brighter. And if you look at the reference image there that I've put in there, this is the cropped one that I did. Notice how typically the borders, other than where that light warm area is to the right of the upper tree, the borders are usually a little bit darker. So when you paint, try to think of a little bit of an ellipse if you know what that is. It's where there's like a little perimeter around your photo or your painting and usually it's a little darker around the perimeter. So those are just little things to keep in mind. Now this is real time. I sped up a little bit at the beginning trying to give a little more education. Notice how I just gave that little mark. This is a gold. I know I've got warmth up there, but I don't want to go too light too soon. I think that was one of the things that I did early on is I would have looked at that and go, oh get a really light yellow. But what happens is you misinterpret values often and you don't give yourself the opportunity to layer colors on top of each other. It's usually best to go with the darker value of that color first and then gradually get to your lights. If you've been painting with pastels or acrylic or oil even, the same principles apply. You want to go dark to light with layering. That's what provides the contrast and that color interest. I had a neat thing happen. One of the patrons of mine on my Patreon page blessed her heart. She said she was a little limited with her budget and everything, but she learned that she can start painting digitally on Procreate. I use Procreate on my iPad. I love digital painting. I just don't have time to do it all, but she said that was an inexpensive way to paint. She didn't have to buy the supplies, but she said the same principles, which I agree, apply with digital painting. You know, it's really a lot of the concepts are the same. It's just learning to use the medium. Now, notice that I went a little bit outside of my reference image. I'm getting a little creative. I'm giving that idea that there's some more trees, another layer of trees, and a little curve around that road where there's a some of the snow can be have the light reflected on it. So I'm getting a little interpretive, but now I've got a little bit of a pink and I want to explain color, my idea of color theory and how this works. To me it's kind of simple. The sun is warm, right? So you use warmer colors. I know the sun is behind that upper right side of the tree. As things get further away from it, they're going to get cooler. Even the pinks. Now I'm just speeding up this little section quickly. I'll talk more about the pinks and the golds in a minute. This is where I, I know I've got a tree trunk in there. So I grabbed the Terry Ludwig eggplant color that a lot of people love because it's a great dark. And I think, I think Richard McKinley even has this one in his set. And I'm just giving some loose indications of branches. A lot of this is going to get covered up when I layer over with some of the masses of the tree. I'm not going to paint any individual leaves in this. I'm going to paint just little shapes and lines. It's going to be very linear. Now I've got a pastel that's not quite as dark as that eggplant color. And I'm using it just to get some of the little finer branches out towards the end. And notice in a tree trunk, obviously it starts thicker at the base and gets thinner and more wispy up around the edges. So again, I just sped up that one portion for that. And keep it very gestural and give it motion and energy. I do have a video on basic tree shapes. Something I think in the video it's called the Fibonacci sequence. But that's a set that I grabbed. It's a Sennelier. Another wonderful soft pastel company manufacturer. It's a French company. Terry Ludwig Pastels is an American-made company or an American company. American-made pastels. And they're just great people. I love them. I love that square rectangular pastel of the Terry Ludwigs. But I also love the round pastels like these Sennelier French-made pastels. Both have vibrant color and oh my gosh if I had to pick a favorite it's hard. I just love them all. All these really nice softies they're called. And Sennelier to me has the most vibrant color. So in that little, I am going to tell you the name of that set, it's the Sennelier 40, there's 40 pastels, half stick set. I always recommend buying half sticks when you can. You get more pastels for your money. Terry Ludwig doesn't have half sticks. I break them in half though myself. But this little 40 half stick set has a beautiful teal, a couple of beautiful teals in it. Also the Sennelier Paris Collection. It's got 120 half stick pastels. Oh my gosh, I love that set so much. One of the paintings I'm doing in this winter series in the month of December is going to be using that set exclusively I think. But notice how gorgeous this teal is. Now what I've done, I've worked that teal in even though you don't really see it in the photo. I know that color cools off in certain areas in the shadow. So I just kind of squint my eyes. I look at the reference image and I look at where those colors might be. Now again, I'm creating another little imaginary bank, imaginary to me. I just made it up. Bank of trees in the distance, it'll start to develop more as I paint. And I have this idea of a row just kind of wrapping and curving around. Notice how delicate my strokes are too. That has taken me a while to do. Now this has a little hint of green in it. And I wanted to add it for warmth and color interest, but I know there's not going to be a lot of warmth in that road coming around the curve. I just thought it would be interesting. And usually warmer colors are more in the foreground. And perhaps some of that golden light is cascading through the breaks in the trees. So now I gave some of that same value to those background trees. Now purple is a great color for snow and shadows. And if you look at the reference image, I don't know what kind of screen you're on, and you squint your eyes, you can sort of see where there's a purple hue, a little tint of purple. And that's what I typically do. I get a question all the time is how do you reinterpret the image with so much color? And all I do is look at a hint of a color that might already be there. And I just intensify the color, but keep the value accurate. So you can get very creative with color as long as your value, that means the lightness or the darkness of a color. So if I'm going to get interpretive with a purple or get, I can get the purple more intense, but I don't want to get it darker or lighter than it is naturally in the scene. A lot of artists have adopted the expression, value is king, but color gets the glory, okay? Color is what everybody thinks, oh color. But if you don't get your value right, your painting is going to look amateurish and not accurate or beautiful. So hope that makes sense. Now this is another, it looks like a Sennelier. I think I might have grabbed it out of the 40 half sticks set, but I thought it had a nice neutral blue. Now that leads me to another topic. I've learned all these things over the years after making gazillion mistakes is that if you use all bold colors, everything's going to be screaming color and there won't be any one area of your painting that's a focal point. And so the power of a neutral palette is that, and that's why I like this Richard McKinley set, even though I'm throwing in some of the other pastels. He has a lot of neutrals in the set. He also has a lot of lights in that set, but with neutrals, you're giving the supporting cast to be able to let the color shine like the star of the show. So I'm going to reserve my my punchiest colors, there's my word again, my most intense vibrant colors at the end where I'm going to add that punch to some of the negative spaces between those trees. I'm going to talk a little bit more to now I'm just giving kind of some shapes of that road coming around giving some little gesture or energy as the road curves around, but I'm going to talk a little bit more too about sky holes, talking about color intensity and how some of my punchiest colors are going to be in those little negative spaces of the tree as this progresses. I'm going to talk a little bit more about how to handle value as you go from the spaces in the upper branches down to the spaces in the inner branches. And if you look in the reference photo and squint your eyes you can see there's little spaces of course around the perimeter of the branches, but in that little glowing area there's some little interesting little spaces and shapes that are between some of those branches and they get less and less as you get more into the mass of things in the trees. So I'll talk about that more in a minute. I just I love that topic. Now I'm adding a little bit of these little marks are some of those, notice in the reference image, some of the branches are reaching out where it's really down deep and dense and thick. It's going to be darker, but we've got some branches that are reaching out. They're going to be a little bit lighter in value, but keep your subject matter in mind. If I was to grab a really light white, notice I could call this painting how to paint snow without any white. Often my videos I feel like I could give them multiple different subject matter titles, but I don't use white. I have a whole thing of white. When I get a set of pastels that has whites in it, I just put them to the side or blacks and I don't know if I've ever used them. I might have used black when I, oh yeah I used that little 40 half sticks set one time and I didn't want to use any other sets so it had a black in it that was my only dark dark, but consider your subject matter. Right now this tree, where's the sun? Where's the light source? It's behind the tree. So even though our brains tell us that the little branches of the trees coming out have snow on them, our brain says snow, white, but it's not white. It's really pretty dark and I learned a lot of this from being in graphic design. I'll come back to that topic. I hope you guys don't mind that I talk all the time, but I know that some of you don't. Real quickly, I love your comments. I've had people tell me everything from, you know, I put in your videos. It helps me relax and be able to fall asleep. I don't know. I don't know if that's a good thing. It's kind of like when I have a preacher I listen to the same thing at night. He's very relaxing and I don't know if I should tell him. His sermons help me fall asleep, but also I've had someone tell me that their bird, their parrot or something loves my voice and just gets so excited. So she puts my videos on. So crazy stuff. So you guys, I'm glad many of you like it, but I might wear some of y'all out. So anyway, back to graphic design. In graphic design I had to use Photoshop a lot. I was kind of, I'm old, okay? So when I started using Photoshop it was it was the cutting edge back then, but I fell in love with learning how color worked by some of the ways I could zoom in on an image, isolate a little area, take that color and compare it to something else. And often things are a lot darker than you think, or the color is more different than you think. So anyway, I could go off on a major tangent there. Now again, notice how I'm getting that halo effect. Remember the ellipse around the outer edge to make sure I'm not getting too light. If I had all those edges light, your eye would just go right out of the painting. The little ellipse in the darker value around that upper left side is going to keep your eye contained. Oh, now this color, it is, I would say, it's not really a punchy color. It isn't in intensity, but the fact that it's a little different than some of the other blues and teals I've added really gives it a nice interest. Also too, notice the shapes that I've done for the trees. I haven't done any leaves. I've just done some little squiggly marks to indicate these branches. And I just think that is painterly and fun and loose. And if you've been on this channel long, you know, I I definitely love impressionism. Not that I don't love photorealistic art. I love that too. And I actually used to do some of that type of art. It's it's actually very relaxing for me to do that type of art. But anyway, okay, this purple here, I'm just warming it up a little. Remember before when I said something about color getting cooler when it gets away from the sun? Well, I know that sun is still radiating some of that warmth out, but it's not going to be as warm as that area to the upper left. So what is a cool warm color? Like a cool red. It's going to be a pink, okay? You're not going to go as golden or as red or as orangey. All right, now I'm even cooling off some of that up there. I know I'm going to add a little more warmth, but I thought I'd put a little bit of that peachy color in there. So I'm just kind of I'm playing and I'm keeping my touch incredibly light. And also too, notice that I'm working the whole. I've learned this over the years because I used to get so frustrated at a certain area. I wanted that area to be all finished and correct. And if it didn't look right, I would just fuss and fiddle with it. And I would just mess it up. So my point is, I'm working the whole. I move around the painting a lot. So now I want to come back to notice this gold is darker. And I'm now starting to add some of those little negative spaces. Some of the gold is peeking around. Well, in the photo it's not. If you squint your eyes, you can see a little bit of that peachy golden color around the the left side there a little bit. I'm doing a little bit more of intensity than you see in the photo. But I soften it later. But now I'm going to start adding the punch. And what I'd like to mention is that in the negative spaces, like I was hinting at before, when you get to the inner parts of the tree, the value is going to get darker. Often it gets cooler. But you've got to consider your subject matter. I've got a sun right behind that upper right side. So I know there's going to be warmth from behind that tree. So I'm just kind of looking at some of the spaces I can do that with. Now also too, if I've got the golden glow of the sun to the upper right side, it's probably going to be casting a little bit of glow on my little imaginary plane over here. So I'm just adding a little bit of that color. My little tree line shape back there, the distant trees is a little wonky right now. So I fixed that later. Here's it that gorgeous. Is this the blue I used before? I think it is. Now I'm just using it to just gesturally work around where some of these branches might be with a little bit of snow on them. I'm not even thinking about snow at this point. I'm just looking at value and color. I was telling my husband today who's not an artist. I said, you know, I wish I could tell everybody what I've learned in a sentence or in one video that is if you can learn the rules of value and color temperature, you can really paint. And I know color theory gets a lot of the glory now that I'm not, you know, belittling color theory. It is very important. But value and color temperature is huge. If you can realize to get the value right, the lights and the darks right, and then you can learn about color temperature, you can reinterpret your photo. You can intensify your photo. You can punch up the color from your reference image or whether you're working from life. By the way, I would love to work from real life. I would also love to work from my own reference images. I happen to love taking photos. But to many of you, I know Monet Café is a place where a lot of us just don't have that life. That's how Monet Café started. I'm a mom of three boys. They're men now. They're big, strapping, beautiful, awesome men. But I had to sneak in my little art time when they got a little older. Goodness knows when kids are little babies. It's hard. But I had to try to find a way to do this in spite of challenges in life. I was a single mom for a while with my boys trying to work. And so I know a lot of you guys can relate to that. That we want to be an artist, but life sometimes doesn't allow us to be the idyllic artist where we always paint on the perfect surface. And it's archival. And we have our own reference images. So praises to all you guys that have lives like that. Now, here is the final. You can see I didn't get the final footage where I intensified the color. But you see those little bits of that bright color peeking through. And to me, that's the focal point. It's this gorgeous sun shining behind these trees and little hints that let you go, oh my goodness, look at God's glory. And I certainly hope you guys learned a lot. This is going to be the next painting tutorial. And I call this one fire and ice. And some of you may have already seen them offering a special December promotion. If you become a patron of mine in the month of December, you can win this painting. And I've decided I'm also going to offer the painting from this tutorial. They just look good together. They're like companion pieces. So if you become a patron of mine, you'll have the chance to win both of those paintings. You'll be entered in a drawing. The drawing will be on January 1st. So you have to be a patron on that date as well. And everyone who's a patron of mine on January 1st will receive my 2022 digital art calendar featuring my paintings, most of them from this past year, with some of my favorite Bible verses. It should be encouraging, colorful, and bright and cheery. Now this is a digital calendar, okay? I couldn't mail out, you know, over 500 calendars to everybody. But you can print it out. I'm going to have a video giving you lots of ideas of how to print it, display it, and hopefully it will bless your lives. So if you'd like to become a patron for those opportunities, you can do so at patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. I always have a link in the description of this video. God bless you. Merry Christmas. I got way more videos on the way, so I'll be back soon. And as always, happy painting!