 Welcome to this soft pastel painting tutorial. I'm calling this painting Tangled in Pink. And in this lesson I'll be sharing my three-value underpainting method that works great and it's really easy. I'll be creating an alcohol wash on some sanded pastel paper. I think you're gonna learn a lot and have a lot of fun. And in case you didn't know, this is Monet Café and I'm artist Susan Jenkins. And I would really appreciate it if you would go ahead and like this video. Also leave me a comment. I love to hear from you. And subscribe to my channel and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future tutorials. I would also love it if you would consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. This is a place where you can get extra content for many of my lessons plus you support this channel to keep the free lessons coming. And a shout out to one of my patrons right now on my Patreon page Cindy Sanford. She shares such lovely photographs in our group and she's becoming quite the outstanding artist herself. Thank you so much Cindy for this photo. Now let's talk about the products. I think you'll be happy to know I'm once again using the Paul Rubens set of soft pastels. I love these pastels because they are affordable but a great quality as well. I would say they're very similar to Sennelier pastels and the vibrancy, the softness, the color application. And I often do something I call a color test when I'm checking pastels to see how much color to binder ratio there is. And if you get a lot of color on your finger when you do this, you know you've got a really good quality soft pastel. So I'm using also that was the 36 set. I'm also using some of the colors in the 40 set. Each of these sets is under $50. You can get them on Amazon. I'll have the link to both of these sets in the description of this video along with all of the other products. I love this 40 set. It has so many nice earthy warm tones in it. So you can really get started as a beginner for relatively inexpensively by using these two sets. The surface I'll be using is a sanded professional sanded pastel paper. And yes, I do mean sanded. It feels like sandpaper. That's what gives you a lot of layering ability. I love this Luxe archival paper. It takes water and other liquid mediums so well it stays nice and flat. And it is a little bit more expensive. If you're getting started, I do have many alternatives, even making your own do it yourself pastel papers. I have a video on eight ways to do that. Lately, I've been taping my surfaces down on a piece of black foam core board. I do it with a piece of black artist tape and I am going to be using alcohol. You could also use water. Alcohol just dries faster. Now I'm going to show you three values that I'm choosing. My main color is going to be a teal color and I'm picking three different degrees of lightness to darkness, a light, a medium and a dark. And I'm going to use these three values to create my under painting for a nice cool beginning. And I'm using a piece of vine charcoal just to get in my sketch. The great thing is the sketch is very simple. I'm really just getting in the horizon line, some of the tree shapes and that's just about it. And now I'm going to get started with my three values. I'm using my lightest value in the sky. And notice I'm turning my pastel on the side using broad strokes. Now I do add a little bit of a lavender color. I mean, you could totally just do this with just the three values. But I thought I'd go ahead and pop in a little bit of this lavender color to kind of neutralize that sky a little bit. My next value is going to be my dark value. This is a nice dark teal that's in the Paul Rubens 40 set. Now I'm sanding it off a bit. Sometimes certain pastels will have a little edge to them where you can't get an even application. So I sanded it off a bit. And now I'm just blocking in these tree shapes. Once again, laying the pastel on its side and just giving some kind of direction to how the trees would be growing. And you don't have to press really hard with this just enough to get enough of the color down. And now I'm getting my middle value, which I'm using to actually scumble on top of some of the trees that were darker because some of the tops of them were a little bit lighter. You could totally just put the dark down first if you wanted and then go back later and layer the lighter values. So now I'm using the middle value again to get in the field. And a really simple way to think about it is that the three values are going to be the lightest value is the sky. The middle value is the flat parts of the earth or the field. And the darkest value is going to be vertical elements such as trees. Darker values are also things that are in the foreground. You'll see me at that dark again. But right now I'm getting in directional strokes with the middle value. And I know I'm going to be wetting this, but I still like to get my my coverage in a directional way. I'm adding more of that dark to see in the reference image how there's some dark, darks down in those deep grasses and just kind of scumbling that in with some of the middle value. So there's my three values again with a little bit of lavender in the sky. And I am adding alcohol with a brush. You can use whatever brush you have. I like to use a brush that's a little bit wider or bigger than you would think. It helps to create those nice broad strokes. And even though the under painting does get layered over, I feel the gestural marks do influence the final painting. So I'm just emulating the feel of this landscape. I felt like even the trees were reaching. I love it when the flowers are reaching to the heavens like they're in praise and worship. It really does feel like nature glorifies our Creator. And I love to make that feeling in my paintings. So I'm picking out a few colors. Now it is dry. I think I got a blow-dry and dried it very quickly, but it dries pretty quickly because it's alcohol. So I got these nice warm lavenders for the sky. One's a little more pink. One's leans a little more blue. And then I got a neutral color that's it's not really a white. It's almost a beige. And I wanted to keep some of the colors a bit more neutral and muted in this. And I just loved making the sky a little bit of that lavender with the blue that I had already put down. It just made such a soft pretty color for the sky. Now what I'm doing now is also called, oh let me stop here, I like also to put in a lighter color. This is the color I had, the lighter of the three, in an area of focal interest and also usually just above the horizon line, the sky does get a little lighter. Now I've gone back to, I think this might actually be a black. I think it is. I don't often use black, but I love to limit myself with a pastel selection like this pastel sets. You can literally buy a pastel set and create a painting. This one happens to be a great one. I have another video where I used only the Paul Rubens 36 set to create one painting. And in this case I'm using the two sets. But the black worked fine. I typically love to use a dark purple, a Terry Ludwig eggplant color it's called. But this proves that you can use black and layer other colors and you don't keep that harsh black color as we layer. And again this Luxe Archival paper is going to take a lot of layering, fortunately. Now I'm adding a little bit of kind of a pink color to the sky to give it a little bit of a glow. Oh and all I did with that dark was again I just reinforced the darks of the trees and some of those grasses. Again with reaching up gestural strokes, keep it nice and free. And now I love this really pretty neutral kind of a beigy color. It's not normally a color I would use for grasses. But these grasses are far into the distance and also like I said I want to give some gentle color. Now I've got this it's like a gray, gray blue teal. It's I mean I can hint a little bit of colors even when something looks gray. I can see how it leans and it leaned a little bit of greenish teal to that pretty gray. And I did have a month I think it was two months ago. I focused totally on neutrals for the whole month and the power of neutrals in your paintings. This is another beautiful neutral. I believe this one is in the 40 set. It's a neutral green and I think it's just so pretty. It's like a mossy green. So notice how I just layered those over the darks of the trees. And now I got this neutral. It's almost like a neutral purple. This dull purple. And it was just really fun using some of these colors. I know we would typically just go for greens. Let's get some foresty greens, some earthy greens, some tree greens, grass greens. But we really can pull colors that aren't maybe what you would normally choose but they are the right value. If you get the value, that means the lightness or the darkness right, you can get rather creative with your color choices. And these are still greens. This is another nice neutral green that I think that one is also in the 40 set. It was just a little lighter. And just so you know, we layer typically in pastel and with acrylic and oil from dark to light. The darkest value is usually first, layering the lysis on top. It's like we're building the tree from the inside out. And it works that way with many elements. Even these grasses. I get the darks in. Eventually you'll see me add the flowers in. I didn't worry about drawing any flowers or sketching any flowers to begin with. Because most of these flowers are small and I'm going to add them in after the fact. Not totally after the fact. I'm going to layer some over them too. But I first wanted to get in the base for some of these grasses. Again, I'm using some of these neutral colors. Some of the same colors I just used in the trees. It's going to connect the painting together and let it feel harmonious and congruent. This is a really pretty neutral kind of a brownish color. And what's interesting, I think the reason I decided on this is the flowers are so punchy. I made them even brighter pink than they are in the photo. And I even warmed them up a bit. I made mine kind of a cool red and pink. And that was because the set that I used, I wanted to try to use only these two sets. I throw in a couple other colors later. I'll talk to you about. But I loved those bright pinks that were in that set. And I thought if I have everything in this painting so vivid and bright, the flowers aren't going to get the attention. So that's why I decided on some of the neutrals. Now you saw I added in a little bit of a vibrant, more pretty purple in some of the grasses that gave nice shadows. And so now I'm adding another pretty neutral kind of purple color in the sky. It looks a little dark now. But what I'm doing now is adding a little bit of soft lavender. Now that I believe lavender was from another, from my workshop set of pastels. I have a whole lot of pastels in my workshop set that I don't necessarily know exactly which type it is, especially if they're a little like that one. Again, I'm using brown craft paper this time to test some of my flower colors. Often it's a good idea to do that before you commit to something. That way you already know. That's that red I was telling you. It's a cool red. But I thought let me just play with that and see if it makes some really punchy pretty colors. Now I don't know, which is pretty standard for me, the names of these flowers. But they were, you guys always tell me, I'm learning a lot from you guys, or y'all I should say. I'm a southern. I can't help but throw the y'all in there sometimes. But you guys help me so much with identifying flowers for me. They look almost like little pom poms. They have little spiky things sticking out of them. But again, just like with the trees and the grasses, I go with my darker colors first. Darker values I should say. And then I gradually layer lighter values on the tops. Again, building from the inside out. And here I go, laying a little bit of a lighter pink. And also I'm horizontally glazing some pink. Why would I be doing that? Well, a lot of times your flowers, if you see them in a field like this, they're not just right where you are. Often they cascade way off into the distance. And you won't necessarily see the individual flowers. You'll see more of a blanket of color in the distance. And when things are far away, they're usually a little lighter in value and a little more pale or neutral in color. So that's why I use that lighter pink to glaze over those distant fields. Just a hint. Now I'm just sprinkling in flowers in a way that I feel will be a beautiful composition, pulling the viewer in. The beautiful photo from Cindy was already doing that. You can see how the flowers, they're just grouped in very compositionally beautiful way already. That is that cooler red. See how it's a little warmer than some of those pinks? And it looks kind of segregated now, separated from the pink flowers. But I'll connect it a little like right now. I'm layering some of the pink over that warmer red to kind of make it feel like it is the same flower. And the reason I did that, I wanted to play with that pretty cool red. I don't think I had used it very much. And also, things are typically a little warmer in the foreground with color temperature and it gets cooler and lighter as things recede into the distance. So I thought it made those foreground pink flowers pop a little bit more using some of those reds. Sprinkling a little bit of that in now again. Also trying to make a visually appealing composition with groupings of flowers. And what we want to try to do is not create patterns where things are lined up like soldiers or in these look like mathematically equally divided areas. Nature doesn't do things that way. Often you'll have a little grouping of flowers here and then they cascade a little bit. And then another little grouping of flowers. And I often compare painting to music. There's a lot of similarities. One is that basically you don't want a pattern kind of like with music. If you had a song that had the same division of notes bump bump bump bump bump. Maybe a little skip every so often it would be a very boring song. So creating a painterly and more natural looking composition is much the same way. Now here I'm gradually adding like I said we're building the flower from the inside out and I'm adding some of those little linear strokes that seem to be almost exploding out of the flower. I apologize that I didn't zoom in more for some of the detail but I was trying for a layout of my camera view for you to see the pastels I'm actually choosing. And I know I couldn't get both sets in so sometimes you can't see what I'm choosing from the upper set. But if you have these sets you can probably figure it out. And I did just speed this up slightly just to make the video not so long. And now I'm adding some of the stems and grasses. I love to pop things up over the horizon line. I feel that just makes the flowers feel even more so like they're reaching to praise our creator and just to celebrate life. With stems grasses and leaves I don't often try to create everything exactly where it is in the photo. I usually don't actually. But I try to look at the general design of the leaf the general shape and then just give those suggestions throughout in areas again that compositionally look nice. Now here's that pretty neutral again rather than going with a really green green. I went with those gorgeous neutrals. I think it worked so well with the teal underpainting and the pink flowers. I really was having fun with color with this one. Now I want to pop some of the pink flowers up over where the trees are because that's going to create some contrast. And so those are like really far away so there's super little teeny pink flowers back there. And again just still adding in some pink flowers now that will be ones that will get more buried. If I just finish the painting here the flowers look much like they're on top of the field and that's not how things work. They get buried deeper with other grasses layering them. So you'll see me do that too. Now I did go for one of these pretty greens. I don't know if I'd even used this green yet and etc. But I added some of that to some of the trees. There was some light even though the sky looks a little cloudy. There was a little bit of light coming into the field and onto the trees. And light typically warms things up. So that's why I went for a little bit of a warmer green. And I wanted to punch up the color a little bit. I had a lot of neutrals going on. Playing still with just sprinkling in more flowers here and there. Trying to keep them in groupings that are visually pleasing. Now I'm going to grab a lighter value in just a minute. And I wanted to put some lighter flowers in this. Little sprinkles of I'm saying sprinkles a lot in this video aren't I? Of some lighter flowers in the background. But oh first what I'm doing here is I'm blending the sky a little bit. Once you get a few pastel layers down first they look kind of chunky. But I wanted the sky to look really soft. So I used another pastel. I didn't use my finger or a blending tool. But I let the pastel blend the colors. And I think it keeps things looking more fresh than if you use your finger. It gets all muddied. This is where I'm using a little bit of a lighter value. I thought maybe it's too light. So I was trying to this one's a little more neutral again. Which I was again loving these neutrals in this painting. I was just kind of putting in some where I thought it might give the hint of lighter values of flowers in the distance. Now I liked this little minty green. Isn't that pretty? And I decided oh I think these make the better choice for light flowers. I'm just continuing to work on some grasses. Getting in some areas that are a little bit darker. Where perhaps many of the flower stems and roots are tangled together. And that's why I called this painting tangled in pink. They seem like a tangle of flowers. And later you're going to see me actually do a little technique where I actually grate some pastels. Yes with a grater like a cheese crater. Grater just to get little sprinkles of value. Looking like little teeny flowers. And I often find that when you drop things or grate them they fall more spontaneously than if you tried to put them in yourself. We tend to put things very much mathematically and in order and in a pattern. So you'll see that great great method in a minute. But I'm using now what is called a prismacolor new pastels. Built in you pastel. They're harder pastel. Almost like in little rectangular sticks. And I'm using this to scumble in some grasses. I don't want my grasses all just reaching up again very orderly like soldiers. They're tangled. And they're going to have gesture and motion. And I don't want to be totally haphazard with it. There is a bit of rhyme and reason to it. But it does create a more natural looking painting. I'm even putting some of this color. It was kind of a nice soft green. A little lighter in value that made for some lighter highlights on some of these trees. And now it looks kind of like there's four trees there. And the ones in the middle look like they were more shadowed. So that's why I used this cooler color of a green to highlight some of those trees that were in the middle. And I'm using it also to scumble in. Give some suggestions of shapes of some of the leaves and the grasses. And here comes the cheese grater method. Again for getting in just little teeny flowers that might be growing. Like maybe a suggestion of baby's breath or something. I'm using kind of a neutral gray. Again used a lot of neutrals in this painting. And I do grab some more of the pink. What else? Yes some more pink. And I'm sprinkling some of those in. Like they might be really far away. And just giving some interest compositionally. And now I'm going to take a piece of tracing paper. I layer it over my painting. And I tape it down. I don't want it moving around. If it shifts you're going to make your little sprinkles of pastel kind of get muted and dull. Now I just grabbed a wine bottle. An empty wine bottle. I keep this empty wine bottle just for rolling. I don't have a good rolling pin. I need one. I don't bake a lot. And now when I lift up the tracing paper I've gotten some of those little sprinkles still left. And what that did is it set them into the sanded paper. And other than a few grasses I'm pretty much done here. And what I loved about this painting was the play of color with the neutrals. And I really think it came out lively and fun and energetic. So I hope you enjoyed this and learned something from this tutorial. And if you recreate from this tutorial I would love it if you would find me on my social media links and tag me. I love to see your recreations. Also consider becoming a patron for five dollars a month. I would really appreciate that. It helps this channel keep videos coming and you can find this original painting and more in my Etsy shop. All right everyone. God bless and happy painting.