 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm bringing you a product review video of some pastels that are quite affordable, great for the beginner artist. I'm also going to be doing some painting demonstrations and if you haven't subscribed to this channel I really hope you will. We have a lot of fun and a lot of learning. Now these are the three I call them pastel sketches because I do them on drawing paper. All of these three chicken paintings, the reason they're chicken paintings is because it's farm theme in our Monet Café art group on Facebook but all of these chicken paintings were done with this set exclusively but they work great for florals and landscapes as well. So in this demonstration you will see me creating three paintings using only Arteza pastels and I'll be sharing a lot about this product with you. Now the painting process will be sped up but for my patrons you will have the real-time footage to follow along in this tutorial. I've actually already uploaded it for my patrons on my Patreon page. If you don't know what that is let me quickly tell you. It's a place where you can support this channel for $5 a month. It's patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. You support the Monet Café channel so I keep bringing free videos but you get lots of extra content and I love that I get to chat with you guys and see your work that you post in our homework album. So check that out. There will be a link at the end of this video if you would like to become a patron. What I wanted to do is share with you that I recently got a set of Arteza pastels. Now this is a set of 72 pastels. Arteza sent them to me to do a product review and I'll be talking more about them as I paint. One of the advantages is of course they're less expensive. For 72 pastels, a decent size stick, they're only about 40, 43, 45 dollars. This is actually on Amazon. I have them on my Amazon shop but from the Arteza site they're about 43, 44 dollars and I'm using once again the toned gray paper that I've been using for many of the past farm scene or farm themed paintings I've been doing. You know I love this because of its practicality and affordability. Look at this an 11 by 14, 24 sheet pad or notebook is only it's less than $10. In continuing with our farm theme for the month of July I found a lot of great reference images of chickens on pixabay.com. They have some great copyright free images so I'll be choosing a few of these images to do some pastel sketching which is a great way to loosen up, have some fun and not take art so seriously sometimes. So join me as I paint this rooster and I'm going to call him Clock Norris because he looked kind of tough and pretty cool. So what I'm going to be doing this is the only pastel right here that I'm using for this other than the Arteza. Everything will be Arteza the 72 set except for this. This is a Prismacolor new pastel. You know I use these a lot for sketching. They're harder. This one is the spruce blue and it's just a nice little hard pastel to do some sketching. And even though I work a lot on sanded pastel papers if you've been painting with pastels very long you know a lot of pastel artists prefer sanded papers. They're literally a little bit like sandpaper. They hold a lot of layers but I for the month of July have been using almost exclusively this gray tones Strathmore paper and I really love bringing options to beginner pastel artists that are more affordable. So yes you can work on unsanded surfaces and then as you find out if you like this pastel painting process or not you can gradually try some sanded surfaces if you like. Actually Dakota Pastels Dakota pastels dot com has some nice sampler sets of pastels and papers so you can try a few different types to see what you like. Now once again not only is the paper inexpensive but these pastels are very affordable. Quality soft pastels can get expensive in the hundreds for a set of pastels and sometimes it's hard just to dish that out early on in your pastel journey. So a set like this could be a good option for you and then as you grow and see if you really like this medium then you could gradually work your way up to some of the more expensive brands. One thing I would like to mention early on here is to not buy the pastel sets that you typically find at craft stores. I'm talking about stores like in the U.S. anyway like Michaels, Joann's, Hobby Lobby. Occasionally they can have some of the better quality pastel sets available but often they have like their store brand. I know one particular brand is called Reeves or EVES and some of these brands are really going to frustrate you. They do not have a lot of pigment in them and that leads me to a good segue as to why are some of the better pastels more expensive. Well the reason you get such vibrant color and great application with the more expensive brands is they are almost all pigment. I mean the color, the actual color, the pigment. It has very little binder what holds it together. That's why they're a little more crumbly. That's why they're soft. They're considered soft pastels so you're getting almost pure pigment applied to your surface and since the pigment is more expensive than the binder that's why the better brands are more expensive. Now when you get to the cheaper pastels or less expensive pastels they have more binder in them typically less color. Now pastels like this, the Arteza, I was pleasantly surprised. I was a little bit afraid that they were going to be like some of those store brand or craft store brand pastels and I found they applied better than I anticipated. So I I'm definitely going to use them. I think one application I will use them in probably quite a lot is for under paintings. Often it's good to use a harder pastel for an under painting and they had some nice bold colors. Often I like to when I say under painting it means to tone your surface either solid color or with a kind of an impressionistic beginning prior to starting your painting and I actually already used these as an under painting and it worked great. And with respect to hardness to softness level if I had a scale or a gauge some of the most expensive soft pastels are very very soft. Once again almost pure pigment. There are some on the other end of the soft pastel. They're all called soft pastels but on that range the harder ones would be like that new pastel. They're made by Prismacolor like the one I just did the initial sketch in. They are harder. I would say this Arteza is hard to medium similar to a Rembrandt pastel. And let me mention Dakota Pastels once again. They have a nice chart of pastels from softness to hardness. You can see where the Rembrandt is right there. That's kind of where I would put these Arteza pastels. Alright here is Clark Norris in all of his glory. And now let me move on to another painting of a sweet mama hen with some of her little baby chicks. In the video of these chicken paintings with the Arteza pastel set I mentioned to my patrons about some of the advantages of using one set of pastels or limiting yourself to a certain grouping of pastels. And what that does is it forces you to paint by value which means the lightness or darkness rather than color. Now let me try to talk about that a little bit while I paint. So once again I'm bringing up an advantage of using this set of Arteza pastels because you'll only have these 72 pastels and you will have to get creative with color if you don't have the color that's in the reference photo. As an example in this particular painting of the hen and her chicks I didn't have some of the rich darker burgundies that were in the reference photo or some of the particular colors in the shadows. So what I did is I grabbed a color that was a similar value or close to it or darkness. So that's why I grabbed this magenta color. And I know too that even though I'm limited with how much I can layer on an unsanded surface I still have some layering ability. So it looks a bit crazy that I'm using magenta and purple as my initial layer for this hen. But I've learned that pastels do indeed mix on the surface to get new color combinations. That's a video that I want to be doing pretty soon. We often think that with pastels you can't do any color mixing like oil and acrylic and watercolor. Well we can't mix them like you know how you can combine colors blue and yellow to get green as in watercolor painting. But they do combine to make new color combinations on the surface. So even though I'm laying down this purple and this dark I'm going to layer on top of it with some of the rusty colors and some of the lighter colors of the feathers on top. And that little shadowy color of the purple and magenta will show through. Now I'm also beginning this I believe it's called the comb cox comb of the hen or the rooster on top. And I'm laying down cooler red which would be like a pink. But I later will add some more of the warmer reds on top of that. So I'm definitely getting layering with these pastels even on this unsanded surface. Now I'm adding some of the these would be called local colors meaning the color that's in the reference photo. That's the definition of local color. The color that you see the color that's actually there as opposed to getting creative with color and interpretive with color. So I've definitely been more interpretive with color and getting this purple down and even this pink. But I know that I'm going to layer on top of it and that's again one of the advantages of using a limited set of pastels. You can't just go to your larger set. Well a lot of you beginner artists don't even have a larger set of pastels. So once again it forces you to lean towards the correct value which is of utmost importance in good art. Now keep that in mind. As I paint I'm going to add a little bit of music. I'm going to be back right at the end of this one when we get to painting the little chicks. But as I paint just watch how I use this layering process and how using color creatively can often lead towards a more fun interesting and creative overall painting. This song is kind of bluesy and fun so enjoy and I'll be back soon. In the reference photo the chick was not as fluffy as I would have liked him or her to be. So I just kind of interpreted it myself and made it more of a cute little fluff ball of a chick and then kind of gave the same shape and appearance to the background chicks. And I would say this all of these paintings lean more towards the whimsical end of the painting spectrum which is fun. One of the greatest things I think you can do as an artist is learn to enjoy the journey early on. We get so critical of ourselves and we compare ourselves to other artists so much that it steals our joy and it steals the fun and the creativity and I think it actually steals your ability because you're just not in the right attitude to paint. So often think of it like when you were a kid and you grabbed coloring book and grabbed some markers or crayons or whatever. Do you remember I do painting for the joy of it just having fun now of course our audience back then was showing our moms our dads our sisters our brothers and you know that was always kind of neat. But now often instead of painting for the joy of it and of course for the learning aspect we hold this measurement scale on ourselves of how good we're supposed to be as compared with other people. So I advise don't do that. Of course it's OK to be a little bit competitive and have goals for yourself or yourselves but don't be so stringent with it or so hard on yourselves that you're not just having fun. So that's what sometimes some of these little whimsical paintings do ones that are faster. All of these I know the rooster one took less than 20 minutes. This one probably took a little longer than that. And the last one that you'll see in a minute was was pretty fast to it took a little longer because there are like five or six chickens in it. So I had to get my sketch right on that. But anyway have fun. And now I think you're seeing how these artesia pastels work and they really are getting some good color down and a decent amount of layering even on unsanded paper. Let me mention here too that I typically take all of my labels off before I use my pastels. I take them off and if they're full sticks I break them or if they're round pastels I use a cigar cutter. It works great to cut my pastels in half. And the reason I do this is they're more manageable as smaller sticks than large sticks. But this pastel worked great using the corners and then using kind of the little blunt edge. Now you can really see the layering of those feathers on the Mama Hen and how just those loose gestural strokes really give the indication of feathers. Having directional strokes and varying your strokes really makes a difference in pastel painting or any painting for that matter. So of course I had to lay down some dark to put some hay on top of it and this one was fun. I had a good time with it. I really liked that Mama and her little baby. I was thinking I would call this Mama's favorite even though as a Mama I do not have any favorites with my kids. I love them all the same and it is more than words can describe. All right here's Mama Hen with her babies. Now here's this crazy motley crew. Oh it's five chickens. Okay so once again just getting a sketch in is important when you're dealing with people or animals things like that. You want to get it fairly accurate but again these are whimsical in nature so if some things are a little bit exaggerated it's okay. But I had fun with these guys. I loved this one on the end here. He looked like he was leaning back at the other ones and going what's up with you guys. So enjoy this one. Again notice the layering that I do with these Arteza pastels and enjoy this crazy group of chickens. Now wasn't that fun? So I would have to say I give a thumbs up to Arteza pastels as a great set for beginners. Very affordable and believe it or not I have another chicken painting coming. This one also on the Strathmore gray tones paper with various other pastels. I have another barn painting coming too. I'm running out of month to edit and share all of this farm themed artwork. Alright guys hope you enjoyed. Hope you learned something. Please subscribe if you haven't. Like this video. Make a comment. It really does help with the success of this video on YouTube. Alright guys as always happy painting!