 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. This month we're focusing on the theme figures in a landscape and I'm calling this painting better together. So get ready to have some artistic fun and learning as we focus on placing figures in a landscape. If you would go ahead and like this video go ahead and subscribe if you haven't already and if you hit the little bell next to the subscribe button you'll be notified of any future videos I post. This free video tutorial is brought to you because of the faithful support from my patrons on my Patreon page. For $5 a month you can support this channel and you get extra content. The lovely reference image is from unsplash.com. It's really a great site to get copyright free reference images and I have to thank Wojciech Solinski. Did I say that right? He loves mountains, their majesty, ominousness and he's from Poland. I have quite a few patrons from Poland. The pastel surface we'll be using today is La Carte Pastel Card. I love the surface. It is very textured though and for this painting I will be using a dark blue. I like to buy it in pads that have different color selections and I'll also have a clickable link in the description of this video for this product. I first begin with a general sketch like I often do. I keep it very simple and I'm using a white charcoal pencil. Now I had to use something light because the surface is dark obviously. Now I am just very subtly and simply getting in little gestural shapes for the figures and my lessons for figures in a landscape this month will be more with figures that are either in the distance they're small and so what we're trying to do is really just capture their gesture their movement and their basic shape especially when something's really far away. You don't need a whole lot of detail. As a matter of fact it's going to detract from your painting when you over detail images that are in the distance. They're going to be a focal point because they're typically a little bit darker and of course they're going to have a little focal interest but you don't want to overdo it so I'm just keeping some very simple shapes at this stage and I'll teach more on the figures when I get to the painting process. Now these are the basic pastels that I grabbed to start the painting. I do add other colors but it was a good selection to get started. I'm using a dark pastel. I believe this is the Terry Ludwig eggplant color and it's a really nice dark. It appears almost as black but it's actually a really dark purple. Now the surface is dark already or darker and I know that I still need some values that are even a little darker than that. Now I have my reference image very small right here. Now I'm adding a darker blue just to add some interesting darks but if you want to see this reference image larger I'll have a clickable link to that in the video as well. There was a tree back here in the distance and a few little shrubs and branches so I'm kind of just zoning out and squinting my eyes and seeing where the darkest darks are and I'm just getting in basically values at this point. I'm keeping some big strokes because a lot of the foliage in the front was very tall and I want to accentuate that. I added a little bit of that lavender color to the upper right there. It was a little light so I moved on. I'm adding a little green and now I'm using a piece of pipe foam insulation that you can buy at any hardware store for blending in this initial layer. Now this pastel paper, LaCarte Pastel Card, sometimes takes a little while to blend because it is pretty gritty. It takes a while for your pastels to get down into those layers. It does take a lot of layers though. Now I'm adding another green and these initial stages of pastel paintings are really mostly a value study with some underlying color for excitement and to kind of get your your groundwork down to get your basic palette in and cover the main surface. It also helps to keep things very loose and painterly before you go to getting very specific. There were like some distant hills in the background and some grassy areas and a little bit of a... I don't think in the reference image there was much of a sky but I ended up putting a little bit of sky back there. You'll see by the end of the painting. I got a little indication of that tree. There was another little area that I thought was a nice compositional element. The one on the left, the little dark in the midway to the left, it kind of made a feeling of those right foliage kind of coming in and then a little bit to the left. Almost like a little bit of a road there. Here are my figures. I've tried to zoom in a lot where I'm painting and also crop the reference image so you could kind of see what I'm looking at. Believe it or not I'm actually trying to zone out and forget that I'm painting people. Sometimes our brains think something looks a certain way when it really doesn't in actuality. I'm just looking at the shape of his pants, kind of his head and I'm using a dark... I think it's a prismacolor new pastel which is a little bit easier to draw small things because it's a rectangular and it has some corners to it. It's a little harder too. I'm also just getting the shape of her legs and perhaps a little bit of the feeling that she's walking but once again just look at the shapes. Break them down to their most simple form and I'm going to be having a few other tutorials where I really zoom in or I'm going to do some actually a little bit bigger so that you can get the idea of how to shape people in the distance and they won't remain this dark. It does appear that the sunlight is kind of coming from the distance far away, shining towards them. You see a little backlighting on her hair. He's a little bit more in the shadow but a little bit of light on top of his head but I need to get the dark in first for contrast and then I can layer other colors on top suggesting the color of their shirt. I decided to make them a bit older than they are. I kept imagining my parents, some of you know my mom passed away a year ago and I kept thinking of my mom and dad walking together like this. Also too I decided, you'll see as this evolves, I decided to make them holding hands so I do give that little twist on what was already there and so now I'm just basically working in some of the colors and the values around them and keeping it very loose. I have to apologize in advance. You can see my hair flopping down at the bottom of the screen there. I'm working based on a lot of your comments. You really like this overhead footage. I think you can see better. I have my lighting more consistent over the whole image. I do find though when something is really little or detailed I just have this habit of leaning my head over so that I can see. I don't wear glasses but I wear reader glasses and so I have to see a little bit closer and thus I put my head down and get it in the camera. What the camera does is it starts focusing on my head instead of what I'm painting so a little bit of the footage at the end. I wasn't able to get quite as clearly as I do at these beginning stages so apologies in advance. So yeah I'm just working around. I decided to I think in the reference image there was a little bit of a path. It was very subtle so I decided to make it like they're walking through a beautiful field going towards this little path to get on a road home or wherever and I love when I'm painting how my mind meanders making a story almost with the painting. I do it even if people aren't in the painting. So now I'm adding a little bit of a blue to a shirt. His shirt was kind of gray but I thought I'd make it a little bit blue and so I'm just layering a little bit on top and I'm keeping in mind as I'm painting not to go too light too soon. They really are a little bit darker because of where the light is coming from. Now I'm adding a little bit of a this. Now this is a big chunky pastel. It's kind of a lavender like a neutral gray lavender that I'm adding a teeny little spot to the top of his head there. It gives the feeling of light. Some of you guys asked to how do you make such little marks with the big pastels and there's really just a little trick to it. I basically make these little tester marks. I'll put my pastel down and kind of feel where it is. I'll make a teeny little mark then I'll look at where it landed and you learn over time to just adjust your pastel to where you want it to be and that's just like anything. You just get better with practice and I think I made a few marks that were not quite right so I kind of tweaked them as I work again. It's really small so you got to keep it super simple and I'll just make a few more marks for the woman figure and then I'm going to move on because I don't want to overdo it. This is still the initial stages of a painting and it's best to keep things loose and painterly and work the whole. I find that when I work the painting as a whole the end result comes out being more consistent and painterly so you don't and it's more enjoyable. You don't get overly frustrated at one area that's driving you crazy. Just move on and sometimes these things work themselves out. Now I did decide to give a little bit of dark to the tree. I do end up also adding some other trees. I felt like the tree was just too much in the center of them. You know it looked almost like a triangle so I thought I would give a few more trees. You'll see me add those later. So now I'm getting in just some of these deeper grass colors. I know that there are some purpley bluish colored flowers that are on the top and buried down in the grasses but the majority of the grasses are especially in the foreground. They're pretty pretty dark right in the foreground and then they gradually get a little lighter as it's going towards the people and you can see from the reference image. I'm not going to keep the reference image popped up for most of this painting because it would be too little for you to see anyway but if you pull it up and look at it or look at it at the beginning of this video you can see there was an area to the lower lower right kind of that was really dark like it was some deep deep grasses. I felt like that balanced out compositionally. It was weighted nicely with having the heavy dark color on the right side on the bottom having the people more up towards the left in the top and some of the darker trees. It felt balanced to me. Now I'm adding some of this pretty green color. I can't remember what this pastel was but it layered so beautifully on this Sennelier LeCart. It's a little bit of a cooler green I would say. Notice the greens that I had already put down in the foreground. They were a little darker in value and they were warmer closer to yellow so I'm just gently putting in some of these lighter greens back in the distant field. I'm keeping a super super light touch here because I don't want them to be too light. There was some shadowy areas back there and I also want to keep my focal point my center of interest as the people so you can see right now they're the obvious focal point because they're one of the darkest things and I have contrast going on. There are dark elements with light values around them and also brighter values that's another focal point strategy to have colors that are bolder and brighter and higher in saturation, stronger in saturation. So as you can see I had the part where I painted the people as real time and I've just sped some of this up slightly just to be able to move along in this and not have it to be so long. By the way thanks for all your commentary on the video I posted almost just before this one where I really had a lot of raw footage and I ask if you guys mind it there was a lot of pausing a lot of times in videos like this one I go in and I edit out dead time sometimes I literally walk away from my painting and I don't turn my camera off so I try to for your convenience cut out all of that and in the last video I I didn't do a lot of that tweaking and you guys were so nice you're like we don't care you know it definitely makes it easier on me but again I'm trying to make these videos short enough to watch I know people's lives are busy and to make it a lesson where you can just really concentrate on what I'm doing rather than all this dead time so anyway that that was my long-winded version of a thank you for your comments and I do have to again oh I'm adding a little bit of dark to some of those grasses that were there was like a big tall area on the right side that looked almost like wheat grasses I wasn't sure if I wanted to keep them looking like wheat I kind of played around with it and I kind of decided against it I felt like it was a little bit much so I kept all the flowers kind of consistent in color and type of flower but anyway another thank you to my patrons for helping me to continue to do this because if it wasn't for the support of my patrons I know I would not be able to make this many videos and give all the instruction that I do I would probably just do it like I don't know maybe once every few months but because of the support from my patrons I can keep the free lessons coming here on the Monet cafe YouTube channel and trust me I get comments from people all over the world that are so grateful I mean literally people in countries who have not only they don't have the financial means they don't have people teaching in their area and they can't find art instructions so god bless my patrons for that and it's helping my husband to build our home some of you have been through my saga where our home flooded in 2017 we're still living in a temporary home situation and we bought some property six acres and we're trying to build a home and the future home of the new Monet cafe so all of that is coming down the road and I'm very grateful for my patron support because my husband is literally building our house he has no job other than that so it's my art business alone god bless you all okay enough of that so these were some of the wheat grasses those crazy black things I'm putting in there it's the dark Terry Ludwig eggplant and I was I put down the contrast I'm gonna lighten them up you basically a lot of times with flowers and things that you want to have focal interest you need the contrast so you put down dark and then you gradually lighten it up with your layers you'll see me do that pretty soon so now I'm just kind of weaving in some of these grassy keeping the the gesture of the grasses and also trying to vary the direction I find that as my artwork has evolved as I've painted for many years I found that that has been one thing that has really really helped me or really really been a noticeable difference in my my art is that I have the spontaneous motion to things now you can see I added that blue to the sky I thought that was had a more interest to it if it had some distance with a blue sky I'm getting in a little bit more of some of these grasses in the distance just lightening it up a bit in some areas it felt dark for a while so I was trying to brighten it up a little bit there's the head that I was talking about my gray my gray crazy hairs anybody else have that going on why don't they just behave they just won't lay down but anyway my figures are still a little bit dark but you'll see me tweak this and I really liked the gesture or the feel of the figures at this point I felt like they looked more painterly here's where I am lightening up some of these to give them the feeling of maybe some just sort of grassy wheat like things growing up and so I'm kind of just putting a highlight almost like I put a highlight on their head their gray hair which I'll do more of soon so again I liked their form here probably better than at the end but I I needed to lighten them up a bit which I do with the color of their shirt and things like that now these little square or rectangular pastels that I have here are prism a color new pastels spelled in you pastels and they're harder they're good for grasses they're more affordable actually and they're really great for sketching now here's some of these gorgeous it's like a blue-purple it's this is a Terry Ludwig pastel you can see that one laying there now these are some of the blues it's a little bit of a warmer blue that I'm just getting in shapes I'm looking at where some of the flowers are in the reference image not that you have to follow it like a total roadmap you use it as a guide and then you put flowers where you think it will compositionally enhance the image so I know some of these I'm going to bury to I don't want my flowers to look like they're all just pasted on the top of the grass that's not what happens if you're if you're in nature this photograph is more like somebody who got down low in the scene and so you're going to see flowers that are behind grasses and flowers that are deeper in the grasses so I will layer additional grasses on top of some of them towards the end of the painting I also felt like the blue in the sky kind of connected the blue flowers when I didn't have the the sky as that blue color I don't know it just didn't feel right so you do have the artistic license to look at things and think what would make this just more beautiful and more connected with color and and with motion so I've got the energy going on of the flowers pulling the viewer's eye kind of up and around a little bit of a curve this is kind of does have an s-shaped curve you come in to the the lower left with the flowers curve around that barrier where those wheat grasses are towards the people and then back around that road to the mountains so a really kind of typical s-shaped curve composition and here is more of my crazy head getting in the way I decided to add a little bit this kind of magenta color I know her shirt was that color but I wanted to add a little bit of that in the surrounding area kind of on the road and in some other areas so that when I added the magenta to her shirt she didn't just look like she was standing out like a sore thumb I'm adding a few more grasses that are kind of in the middle ground they're gonna have a little bit of height to them not nearly as tall and broad as the foreground grasses so I wanted to zoom in a little bit more to here so you could maybe see a little better better how I'm kind of just sketching in this road a little bit very suggestive and I decided to add a little bit of that pretty teal blue at the base of some of the trees and here's where I'm giving a little bit more of a suggestion of more trees I felt like that was neat that there were trees kind of receding into the distance adding a little bit of that Terry Ludwig I did just then to the trees to darken them up now I'm adding some lighter greens this is the whole concept again of working dark to light you put your darker values down first and then you gradually layer your lighter values on top I wanted to lighten the sky up a little bit more and I'm peeking in some of these blues and I haven't quite yet defined the area of those tall grasses on the right so I didn't want to give too much detail with some negative painting behind them and now I do this a lot I get a pastel that's kind of a neutral it's almost a gray when things are in the distance sometimes a little bit of bright color in the distance is good but I didn't want it to take away from my focal point there's my little dark area to the left there that I also felt compositionally pulled your eye in you're going to have to pardon my big old head again for a minute as I'm leaning over and working a little bit on the distant hills in the back and you know really at this stage it could have been considered pretty done I liked the really almost unfinished look of some of the grasses and the flowers but you know me if you watch my videos I just get so into it I keep working and keep working one day I'll learn to stop sooner hopefully and you can probably see how the little bits of light areas that I'm adding is really brightening up this painting when you're working on a dark surface like this or a darker surface like this sometimes your painting can feel a little dark and I wanted to make sure I brightened it up a bit so I'm just adding there were some of these little pretty blue flowers peeking up over the tops some of them are reaching really high I moved my painting to my easel it helps me to not get my head in the way and I was also collecting a little bit of pastel dust that's the disadvantage of painting flat with pastels that you sometimes have to pick your painting up take it outside dust it off and come back into work because it's not going to fall like it does when it's on an easel like this by the way I made a new invention based on my filming my new filming technique that I can't wait to show you I always like my work surface to look nice and put some foam core board down to work on well foam core board it gets expensive I have to replace it a lot because I get pastel all over it it doesn't look good for the next video so I thought hmm I got creative and came up with a neat board that oh my gosh I think so many of you are gonna love it I came up with it out of my brain and it is gonna work so great and I'll share it with you hopefully within the next tutorial or so I think a lot of you will love it alright so just little wispy suggestions of grasses once again moving in different directions just use your reference image as a guide I saw some grasses were just diagonally reaching way across you know and that gives a little energy and excitement to the painting thus far I'm almost done with this video you as you can see but thus far I've had only speeding it up minimally and real time when I painted the figures but this last part I'm gonna just speed it up a little bit because these are kind of the finishing marks and then you can see the final that big chunky green pastel I'm using there is a Diane Townsend it's part of the Diane Townsend greens it's a really nice set I think it's 12 pastels so just getting in more of the flowers adding a little bit more purple and keeping them hopefully free and not too patterned that's one thing you want to try to do when you're adding a lot of wild flowers is to keep some it does have a harmony to it but it's not a specific pattern that's gonna make it look very artificial so here is almost the final on the easel I think I tweaked it a little bit more and it came out brighter when I put it up on the easel like this you can see the color so I hope you learned a lot I am gonna be having plenty more lessons on figures and landscapes this month if you would like to support this channel it would really bless my husband and myself for only $5 a month and a lot of other people who want some free art instruction all right my friends God bless and happy painting