 Welcome to Monet Café. In today's tutorial I will teach you how to make your own black pastel painting surface and you're even going to get a pastel painting tutorial. It's all really easy and the great thing is these products are very affordable and great for beginner pastel artists. And make sure you stay to the end because I'm even going to give you access to learn how I mount and store my pastel paintings. So let's start off by talking about these products. This little Arteza pad happens to be six inches by six inches and I really like these little pages. It's called an acrylic pad. It takes wet media. So what I've been curious about doing is just adding some clear gesso to this to make it suitable for soft pastels and getting a lot of layering. Here's the actual Arteza acrylic pad and I really love these sheets. They are nice and sturdy and it's so simple like I said to turn this into a pastel surface by using clear gesso not regular gesso. Clear gesso has little bits of sand in it or something kind of textural and I used to put it in a jar and dip my brush and paint it on. But now I'm like why not just pour it right on the surface. Now if you want to smooth application you could use a soft brush or a foam brush but sometimes I like a little bit of texture and I can use it to my advantage with my painting. What I do is I use a brush that's got a crazy texture. This is a cheap brush. I think it's like from Home Depot and I make my strokes to kind of emulate where my grasses will be. But as you can see it will curl a bit. I have found though that when it dries it usually dries pretty flat. I will often blow it dry and help it along a bit by moving the paper in such a way and blowing it dry to where it really helps to flatten it out nicely. And this is a really great do-it-yourself way to create a black surface that will receive soft pastels. And you can see here that it's pretty flat. I mean it might have a little bit of bowing but not too bad. And it typically dries pretty clear. There's still a little white on this just because it's not totally dry. And here you can actually hear the grit or the sandiness on the surface. I picked a reference photo. I got this one from unsplash.com. A great site for copyright free reference images. I already cropped it to a square format and I have this set of Maggie Price Terry Ludwig Pastels. I put a lot of my pastels in my workshop set but I like to keep some in sets. They're quick to grab with something like this when you just got a paint. So the flowers are paint. This set has a lot of reds in it. So I might change the flowers to red. Before we get started would you do me a favor and like this video. Also leave me a comment. I'd love to hear from you. And become part of the Monet Café family by subscribing. Hit that subscribe button. And if you would like a little bit more you can consider becoming a patron of mine for only five dollars a month. I have extra content and your support helps keep free lessons coming on Monet Café. The composition is pretty simple but I go ahead and sketch it in the basics with a Prismacolor new pastel. These are really great for little sketches. Obviously using a light color because the surface is dark. So I get in the horizon line a few tree shapes and just some suggestions of tall grasses in the front. Now this is a dark purple pastel and notice in the reference image the darkest thing are the distant trees and those deep grasses in the foreground. So I just get in a little deep purple just to start getting some value in. What is the lightest thing? It's the sky. So I'm just basically scumbling in some of this pretty blue and I am going to warm up the sky later. So just remember when you're first getting started with soft pastels, there's a little bit of a light pink color there, don't feel like you have to cover the entire surface immediately. It's a process. And by creating very lightly applied layers the colors start to interact with each other. And that's to me where the real beauty comes in is how those colors play upon each other. And you can see I've added a little bit of the warmth and I'm just having fun with some of the colors in the sky. I think this might even be a darker purple, the Terry Ludwig eggplant color. And keep in mind that even though the surface is black, it's still not as dark as some soft pastel. So you can still get in darker values often even when working on a dark surface. Now here's where it starts to get fun. I've got this nice neutral earthy green that might normally appear dark on a light surface but on this surface it appears a little bit lighter. So I'm using it to get some of the feeling of the light maybe shining on some of the grasses and the tree tops. And carving the trees out is what's called negative painting. I'm literally carving the sky into the tree shapes rather than the tree shapes into the sky. And I did begin with some of the pink colors. I think I mentioned that I noticed this set had some pinks but had some really nice reds too. So I'm gonna do a little combo of pink and red. The final will look more red than pink but this was a nice value to get down to begin with. I found that the darkness or lightness of it was what I wanted to start with. I'm reinforcing some of the darks in the deep roots and you can see it's already starting to take shape. So it's amazing how quickly things can come together with just a few layers of soft pastels. I will stress as I always do getting the value right is more important than getting the color right. The value is simply the lightness or the darkness and I find that is crucial and you can really explore with color as long as those values are right. Here's where I'm going in and adding some of these reds and I'm just very loosely making some marks on the tops of some of the flower shapes that I have already laid down. Notice the reference image has a little bit of that blurry look to it which I love because I like impressionistic paintings or painterly styles of paintings and so I'm just making basically just a suggestion of where the flowers are rather than spelling things out for the viewer. It's amazing what our brains can put together with just a little bit of color and value information and I'm using the same pastel to give the impression of flowers receding into the distance and eventually being so far away that they just start to make a blanket of color across the field. That's really what we see visually when we look at something like this scene. We only see division between flowers separation and more detail when flowers are up close. Now I've got another really pretty green that's from the Maggie Price set and again it's another sagey color a little bit neutral and I really liked it for again some of the tree values that were a little bit more green and some of the grasses. Notice in the reference image really the distant trees just look like a dark blob so I used my artistic license to give this a feeling a little bit more like the sun was coming from the upper right. That's where I positioned the sun. It's kind of like in the distant horizon setting but I made my my values and color choices imagining the sun being in the upper right of this image. And now a quick little break for a subscriber spotlight. I really wanted to feature this subscriber who left me this comment. Her name is Lesia. I am from Ukraine and as you know the war stresses us day by day. Moreover, I broke my spine and art is the best way to relieve the stress and to not lose the ability to live. I don't expose my art here just on my Facebook page. I found your channel interesting and helpful for beginners and advanced artists. Thank you for sharing your experience. Well God bless you Lesia and I know everyone's hearts go out to you and I pray you can find some peace through art. I'm now using an even lighter value green and just sneaking in some of those lighter values. You can see it in the reference image if you squint your eyes. There's some of the deep grasses that are very dark. Then you gradually get some that are a little lighter and finally some that are warmer and even lighter still. I gave a little bit more of that green on the distant kind of hill that goes up to the trees in the distance. And now I'm just kind of gradually layering some of this lightest value green to suggest the sunlight just hitting the tops of some of the grasses. And I'm wrestling with my surface here a little bit. I had one of my pieces of tape across the corner so I removed it just to get a little bit of a pretty blue. I really like this blue. And I added that one kind of to the upper corners of the painting. And now I've got a little bit of a lighter blue and just giving some painterly gestural marks to lighten up the sky a bit. And I'm getting in now this is another pretty blue that I'm suggesting those clouds. And I don't have them in the same place that you can see in the reference image. But you can always break out that artistic license. Here's where I'm going deep behind the trees, adding a little bit of warmth and often value behind trees kind of down in between like there it's called sky holes the spaces between the trees. Often the value is just a tad darker. I had a little bit of this turquoise to push some trees back into the distance almost like there's trees very far away. What happens with things far away is they cool off in temperature. So often a blue, green turquoise will be a neat color choice to give that illusion. I added a few more warm greens to the distant field and I kind of lost some of my flowers. So I just layer a little bit more giving the distant field a blanket of that pretty pink or cool red color and I bring a little bit of it more into the middle ground where we do start to see a little bit of the individual flower shapes again just shapes. And now towards the foreground is where I'm getting my brightest and kind of deepest reddish color. And I'm making these marks in areas that I think will strengthen the composition just pull the viewer in like the flowers are just moving like in a dance to pull the viewer back to the distant field. So just some final touches here getting a little bit more of where some of the light might be coming in and hitting some of those deep grasses. But remember the foreground is very dark so I don't want to add too much light down into the depths of where those roots and grasses are growing up from the ground. I always like to put a little celebrity star of the show peeking up over the horizon so I decided to add one little flower popping up over trying to direct the viewer to go come back over here and look at me. Here's the painting when I had finished with this session and I was really happy with this one. I did decide after to add a little bit of teals and turquoise colors to it and I actually created a video where in that video I show how to mount this painting. You see it did still have a little bit of a curl to it. So I'm going to share a link to that video at the very end on the end screen here and also in the description of this video. So you can check out my method for mounting pastel paintings, how I store them for basic storage or shipping, how I package them once I make a sale from my Etsy shop and lots more. So be sure to check out that video. I really hope this was helpful for you. Also again, like this video comment. It helps the success of this video so others can see it and to come join the Monet Cafe family. As always, everyone, God bless and happy painting.