 Welcome to Monet Café. Come on into the studio with me and learn my five tips for impressionistic painting. Hello artist and welcome to Monet Café. In today's pastel painting tutorial I'll be sharing with you my five tips for painting with an impressionistic style. One of the most common questions I get on this channel is how do I loosen up? I want to paint more impressionistically or with a painterly style and if that's you you've come to the right video. I'm gonna break it down for you in this lesson with these five tips as I paint and I think you're gonna be on the road to painting with impressionism. So I had a lot of fun creating this painting and I think you're gonna learn a lot. So get ready, get yourself a cup of coffee or tea and get ready to join the painting and learning fun. Here we go. My inspiration was this beautiful reference image from unsplash.com that looks like it's from Scotland with beautiful cliffs, flowers and sea. Let's first begin by talking about my products. For the surface I'm going to be using a surface that I really like. It's called Art Spectrum Color Fix Pastel Paper. I like this rainbow pack because you get so many colors. I think I used rose gray for this painting. The pastels that I used is a set of 120 half sticks of Schmincke pastels. Now they do not offer this set anymore and as I always say use what you have. I know if you're a beginner pastel artist you're probably like I was when I started. I didn't have much so I found a really neat way to arrange my pastels in a palette with an appetizer tray. I simply sort them by color and value according to the color wheel. So you're learning a little bit about color theory as well and I put my neutrals in the middle. It works really great. I use this just as a way to tidy up the pastels that I've used for previous paintings. I've placed my pastel paper on my surface just bordering it with some masking tape slash artist tape whatever you have and also too to get this sketch accurate I put this in Photoshop and just made some divisions in quadrants. It really helps you to sketch things out more easily and get it accurate. So if you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page I will be providing a copy of that image for you. I'm using a pencil to sketch. It's pretty light so I'm gonna speed this up. You can't see it that well anyway but you'll see how I just make some lines. I don't get my ruler out but I make some quadrants and I'm using the image just to kind of get things in place and it really is amazing how much easier it is when you divide things up this way. Also I chose this kind of rose gray color because the scene had this like Irish foggy mood to it and I thought it would make a nice base to begin the painting. And now I'll take you through what I'm calling impressionism tip number one which is loose beginnings. This is a great way to start a painting that will help you to achieve an impressionistic style. Now let me show you the product that I used. Keep in mind you can always substitute other products for the stage. Watercolor would even work quite well. Or pastels blended. These are the Neo Color 2 water soluble wax pastels. They look like coloring crayons right? And these are the colors that I chose. I wanted to keep things a little on the cooler side for the underpainting and these literally explode with color when you add water. So watch this magic happen. I'm using this blue for my lightest value. Anything in the image that is lighter. I really just think of values especially when doing a loose underpainting like this in about four values. Something light, something dark, and one or two middle values. Now one of the questions I get so often is how do you choose these colors? I mean look at the reference image. It's it's not really these colors although if you really examine it you can see those distant cliffs. They really are kind of blue. So why did I put pink down on the sides of the cliff? Well I want some color contrast and when I put the water down on this you're gonna see that I have colors that are going to be compliments opposite on the color wheel to some of the colors that I see in the scene. In other words like green. A compliment opposite on the color wheel is going to be orange, red, pink. It's gonna be something warm. And I will often choose very golden colors for an underpainting when creating most landscapes with green. However because this scene felt very foggy and it just felt like it might be a misty rainy day I decided to go a little bit cooler in color temperature for my underpainting. So rather than a red or orangey color I went more with pink and magenta colors and it really did make a end result that felt cooler. And as I said before if you're using a water-friendly surface you could substitute this with watercolor. If you're not using a water-friendly surface you could simply lay down some pastels and blend them to get a soft beginning. And here's where it gets fun. I'm just using a watercolor brush again whatever you have and some water. And I think you're gonna see this is pretty fun. I keep paper towels handy just to control the amount of water. You can see that blue. Wow it just it's like magic it just changes right before your eyes. And as I work here I'm gonna describe to you why. Why am I doing this? Well I like at the point of this video love impressionistic style art. And I feel that this is one of the best kickstart ways to have a painting that's gonna really feel more like impressionism. And these loose beginnings do a few things for you. First of all it's exactly what it says. It's loose. That's one of the qualities about impressionistic painting. And so you kind of just get in the right mood to begin with. And also it allows you to get the majority of the surface covered and create a mood. Like I said this often happens by your choice of underpainting colors. So I think you can see here that it's really starting to feel dreamy. I mean I really sometimes I just love the underpaintings. And I often like using a water based underpainting because it gives you that drippy dreamy quality. You notice I'm using a decent amount of water and it just starts to really blend the colors blend into each other. And things don't feel so segmented. So it becomes this palette of color that's melding into each other. So it's a great way to start an impressionistic painting. And when I finish this up I'm simply going to let it dry. And it is ready to receive pastels. Before we move on to the pastel portion though I'd like to do a subscriber spotlight. This lesson subscriber spotlight is on Hennette Smith on a recent video. She said, Dear Susan, I always wanted to start doing some art. I am 74 years old and due to my work never had the opportunity to begin. I have bad arthritis but decided this is the time to start better now than later. Amen to that. I saw your work and decided to follow your classes. Thanks for your wonderful work. We live in the beautiful countryside on the southern tip of South Africa. God bless. Oh, I've heard it is so beautiful there. And you will have a palette of beauty to paint from. So God bless you, Hennette. And on that note, if you've been watching and enjoying my videos or just this video and you haven't subscribed yet, please click that subscribe button and go ahead and click that thumbs up like button. It really helps this video to get shared on YouTube. And now it's time to add pastel to this dreamy beginning, which leads me to my second tip for creating impressionistic style artwork, which is to exaggerate color. Now for this painting, I stayed somewhat what's called local color. I stayed pretty close to the colors that are in the scene, but I definitely exaggerate them. And you don't always have to do this for impressionistic painting, but I find that's part of the fun. I started with the sky and I chose a pastel that was a little bit lavender to layer gently over the blue that I had put down as the underpainting. Now I know the sky is a little lighter than what I had had down. So I just glaze over a little bit of a lighter blue color and it is very textural at this point. This particular surface is pretty textural. I noticed with the color fix art spectrum that some of the different colors have different textures. And I will smooth the sky out and a little while you'll see me do that with just a little packing peanut. It's like a little piece of styrofoam like you get in your packages to protect them. And I use it to soften the sky. Now when it comes to exaggerating or getting creative with color, I find that that can be something that is a bit of a challenge for many new artists. I often get the question like how did you know to choose that color and how do you know if it'll work? And I basically have my own simple formula that is really just artistic principles that I've kind of reconfigured to how I see it working. And if you're a patron of mine, I'm going to provide you these two graphic elements to help you in understanding that. I'll go into more of this on the Patreon version. If you would like to get that extra content or some of the hundreds of other videos I have on my Patreon page, you can become a patron for only $5 a month. And you get to join my Patreon family. We share. I get to see your work and it's a lot of fun. Before continuing with pastel application, I wanted to go ahead and get in just a little idea of this lighthouse that was on the hill. For me, it was a really great while very small compositional element that just added to the scene. Again, I felt like this was in Scotland or somewhere and a lighthouse is just emblematic of that type of scenery. And I've found that when you have things in the distance or structures like this in the distance, less is more, which leads me to my third tip for creating impressionistic paintings. Less is indeed more. And often we, especially when we're beginner artists, we think we have to have everything in the painting. So it is really a great idea to break down before you even begin to paint an idea of what really attracted me to the scene in the first place. Often I find, especially when you're first starting out as a painter, that we have too many focal elements and it leaves the viewer a bit confused as to where to look. It just gets too much for the viewer to focus on. So when we can identify our focal points early and make one of them the main focal point and everything else should feel like a supporting character in this painting, my main focal point was going to be the foreground flowers, just like a lead in that had a lot of color and energy pulling the viewer into the painting. And then my secondary and third focal areas were going to be that water, the area in the middle, and also where the viewer could meander around and finally exit through the painting, perhaps at the lighthouse or in the sky. So break it down if you can. Find the things that you feel are important for your viewer and for yourself, what you liked in the image. And the concept of less is more is not just to do with your focal point strategy, but also to do with the amount of detail and stroke work that you make. I find that when I was first beginning painting, I overpainted. I overlayered. I did too much. I still do sometimes. And I find that less is more principle works also for the element of not overworking our paintings with respect to how much we actually paint on the surface. Less is more can also be, we don't need to cover up all of that beautiful underpainting. We can leave bits of it peeking through. And I hope at this point you can see how that loose beginning tip number one of that underpainting is really making such a beautiful impact on this painting. That pinkish magenta color underneath the blue makes a beautiful color contrast that to me is so much more impactful than if I had just used that blue even on the rose gray. You know, the surface I started out with had a tone, had a color to it. I never liked just working on a white surface. I'll always do an underpainting, but this happened to already have one color. Often I'll use one color to start with, but I felt that this loose underpainting and this beautiful color underneath would really cause some color excitement when I added the blues for the sides of the cliffs. And here you can see I just was blocking in some of the the rock face that has a little more warmth to it. I put down a little darker value brown. Now I wanted that sky to feel more like a sky. It was pretty textural with the color fix. So here I'm just using a little, it's like a piece of styrofoam. It's a packing peanut that you get in your packages to protect them. And the application of the pastels on the color fix surface was a bit too textural. I could see, I liked it, but I really wanted to soften things up. Remember I wanted this to feel a little bit moody, kind of like a cloudy day. And so I'm using this packing peanut just to kind of blend in. This is still almost part of the blocking in stage. And this will lead me to my tip number four to impressionistic painting, which is work the whole. What I mean by that is we're going to try to work the entire painting as a unit, an entity, and not just segment the painting into little individual parts that are just connected like puzzle pieces. With impressionism, it feels harmonious. Elements feel like they just blend and meld into one another. And it is a complete piece rather than a piece of many parts. And I feel the need to stress that these tips that I'm giving are coming from my experience as an artist and the fact that I love the style of impressionism. I have not had formal art training like many artists have. I do have a fine arts degree, but it happens to be in computer graphics. And I still use that all the time with my art career. But these are things that I've learned really just from painting a lot and examining. And so I share that to give you encouragement. If you haven't had any formal art training, yes, it can be done. And that's really a little bit of how Monet Cafe started. I had a hard time finding a lot of education online, especially since I was pretty broke for a period of my life. And so finding free resources and also painting lessons where I didn't have to leave my home. I was a single mom for a while with three boys. And so I thought if I'm learning these things and it took me a long time to find ways to learn to paint, I'm going to share it. So I started recording myself and started sharing what I was learning. And so there's your little backstory of how Monet Cafe started. And here you can see I've added a little bit more detail to the lighthouse. And now that I have back to working the whole, I have almost everything a bit covered with pastel except for that foreground, which I purposely left a lot of that magenta showing through. I will be instructing on that in just a minute. But I did want to go ahead and start working a bit on this rock. And this isn't one of the tips, but I'm just going to give you one of my suggestions is it's going to sound maybe strange. Often when working with something like this, I kind of zone out. I forget about what I'm painting. And I just look at the colors and the shapes and the values. And often if you can try to just paint by those simple principles, rather than, oh, I'm painting a rock. Usually you're going to get it more accurate by that strategy than if you are really focusing on every little crevice and every little detail, which is another tip for impressionistic painting. Like I said, don't paint everything. You know, that's not my focal point, that rock. I did notice, though, that rock. Doesn't it look kind of like a dragon's head? I didn't notice it in the photo that much, but as I was painting it, I was like, oh, yeah, that looks like a dragon asleep on the side of a mountain. That's pretty cool, huh? And now I'd like to talk about tip number five, which is color harmony. Now I'm not going to break out any color theory rules on you. I find sometimes artists can get intimidated by, oh, I have to learn all this color theory. But in general, you do want, with each painting, for those colors to feel harmonious to the scene. That's why I often, I say this so often in my videos, if I have a color in my hand, I will look where I can use it somewhere else in the painting. This not only helps you to paint faster, because you're maximizing, you know, your strokes, not having to lay a pastel down and pick it up all the time, but it will cause your painting to feel connected and more harmonious. So harmonious color is, to me, another great element of that impressionistic style. I mean, if you looked at some of Monet's paintings, it's just like all of the colors just feel like, again, it's kind of like one of my tips, working the whole. Color should feel that way as well, where the entire painting has colors that work well together and kind of bounce off of each other in different places in the painting. For example, what I have chosen in this, with even some of my original underpainting, I didn't pre-choose my colors. I looked at my reference image. I could see it had some beautiful pinks, some beautiful greens that were kind of muted, and the side of the mountain had a little bit of that blue-gray color. So in choosing my underpainting that was a little brighter, bolder in color, those became the colors that I focused on. Now, I can expand a bit from those parameters of the greens, the kind of soft greens, the gray blues, the magenta colors. I can expand a little bit on those with respect to intensity of color and the values that I use as they recede into the distance. But in general, I would say this is a pretty harmonious and simplistic color palette. If you take note of the things, I think you saw the final painting at the beginning of this video, but notice I don't have really any reds or yellows or orangey colors in here. There are some earthy colors in the rocks, especially more in the foreground, because colors do tend to get warmer in the foreground. But I would say my color palette is a bit of a triad. If you look at a color wheel, I've got some blue, some green, and some red violet, and it makes almost a triangle on the color wheel, and they work very nicely together. And also, if you recall early in this lesson, I was talking about that cool mood, and therefore it would make sense that I don't have a lot of warm colors. I mean, even I could have broken out my artistic license and added some flowers in the foreground that were more yellow or more orange, but just to me, it would not work well. So I believe that impressionism is not just something that is the way you make your strokes with loose strokes. It also has to do with color harmony that works throughout the whole painting. And now I'm going to let you continue to watch me work this painting. I'm going to add some music. If you're a patron of mine, there is extra commentary in your version of this video at the end when I add the flowers. But I hope you will keep watching, because once again, you can watch this process. And also, like I said before, you can choose to slow this down if you want to follow along with this video. And also, if you recreate from my lessons, you're always feel free to recreate. But if you share on social media, it's really artist etiquette. If you tag me or mention that you saw it and or mention that you saw it on this Monet Cafe YouTube channel, and you can tag me on Instagram at Susan Jenkins Artist and also on Facebook at The Art of Susan Jenkins. I have all of my contact info always at the end of each video. All right, enjoy to this song that I felt like it was a little bit, I don't know, Celtic. And I will be back at the end with some more announcements. All right, enjoy. I've zoomed in and slowed things down a bit. So you could see a little bit of my strategy with this little area of water. And this is an example of a couple of my tips in action. One is remember less is more. I do want to give this some attention because it is a focal point and strategy to pull the viewer into the painting after meandering through the flowers and the foreground. So I'm giving just a little attention to some of the water that's breaking on these rocks. I've kept the water really right at the base of the rocks, really cool and a little darker in value because they're in shadow, but there's a little bit of this water that's in the sunshine. And so I'm just giving it some very subtle highlights and mark making again to pull the viewer into the painting. When I first decided to start painting seriously many years ago, I think one of my biggest mistakes that kept my paintings from looking impressionistic was too much detail. And now I'm adding a few more of the pinks throughout the painting. And I hope you can see how I have used those colors throughout the painting, the pinks, the blues, the greens. And now I'm pretty much done and I'm going to take this tape off. Now color fix made by Art Spectrum, this particular paper, color fix sanded pastel paper, has a little border, a little white border around the perimeter of the painting. And I wanted to preserve that, so that's why I put the tape all the way around my painting. If you're a patron of mine, you'll be getting a lot of extra goodies and you'll be getting my color notes. I think you can see the general really easy color palette here. Before I show the final, I wanted to let you guys know, in case you haven't seen it already, underneath all of my YouTube videos are links to products. This is my Monet Cafe Art Store and I've started making some t-shirts with some hopeful and encouraging Bible verses and sayings. I have some humorous art themed t-shirts as well and of course Monet Cafe Coffee Cup featuring one of my own paintings, this really neat art bag, and of course Monet Cafe products and t-shirts as well. And here is the final painting. I really hope you learned a lot and I hope my five tips for more impressionistic paintings has really been beneficial to you and I'd really like to start ending my lessons with some hopeful words and this from Isaiah says, but they who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up on wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. I pray this lesson was a blessing for you and if it was, go ahead, hit that like button, subscribe to this channel, become a patron if you like and as always, God bless and happy painting.