 Welcome artists to Monet Cafe. I'm excited to bring you this easy way to paint sunflowers. I love bringing content that really helps the beginner artist and I found a neat way to paint sunflowers. This is a sunflower field near my home and it's just beautiful. So come on let's paint some sunflowers and have some fun. I chose one of my reference images that just had a lot of different sunflower heads and shapes and positions. Sunflowers often face down, especially the larger flowers with a lot of seeds in them. I'm just using some various soft pastels and if you're a beginner just use what you have to help beginner pastel artist. I've organized my Amazon shop in such a way to where you can find these ideal lists. The first one is beginner basics for pastel artist and I have quite a few sets listed in that section that are affordable and a really great quality. Another resource you have is if you go back to my main page I have a video section where I do product review videos. You can even watch me using some of these products and they're very short and I find it's really helpful. Also the surface I'll be using for this particular painting has a product review video here. It's called pastel matte and in this tutorial I'm using a little 4 by 5 piece I've cut and this is one that has a tone to it a color. It's kind of beige. It also comes in white and I like working on a surface that's toned. If it's white I usually will tone it myself. So this is a great surface. It takes a lot of layers and it's still not very gritty like some sanded pastel papers but as I always say use what you have. These techniques will work on various surface types and before we dive into this tutorial a little request from me would you please like this video make a comment. I love to hear what you have to say and subscribe. Also if you'd like a little more consider becoming a patron of mine. It's only $5 a month and you support this channel Monet Cafe. Often I'll start with painting a little bit of a background first but in this case I wanted to just focus on these sunflowers and my little technique for painting them. I am observing just some of the shapes of the sunflowers. Now I'm not trying to duplicate this photo. I'm coming up with my own positions for pleasing composition of some of these sunflower heads. So what I'm doing first is this is just a dark purple. It's not the darkest purple I often use the Terry Ludwig eggplant but I'm just getting in some of these centers. This is just to give me an idea of where I want some of these sunflowers. Now keep in mind we don't want all of our sunflowers facing forward. That would be boring and they're not in nature. They do face the sun typically they turn but some of their heads are turned downwards some are turned away from you and here I am adding a little bit of a darker color to the centers. Once I have the center of the flowers in place I am just getting a this is called a Prismacolor new pastel. It's it's good for sketching. What I'm focusing on now is getting in some of my flower shapes of the petals and I want you to notice that they're not just circles around the centers. I'm giving them varied shapes and some of them all of the petals will show facing forward. Some of them will barely have any petals showing on one of the sides at all and that's because again they're facing different directions and a great way to do this is just to analyze some of the sunflower shapes and they have their slight little nuances and differences to them but often they do like I said before kind of hang down. The smaller younger sunflower heads are the ones that usually face forward. Now before we start we want to consider the sun. Where is your source of light? In this instance I'm imagining it as my upper right area of my painting and the reason that's important is it will influence where certain values and colors will be. In this case my darker values are going to be on the lower portions of the flower heads and a little bit more to the left since the sun is upper right so that's why I'm choosing this kind of a neutral you wouldn't think of this if you were if you're a beginner artist you would instantly go for those yellows and gold colors but with soft pastels we have to layer down the darker values first to rest the lighter values upon. It's called value contrast and color contrast and so once we get these values down we can begin to layer other values on top and colors on top. So now why am I choosing this color that's a little bit warmer to put on the top sides of the flower heads? That's because the sun is warmer and that's what is hitting the upper right side of the sunflowers. I even went a little warmer with a pretty orange color and this is going to give that illusion of the sun hitting those flowers on the upper right side. So they look a little crazy right now but it does come together. I decided to get a little bit of a darker red believe it or not there are little bits of red sometimes in sunflowers in little shadowy and crevice areas and the centers of my sunflowers aren't quite large enough now so I'm going to kind of reestablish those centers. They should be quite a large portion with not petals like a daisy coming out. The petals are a little bit shorter than most flowers so just giving the centers a little bit more shape to make them very recognizable as a sunflower species. And here's where it will start making sense and coming together. Now that I have my shadowy colors and warmer tones down I can start to add some of the little petals. Again this pastel matte surface receives multiple layers quite easily. If you're working on a non-sanded surface sometimes it's a little bit harder to get final layers down. But I'm using it's kind of a yellowy green. Can you see that? And I'm just really analyzing some of the ways the petals are coming around. See how some of them actually come in front of the flower head? Especially the ones that are drooping down. So I'm just giving them little gestural marks in the general direction that I see the petals on some of the flower heads. And of course flowers are going to get smaller in the distance. So that's why some of the ones kind of towards the top. They're smaller. Some of them are newer, younger flowers. So I'm just kind of re-establishing a little bit of the warmth underneath some of the sunflower shapes. And like I said this is a little backwards way of me to paint. A lot of times I'll do the background first. But I actually kind of liked this technique. You'll see me add it later. Now I'm going to turn on the sunshine and add some lighter highlights to some of those petals that the sun is catching. Again from the upper right side. And this is where it starts to get fun and they start to be more recognizable as sunflowers. Also too, I often like to go into the centers. Now they're kind of boring right now. They're just kind of dark. So I love to add a little bit of purple. And I'm adding this kind of to the shadowy side where the sun might be catching a little bit of that area. And I also love to add a little tidbit of a pretty blue. And you see how it just makes those flowers come to life. I'm adding just a little bit of red in just some little hidden areas in the flower petals. Just to give it a little color. Pizzazz red is a fun color to just sneak into little areas of sunflowers. Now I'm even adding a little bit more petal highlights to some of these areas. And keep in mind too that in nature your flowers aren't all going to be pasted separately apart. There will be some flowers overlapping other flowers, as in the case of the one to the lower right and the one behind it. Now I am going to add a background, like I said, and add more flowers in the distance. Often when I'm doing a painting with flowers in them, I usually only paint the larger flowers first and add the smaller ones as the background kind of develops. So now I'm going to grab an even lighter yellowy tone. And this one's maybe a little more lemony yellow and add a few more just barely light highlights just on the tips of some of the petals. And now you'll get to see me add the background and that portion for the Monet Café version here, the free version on Monet Café will be sped up. But if you'd like to see the full real-time tutorial and a little bit more commentary of the background, consider becoming a patron of mine. It's only $5 a month. You get more content. You get to share your work with others in our Patreon family. I get to see your work and we have a lot of fun. So enjoy the rest of this painting process to some lovely music and don't go anywhere. I will be back at the end to reveal the final painting and to give you some more resources on learning how to paint sunflowers. Enjoy. I've now added in some stems for these sunflowers, some large leaves and worked in some dark values deep down into the foreground. And this was kind of neat painting a little bit negatively painting my flowers first and the background afterward. I kind of liked it. So I hope this was fun for you. I think it took me about 35 minutes to paint this. I created it after dinner last night and I thought, you know what? I bet I can share this and others will like to learn some of my little sunflower painting tips. They're really not all that hard. And by the way, over on my Patreon page, I have a new painting tutorial on a little sunflower painting with some sunflowers in a field and I go through all of the steps. So if you're a patron of mine and you haven't yet seen that video, go check it out. I go through all of the steps to create an under painting using these beautiful magenta colors and liquefying them using just a little spritzer bottle of water. So I go over the same principles of this video on painting sunflowers and even if you're not a patron of mine, I'm trying to get better at posting to my blog. So I created a blog post for that particular video. I'll have that link in the description of this video and anyone can view that. So that was a lot of learning. I hope you learned a lot and had fun and you can always recreate from my tutorials. I would love it if you share on social media to tag me. You can find all of my links there and mention Monet Cafe so others can join the fun. All right, everyone. God bless and happy painting.