 Ah, take a deep breath and relax my pastel painting friends. As you learn my flower painting secrets, I've got 10 of them in this pastel painting tutorial. I enjoyed painting this immensely as it was so bright and sunny and happy feeling. I began this painting of a beautiful meadow of flowers and a red barn on a sheet of Cinellié La Carte pastel card. I love the surface. By the way, I have an Amazon shop where I share so many of the supplies and the products that I use in my videos. I have a link for my shop in every video description. So check that out. For the sketch, I'm just using a Derwent charcoal pencil. This is the light version. There's light, medium, and dark. I don't always use like a charcoal pencil to make a sketch, but because this had a structure or a building in it, I wanted to make sure I got some things right. By the way, this is a super easy structure because it's just a forward facing front of a barn. So it should be really great for beginners. I got in some tree shapes. I like to keep them a little bit geometric. And number one in my flower painting secrets is to sketch in large flower shapes first. You don't have to worry about the small ones. They can just be lightly layered on top afterwards, but the larger shapes, you not only want to get them in just to know where they are, but to get a good composition. You want the flowers to pull the viewer's eye into the painting. Now, this is an example of some real time here. And here on the Monet Cafe channel, I do speed things up quite a bit with a little bit of reduced content and commentary. But over on my Patreon page, you get the exclusive videos with lots of real time content, extra commentary, my color notes, lots of goodies. And if you would like to become a patron, you also support this channel for only $5 a month. You can cancel it anytime. Super easy to do. We have a beautiful family. You become part of special groups where I can see your work. And while you're at it, if you liked this video already, go ahead and hit that like button. And if you've been watching this channel for a while and you haven't yet subscribed, I'd love it if you do that and click that bell icon to be notified of future videos. And as you can see, I'm adding some blue to the sky. One is cooler, up higher in the sky. And the other is warmer. Cooler is usually like blue or like ultramarine blue and warmer is more like turquoise. And the warmer colors are usually closer to the horizon line. So let's get in some color for this barn. Now what was neat about this barn, I'm getting in some red, pardon me, I'm using my, I'm left handed as you can tell, but sometimes I use my right hand if it's just easier to get to. What's neat about this barn is I'm getting in some nice red color and a dark red for that little shadow underneath the Eve there. But now you can see I'm layering on a red that's a little bit warmer. And you're gonna gradually see this building or barn get warmer as I go along because the sun is shining so bright. Now, rather than trying to paint all those white doors in the shapes inside, it's best just to paint the dark shapes first. You'll see me come back and add the lighter part later. Now I'm just getting in that little idea of that trail that I had sketched in. I loved this composition of this reference photo. It was so well composed already. There wasn't a whole lot I needed to tweak on it. So I'm using the same purple to get in these tree shapes. Now, if you're using the Sennelier Pastel LaCarte to card, that's a long name. It's a little bit of getting used to, but I absolutely love it. Everything feels very and looks very textural at first. It takes a while before the pastels start layering themselves and then they start blending together. So embrace that. Don't try to press very hard at the beginning. Keep a light touch. So you see I've added a little bit of burgundy to my dark path and my dark trees. Now let's get in a little bit of warmth, some green in these grasses, but I'm getting in my darker greens first. It's kind of a medium to dark green. Now that distant field is gonna have some super bright green grasses because the sun's so bright. And I didn't wanna just layer it right down on the surface of the paper. It needed to be a little bit darker, but I decided to add lavender back there. And you'll see this painting just come to life as I work. If you doubt yourself, when you first start painting with pastels, join the club. Often things look a little bit like a mess before they start coming together. Now I'm adding some greens on top of those trees. Pastel painting is all about layering. And we're not layering and covering everything up. Little bits of the first few layers of color just peek through. And that's really what happens in nature. You've got a combination of colors playing upon each other. Now for step number two or secret number two, begin with the darkest value of the flower, even with a white flower. You're going to look at your flower heads and determine what is the darkest value. It might be something in the shadow like a violet or a blue. So we can typically lay those values down first and add the light later. You'll see that develop pretty soon. And number three, don't focus on the particular variety of the flower, but instead focus on the shape. You see, I've just put in little jaggedy shapes of these flowers. I'm not forcing my brain to think of what these flowers are. I'm kind of zoning out and painting shapes of flowers and turn them in different directions. Often we give them all the same shape and all the same direction and it becomes very boring. So now as you can see, I'm working the painting and I'm not just talking about flowers in this lesson. Of course, I'm gonna talk a little bit throughout the whole process. Now I'm just adding a little bit of cool green first. That's a cooler green before I add some of my warmer greens. In this painting, just like the reference photo, I wanted it to feel like the sun was shining. But as you can see, it doesn't feel that way yet, but that's because with pastel painting, we typically get our darker values down first. Now you can see I'm warming up that barn, giving it a little bit of just some light, horizontal strokes where I see a little bit of warmth. Now, remember those dark shapes I put in before? Now I'm coming in and I'm putting in just some little darker areas for where the little window panes are and the windows for the doors. Pretty soon you'll see me add the little white areas surrounding it and not totally white. We have to keep in mind this barn is far away and so we're not gonna see things in a lot of detail. Also, it's not the primary focal point. I would say it's a focal point, but it's a later as the viewer pulls into the painting with the beautiful flowers. And we gotta keep it a little bit non-detailed, just very painterly, very loose. We wanna get accurate as far as our lines and angles, so it doesn't look amateurish, but resist the urge to over-detail structures in general and especially if they're far away. Now I'm lightening up those trees. That's just, again, the way it works. We work dark to light and soft pastel, turning the light on as we go, also keeping in mind the position of the sun. And in this reference image, it was upper right. The light is kind of coming down from the upper right-hand side. I'm even giving a little more warmth to this barn and I reinforced the shadow under the roof line a little bit. And that's pretty much it. Again, it doesn't need a lot because it's far away. So now let's go ahead and lighten up some of these grasses. This is a really pretty, I believe it's a Sennelier pastel. It's in between a green and a yellow and it is such a unique color. I really love it. All right, now for secret number four, create a variety of flower shapes. I sort of hinted at that one already, but just keep in mind you want your flowers to have a little bit of personality and not have everyone the same or turned in the same direction. Now here I'm showing a special little set of pastels. These are called Henri Rocher. I don't show them or talk about them a lot because they're, I think, the most expensive pastels in the world. I have another video on that, but the colors are just gorgeous. And as I was mentioning light source, that's another thing we want to keep in mind when painting flowers. Our lightest and brightest highlights on our flowers are going to be consistent with where the sun's light is casting upon them. So keep that in mind. Often the shadows will be mostly on the left if the light source is coming from the right or if the light source is directly overhead, the shadows will be underneath those petals. And the next flower painting secret is pretty consistent with painting in general. We want to remember that the flower shapes get smaller and closer together as distance increases. So while flowers may be large and spread apart in the foreground, as things recede into the distance, they are gonna appear closer together and also obviously appear smaller. Things in the distance look smaller. And really in the far distance, flowers will often appear like just a blanket of color. If you were painting a field of merry goals, they'll have individuality in the foreground, but really far in the distance, you'll just layer a little bit of gold or yellow to emulate the flowers. Number seven is don't forget to bury some flowers. Not every flower is going to be floating on top. That's just not the way nature works. So often I'll just remember that and I'll put in like I did with those orange flowers, some flowers kind of underneath that later I will add grasses on top of to give a more realistic impression of nature. I still lightened up the trees a little bit and now this field just had so many beautiful colors of flowers. I just loved painting them. And here is tip number eight, white flowers aren't always white. As a matter of fact, they're rarely stark white. Our brain tells us they're whites. It's kind of like that blue dress thing. Does anybody remember that? Is the dress blue or is it gold? It kind of depends on what lighting it's in and often the only thing that's gonna be the lightest are gonna be the tips of those petals of a white flower where it's catching the sunlight. And tip number nine is paint what you see, not what you think you see. This is a general artistic or drawing principle where don't paint what your brain says this flower looks like. Look at the flower. Do you see how it actually has? Sorry, that was me praising the Lord while I was painting. You see how this flower has a petal that's actually lifted up almost around that little center? Well, keep in mind, we want our paintings and our images in our paintings to, they don't have to be super detailed, but you want them to represent what the element is and flowers just don't grow with all of their petals radiating out like a circle from the center. They're turned. They have petals that have gesture and personality. Now I added this one flower kind of in front of the barn. I didn't wanna add all of that other debris or stems and things in front of the barn, but I wanted to add that one flower. I thought it was a great compositional element. So I'm adding a little dark areas to create some contrast here. And still just kind of placing some other flowers where I think they will compositionally enhance the painting and I'm getting close to finishing here. I wanted to keep this loose and fresh, but I do have to do something else. I have to add some stems. And when you paint flower stems, keep in mind they should be gestural, varied, and with varying thickness. We don't want them to be sticks, just sticking straight up. They're going to be leaning in different directions. They're gonna have motion. I like to do my stems in a quick little gestural mark. When you paint your stem slowly or too thickly, they just look very artificial. So I'm adding a little more debris in the painting, these little elements suggesting different leaves, different shapes to try to break up the monotony of those grasses and again, keeping it nice and loose. And one of the reasons is I was working a little bit quickly because this is one of the paintings in our Monet Cafe and my Patreon monthly theme. This month, the theme is to paint 20 paintings in 30 days. So in one month, we're all painting 20 paintings and I'm like, why did I do this? Cause I've got to paint the paintings and make the videos. So, but this one was fun. I think it helps to keep your work fresh. I just added a little bit of a sky holes, a little bit of negative painting in the trees, a little suggestion of clouds. I didn't want much because I didn't want them to steal the show and that is it. So I hope you learned a lot from my 10 secrets for painting flowers. And again, this was just a joy for me to create and a joy for me to bring this lesson to you. So if you've made it this far, I hope you loved the video. I hope you'll click that like button and subscribe if you haven't. And if you'd like a little bit more or to support this channel, consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. And as always, I pray blessings upon you and that you enjoy this beautiful journey of being an artist. Happy painting.