 Welcome to Monet Cafe in a series of lessons I'm calling down on the farm. Many of you know from my last few videos that I am not in my home studio. I'm staying with my sweet daddy at his place about three hours away since the passing of my mama and I've set up my studio in their lovely basement at their home. Today's painting will be of a farm house that is just a beautiful country setting complete with clothesline and chickens in the backyard. I love it right. Oh and if you haven't subscribed to this channel I hope you will. We learn a lot. We have a lot of fun. It's a great place to be. Also click that bell icon to be notified of future videos. Now similar to the last two tutorials I'll be working on Strathmore toned gray paper. This is a much cheaper alternative to some of the sanded pastel papers and proof you can work on unsanded just drawing paper. So this should be encouraging to a lot of the artists out there who have inquired about cheaper alternatives. I should say less expensive. That's probably the better word but I know a lot of you are limited financially as was I when I first got started. I will be working a lot from my Prismacolor new pastels but in this particular lesson unlike the one the two prior to this I'll also be using some other soft pastels as well. I didn't plan on spending the amount of time on this painting that I actually did but I started having fun with it. This is just a charcoal pencil by the way marking out my area to paint. I decided I wanted to really make it that farm setting with a clothesline and some chickens in the backyard or front yard whichever one it was. So be sure to stay tuned to the end of the video for that but the painting ended up resulting in being oh gosh I don't know an hour and a half to two hours of interrupted time. My life is always interrupted so I had to stop and come back quite a bit but I'm going to give the real-time version to my patrons primarily real-time version. If you don't know what a patron is it's a way you can support this channel for $5 a month but you get extra content. It's patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins and it's only $5 a month. You can cancel it anytime. You get a lot of extra goodies being a patron and I also get to see your work. We have a homework album where you can submit your work from these lessons but in general a lot of people just support this channel Monet Café because I always have free content like this. I am going to start giving you instruction in a second but that way I can keep these free tutorials coming. There are so many people all over the world who literally have no means to get art instruction whether it be just where they live or finances. So thank you to those of you who support my Patreon channel. All right I'm just working with various pastels. Some of these like I said are the new pastels. These are some of these teeny little pieces. And what I'm doing now is I'm doing what I often say. I'm working big shapes. I don't need to get into any specific little details now but I'm getting in the general location of things and I have my drawing format or my composition format similar to the format of the photograph so I know things are going to land pretty much the same along the perimeter of the paper. So I'm kind of seeing where the road is, where the house is going to be and these are things that you do want to take a little bit of time with because you don't want to have to go back and correct these things at the end. So I do like to get in some accuracy especially if you're doing a structure. This is the first in a while that I've done a structure in a landscape painting and I'm going to give you some tips and techniques on how to accomplish that. So that should be a lot of fun too. Rather than me putting the reference image up in this video like I often do, I'd have to shrink this kind of small. You might not see it that well so you have a link in the description of this video where you can go pull up this reference image and watch as I paint. And once again if you follow along with this, even if you're not a patron of mine, share it on Instagram and tag me at Susan Jenkins Artist. I've been loving the fact that you guys are tagging me and I can see your recreations from these tutorials. In this lesson I'll be hopefully giving a lot of valuable instruction to you guys for many different things, but one of the main things I want to talk about is creating a structure in a landscape. And one thing you want to make sure you get right, especially if you're creating a structure that is a bit larger, later you'll see me create a little shed in the back and you can just get some little gestural marks if something is small enough and far away. But this house was large enough to cause me to want to make sure I get the perspective correct. That's something that will very quickly make your painting look amateurish. I know this from experience because I have done it wrong so many times. And I've found that there's a delicate balance between getting your basic perspective correct but at the same time not having it so rigid that it looks artificial. So it's okay if the roof sags a little bit as long as that main line is correct with regards to perspective. So if you are not really familiar with drawing things like structures, architecture and paintings, then I'd like to recommend this cute little couple that has a YouTube channel called Linescapes. They have some of the best little videos that are easy to understand on one point perspective. They also have, they include like shading and shadow. They also have some on two point perspective. So they're just adorable too. They're really cute. I'm not sure where they're from but they have the cutest accents. So if you'd like to learn a little bit more about this, I'm going to try to include the link to their YouTube channel, maybe these particular videos in the description of my video here. Also too they have these neat little perspective tip cards. One of them is free. It's a free PDF. I'll include a link to this as well and well, I mean free. You can't go wrong. But simple little things about where the horizon line is and how to get things correct. So I love it. I think these are great. There's one also that you can get that's only 350 and you get all of these cards. So you can just take them with you on the go, have them in your studio. It's a great tool. I actually want to order them myself so I've got to make a note to do that. And like I typically do, I like to work the painting as a whole. So even though I could have gotten really specific about that building and I do go back like now and kind of correct some things as I see it, I don't want to get so overly detailed with it that it becomes disconnected from the rest of the painting. And I think that's what happens for me. If I get too specific in any one area, you lose that cohesiveness of the painting. And it doesn't feel like a hole anymore. It feels like a lot of segmented parts. This is a fairly simple house shape. It did have some different roof angles like that little almost a dormer on the back side. I can't determine what's the back side of this house and what's the front side so it doesn't really matter. But I will later be adding to a little, it's like a little shed of sorts coming off that back side if you want to consider the shaded side, the back side. And you'll see kind of how I address that. So really just some basic shapes and shadows are all you need. While the house is obviously a focal point of interest, we also want to keep the eye dancing around the painting and enjoying the other things in the painting. Now you can see I did a little negative painting there. I used this dark that's going to be some of these background trees. There are some trees that are a little bit closer to the house that will have more dark values. And then they gradually recede into the distance. And you'll see me later kind of cool off some of those distant trees. But I use that dark, I know my hands in the way now, to kind of carve that line right where my hand is there of the line of the house there to be a little straighter and more vertical. And now what I said about shadows and shades and shapes is really what I'm doing right here. We can see that I just got two basic shapes with different values. I've got the plane of the house facing us. And I've got the plane of the house that's in the shadow where I'm working right now. And isn't that amazing how that just creates the illusion of a structure. And that's why we want to get these lines correct prospectively so that it feels accurate. Even if some things aren't perfect, like I said, a little saggy roof sometimes gives character as long as your basic lines are correct. So that's definitely going to keep your painting more professional. Now as far as the windows go, I'm using a little new pastel. They're the harder, made by Prismacolor that I showed at the beginning of this video. They have kind of a little squared off edge to it. So I'm just using that to create a little shape of a window. I go back and make them a little larger later, but I was just getting in the general idea of where these little windows are on the house. You may also notice that I'm going outside of my original format size, you know the rectangle I drew at the beginning. And I've learned over the years, I don't know why, I seem to paint larger or either want to allow myself more room if I decide I want things to be a little higher or a little wider. So that might be something you like to do too. Create your border with room for adjustment. Even if you just feel like the composition would be better, which I did here. I felt like some trees a little higher above that house would be more interesting than the house just being almost right at the peak or the point of where the painting ends. And so I'm just gradually working these shapes, correcting some things as I see. And now I'm just adding a few little bushes, shrubs that look like they were growing near the house. And you can use your artistic license to add or remove things as you see fit. What would create a stronger composition? So you do have that license and ability to do that. And now I'm going to add on the back of the house that little angled roof line or shed that's coming off the back. While the house was simple, if I had not added this, this was actually in the reference photo. It would have looked a little bit too basic or simplistic. So there were some things I did want to keep. Now I'm just kind of working on some of that roof structure. And I thought the little shed off the back added some dimension to it. And I did, though, decide to leave out in the reference photo, there seemed to be a lot of stacks of wood and it created a barrier as far as I was concerned. So I thought, hmm, let's leave some of those out or I think I leave all of them out and add some other things of interest. Like I mentioned before, or you probably saw the picture at the beginning, I decided to add a little clothesline in the distance for interest. And also some little shapes, little gestural shapes of chickens. I felt like the little shed that I'll, you'll see me add later to the left and the back of the house look like a little chicken coop or chicken shed to me. So I decided to put some little chickens in the yard. And so stay tuned to the end of the video to watch that. And I will talk a little bit about the best ways to do things that are not your main focal point is to not give them too much attention to detail, especially since they are in the distance. So that should be fun. I had fun making the little clothesline. And now I'm kind of cooling off the upper area of the bright side of the house because the roof is actually casting a little bit of a shadow. And also too, I, it's very important to determine where the source of light is coming from. And based on the house, you can tell it's upper left and shining kind of at an angle going left and down. So that's why that side of the house has more light. And here's where I'm adding, I'm cooling off the background. I wanted to give the sense of distant mountains beyond those trees. But this is a little farmhouse in the country. And my whole family's from the Western North Carolina mountains, Appalachian mountain area. And I just love how the mountains just cool off to beautiful blues and purples in the distance. And that's just the perfect example of what color, temperature and value really does in real life and in art. These in the distance are going to get typically cooler in color, temperature and lighter in value. So that's why mountains tend to look bluish. Now I'm reshaping the windows just a little bit. I've got a little bit of a harder new pastel that I'm giving almost like a little shadow underneath the window frames where the light would be casting a shadow to those inside frames of the windows. And now I'm just adding a little bit more of a value, right? Like I said, a simple shape underneath that shed and it starts to give that impression of a structure coming off of the house. And now if you're a patron of mine, you'll continue to see this video in real time. If you would like, you'll have both options patrons. And I'm speeding it up for a portion here though. So if you're watching on just the regular Monet Cafe YouTube channel, there will be this portion that is sped up. But don't worry, you've got more commentary coming at 33 minutes into this video. I'm going to slow it up a bit and give you some more instruction on specifically I'm going to be creating the barbed wire between the fence post, also that clothes line and the chickens. So enjoy this to the lovely music of Josh Snodgrass. I met him online when I heard some of his music. I told him I had a YouTube channel ask if I could use some of his music as background music for my videos. And he said, absolutely. So what a wonderful guy. If you would like to get some of his music, it's just lovely acoustic guitar, a lot of spiritual hymns. So enjoy this while I have this sped up and then I'll be back, like I said, at 33 minutes to give you guys some more commentary. All right, guys. Enjoy. Before I'm adding the barbed wire in between the fence post, also too, just a note, with fence post, give them character, you know, especially with an old farmhouse place like this. I like to have a few of them leaning. You can see on the right hand side, one of them is kind of leaning behind the other one. And I really think it gives it believability and character. So and adding the barbed wire, I'm using, I wish I could have gotten a little bit of a sharper point to some of the wire in the distance to make it look even thinner. So here we go with the clothesline. Now this is real time. And basically I just pulled that photo off of, I think it was Unsplash.com. It's a great place for copyright free reference images. But really all I need, it's so far in the distance, less is more. Otherwise it's just not going to look correct. I used my charcoal pencil just to get two posts with, I wanted it dark and then I wanted kind of like the fence post to have a little highlight on the left hand side. Just barely a little highlight. You almost can't even see this, but that's what would really happen in real life. Now I'm giving the little wire for the clothes to hang on here. Once again using the white charcoal pencil and give it a little droop to it, because we're going to have some clothes hanging on it. Now these have to be so simplified in order for it to be believable. Like I said, think about it logically. When something is this far away, are you really going to see the buttons on a shirt? So I got a little shape in there. And it's a little difficult working with these chunky pastels. And I've mentioned to a lot of people who ask, how do you even know where the pastel is landing? Sometimes you can't even see where you're putting it. And you see me kind of tap, tap, tapping sometimes. I'm testing where it's landing. So I give a few little test strokes. And I've literally learned to feel where the pastel is on the surface. I need a little bit of a blue that showed up better. So I got this other blue. I actually even brighten it up a bit. I ended up with some patriotic colors, which was kind of cool. That was like I was imagining we had a shirt, some blue jeans, and now maybe, I don't know, another red shirt or something. And I think I add another sheet or towel or something behind that. So you get the idea that there is a clothesline in the yard with very little information. It's amazing what our brains will put together with very little information given. So I thought this added a nice interest to the painting. I was thinking about this without the clothesline or the chickens that I'll add in a minute. It was just kind of a house and road and some grass. So that's once again how we can break out our artistic license. And you saw how I pulled up a reference image just to get a general idea. And I think it added a neat touch. And for the chickens, I did the same thing. I just found some chickens in a yard. I think this was also on unsplash.com. Those were some good chicken shapes. And they are so far away once again. They're not going to have, well, they're going to be teeny for one. Chickens are smaller than that clothesline. But they're just going to be figures. And if you just get a general little shape, I have one of them that looks like, I mean, if you can see this, that it's just kind of standing up. Another one that kind of looks like it's leaning over. And again, the brain will put together that these are some sort of chickens in the backyard. So pretty cool how you don't need to do a whole lot to give a little focal interest to your painting. At this point, I was getting pretty close to being done. And I want to stress again that this painting was done on unsanded Strathmore gray tones drawing paper, a lot cheaper than sanded pastel papers. And it's just a reminder that we really can create pastel artwork on less expensive papers. I am stressing that because I have so many of you who are challenged with some of the pricing of a lot of these supplies. And I love to be able to provide solutions for you. And it reminds me that I like working on unsanded papers too. So I hope that's very, very helpful. I will have links to all the things I've talked about in this video in the description of this video. So I hope you enjoyed that lesson. Here's our country farmhouse. Oh, it reminds me of many places I know back home. I still call it home in the mountains of North Carolina. So I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you learned a lot. I hope you're blessed. And as always, happy painting.