 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm so happy to bring you part three in a four-part series that I'm calling Pastel Painting 101. You may recall if you've been following the series that we started with part one called the birth of a painting and the importance of value and doing a value sketch, which will not only strengthen your composition but will establish correct values, which is the core of any painting. Part two we talked about crucial first steps, the planning stage, and in this stage we went beyond value and incorporated our color concept to gain direction and insight into our color palette strategy. And now in part three called What Lies Beneath, we will talk about the underpainting. I get so many questions about the underpainting, so I'm so excited to give a more in-depth lesson on not only how to do an underpainting but also on why we do it and how it can bring beautiful colorful life to your painting. Following this lesson is part four where the painting comes to life, the final. And here we go. Let's create this underpainting. I've chosen some warmer tones for the underpainting that are in the family of pink tones. And here I'm just once again working on my large sheet of mousse print paper. This has been kind of my practice session here. And this is not the final underpainting, but an opportunity for me to kind of work out some color choices and talk to you guys about the advantages of creating an underpainting. I remember being totally confused about underpainting early in my art career. I thought, well, why not just work on a white surface? Well, let's consider this painting I did in a tutorial here on Monet Café. Now, this is a white snow scene. So why wouldn't I just use a white surface and start painting all of the different values of gray? Well, you know, they say a picture's worth a thousand words. And here is the final painting. And you should be able to see the dramatic and beautiful impact that an underpainting can have on your artwork. By using some vibrant pinks and oranges for my underpainting in this particular reference image, I took what would have been a rather dull and lifeless snow scene, turning it into a scene where it felt like the sun's last light was cascading across the snow. And I feel an underpainting as my opportunity as an artist to give my own creative flair and interpretation to things artistically. And I think the next most common question I get about underpaintings is how do you know what color to use? And I like to say that there are no hard and fast rules about these color choices, but there are some general suggestions that I think creates a more lovely final painting. I would say first and foremost, don't choose a color that is very dominant in your final image. So if the painting has, in my case, there's a lot of golds, a lot of warm tones in this wheat field, I wouldn't choose a golden color. And that's why I chose these colors in different values from dark to light that lean more towards pink. They're a little cooler on the color wheel than golden colors. And I often use a more gold or warm toned underpainting when I'm doing landscapes. And that's because the typical landscape usually has a lot of green. You've got green grasses, green trees. And so gold is a beautiful complement. It's opposite on the color wheel to green. And this is a little snippet of a video I made a while back showing the differences. I did two paintings at once with two different underpainting colors. With one I used more of a vibrant pink, fluorescent pink. And the other I did a beautiful golden yellow. And neither of these underpainting color choices would be considered right or wrong. There will basically be some subtle differences in the final painting as far as the mood. That's the way I like to think of it, the mood, the tone. You know, colors do evoke certain moods in us. Often warm tones can be comforting, but can be passionate also. So color is a beautiful way to express yourself. And underpaintings are a tool or a method that you can use to express yourself through your artwork. In these examples, the differences may be subtle, but I can definitely feel a difference between the pink underpainting and the golden underpainting. And the best way to learn these things, like I always say, is to practice. Do lots of studies with different underpaintings. And while this one in particular, my little practice underpainting here, is an underpainting with various values in that pink family, you saw the ones before I basically just toned the whole surface with one color. That's probably the easiest way. You tone it and then you can do yourself a little value study and then get to painting. And if you haven't seen parts one and two in this pastel painting course, I suggest you go back and watch those. But this one is pretty much self-contained. If you want to just learn more about underpaintings, but a lot of the things that I'm doing here are a repetition of what I did in the first two videos where we talked a lot about how to get expressive and get motion and movement into your artwork and not have your work stiff or tight. And I don't always do, as in this case, a preliminary underpainting prior to my underpainting on my final surface. But it's always a good idea. Do a small study. It might not have to be this big, but you can go ahead and lay down what you think are underpainting colors that would look nice with your final and just do some experimenting. It's never a bad idea to do more studies prior to a final painting. And I know we all often want to just jump right in and start our final painting without all of this preliminary work. But I have found that every time I put in this sort of effort before a painting, it always comes out to be a piece that I'm proud of and one that I strengthened my artistic skills that will simply make me a better artist. Now I know that was a lot going on in that little sped up version, but it gave me a chance to talk to you guys a little bit before starting the actual underpainting on my surface I'll be using. I am going to be sharing my products with you as well. And when I do little preliminary studies like this, I often will do them on a surface that's less expensive. In this case, newsprint paper is very inexpensive. You can't get a lot of pastel layers on it, but it's a good surface to just kind of work some things out and not spend an arm and a leg on expensive pastel surfaces. You know these products can get a little pricey. Now I'm just adding some expressive marks. That's part of this painting is that sky. I talked a lot about the energy in this painting in parts one and two and I am pretty much done here. I did like the pink underpainting concept and I went with that, but I did warm them up just a bit. So let's get started talking about my final and actual underpainting for this piece. I've chosen a set of pastels to create the majority of this painting. Once again those were the pinks that I had used for my little underpainting study, but I liked these pinks. They had a little bit more warmth to them and this set of pastels is made by Terry Ludwig. I love these pastels. They're just wonderful for working on pastel surfaces and it's called the Maggie Price set and that's my little color guy is all messy, but I love how it's arranged. It's arranged according to value and color family. It makes it real easy to do a value study and these that I'm using, it's that one's very similar to the color I already used in my preliminary underpainting. Then I'll use a middle value I'm pointing to there and a light value. So those are my color choices for my underpainting. I do also use that darkest dark that's up there for my darkest value and I think that's the Terry Ludwig eggplant color. Everybody loves using that as a dark. Now my surface I'm working on is Luxe Archival. This is a wonderful sanded surface. It's water-friendly. It takes lots of layers and it's really a great surface for pastel painting and I know a lot of these sanded surfaces can be expensive. So if you're just starting out some good options for unsanded surfaces, which are less expensive, is Canson-Mittant's pastel paper and also Strathmore pastel paper. To begin the underpainting, I am simply sketching in on my Luxe Archival surface with a piece of willow or vine charcoal. These are sticks of charcoal. I like this stick form because it helps me to keep loose and gestural lines. And by the way, in every video I post on Monet Cafe, I have a link to my Amazon shop where I have organized different categories. This one is one I just made for Beginner Basics for Pastel Artist, where I have a lot of the products that I talk about, ones that I think are a good beginning if you're just starting your pastel art journey. Another category is Practical Studio Tools. These are a lot of the things that I'll use as I'm painting and I have a lot of questions about handy dandy color wheel. I keep on my easel all the time along with the grayscale finder. And another category I have is Pastels and Painting Products. These are some of my favorite pastels. And this also has the willow charcoal that I'm using right now for this particular sketch before the underpainting. Each one usually has a little caption that I'll give some more information on. Also too, I just use this as a handy tool for you guys to find things. You certainly don't have to buy them on Amazon, but it's a neat way for me to organize products. And I have pastel papers and more. And also to help you not have to spend so much, I have so many videos on how to make your own pastel surfaces and this is a category with some of those products. And now back to the underpainting on the Lux Archival Surface. Now I'm just speeding this portion up. If you've seen parts one and two, you know I've done this basic composition of what is this like the fourth time now. So I really have a feel for how I want this wheat field to be represented. I know my energy that I want to capture. I know what my focal point is. So think of this as a gestural foundation or beginning to the painting. I won't necessarily have all of my blades of grass and things in the same location when I get to painting. But this definitely gives me my mood and my concept for the painting. Now I just did a little kind of measuring to get my idea of where some of these background trees are and just notice the looseness of this. So often, especially when we're first painting, our work can become very tight, lacking the feeling of motion, energy, and that painterly style. That's also one of the questions I get all the time or the comments from artists is I want my work to be more expressive and painterly. And so keeping the gesture early on, focusing on the energy of the elements is really going to help get your results of a more painterly piece. And it's basically just establishing the very things that drew you to the reference image in the first place. For me, it was that wheat field that seemed like the wind was blowing and pulling the viewer in through the field and then around and up to that beautiful sky. And now I have my general energetic sketch in and this is real time. I'm using that Maggie Price curated set from Terry Ludwig. This is the not the darkest dark. I am going to use later the really dark eggplant color, which looks almost black. So this is the one that's a little bit lighter than that. And it's kind of a magenta warm tone. And I'm using this very lightly. One thing I did wrong when I first started with pastels is while I did many. So here's just one thing I did wrong was to just give too much pressure. When we're first beginning, just keep a really light touch. A couple of things are happening when we do that. We're not over filling the tooth of the paper, whether it's a sanded or unsanded surface. And also we're keeping things looking more light and painterly. And as I shared in the example of the snow scene, if I was to just start this painting with some of the colors that I want as the final colors in the scene, the white of the paper would be the base or Luxe Archival is actually kind of white. There's a lot of other sanded surfaces that are more creamy. And so I think this was the thing I was confused about early on is and it's also one of the questions I get all the time is why do an underpainting if you just cover it all up? Well, the goal is not to cover it all up, at least for me anyway, because I love those little influences of the underpainting peeking through that definitely create the mood and the energy color wise for your piece. And so therefore I feel that if I just left the tone of the paper, what it is originally white or cream as the base or the beginning, I feel it would be more lifeless just to add the colors that are in the reference image. Now I'm going to be doing an alcohol wash. You can just blend what I'm doing right here. I'm using a little piece of pipe foam insulation. I use it a lot, but I wanted to do a wet underpainting here with some alcohol. This is just drugstore alcohol. I'm going to be using a brush. My handle fell off of that brush, but it happens to be my biggest brush. I'm going to use a smaller brush for some of the background trees. But again, you can blend even with a paper towel to blend the whole thing in if you prefer not to use alcohol. So there's so many different options. I think that's one thing that can get confusing about underpainting and painting in general is there's so much variety of ways you can do it. Now I am speeding up this process here. It would just really kind of get monotonous. But notice the energetic strokes and I'm using what is on my brush when I go to one of the areas with more pastel. I'm using the residue that's on the brush to use like paint and I'm painting in the lighter values in other areas. So now I've got my smaller brush and I'm just giving strokes that emulate the direction of the grasses. And now I'm just brushing in some of these background trees. And as I shared in video one and two, I think anything that's perpendicular to the grasses, which is usually trees, anything that's upright is typically darker. Things in the foreground are also typically darker and start to become a student of nature. I find that we get our best learning from God's creation. So when you are out and about, pay attention to how color and value behaves in real life. And now I'm using the lighter or medium lighter than the one before, but this is the medium value of the pink. It's more of a coral color, I think. Now I also meant to mention that I'm doing my alcohol wash underpainting in sections. Notice I did the wash on just the darker of the magenta colors and I let it dry and then I applied this middle value. And I am basically getting in some of the darker values in the clouds. If you notice the sky, we've got the big hole of blue in the middle, which is a darker value in relative, dark relative to the light colors in the sky. None of these are as dark as the trees or the foreground. But this is that middle to darker value in the sky. And I'm using it very gently, actually so gently that I actually dropped my pastel right there. When I do this real time, you can sort of see that I am keeping a really light touch and I'm turning my little pastel in different directions to emulate the direction of the sky. And I'm also paying attention to not be haphazard and to get my cloud shapes pretty accurate as far as the energy that I want to capture in this painting. You can also see how I brought some of that middle value down into the grasses. Once again, like I said, foreground, things in the foreground are typically darker and they gradually get a little lighter in value in the distance. So I'm using this middle value to represent some of the grasses that are further away. And once I get this middle value where I think it needs to go, I'm going to once again be doing an alcohol wash. So sometimes I like doing a wash, whether it's with alcohol or water. By the way, basically water or alcohol turns your pastel into paint. You're basically taking a dry medium and turning it into a wet medium. So sometimes I will do it in stages like I'm doing here. And sometimes I will put down my three or four values and do it all at one time. And as I mentioned earlier in this video, probably one of the easiest ways to do an underpainting is just to tone the whole surface. I could go with this middle value coral color, tone the whole surface. I could blend it in with either a paper towel or a piece of pipe foam insulation. You can get it at any hardware store. Some people have used a pool noodle, if you know what that is. And sometimes I will say sometimes the paper towels work to blend. Sometimes they don't. It depends on how textured your pastel surface is. And now I've obviously started applying the alcohol with my largest brush here to the medium value pastel. Once again, you can see how I kind of use the residue of paint. Like I said, this pastel kind of turns into paint. While it's on my brush, I will brush it in other areas that might be a lighter value. Also notice that not only were my pastel strokes directional going with the energy of the clouds, my brush strokes are as well. And really this is just basically a value study with a color family. If you want to think of it that simply. I've chosen one color family with really just, do I just have two values here? Yeah, I just have two values here, not counting the white of the paper. And then I'll add my third value. And eventually I'll add more dark values to the trees and the foreground. So that's all this is. It's a colorful value study with or value underpainting. It's not really a study because this is the final painting. Using one color family. If you want to think of it that way, I like to try to make it as simple as possible. Now I've used, and so far in this tutorial, I've talked about the warmer tones. Even my examples from other tutorials were all either gold or these pink tones. So could you do a green underpainting? Could you do a green underpainting under a landscape with a lot of green? You could. I wouldn't choose the same green that's in the grasses. Let's say you had a field of just warm, almost yellowy grasses. You could choose a cool green to put underneath them. So it's not like you have to stay to some set rule for under paintings. You have the flexibility to do what you want. There's just some that are going to be more drab. Like I said, if you chose the same green as the grass that's in your reference image, it's probably going to be a little boring. You're not going to get that color has a vibrancy to it. They interact with each other. So that's why I like to choose colors that are different and might complement my majority of the color in my reference image. You can also choose an underpainting color or color family based on a mood you're trying to have your viewer feel. And I would actually like to do a video on just color and how it affects your mood. I found some interesting things when I was in some marketing classes in college that color definitely affects mood and our behaviors. Did you know that in many fast food restaurants, they use a lot of reds and oranges and yellows in their decor within their restaurants because they're kind of exciting and you kind of want to go there and then get out of there. You don't linger as long. They're not as soothing. So it really does affect how we feel. If you wanted a painting that had a more calming mood, you might could choose some blue underpainting tones. Not saying that these reds or gold can't have a calming mood either. Of course, they're going to be under paintings and just peeking through. But in general, cooler colors have a more calming effect than warmer colors. So those are just some things that you can think about when choosing under paintings for your artwork. Also, as I mentioned before, it is a great idea to do some studies. I know we want to just paint. We want to have final pieces that we're proud of and we can share on social media, but we learn the most when we're practicing. And I've had many of my artists and my patrons, my artists, but I feel like they're mine, my little artist family. But the artists in my Patreon group do studies that I've recommended where you do multiple underpainting colors for the same painting. Get a little five by seven surface, maybe four or five of them. Tone them all different colors. Do the same painting. Make it something really simple, a tree, something basic. And then you will be able to see how the underpainting affects the mood. Now that's back to what I've said before about, I don't like to cover the whole underpainting up. I did early in my art career, but I've gotten much better now at letting the painting, I mean, why cover it all up if it has this nice influence on your final painting. So the better you get, the more experience you get, the more confident you get with your strokes and you don't overwork things as much. That's typically when we cover our underpainting too much is we have overworked things. We keep trying to correct things and we just fill everything up, you know? So don't feel bad if you do that. I've done that. We all have. But the goal is to have what I call efficiency of stroke. I don't know if I invented that. I've never heard it before, but that's the way I think about it. I want to get better as an artist to where all of my strokes are very efficient. That doesn't mean they're tight. They're loose. They're carefree, but they're not wasted to where I have to overwork things over and over again. This goes for underpainting as well as whatever your final colors are you put on top. Here I'm adding a little more of that darker magenta to the foreground. I kind of want to reestablish that foreground grasses. And now I've grabbed the Terry Ludwig Eggplant color. It's the one that looks almost black and I'm getting in those trees. I'm shaping them a little bit more to give them more interest with their shapes. And I know that even if I put a value down that's dark, I can lighten it up. And that's often my strategy with things like trees. I don't paint leaves with trees. I paint values and colors to represent them. And often you need to get something dark down to be able to suggest those lighter values on top. And thus far I haven't even used that lightest value of the pinkish coral color. I've just used the darker magenta, the medium, and a little bit of that eggplant color on the trees. The lighter colors that you see in the clouds, one is the white of the paper. You can see the white. I'm going to let some of that still be very light, but I haven't even added that lightest color to the cloud. What you're seeing as maybe lighter in the clouds up there is where I used some of the wet medium color to kind of paint in certain areas. So that's proof you don't even need a lot of color to be able to start an underpainting. Again, the simplest method is to use one color, but you could use two values and whatever the color of the paper is, if it's a lighter paper color, to get an underpainting or a value study, especially if you're going to do some blending or a wet application, such as alcohol or water. With blending, you can also use almost like a paintbrush. If you use your pipe foam insulation, your paper towel or your packing peanuts or your pool noodle, whatever you use to blend, you can use whatever residue is still on it to use like your painting in other areas to represent a little bit of a lighter value. And speaking of pipe foam insulation, I'm using it once again. I just wanted to get a little bit of a softer feel for my grasses and I wouldn't have had to do this, but I felt like I wanted it to just feel more like it's flowing before I add my final color. I'm getting close to done. I do have a little bit more on the sky to do, but notice how I took the darker values and I created like almost a trail. That darker area, it's almost like a V that's curving off to the left and then back around to the right. It's pulling the eye in to my main focal area, which I believe is the sky, the those clouds and that light area and those clouds right above that tree there. So my goal with all of this was to create a painting that was pleasing and often the way you do that is by recreating what drew you to the image in the first place and it was definitely that beautiful sky and how I felt those grasses pulling me in. So now you can see as I've blended, I've also created the foreground to be a little bit darker in general. It's darker than the sky. If you look at the reference images, point your eyes, you can see the foreground is definitely darker than the sky and the blending accomplished that. Now I'm back to the dark Terry Ludwig. I'm just once again kind of reestablishing some of the areas. Notice I'm working more on that one tree with the darks than the others because that's the central focus for the trees. It is in a good position with respect to composition and that's why I'm giving it a bit more contrast than some of the other trees. Also it's closer. Things that are closer are a little darker. So I'm using the Terry Ludwig egg plant here. Notice how much darker it is now. Now you can really get an idea of how much darker this is than the original dark magenta that I put down. And you know it's so interesting to me how how much color and value is relative. That means it's relative to what's around it until I added this dark. You thought the other one was pretty dark and now you're like wow it's not as dark as I thought. So it it definitely depends on what's around it. So I'm using this strategically in areas, this darkest color in the foreground, to represent the area that I can see. If I really squint my eyes and look at my reference image and I know I have it small on the screen for you guys, but if you pull it up I'll have the link to it in the description of this video. You can see there's definitely a darker area that kind of meanders a little bit back. And you have the artistic license to change some of these things. If you would like to pull the eye different way you know compositionally you can add this in areas that you think will enhance your composition. And now in just a minute I think I'm actually going to grab yep that lightest value and I'm using it, oh it's I turned it around because it's uh I had a little mark on it of another color. Also too these look a little smaller than Terry Ludwig pastels. If you're used to using them it's because sometimes I break them. They become nice little sizes for me to use and also I'll break them to be able to put it in another set. I had a travel set that I needed to put some new pastels in and so I broke some of the colors I already had. But again these are nice little sizes for me to use. Might not be for everybody but it works for me. So I'm using this lightest value. Of course the lightest value is the white of the paper. But I'm using it, oh I had a little visitor. There's my little Jackson. He came in and needed a little puppy love. But I'm using the lightest value to of course get some of the cloud shapes. Oh I'm already back to the medium value again. But I got in some of those cloud shapes that weren't quite as dark as the ones that were probably more filled with water. That's how clouds get dark anyway. And I haven't even gotten in that darkest area. That's the blue. Again squint your eyes. Look at that reference image. Sometimes color can make it hard to see value. And another trick is to convert your photo to black and white. That's going to help you see what's the darkest area. What's the lightest area. So now I'm getting in. The reason I paused on putting this in is I wanted to capture that little, have you heard the term silver lining around the cloud? It's really just backlighting. It's the sun shining around the clouds. So I wanted to take my time to shape this blue patch in the middle and be able to leave the little silver lining spaces there around that cloud that's over the tree. I felt like that was such a beautiful interest and contrast where you have the darker cloud and that lightest, brightest part of the backlighting. And here I'm wiping off my pipe foam insulation to get it cleaner. You know you can actually wash these in the washer. I usually just wipe mine off but I wanted to get some of those darker values off of it because I'm going to blend the clouds. Now clouds are soft. I wanted to not only soften up the cloud but lighten up the color a bit. Sometimes when you blend the color gets a little bit lighter and so now I'm making it feel more cloudish, cloud-like. But let me talk about something about under paintings that I want to stress is that your under painting not only just becomes this beautiful color influence for your final piece, but wow you are already so far ahead when you've created your under painting. You not only have this beautiful color influence that's going to give life and beauty to your painting but you also have a full out value representation. You've got your values established so an under painting can be such an important part of your painting especially if you're doing it with the different values like I am. Of course like I said you can just do you can just tone your paper but then you're going to have to work on your value study with some other colors. So it is a really great beginning. I love the under painting process. I find that it is relaxing for me and it's more simple sometimes because you're just working with a color family and a few values and then you can start having fun with color. And typically my value studies don't take this long but I really wanted to get these clouds right and it gave me the opportunity to do a lot of talking to you guys about when, why and how to create under paintings. So hopefully this lesson has given you a better understanding of the importance of an under painting and how it can so beautifully affect your final piece. And in part four is when I will be completing this painting adding some beautiful colors and I was very happy with this final piece. It felt like it glowed. So if you are not a subscriber to this channel and you've enjoyed these free tutorials I have over 600 lessons on Monet Cafe all for free. Would you please subscribe, like this video and leave a comment. That really does help my YouTube standing. Also if you'd like to support this channel to keep these free lessons coming would you consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. It's only five dollars a month and you can cancel it anytime and stay tuned for part four in this pastel painting 101 free course on Monet Cafe. All right artists be blessed and happy painting.