 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I think a lot of you are gonna enjoy this lesson today on creating light with soft pastel How do we do that with an opaque medium? Oh, this is gonna be lots of fun So come on in the studio with me and let's get started I'd also really appreciate it if you would take a moment right now to like Subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos And I'm able to keep these free lessons coming because of the support from my patrons on my patreon page If you would like to consider becoming a patron, it's only five dollars a month and you get extra goodies and extra content Let's talk about the supplies used. I used a reference image from unsplash.com I'll have the link to that reference image in the description of this video. Also, I'm using a homemade surface I have another video showing exactly how I made these boards and I'll have a clickable link for that video in The description of this video. It's really an economical way for you to paint with pastels and make your own DIY Surfaces. I thought this surface was perfect for the reference image because the color was already very similar To the lightest part of those lemons where the light was shining through it I'll get back to the sketching in just a minute But I wanted to share with you the primary pastels that I used for this were the Jack Richardson hand rolled pastels It's the 40 landscape set. I recently did an Amazon product review video on these pastels I'll provide a clickable link to that video as well And obviously many people are loving it because since sharing my video review They've sold out so you may have to try to find these pastels on Dickblick.com or some other soft pastel retailer But as I always say use what you have you don't have to have this set of pastels And I know a lot of you first getting started you don't have that many pastels So I'll give you lots of options and talk a lot about that as I'm painting I'm simply using a charcoal pencil to sketch in just the basic shapes Nothing is to be too complicated at this point I find that when I focus on the big shapes and a sketchy type of quality It's going to help to enhance that painterly feel and as I sketch here I want to talk a little bit more about the topic of this video, which is capturing light and One of the reasons that I chose this particular board of the homemade boards. I had made I made various different colors I often I'll do this. I'll look at my reference image usually the way it works with me I just want to get some inspiration and Often I don't really have a theme or a subject matter in mind unless I'm doing a particular tutorial on it And often an image will inspire me, which was the case when I saw these lemons I thought wow capturing that light. What a focal point, right? And I let the reference image kind of guide the process Even with picking out my surface and my pastels So I thought this particular almost lemony lime green color would be perfect to capture that translucent feel of the lemon slices and with an opaque medium like soft pastel or acrylic or oil We can if we're not careful we can lose that translucent Feeling and I thought it would be really great to let a lot of this surface show through now The board that I created this lemony lime color on was a white board Actually a piece of matte board and I used the smooth side So let me just pop in a little clip of how I made it here This is something called golden fine pumice gel It has a little bit of grit or sand to it which soft pastels work really well with a gritty surface And I used golden open acrylics that color is green gold You can kind of see it up there in the top left corner And it has a little paint swatch on the top of the tube that shows you how Translucent it is and this green gold is very Translucent so when I apply it to the white board a lot of the white board is going to show through You will see that right now. So it gives me a very light and translucent feel Now if you actually I think the golden fine pumice gel is a little hard to find right now at least on Dick Blick I ordered it it was on back order, but you can do the same thing with the the bottle That's right above my hand there says liquid Tex clear gesso also is a product that has little granular kind of sandy elements to it and it'll create a sanded surface So this is such a neat way to make your own pastel surfaces and I like them being on boards like this They're a little more sturdy and I have control over what colors I choose to make them So there's many advantages to do it yourself pastel surfaces. I have so many videos on this channel I have a playlist actually on Homemade surfaces if you want to look at all the different ways that I do that So I thought that would be neat for you to see how I do that because that is what I think is going to keep This lemon slice looking so Translucent now one medium that has Translucency kind of inherent to the medium is watercolor watercolor. It would be a lot easier to actually Capture that so the trick here is using an opaque medium one that's not see-through to create that see-through feel so I'll talk more about my strategy and You saw I just erased a little bit of that charcoal with a kneaded eraser just to kind of soften it up I didn't need all those black lines showing through and now I'm using like I said primarily the Jack Richardson Landscape set. It's 40 half sticks of Soft pastels. I always recommend if you're a beginner artist and I get these questions all the time What's a good set to get? Well, there's so many of them But I always recommend half stick sets whenever possible a lot of companies offer sets that Basically have a little smaller version instead of a full stick They have a half stick and you almost always get double the color for your money and that's what you want as a new artist You want a lot of colors to choose from But as I stated before you do not have to have this set as long as you use values that are close Now, why am I using these blues right now? I mean what why are you some blues? Lemons are warm, you know a warm color, but I know this side of the lemon is in shadow You'll be able to see it from the shadows that I create and so I want to get that shadowy color in first and One of the wonderful qualities about soft pastel is their layering ability So if you get in a cool tone, I can later lay in some warmer values like I'm doing right now See, I picked a more of a brownish color Now the reason I'm doing that is I needed a darker value and believe it or not a darker value Brown is a dark value of yellow. I remember as an early artist thinking I need a darker yellow I can't find yellows that are dark. Well, it's brown and so that's a good color for me to use to get the shadowy side of the lemon and Have that coolness already laid down So it gives that feeling of shadow things in shadow. This is to my knowledge. This is my expression When you get in the shade or a shadow you cool off, right? If you're hot outside you go get in the shade Well, that's the same thing that happens with colors. They cool off They lean more towards the cooler side of the color wheel So that's why I got those those cooler colors in first now notice. I'm working dark to light I often work that way. I'm not going to add my lightest highlights until the final end of this painting And I'm working the whole I'm trying not to Do what I used to do is a beginner artist, you know early on and I know a lot of you guys If you're new you probably do the same thing I would have focused just on that middle lemon slice because that's the most exciting part, right? It's the focal point and I would have probably gotten all Just too into it and the result would be it would be over detailed and then my painting would not feel connected So if you want to painterly impressionistic feel and for your painting to feel like it works Work the whole try to get your basic values first in and colors in in big shapes And then you gradually hone in and fine-tune things to the finish So that is some advice. I always give Work your big shapes blocking things in is what it's called And now I know that this the leaf shape is quite dark If you look at the reference image you can see that and it's also on the shadowy side now There's a very light green leaf behind that one. The light is catching that one and you'll see later I actually tweak this I didn't really I looked at it and we have the artistic license to be able to do that as artist I didn't like how it was kind of going out and behind it. It was a bit confusing Sometimes I'll just lightly use my finger to blend like I did there. So later. You'll see me actually read or adjust that by Literally erasing it off with a stiff bristle paintbrush. So that'll be coming up later Now I'm still all Jack Richardson pastels to this point But again, you can use similar values and as long as the colors are close You'll be good to go now notice too I liked the complementary color palette going on here big time and the same strategy. I'm working dark to light Notice to how very Textural this board is now that's something that would have freaked me out as an early artist as well It would have bothered me. I was I would be like man. This is just not blending. It's not getting smooth well hold your horses artist because What happens is the pastels as you layer more they start to blend themselves and what looks very chunky at first will eventually start to pull together and I'll talk more about that as they start to blend now This is probably the darkest pastel in the Jack Richardson landscape set and it's a wonderful dark It's kind of a really dark navy and it was perfect for laying down these shadows now I got another really dark gray blue To kind of layer on top of the dark blue you see how it almost created a new color And I'll do the same strategy with the rest of them But that's something I actually really want to make a video on is showing you if you're a beginner artist And you have a very limited set of pastels You can actually create new colors you have more colors than you think and that's because we can layer colors That actually create a new color The dark blue that I'm adding here when I add the other blue on top It's a mixture of both those colors as long as you keep a light touch and you kind of scumble the colors in So don't fret you probably have more colors than you think And I'm just softening up getting some of that some of that yellowy green Smoothed out a little bit here for the shadows and all of this has been at real time so far and notice now how it Actually now I'm just adding that stem. It was kind of hard to distinguish where it was coming from I think I tweaked this a little towards the end too. I didn't want anything to steal the show from the main lemon So so that's why I kind of make some adjustments at the end notice also that I Haven't done anything to the translucent the most translucent lemons Which are the slices the round one and the little wedge in the lower right corner I'm leaving that very Translucent lime color and not messing with that until I really want to start focusing on Getting a little more detail to that area now. I also too wanted to warm up some of the shadows I know light was peeking through But there was some warmth to that light and it was a little darker in some areas So I'm using this really nice neutral brown color Notice too how when you don't over blend you Really have more of a painterly feel and that's what I get a lot of comments from you guys from us I've been an artist who focus mostly on realism and I'd like to get that painterly feel well One thing is don't overwork your painting and don't over blend and often I'm preaching to myself here to stop before you think you're done Now I did have a little bit more of that light kind of peeking through But notice I put the dark down first to be able to layer that light and and things are starting to layer themselves now And I was really liking these early stages. It sort of had a little bit of a van go feel, you know that's kind of how I was feeling and also, too, this is still part of this month in Monet cafe and For my patrons in my patreon group. I'll talk a little bit more about that a minute The theme is tiny treasures and I have been talking this month about so many of the advantages of painting small and My patrons from my patreon page. Well, let me describe what it is to be a patron of mine all the the lessons on This channel Monet cafe are free free for everybody and one of the most beautiful things to me is that there are people all over the world Who have limited resources? Sometimes it's financial resources. They're limited. They can't afford to get art lessons or time limitations They have children and they don't can't get out much or Also, too, some people have physical handicaps and can't go places to get art instruction So that's what I love about Continuing to be able to offer free tutorials on Monet cafe And I have many of them or some of them are unlisted only my patrons can see them But I have over 600 videos probably about 500 of them are public and so there's just so much content I do focus on soft pastels a lot, but the lessons really go across so many different mediums And so to keep those lessons coming, you know, it's all free and a lot of the things I do of course the supplies cost money and the Camera equipment and the time that I put into it Editing these videos is really it takes more time than painting them So the support from my patrons $5 a month for my beautiful patrons are the ones and the reason why these free lessons keep coming So if you're one of those people who is in that position You really need to give a little applause and a hallelujah Thank you to all my patrons because that's the reason I'm able to keep this coming This has become my full-time profession now and it's because of my patron support So if anybody out there would like to support this channel I'll put a clickable link. Well, I'll put a little card right here And there's always a clickable link at the end of this video and in the description So thank you patrons, but my patrons are doing the most awesome little tiny paintings right now We have a homework album and I have been oh my goodness Enjoying not only your paintings, but your comments. You are totally embracing the benefits of tiny paintings also too if you're Not a patron of mine. We have a Monet cafe art group on Facebook. I see a lot of your stuff there Though I do focus mostly my time with my patrons, but you can become a member there for free You just have to ask to join Monet cafe art group on Facebook So lots of resources lots of free resources, which is awesome. Alright, you see it all coming together now I've just been layering color now the limes limes I say lime because the background looks a little lime colored the lemons actually did have some Golden kind of colors to them. That's why I added some of those golden kind of brownish colors And some kind of orange tones. You'll see me add later. Now. I'm trying to get remember when I said I work dark to light I'm getting just a hint of where these highlights are gonna be. This is once again a Jack Richardson I still think that's all I've used at this point. I'll mention when I grab some other pastels and I'm sneaking in Some of those lightest highlights. Alright, now here is where I'm grabbing a different pastel These are my handy dandy prismacolor new pastels. It's spelt in you pastels these long kind of rectangular sticks in the soft pastel genre of of pastels Of soft pastels they range in hardness to softness The jack richison's I've been using I would say are quite soft But not as soft as a senelier perhaps so these things you learn as you as you paint But these prismacolor new pastels lean more towards the harder side of pastels and while sometimes you can't get the vibrant color with the the prismacolor new pastels They are excellent for blending and getting in little sketchy lines So they have their wonderful place in the soft pastel lineup Now I'm adding the the little filament. Is that what you would call it inside of the lemon slices? They were a little darker in value But because the light was shining through them, what do you think that would do to the color temperature? If light is shining, would it be dark? Would it be warmer or would it be cooler? It's going to be warmer. So that's why I picked this kind of neutral brownish color that I used before I didn't want it to be too dark But it is kind of An opaque element in other words The Structure of it is a little more opaque. So that's why I wanted to get it a little bit darker But I'm reserving or preserving that very translucent center of the lemon right now I want to reshape that Lemon back there a little bit and that's the neat thing about pastels. That's why I said with the sketch get it in loosely Um, I mean you want to focus on good drawing. Don't get me wrong, but don't get it so tight that it looks um, I don't know Unimpressionistic if that's a word So these things can be developed as you work. Now the highlight on that lemon leaf to the plant Did have some coolness to it. So I'm kind of working it a little bit and Again, you'll see me in a little while. I lose that back leaf I felt like it was confusing with the one that had kind of some of the blue highlights there I also wanted to share with you a little trick if you're Maybe a little concerned or you're a beginner and you're not sure of your composition Or if you've got your elements in correctly and you want to get a better way to see those things Well, one way it sounds crazy. Take a picture of your painting at a particular point or drawing and look at it on your phone or whatever device you're looking at Look at it as a teeny image as a little thumbnail. That's what it's called those little teeny images And it sounds crazy to say but you can actually see Errors and and your composition more clearly when things are small So and I have another trick for you coming up soon, but let me tell you more about this now Here's where I was adding if you look at the reference image I don't know about your screen, but I see a lot of orange It's the warm light in the reference image in the lower right corner here So that's why I'm using this new pastel and then I used a little bit Can you see in the reference image? I'm seeing almost reddish tones where the sunlight is really bright on those little parts of the lemon where maybe that slice is just kind of touching the other one And so this new pastel worked well to get that warmth in there Also because these pastels are harder, they really do start to blend Your other pastels. I find they're good sometimes for blending clouds once you've gotten a few layers of your softer pastels in I can use my new pastels, you know with the unappropriate color of course to kind of soften clouds And okay, here's the second tip for seeing any errors maybe in your composition Is to take your painting if it's on a board And take it into your bathroom or wherever you have a mirror and look at it in the mirror This works really well for doing portraits, whether it's people or animals When you mirror the image You're really able to see errors more clearly and it's just a neat little trick I had someone. Uh, oh, I think it was someone who commented on my Page by the way, I'm trying to build my instagram following. So go find me on instagram I'm at susan jinkins artist. I share a lot of little quick fun videos and reels on there But I had one of the artists on there say wow. Thank you so much for sharing so many Things or she said something like you don't hold back anything a lot of artists like to keep secrets of their techniques And I'm like, man, isn't this supposed to be shared? You know, so Thank you to the person who shared that because I think what's really neat is that We're going to develop our own unique style anyway. So why is any of this a secret, you know And hey, it's just more beautiful when we share. All right, so you can see things are developing And I think there were a couple of times I grabbed A pastel that was other than the jack richison set And even other than the new pastels I talked about but mostly you can see It was almost exclusively the set and you know, like I said before I've been enjoying I'm now doing product review videos on my amazon shop And stay tuned for more of those by the way, you can learn a lot about the products that I'm reviewing from my little short videos But uh, I was happy to see that Amazon sold out of this set. They had a price really pretty good for this set on amazon I always say compare don't just buy something because it's on my amazon shop Check it out on other sites get your best price But often I like to buy things on amazon because I have amazon prime and I get free shipping So where the price might be the same On amazon versus dick blick or other art retailers. If you're having to pay $15 in shipping Well, there really is a savings to using amazon. So that's just my two cents No pun intended about saving money. I've had to save money a lot in my art career So I feel like I can really relate with so many of you Don't we wish we could buy everything all of these art supplies and goodies? But I improve that you can get started without a What did they say having champagne taste on a beer budget? Oh my goodness, but you can get started without having, you know, lots of financial resources to begin with Okay, I digress susan get back to the painting and what i'm doing now you can see I added some of the cool blue colors Do you see those little spaces? Like underneath the wedges. Well, you can't because my hand's in the way now But like where that round slice is there's a little teeny section of blue kind of peeking through to that other slice there Okay, I'm taking it off my board now to show you my little trick I wanted to reshape the leaf. I didn't really like How there were two leaves one on top of the other I felt like it was confusing and I wanted to simplify it So why would I turn the board upside down to do that? Well, it's because I don't want all that pastel to fall on to my translucent lemon that I'm trying to preserve So if you just get a stiff bristle paintbrush that one I was using was kind of stiff It really will knock off a lot of the pastel Almost like erasing it and give you the ability to get more layers in Now with this particular homemade surface, I find you can easily get five or six layers Um, so and you will know when you have over Saturated your layers if you want to call it the pastels start to become very muddy They lose their vibrancy Sometimes they'll start to feel kind of slick And then sometimes you literally just can't get any color down and that means you've over layered your surface Oh, and by the way, I wanted to mention that the reference image that I got from unsplash.com This particular photographer had quite a few photos That were along the same theme. I think one of them may even have been oranges with light shining through them Then she had another lemon wedge with some light shining through it And I'm going to speed things up a bit for the remaining part of this except for the end I'm going to come back to real time when I go to add those you see the seeds if you can see the reference image I had to make it really small But the seeds that are in the lemon and some of the little filament things inside there I'm going to come back and talk a little bit more about that So let me add some music for you guys real quick and I'll be back real soon All right, I'm finally going to start working more on this central lemon slice Here I'm adding if you look in the reference image, there's a little bit of a shadow on the bottom Right side to the lemon also a little bit on the top left kind of section of it So I'm using my little stiff bristle brush again just to kind of blend some things slightly And that's another neat little technique. You can actually you know brush with a paint brush on your painting to blend things Now I'm going in and getting some of those areas What's this video about creating light and even though I've kept Still the translucency of the original surface there I want to brighten things up even more with some of this sunlight that is just so beautiful shining through back to the jack richest sun pastels They had some lovely warm yellow colors in this set And that's one of the reasons that I I chose the set. I'm like wow these will really be great for this For the lemon colors now i'm back to using my prismacolor new pastel They're also sometimes easier for getting in Smaller spaces like I'm doing right here, and I'm giving a little texture All you have to do is suggest these things don't overdo it We don't have to tell everybody or show everybody every single little bump on the lemon Just give it a suggestion now. I apologize my light changed in my studio Um, I don't know maybe the sun came out or something. Um, but I'm still continuing to give a little bit more Texture to these now. I've slowed it down a bit. Now what I'm doing here. I'm using kind of a blue prismacolor new pastel and I'm getting the shape of that lemon seed in and I'm doing it very lightly I don't want it to be so opaque or so dark that it pulls the viewer's eye Away from my central focal point and I'm just suggesting them where they actually are on the lemon And now I put the blue down But I'm going to warm it up a bit because light is shining through this lemon Back to my point about how you can create new colors with pastels by layering Here's me again using the warmer tone to suggest the seeds. This is really so easy You know, I like to say painting's not hard once you learn the rules You just got to keep at it to be able to learn the rules So now you're getting that feeling of the light shining through that Upper if you divided the lemon slice in half kind of diagonally that upper left half Where the light is shining through and you can tell that's where it's shining through You can see it by the break in the shadow on the ground and those shadows really helped to ground The lemon too and they're getting such a three-dimensional feel just by using Color and value, you know, that's all it is. It's like an illusion I used to do magic when I was young not weird evil magic, but illusion I I fell in love with it when my dad here. I go on a tangent warning tangent My dad Brought me home. He got we didn't get to go to disney world until later when we were kids while my dad was trying to build a business and He got to go to disney world on some convention and he went by the little magic shop Is anybody ever been there and they had so many neat little magic tricks and he brought me home some and I don't know I was probably seven years old or so and I was fascinated by trying to Trick people with these illusions And so when I paint I often think, you know, really painting is an illusion We're giving the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface So it's quite fun and quite challenging, right? All right, here is the light shining through this lemon And I hope I have really helped you guys to understand more about creating light with an opaque medium like soft pastels Also, I have lots more tiny painting tutorials coming I gave my patrons a chance to vote on which lesson I would upload first I have like four more paintings and they chose this lemon lesson first, but next will probably be um That beach scene and then these peacock feathers were done with some iridescent pastels and metallic watercolor So lots more free learning and fun on the way I'm going to get a little abstract where I repurposed a piece of sanded pastel paper having lots of fun with color So if you've made it this far in this video, I really hope you will click the thumbs up like this video Leave me a comment subscribe if you haven't already and if you'd like to support this channel I'd really appreciate you becoming a patron for five dollars a month. All right, everyone happy painting and god bless