 Welcome, artists and newcomers to Monet Café. I think you're gonna love this lesson where we'll paint some bright and happy summer daisies and believe it or not, we are only going to use 11 soft pastels. Yes, it can be done. So I think beginners are gonna love this lesson and here we go. My reference image is a lovely photo that I found on unsplash.com. I will have a link to that in the description of this video. And before we get started, if you enjoy this free tutorial, would you please give this video a like, comment. I love to hear what you have to say and also subscribe to this channel. And if you would like full content, lots of goodies and more instruction, consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. It's only $5 a month, which greatly supports this channel but also you become part of my Patreon family. I get to see your work. It's so much fun. The surface that I'm using is a piece of white pastel matte. It is a water-friendly, soft pastel surface and I really do love it. And you can kind of see my setup here. I'm just working on a little easel I set up. It's actually a little holder made by Ikea. I have a piece of black foam core board with my pastel matte attached to it. I'll have a link to the surface that I used in the description of this video but I like to stress use what you have. You don't have to have all of the products that I'm using, so just improvise. I'm going to tone the white surface with a warm color, this pretty orange and reddish color and these are Prismacolor new pastels but you could use any pastel for this. And this is not body mist. It's actually alcohol in a little spritzer bottle. I find it works very well and a big bristle brush. I like using big brushes when I'm toning a surface like this. So basically what I'm going to do is I have two values here. I have the orange, which is a little bit lighter and I have the red. The reference image has some tree line. Think of things just in geometric shapes often. I think that's best because we can sometimes get too detailed and all we really need are two main values here. So my trees, you can see they are almost always the darkest thing in a landscape and my sky is almost always the lightest element. You might be thinking, so why are you toning your sky with this orange color? Well, I will have two colors, right? The red is the darker one and the orange is the lighter one. You could totally just tone your paper one color for this or you could just use a surface and not tone it at all and just get started with the 11 pastels. I'm going to be showing you soon. So often in a landscape painting, especially when you've got flowers growing like this, there's a darker element down in the deep roots. So I put some of the red there. Now I am gonna speed this up because I think you can get the idea and I'm just basically spritzing this and brushing like crazy and really the looser the better I find when creating an underpainting like this. Now it did dry a little bit lighter, but here we go, ready to get started and these are my little sweet 11 pastels and they are from the Sennelier Paris Collection but I'll stress again, use whatever you have and just try to match the colors and values. I'm using a lighter pastel just to sketch in some of the larger flower shapes and I don't have to copy the photo exactly. As a matter of fact, I often never do that. I just use the photo as a guide and I use my artistic license to place flowers where I think they're compositionally pleasing. Now believe it or not, this blue is the darkest value of the 11 pastels and this was part of a full tutorial on my Patreon page where I have it slower and all commentary throughout the whole video. So if you would like the full version, again, that's some of the perks you get for being a patron of mine, but we were talking a lot about value in that lesson. So this blue pastel is going in the areas that are the darkest values. Again, what are those? It's going to be the vertical elements, those trees and the deep roots of those grasses. If you squint your eyes, you can see those are the deepest values. Now value gets lighter as it recedes into the distance. So that's why I got this lavender pastel. It's a little bit lighter in value and a little bit cooler in color temperature. That happens as well with the distance. So I'm using it for the trees that are further away and gradually putting in for some of those grasses that are starting to go back into the distance. And now what's happening? We're going back further and this is a little light for some of those most distant trees, but because I've limited myself to only 11 pastels, I have to use what I have. Now this is a beautiful light teal color. And normally I would not choose this color to create this mountain in the distance. And I used my artistic license with the mountain. I shaped it differently than the photo, but because I have this limited palette, only 11 pastels, I am forced to choose value over color even. Choosing value is more important than choosing color, the lightness or the darkness of the element in the scene. So I'm using the same color to get the top portion of the sky. And if I continued it down all the way down, it would blend right in with that mountain. So I'm lightening it up with a pastel that's kind of a yellow color. Yeah, this one here. And sometimes if I haven't used a particular pastel, it has these little edges on it. So I have to work it a bit to smooth it out and to get the pastel to apply more smoothly. And so I'm getting this yellow in, often right at the horizon line, above mountains or above trees, you have a little bit of a lighter value right over the most distant elements and the lower portion of the sky. And if you've never watched my channel before, right now you might be going, well, I'm gonna find another tutorial on painting because they definitely go through a messy stage, especially if you're going for that impressionistic and painterly style. So don't worry and don't doubt yourself. If you go through these phases, I used to do that all the time too. I'd be like, this is a mess. It doesn't look like anything. And then lo and behold, it starts to come together. You'll see that happen. So now I'm adding some of this green. It's kind of a middle value green. And I'm just loosely scumbling it into where some of those deeper grasses are. And I'm not even trying to be so specific about painting around all those flower shapes. As a matter of fact, if I was too specific, my painting would start feeling tight and lose that painterly feel. So the trees are not going to be blue. So obviously I'm layering some of this green on top. And this is an example of how you really can work with a limited palette and still get the feeling of a green landscape. Putting that blue underneath didn't really affect the fact that your mind will read it as a tree. It just has some deeper blue shadowy colors underneath. And I've used this lighter green to give that same impression of the trees receding into the distance. This one I think was a little light. Again, I'm getting lighter in value as I increase the distance. But again, I was forced to use what I had. And I was very happy with the final painting here. Now, what am I doing here? This is a packing peanut. You know the kind that you find in your packages to protect them. And I find that on this pastel matte surface, it's pretty smooth. A packing peanut works great for blending. I've zoomed in here so you can see it a little more. I do turn it so as not to contaminate colors. And I have a whole bag full of them. So I often just grab a brand new one. And I'm softening this just to kind of give it a more romantic feel. And here you can see where I've completed the softening even in the foreground. Now, for the flowers, I'm not worried about individual petals right now. I'm certainly not gonna try to paint those white petals. And this may seem a little strange if you're brand new at any kind of painting or pastel painting. But I like to get in the darkest value in an element that I see. Now these flowers, obviously they're, our brains say they are white with yellow centers. But if you really examine white flowers, you'll see that there are other values. There are often shadows and cooler values. So I like to choose a value that's a little bit darker than white and often cooler, which that one was, to lay down a base before doing the petals. Now I'm using the brightest orange. And I know I'm gonna have some yellow, but I'm putting down my darker value first. That's typically how we work with soft pastel painting. We get in a deeper value first and I know there's little hints of orange in those centers. So you'll see me gradually layer them with some of the yellow color and then they really start to take form and feel a bit more three dimensional. Here we go. I've grabbed the yellow and I'm taking note mentally as to where the sun is. I could tell from the photo, it looked like the sunshine was kind of coming from the upper left. Therefore, I'm glazing over the flower centers with the bright yellow, kind of on the top leaning towards the left side. Just a couple going towards the distance. Things really lose detail in the distance. So I'm not getting too carried away with all of the centers in the distance. Now I've got this, I think that was like the tealish color that I had used. And I'm using it first to start creating some of these petals. And here's my advice for flower petals. Try to resist what your brain is gonna tell you is just to radiate petals out from the center of the flower. Examine the flowers in the photo and you'll see that petals are coming out from the flower based on how the flower is turned. Sometimes you don't see any of the petals behind the flower. Sometimes flowers can be positioned where they look almost flat to the level of the viewer's eye. And so just take note of those little differences, nuances about how flowers grow and it will also make your painting feel more real. Because flowers do that in nature. There's a beautiful spontaneous harmony to them and they're definitely not all the same. So I've made some marks on some of my flowers that I think are going to be more of my central focus. And you'll see me add, I call them supporting characters later as I continue to paint. Now, my foreground lost a little bit of its depth, a little bit of its dark value when I did the blending. So I'm just gonna reestablish some of my darker values in the areas where that is most needed. And again, just reestablishing some of the green and you can see it's starting to have some depth to it. And I hope you find, as I do, that it's quite refreshing to use a limited palette. I find I enjoy the process so much. I already have my limited palette of pastels in front of me. I don't have to overthink things. I know I'm not getting up to find new pastels and it just forces me to work with what I have. So this was really an enjoyable experience. It's also great, again, I stress this for beginner artists because if you're on a budget and you're just getting started, you probably don't have many pastels. Again, my Patreon lesson focused so much on value and this was basically considered a high-key painting, meaning that we're using the higher values on the value scale, which means lighter values. So most of these values were leaning lighter on the value scale than darker. So that's why some of the colors are rather creative. Now you can see I'm making gestural marks. You may have noticed I'm left-handed, but I use my right hand quite often because of sometimes how my camera is placed. It's just easier to use my right hand. Any other lefties out there? I find lefties are usually pretty ambidextrous just because we live in a right-handed world. Now I'm creating some negative shapes in the tree forms. Negative painting is something we often do as artists to create that painterly style rather than trying to create all of the branches and leaves on the trees. We almost create a geometric shape of sorts and carve the sky into the trees. You can see I've done that on the trees behind my left hand here, and they really look more artistic and painterly that way. I'll develop some more of the negative shapes. Oh, I'm doing it right now. So just think of it as carving the sky into the tree line. I'm sure you can also see that some of my flowers, as they recede into the distance, they've gotten just very gestural, obviously smaller, things get smaller in the distance, and really just very quick little gestural marks to keep your painting feeling very fresh and alive. Some of my flowers, you can see I'm glazing over, I'm burying some of them with some of these strokes of grasses. The reason is that's what happens in nature is you don't see all the flowers pasted on top of grasses in a field. Many of them are deeper in the grasses, so therefore it's a good idea to just cover some of them up with your grass strokes. Just reinforcing some of those very distant trees with a little bit of that lavender pastel and shaping some more of the trees in the distance. And this painting is getting pretty close to being finished. I considered this a bit of a study and an exploration in using a limited palette, so I encourage you to do the same. Often it's a good idea to work a bit small. I know this is large, sometimes it helps you guys to see it when I paint larger, but that way you don't worry so much, especially if you're using kind of an expensive pastel surface, and I think it takes the stress out of it. So now I'm using my very lightest pastel, it's almost a white, a little bit of a yellowy white, to make some final marks. These are my marks that are kind of like icing on the cake. My flowers are gonna get more attention when I press a little bit harder. I have a few of my flowers up above the horizon line, reaching up into the trees. I always find that's just more fun and creates a more beautiful and fun composition. Lastly, you'll see me add a few more grasses throughout with just a gestural and fun style, a few more of these little yellow marks on the tops of the centers of the flowers. And again, if you would like to see this slower with more commentary and all of the extra instruction that I give on my Patreon page, you can find that by just going to patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. Again, it's only $5 a month, less than the cost of a cup of coffee these days. Gosh, that's crazy, right? But there's still a lot of great free content here on Monet Cafe. Here is the final. I loved it. It made me happy. I love daisies. And it's very impressionistic and just a sweet mood to it. So you can kind of still see that orange underpainting glowing through, right? Here's a little sneak peek at some of the extra footage I gave to my patrons. I shared a tip on taking your pastels, take a photo and convert them to black and white. This is going to allow you to see your values better. For some reason, it's harder to see when they're in color. So if you're having a hard time finding your values from dark to light, you can use that little trick. I hope this lesson blessed you. Once again, you can find the products and the reference image in the description of this video. And I love it when you recreate from my tutorials. You can find my links to my Instagram page and my Facebook page on this end screened here. And if you recreate and you share on social media, please tag me. That way I get to see what you do and other people can learn about this channel. All right, everyone. Hope you learned lots. As always, God bless and happy painting.