 Hi guys and welcome to Monet Café. We're going to have a fun little lesson today on blending reflections for pastel painting. If you've ever been curious about how to do that, this is the lesson for you. I'm going to give a neat little tip and some interesting little tools that I discovered along the way that work quite well for blending. So these are the pastels that I've chosen, a various combination. I'll talk about them a little bit in a minute. But this is the photograph I'm using. It's actually a photograph that I took a collection of some photography when I was in Fort De Soto, Florida. What a beautiful place. So now I'm going to go ahead and show you these pastels. I think some of you liked when I took a piece of paper and I actually show you each color. And those, I'm doing it in order from top to bottom of the photograph. For example, I'm just kind of going down in the photograph. But up at the top there, you see it's got some lighter. I'm actually seeing some yellows in there, even though there's some pinks. I'm going to be blending it with the pastels too. So I'll talk a little bit about that as I'm doing it. But pastels, you can actually blend them together. While you can't mix colors in pastels like you can in oil and acrylic and watercolor, you can kind of mix them by blending. And I'll talk about that in a minute. These are a combination. I think some of these, if they're larger and round, they're Sennelier pastels. If they're square and large, they're typically the Terry Ludwigs. Ludwigs, people say that differently. I have some Rembrandts in there that are harder. That's, I think that's a Sennelier there. And those darks are going to be the darks for the trees. I'm using a combination of darks. That might be an eggplant. I've got a dark, dark green, a dark, I don't think that's an eggplant. I think it was more of a dark burgundy and a dark, dark purple. Now in the lower parts of the water, I have kind of some neutral blues and kind of some neutral, like a lavendary type of a color. So the paper that I'm going to be using here is a sanded surface. If you know my channel and you know, I talk about sanded surfaces and it's pastel, LaCarte pastel paper. And it's called a pastel card because it is a heavy weight. I'm mistakenly in my last video, you probably can't see it. It's really small down there. It says 360G typically in a lot of pastel papers that are sanded. They have the grit or the roughness or the texture to it. And that's actually French there. I think I'm not sure what it's for, but on the back it's actually 200 pound. If you were to convert it to English weight of card, it's thick. I'm not sure of the grit. I could not find it on there, but it is actually a little grittier than say, for example, to compare it to UART paper. I talk about a lot of, it comes in various textures, but the 400, this one's more gritty than the 400 UART. I like it a lot. It helps me to stay impressionistic. And I'm going to be pretty impressionistic with this one because it's a little teeny, teeny painting, just two and a half by three and a half. It's called the art trading card size. So sometimes these chunky pastels make your painting a little bit more impressionistic, which I like. So let's get started here. Oh, and I wanted to share, I have a new little member in my art studio. This is the little kitty that I rescued a week or so ago. We had so many rains here, so much rain and storms. Oh, she just meowed that I was outside when we finally got a break. I was just playing with my dog. We're out on some acreage now. And I was just really, to be honest, I was just praising God and praying and looking at the beautiful sky. And I heard this little meow. And I found this little kitty literally almost drowning in a puddle of water. And I brought it in. I thought it was a boy, but it's a girl. For now, the name is Ginger. But if you guys can think of some kind of neat little artistic female name, that would be cool. Now let's get started with this very small two and a half by three and a half inch painting. If you're curious about the size, it's actually a standard size for something called A-C-E-O. Art, Cards, Editions and Originals. I like the name Art Trading Cards better. If you want to know a little bit more about them or the history, go a couple of videos back of mine. And you'll see I've been doing these small paintings that kind of suit my busy lifestyle right now because I have so much going on. But they, they're also kind of fun, you know, I really like them. I pardon for the focus messing up here. The camera's focusing on my age spot hand right there. But it's going to correct itself in a little while. It kind of focuses on whatever's closer to the camera. So bear with it for a little while and then it gets better. But that was just a new pastel. I was using a harder pastel to kind of get in that tree line. I'm correcting now. I noticed the trees, that big clump of a bigger tree on the right hand side. The trees were a little lower kind of going to the left. I decided to do away with that tree that's popping up there on the left. I just thought the composition would be less busy and it would draw the eye back further into the painting without that dark tree to the left there. So I'm just now using again those darker pastels that I put down on the paper to my left there. This is a combination of darks. I've got the dark kind of a greenish, a really dark green, a little bit of a magenta purple and also a dark purple. I'm going to be adding later. So what you want to do with reflections is whatever is above, you want to do a mirror reflection below, which is what I just did. If you were to turn this paper sideways, you would see it looks almost like a butterfly that has wings on one side and the other that match. And I'm not blending these right away, but I'll show you later how we make the reflection look more like a reflection in water by a simple little blending trick that you can do. Now I'm adding a little more purple on it. Whatever you do to the trees above as far as color, you want to add it below as well. Those colors are going to reflect in the water. So I put that purple in those trees. I'm going to add the purple to the reflections in the water as well. And you want to keep this loose and free. It's not so fussy, but you want to have it accurate enough to be believable and you know the way things usually are in nature. Okay, so now I've got my darks in and I've got that background sky kind of going with those blues. Now I don't know if you remember I was talking about how you can actually blend pastels almost like mixing color. Those, if you notice the blues that I used back there, I've got a dark, you know, almost, it's like a really, that darkest blue, not the teal blue I put down and then I put the teal blue kind of on top of it. I'm going to be adding and blending those a little bit more, too, because if you look at the photograph, go over and look at that photograph. Look at the blue that's right above the trees. If I was to add just that teal blue, it would look kind of flat and maybe a little dead and boring. So that's why it's good to blend some colors together. I was like, you know, I want a richer blue, but I've got to tone it down in value. So that's why I did the darker blue and then the lighter teal blue on top of it. I'm doing the same thing with these pinks now. I've got some pinks, some kind of peachy pinks and more true pinks going on here. And again, whatever I do in the sky, same thing down in the water. So I'm literally just doing a mirror image of everything that's above the horizon line to everything that's below the horizon line. So you're just kind of mimicking the same colors. And notice too, I'm creating a little bit of movement down in the water. Your strokes are going to get wider. If you notice those little lines and reflections in the water, they're very broad in the foreground and they get tighter and smaller as you go in the background. That's just, you know, the law of perspective and how things work. But all these little things you learn in art are going to make your paintings just more believable and more accurate. So again, I was seeing more of that orange and golden color than is actually in the photograph. But that's how I think you can make a painting a little bit more dynamic and exciting than a photograph is. I happen to enjoy now. I've been using a lot of my own photography and I'm really liking that because I was actually there. And I think even though our old brains get tired and forget things, I do think there's some memory there and emotion there when you actually visited a place. So that's why I'm encouraging to use your own photographs if you can. But if not, I know how crazy and busy lives can be. I have certainly used a lot of reference material from sites such as Paint My Photo. I've talked about that before, pmp-art.com and other places. I also like to just ask friends if you're on Facebook or Instagram or something. If you see a photograph that's beautiful, just ask them. And usually they're like, yes, they're excited for you to paint their photograph, but always ask permission. Now, as you can see, I've just been gradually adding these colors there in the front. You can see how really gritty this surface is. But I'm just continuing to add layers of color, which is actually, like I said, it is blending the colors by simply just layering the pastels on top of one another. You want to be careful because you don't want to over layer or your colors get muddy and not as vibrant and just bold. I love beautiful bold color. So now, very soon, I'm going to do what I said in the very title of this video and show you a neat little blending technique for reflections. I did it in, I believe it was the last video before this, a couple of videos before this. I had some water and reflections, and I actually used a technique that's used a lot by various artists, but it's a cheap little tool you can use for blending. It's pipe foam insulation, and you can buy it at any hardware store. And while I love that, I had this creative idea to try something different. And I'll be going over that in just a minute. I thought it was coming up. Oh, here they are. Look at these very interesting looking blending tools. Have you ever seen any tool like this for pastel painting? Well, I can pretty much guess that you haven't because they're not pastel blending brushes. These are actually makeup brushes. These are actually fantastic makeup brushes. My daughter-in-law, who is a hairdresser and makeup artist, she's fantastic. She and my son came up with this product that they marketed. They actually ordered the product, came up with their own branding and logo, and they sell these makeup brushes and shows and things. And I just had the crazy idea because they're so fantastic. I mean, ladies, if you want some great makeup brushes, these will blend your makeup flawlessly. They're called Ovel, O-V-E-L, makeup brushes, ovel.com. But I thought, why not? Let me give it a try for blending. This little one right here that's actually more you can use it for your eyebrows is great for just pulling those, those reflections down. And that's the technique that you want to do. Whether you use a blending brush like this, or a piece of pipe foam insulation, you're really just pulling down that reflection so that you kind of emulate the way the, the reflections seem to almost drip down. And then the reflections of the water are going to go on top of that. So this is step one in creating reflections. It's just to pull those shadows underneath down into the painting. So that little brush worked quite well for that. Now I'm just going to choose a couple of the darker pastels. I wanted to kind of develop that, that tree. He looked weird to me like he, I always personify trees to call it a him and a her. But he looked like he, I don't know how to head in the middle and two arms sticking up on the side. So I wanted to give it some more variety and leave. So that's what I'm doing. I'm getting my iPad so that I can look at myself. I can see it with my own eyes up close because I had my iPad far away. Okay, so I'm just giving it some more shape here, shape to the trees. And then later, the trees will get more shape to them and look more like trees. When I add what's called the sky holes, a lot of you guys are probably familiar with that. If you're not, those are basically what you add later, instead of drawing individual leaves or painting individual leaves, you actually carve them out by creating the negative spaces instead of the positive ones. You'll, you'll see me do that in just a little while. Now I'm going to do a little more blending with the handy dandy little makeup blending brush that I discovered. And then I'm going to start working on adding, making the water more believable by adding the, the horizontal strokes across it, which will give it the indication that it's actually flat water. I'm going to play some music now for you to enjoy and I'll be back in a minute to finish up. Finishing up here, you can see right here where I take a harder pastel and I just kind of lightly drag it across the, the foreground there, the four water, I should say not ground. And it kind of creates that little glistening, glimmery look on the water. So I really hope you enjoyed this guys and please come back soon and also don't forget to subscribe. I forget to say that all the time. So if you want more free lessons like this, come on back and also join us in Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook. Thanks guys. Happy painting.