 Hello, and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're gonna have some fun today, and if you're new here, please subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. The beginning of a painting is so important, and often artists have a hard time in becoming overwhelmed with details. And I have found that blocking things in with large shapes and working somewhat geometrically can be a huge advantage for a successful painting overall. So join me in this lesson where I will do just that. As I work from this reference photo, that could quite possibly cause us to get overwhelmed by how many daisies and how much detail was in the field. So let's get started with the supplies that I used, and we'll get right into this lesson. For this lesson, you can use whatever you have, but I happen to be using a piece of pastel matte, and I'm using white. I had not used white, but I think once before this painting, and the reason I love working on the white is I can tone it, whatever color that I want. Pastel matte also comes in colors, and I love that they have a little piece of glass seen between each page if you wanted to use it for protection for your painting. Now I'll be toning mine with these Daylor Rowney acrylic inks. I'll be mixing a few colors, and also I'm using my Chinese watercolor brush, but any kind of watercolor brush would do. I just like that this has a wide amount of bristles that holds a lot of water and color. Of course I'm using some water and some paper towels just to dab my brush on. Now what I'm doing is I'm mixing up the Indian yellow. I believe I'm going to mix it up with the red that I had, and I really like this combination, but I also really love the fluorescent pink and the Indian yellow. That's the red. So I simply combined the two, and I did add some water to this. I don't think you can see me doing it here, but because I'm not doing a wet underpainting, the paper is still dry. See how that goes on just kind of thick? So I start adding water to it with my strokes, and see how that's much more fluid. So what I'm doing basically is I'm just kind of toning the paper, and then I do basically a little bit of a value study. Nothing other than me just kind of, once again, this is about simplifying things and kind of making those geometric shapes. So I just sort of got in those background trees with an application with a little less water, getting in kind of some energetic strokes. We know that things in the foreground are typically darker in value, and larger, taller grasses in the front. So this is just really kind of like a little very basic roadmap for me to begin, and it also sets the mood with that warm undercolor or complementary underpainting color. And that's a question I get so often. Why do you even do that if you're just going to cover it up with pastels anyway? And often I don't cover the whole thing up with pastels. You see a little bit of that peeking through. And if I did it just on white, it would just appear very flat. The color is much more vibrant when you have that underpainting of either a complementary color or a color that just works well with your scene. And I actually blew mine dry just to get going. And I often use these matted frames. I had my horizon line a little too much in the middle, so I kind of changed it. And I like using these. The interior part of this is an 8 by 10. Then I know I've got a standard size. I could have done this before, but I thought of this after the fact. Now it gives me a little place to kind of make some color notes on the outside of it. And now let's start looking at the geometric shapes of the trees on the horizon line. Now I'm doing my hand in a fluid motion because we, even though we're making kind of some geometric shape, oh I'm changing the horizon line. This is where I realized I wanted my horizon line a little bit higher. So that's how you can see how much you can alter things, even if you get things not quite right to begin with. So I'm just seeing these trees and purposely not rounding them. I think when we make rounded trees, I've had a habit of doing this in the past, too. They look a bit more amateurish. Trees don't grow in bubbles or in typically the round format that we often give them. So I'm just making that one tree kind of was sticking up. You might can see in the reference photo a little bit higher in a weird trapezoid kind of shape. And now I'm just kind of blocking in some of the other trees that are getting further in the distance. I'm trying to create a little bit of a sense of depth here with different layers of trees rather than just one straight line. That'll get the painting more perspective. And by the way, I'm just using a harder new pastel by Prismacolor in you pastel. And I like these. They're great for sketching. They're still considered soft pastels, but they're definitely harder than, you know, some of the real softies. Now I'm going to do the same thing with the clouds. You can do this even more basic and simplified than I'm doing it. And I actually want to do things more simplified myself. So a lot of times you're getting a lesson of things that I am working on myself. So I'm getting in these geometric shapes. Notice with the clouds, same as with the trees. I didn't make bubbles. Often we have curvy marks or rounded marks in our trees and our clouds. Also the same thing with roads. It's usually best to have more of an angle or geometric form rather than a rounded curvy form. Now before I move into the geometric shapes, the simplified forms in the field, I'm going to use my darker new pastel. I think this is the one called spruce blue. It's really a great color of the new pastel to get in things that are darker in value. Vertical things are typically darker than things that are flat, such as trees are vertical. So they're not getting the direct sunlight. They're going to have more shadow and things get lighter in value as they recede into the distance. So I'm just keeping a lighter touch as I move back. But I just kind of wanted to get those in before I moved on to the field. So you see this is really breaking things down to a super simplified form. And of course the whole overall feeling is going to be a bit more impressionistic because it's not so detailed. Now I just cooled off the temperature in the background trees, which will give the illusion of them being further away. Typically cooler temperatures are more in the distance and warmer temperatures are typically in the foreground. Now I'm just using kind of a lavender to get the clouds in. I know that the clouds have like white appearance to them, but they also have a lot of dark to them with like some rain that they're holding. So I typically like to get my dark sand and not worry about getting so fussy about what's dark and what's light. Just block them in a nice, you know, medium value or something you think is going to work for those darker values in the clouds. And then you can add the whites later. Now I'm kind of blocking in around in and amongst the clouds. Once again, kind of filling in that geometric shape and also going ahead and making a few. I know the sky is going to be a little bit darker blue in the upper heavens. And so I'm giving some of that blue to where the lightest parts of the clouds are and work with them later. And now I decided to go ahead before I get to the foreground. I'm just kind of blending some things and I probably should have done the geometric shapes in the foreground first for this lesson. But sometimes I just get on a tangent and want to have some fun. So just doing a little blending. And by the way, this was part of a real time lesson for my patrons on my Patreon page. But often I like to I like to share with Monet Cafe too, because I know there's a lot of people who can't afford to support on the Patreon group and they're just trying to learn art. So if I can take a lesson and speed it up a bit and give a little bit of information, I like to do that. I'm using different values of the new pastels here just to really give you guys an idea of what I'm doing. The background area, I could kind of see a band that was lighter. Now this is where I'm blocking in with a kind of a medium value pastel. Some of those areas in the foreground, if you squint your eyes, you can see kind of patches of dark down in the deep grasses. And then I know I've got some middle field areas and I see also too a little bit of a division. Now I could pop this over into photoshop and get what's called a cutout filter and really see these geometric shapes, but I didn't do that. I just squinted my eyes and saw where they were and I wanted to do that because a lot of you guys don't have photoshop and you can't do that. So once again, I'm just breaking down this field into the divisions that are the most simplified and keeping things a bit geometric. As you can see, the overall feeling of this is a little geometric and chunky at this point, but don't worry, your painting doesn't have to stay that way, but if you wanted it to stay that way, that would be an interesting style. I know many artists who keep that very blocky kind of style and I really like it. Okay, once again, oh and by the way, what I'm using to blend is a piece of pipe foam insulation that you can get at most hardware stores. It's literally what people use to insulate their pipes in the winter to keep them from freezing, but I don't know what artist originally found out it was a good blending tool, but I also use a chamois cloth sometimes on this pastel mat. It doesn't work on everything, but all right, so now I'm I think I ended up getting that a little too light. I changed my mind. I was lightening up that background tree that was the furthest away and I think I darkened that up later. All right, I'm using my 120 set of unison pastels and I love this. It's a half stick set. It's got so many pastels in it that you could really just create almost any painting with it. It's got a great selection of darks and all colors they're laid out according to value. It's really nice. I know I brag on the set a lot, but it's a great tutorial set for me. I don't have to get up and go find all these things. All right, so you see I'm just blocking in more value. Often if you just use one color it's kind of boring. If you use too many colors it'll get muddy, but I like to use two or three colors in my darkest values to give the area a little bit more life or the color a bit more life and so now I'm just creating a little sense of depth as that the depths of the field kind of meander almost making a little bit of a trail leading back. It doesn't have to be a perfect trail, but as you can see now it's kind of breaking up the edges of that geometric shape, but it was a great way to begin. And now rather than getting caught up in any one area too much, which we can do so easily, sometimes we just get so focused on one area we want to make it right, and we end up our painting doesn't have an overall harmony to it because it's not been worked over the whole painting which is what I recommend. So that's why I'm trying to get most of the paper filled in with color because color and value all do play upon each other and if you get two into one area your painting can lose its congruency with color and value as well. So it's good to just get something in keep focus on value first, get your value right even if you don't have the right colors in front of you. Color is a lot more flexible than value, so get those values right. Now typically in skies I know that they are darker in the heavens in value and they're cooler in color temperature so that's why the strokes I made at the top up there where I'm kind of blending over it now are a little bit more of a cool blue and they're gradually moving down to a teal blue or turquoise blue as I go down to the horizon because skies at the horizon line are typically warmer in color temperature and lighter in value. So from the heavens you're going cooler and darker in value down gradually going to warmer and lighter in color and temperature. So now I'm using a chamois cloth this time I thought it would blend better. It actually does blend really smoothly on this pastel matte. For me it works a little bit better than the pipe foam insulation when you want to get a smooth blending. So once again I'm just kind of getting things filled in before I get too fussy with detail. Again that's one of the points of this lesson work large big shapes geometrically and get things down overall before you start getting too fussy with detail. So now I know once again the rules of color temperature I know that things in the background are going to be a little bit lighter in value. Now I also know things in the background I always say typically are cooler in color temperature but I really thought I needed to add some warmth underneath some of these green grasses that I'm going to be adding. And a nice shade of peachy color almost a little bit pink peachy was good before I start getting it's going to give some interest to and some variety to the painting rather than just putting green down everywhere. And once again it's like colors playing upon each other. And I do already have that beautiful gold complementary color underneath but in some spaces are places I decided to add a little bit of a darker color underneath. And now so I don't get too fussy with things I just decided to go ahead and get some of the greens in and just kind of block it in keep it simple block things in and then after that just go ahead and give it a blending with my I think I use my I mean my chamois cloth again. And sometimes I decide not to blend the field and get things kind of softened up but I really wanted to kind of get some of the orange underpainting covered more. I didn't want it to be quite this textural looking so that's why I decided to go ahead blend it in and get more of an impressionistic look before I start getting into some of the details. At this point I am going to speed up the rest of this lesson because the main focus was on simple geometric beginnings that can help you break things down and not get overwhelmed by subject matter that's too difficult. I think you could you could do this technique with any painting and it really is the best way to work. Now I've seen artists who can start a painting literally start like a portrait and they start in one eye and they gradually move out and they get the painting completed in little sections and I'm always amazed at how they do that and often they do it quite well and and the painting does have harmony to it. But overall I feel for impressionistic painting this is a good rule of thumb and a good way to work and it's my favorite and I hope you'll try it if you haven't already. All right now I'm going to speed it up. Monet Cafe has a lot of content here that I've provided but I didn't want to give the whole real-time lesson because I do promise my patrons something special and they did get the complete lesson but I still think this will be beneficial to those in Monet Cafe who check it out. So like this video keep watching comment and keep enjoying this beautiful blessing of art. Oh we're so blessed as artists. Now I'll be back at the end but enjoy this for now. Here's where I'm beginning to put in some of the daisies and with daisies you want to keep them lyrical. You don't want to keep them too patterned. They need to have a musical feel to them but not be so structured and also keep in mind that flowers turn in different directions. Some will be buried down deep and have their heads of the flower facing down or some will be up high reaching up. Some will be turned sideways. I did spray a little bit of workable fixative on there but that's another lesson. I want to show these pastels that I used. None of them are white if you notice. They're kind of neutral and different values. I'm using the darkest one right here that I showed for more of the white-ish flowers that are more buried down in the grasses in the foreground. When something's down deep in the grasses they're going to be in shadow and typically they're more neutralized in color and they're a little darker in value. And the flowers on the tops will obviously be a little bit lighter. Now unfortunately I didn't get all the footage for my painting of the flowers and I probably gave it more detail. I kind of liked it at the more impressionistic state but hey I'm always still learning too. Here's the final painting. I do have this painting on my Etsy shop if anyone would like to give this Field of Daisy's a new home. Hope you enjoyed that and as always happy painting!