 Welcome, friends and visitors to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm giving you a little taste of what we do over in my Patreon group. This was a little lesson where I literally sketched and painted with my non-dominant hand. I'm left-handed, so I painted with my right hand. And it was a fun little homework assignment that we had, so I just thought I'd share a little speed version with you guys. And I'd love it if you would subscribe to my channel. We have a lot of fun here. I bring a lot of free videos and information. And I'd love it also if you would like and comment and hit the little bell icon if you'd like to be notified of future videos. Now for this lesson I used Canson non-sanded paper. This is not the Canson Touch that actually is a little sanded. And I know as pastel artists we often choose the sanded papers, unsanded papers like this one. They don't get as much layering, but I'm finding as I advance in my art career I'm kind of going back to some of the non-sanded papers. So this is the Earth Colors Canson. It's a 9x12 pad with some nice warm tones that make for a nice underpainting color for a lot of landscapes and things. So Earth Colors I really liked this one. Also for the pastels I used exclusively a set of pastels that I love called the Elizabeth Mowry Poetic Landscape. Now I picked it because my studio was so messy and I really wanted to work from a set that was all intact. So I grabbed this set. I love these pastels because they're not too hard and they're not too soft. What is it? Goldilocks said that about the bed being just right. So it's a really great set. It's about $400 to $500. I know that sounds like a lot but it's a really versatile set. Elizabeth Mowry is one of my favorite artists and she curated this set and I also love this book of hers. So I just did a sketch with my non-dominant hand. I'm a lefty primarily. We've got any other lefties out there and I'm sure as lefties you know that we kind of have an advantage in being slightly more ambidextrous than righties because we live in a right-handed world. Often we have to adapt to things being right-handed but I still don't sketch a lot with my right hand. Sometimes if I can't reach something while painting I may use my right hand to get to something but I don't do it enough to be really good at it. But I find this exercise was awesome for kind of breaking out of some of our habits we get by just using our dominant hand. It definitely helped me to really analyze, to think, to analyze my subject matter even though I thought I normally did that a lot anyway. I had to do it even more in this case. I wanted to give some little tips here too. If you're doing something like this, especially that like a glass or anything that requires your rendering to be accurate, it's a good idea to get your sketch inaccurately to begin with. To just get you some, even if it's not very detailed, I don't do a whole detailed sketch. I just get some points into where I know where they are and you can slightly adjust later but it's a good idea to get it in somewhat to begin with. And it's also a good idea to make your reference image whatever you're using unless you're painting from life to be the same proportions as your drawing surface. For example, I have a little program a lot of times in your phones you can edit your photo and crop it to a certain dimension and I cropped it to an 8 by 10 and I made my image on my surface an 8 by 10. So that when you sketch, you know that you're my, if you're going to sketch it exactly like you see it, I know that my negative shapes, the surrounding parts on the flower are the same proportions on the reference image as they are in my drawing. So it does make it more accurate for measuring. And I use a little method often where I just kind of, I kind of look at the halfway and quarter, quarter way parts on my paper. I don't draw the grids often but I, and I also do something that I call spatial relationships. I'm constantly looking at, okay, look at the little negative place between where the two flowers meet or, you know, just looking at how things compare as you sketch. I did have to correct some of the stuff. Again, remember I'm drawing with my non-dominant hand so that was a bit challenging to get things accurate. But I found it fun and we do have a lot of fun in my Patreon group. I've only had my Patreon page and just so you know, it's patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins and I've only had it for less than a year. And it has just blessed me so much. Of course, to support this channel, a lot of people pay the, it's $5 a month. You can cancel it anytime. A lot of people just want to support Monet Café because I literally bring free videos to a lot of people in the world who have no resources. I get so many beautiful comments from people. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I had no idea how to paint with pastels and I've learned drawing principles that I don't have any ability to go to any courses or, you know, some people financially are limited. So a lot of people support me on Patreon just for that, just to keep these videos coming and you're making my equipment better. Everything is getting better because of your support. But for the people that are getting on there that really want a little bit more, I'm really putting my heart and soul into my Patreon page. I'll admit it is a lot of work. But the benefits are not just the financial. Of course, the financial is wonderful right now. My husband literally just lost his job and I was just showing my pastels there and I know a lot of you guys are in the same position so we're having to do what we can to try to make ends meet. So that's been a blessing too. But more so than the financial. It's just the beautiful, sweet relationships that I'm building with some of my patrons. Unlike the Monet Café art group that I always recommend you guys if you want to know more about pastel painting, it just hit 10,000 members in that group. And I was, that's my bracelet I'm showing off. I do have a link to my earth, it's coincidental the bracelet is called Earthcolors. It's my Monet Café bracelet I had designed by this jewelry designer. She's awesome. I got to remember what I was saying before. And coincidentally, before I even realized I was using this pad called Earthcolors, we had named these the Earthcolors bracelets. I'll put a little picture in here of them. Again, the links in the about section if you want to buy one. But the little stones on them, they look like soft pastels and you can put essential oils on them because they're lava rocks. And you just smell like I had eucalyptus on that day, it was yesterday. But anyway, back to my patrons. It's just an intimate little group. I shouldn't say little. It's too, at this point of this video, it's like 200. Oh, well let me stop here. Now I got to explain. This is a chamois cloth like you used to dry your cars or things. And you can't use this on UART paper. I blend sometimes when I blend on UART paper, I use a piece of pipe foam insulation that you can get at a hardware store. If you used this on sanded paper, it gets stuck on the sanded grit. But it works great on this non-sanded paper to blend. It also works great on pastel matte. Okay, now back to what I was saying. Oh, I think I accidentally drew with my left hand once. Maybe twice, but not for very long. The only time I use my left hand is at the very, very end, just to get some of those marks in the glass. But I don't do it for much. But anyway, so I am so thankful for my Patreon group. But now I remember what I was saying. Back to the Monet Cafe Art Group. It's a group on Facebook that you can join with over 10,000 other artists. Now, of course, not all of them are active. But for the ones that are, there's all levels. There's people who've been painting for years. We have a little painting challenge every month. We have winners and you as a beginner, if you're a beginner and you get in that group, you can literally ask just about any question and you'll get so many great answers. I find that's the beautiful thing about the group is so many artists willing to answer questions. Those end up being the most popular post, by the way, I notice when someone says, what's the difference between this paper and this paper? Are these pastels good for this, you know, method or surface or whatever? Artists are so willing to help. Alright, so I have jabbered on. But you see, even on this non-sanded paper, I'm getting some pretty bold color results. Also, too, I wanted to mention that medium hardness pastels, medium to hard pastels, are better to use, especially at the beginning stages if you're working on non-sanded paper because you don't get much layering anyway because there's not a lot of tooth to the paper to hold the pastels. So it's best to use the hard ones to get down your basic values, colors, and painting. Then you can use the softies if you haven't overlaid to get that brighter color. Now this was, like I said, only the Elizabeth Mowry set for this entire painting. But anyway, it's a great hardness, I should say medium hardness pastel to use on non-sanded papers. I really like it. Okay, so I just, I guess I just wanted to talk and share this with you guys, and I hope you're enjoying. And again, comment, let me know if there's any other types of videos you'd like to see. I love reading your comments and just seeing how some of you are so excited about learning to paint. It is therapeutic. It's great. Alright guys, I hope you enjoyed this and I'll be back soon with more videos. You know that. Alright guys, happy painting!