 Hello, artists, and welcome to Monet Café Studio and Merry Christmas almost. We're still working on painting number three in the Winter Study Series. In this series, we've been working on creating variations of a scene. And as you know, if you've seen the previous videos, I'm using a different set of pastels for each of these four paintings. And in paintings number one and two, I used actually, I'm going to zoom in to the most recent one is number two. And I used a small set of Sennelier pastels. They're 40 half sticks set. And for painting number one, I used the Diane Townsend Landscape A set. And before we get started on painting number three, and I'll share the set of pastels I use, I want to real quickly brag on my patrons from my Patreon page. They've been producing such lovely work from this series. And it is just such a precious blessing for me to get to be able to see the fruits of your labor. So this version of painting number three will be sped up. The Patreon version is all real time. This painting took about 35 minutes and it's all real time. So if you'd like to become a patron, it's real easy. You can get all of the content. It's only $5 a month and it's such a beautiful family of artists learning together. All right, let's get started. I'm once again using this lovely reference image that's from unsplash.com. I will have that in the description of this video along with all product links. The surface is Kanson Me Tants Pastel Paper. It's an unsanded pastel paper that's quite affordable and great for beginners. What I used was a page out of the gray tones pad. There's 24 sheets. Each sheet is 12 inches by 16 inches. I used the, I think it was the second to last color in that. It's kind of a tan color. And by the way, they do have smaller pads available. And again, you can use whatever surface you have. Now here is the set of pastels I'm using for the third painting. I have one that's missing. I misplaced it somewhere, I guess. You probably recognize these as Terry Ludwig pastels by their rectangular shape. And this is the Richard McKinley set. I do love this set. I thought it had some really beautiful colors for wintery scenes. I remember when I first bought this set. I was surprised at how many light values there were and how many neutral colors there were. I find that it comes in really handy. Even if I'm not creating a full painting with this set, it just has some really great colors. Another thing I mentioned in one of the previous videos, tutorials of this series, is how differently the pastels applied to an unsanded surface. And after I finish the fourth painting, which will be a separate tutorial, I'll give my final synopsis on which ones I believed really performed so nicely on this Canson-Mittance pastel paper. As I mentioned, this is the speed version here on the Monet Café channel on YouTube. But there's a handy little feature on YouTube. It's a little gear icon at the bottom right of the video. And if you click it, it will allow you to slow the speeds down. Now I'm going to play some music to this in a minute. So I suggest you turn the music down if you slow down the video footage, because it'll sound really weird. But here I am once again creating the same sketch that I did for the first two, and I'll do again for the fourth. One great thing about doing variations of a scene, that's actually this month's learning theme on my Patreon page, is they say repetition is the mother of learning. Well, that's true. And the more you do something, the better you get. And with painting, the more you do it, the more, what I believe, the more loose you get. And the more painterly your paintings become. And they just get better and better. So this is the sketch. I just used a little kind of dark Prismacolor pastel. It was kind of a brownish color. And now I'm using this beautiful, foresty, kind of cool, darker green for the trees. And I believe this set does have the Terry Ludwig eggplant color. That dark, I think that one is. It's the lower left pastels in the set. I know it's fast, but all of the darks are on the lower left of that set. And that eggplant color is such a great dark. It is more of a dark purple than a black. I don't like using black. It just feels very flat to me. So as you can see, there's lots of pretty purples in the set, like lavender colors. And I love that there were so many neutrals in this set. And that's one thing about artist Richard McKinley. He's a fantastic pastel artist. He talks often about the power of neutrals. He uses a lot of neutrals in his paintings. And yet when you look at his work, you see all this color. Well, what happens is if you use brilliant, highly saturated color everywhere in your painting, I heard artist Marla Beguetta say, if it's everywhere, it's nowhere. Meaning that if you've got bright color everywhere, nothing's gonna stand out. It's all gonna kind of be everywhere and the same. But if you use a palette of neutrals, it will highlight those impactful colors you're trying to use. Isn't that a beautiful bluish green there? See what I mean? And I loved doing this series of four with different sets for multiple reasons. One is that not only doing things again and again gets you better, but it forces you to break out of color habits and even painting habits that you may have developed. And you'll start to notice your work gets more fresh and alive and impressionistic. I noticed in this series, my style of my trees started to really look impressionistic. They started kind of hugging that sunlit area. Ooh, look at that pretty color right there. And by the way, the Terry Ludwig Company is so awesome. It's a US-based company. The owners, I chat a little bit on Facebook with Joff. I don't know if it's Jeff or Joff. It's spelled G-E-O-F-F Ludwig. He's the son of Terry Ludwig. What a fantastic guy. So it is a great, great company. Look at that pink. So again, I'm bragging on not only the company, but this set, Richard McKinley, the artist who curated this set. So the other advantage is I loved how each of these paintings just had their own unique color palette. It was really so fun. Okay, there's a benefit number four or five, whatever I said, it's fun. And they're faster if you do little studies like this. And I thought this would be great for the holiday season. That's one of the reasons I chose this theme for my Patreon page. I wanted some paintings that were manageable for my artist and my Patreon group to follow during the crazy holiday season. And the paintings that I shared from my patrons, that's just a snippet of some of their work. Oh my gosh, I'm just in awe of how great they're doing. We have something called a homework album where they can share their work. And I do a little review of that each month. So anyway, just bragging on them, they're so great. So you can see how this is coming along. I think it's almost done. Look, I'm gonna talk through this whole video. I might as well just keep talking. Look, it's almost done. No music is coming, by the way. But man, these colors are just yummy. I love some of those blues in the shadows of the road. By the way, with snow paintings, I've shared this in the other two videos. For shadows, blues and purples are just awesome. But in painting number four, you're gonna see, I got a little crazy with a set that had colors. I was like, I don't know if I'd use this for a winter painting, but it worked. So stay tuned for painting number four. Now here you can see painting number four in the lower left there. So that one is on the horizon next week probably. All right, guys. I'm so happy you've joined me for this tutorial. Please give this video a like, a thumbs up. It really helps. Leave me a comment. That also helps so much. And become a patron if you'd like to join my Patreon family. All right, everyone. Merry Christmas and God bless and happy painting.