 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I'm glad you're here. Subscribers, artists, and patrons. Today's lesson will be on painting a chickadee, and I'll give some instruction on birds in general. And I'll be using pastel matte. This is a surface I've never used before. I just got it for Christmas, and I'm also using some Terry Ludwig pastels. I want to give a little quick tip here though. This little tray is an older pastel box that I'm repurposing. I cut out some little foam pieces to put in between the sections that were already divided, and it makes a great little studio tray to be able to use while you're working. And here is the photo of the cute little chickadee. He was so chunky and cute. I got it from pmp-art.com. It's a great site with free reference material for artists to use, and it's great when it's a subject matter. You can't get a photo of yourself. I don't have a chickadee in my backyard. Okay, here is my pastel matte that I'm opening up for the first time, and I'm so excited because I've never even had this product in my hands. I'm not even sure what to expect. And I was actually, you see it comes in various colors, I was actually very surprised that it doesn't have really a sanded surface at all. It has these little, that's the white, it has these little sheets of glass seen over each page, and you can see the different colors there. But the surface is rather smooth, but there's something about it that works very well with pastels. All right, now here is my little quickie bird drawing demo. To get a general shape of a bird, in this case, the little chickadee I'm doing, I did the two circles, one for the body, one for the head. I'm speeding this up because it would get kind of monotonous. See how I divided that little circle for the head into quadrants, and then the beak goes on the middle quadrant, horizontal quadrant, the eye goes behind that. You can kind of watch this for a general idea of how to draw a chickadee. But basically, I wanted to keep that plumpness. I liked the fact that he was all, like in his winter feathers, I guess you could say, he was fluffed up. And anyway, so this is just a little piece of charcoal that I'm using here. I like drawing with charcoal because it's kind of in the pastel family. And I can kind of blend with it a little to get my values. I can do a better value study with charcoal than I can with pencil. And so that's why I kind of like playing around with charcoal when I do a sketch. So this is the general idea. It was a multi-purpose one to get me kind of warmed up general drawing of the chickadee. And then the other was just to give some instruction on drawing or painting a bird. Okay, I'll speed up this drawing just a little bit more. But it is a good idea if you are going to paint a bird to do a few sketches of them. Also, maybe look at some other birds of the same variety. Do some drawings like that drawing I did kind of on my left below where the birds are facing different directions. It really kind of helps you to understand how that particular bird is made. So one of the hard things I find about birds paintings and drawings is they have a delicacy about them that sometimes can be hard to render. You want to kind of keep it really sweet and delicate. So all right, sorry for my hair getting in the way here. But we will start the pastel painting after this. Now here's the point where just the commentary ends for this particular video here in Monet Café for the extended content and more instruction. That's on my Patreon page. And if you'd like to become one of my patrons, you can do so for just $5 a month. You can cancel at any time and my patrons get a little extra content. But of course, you can still see the remainder of this video right here in the Monet Café YouTube channel. I also plan on bringing you a whimsical bird painting lesson in its entirety for the Monet Café channel right here. And hopefully I can have that for you soon. So hang out, enjoy the rest of this video that's sped up just a little bit and hang out to the end for some more commentary. Alright, so I'm finishing this little guy up at this point. And my conclusion about pastel matte as a surface for pastels, I love it. I would definitely use it again. I'm looking forward to doing some landscape paintings on it, along with some other animal portraits. I think it really lends itself to nice animal work in general. So I hope you enjoyed this. Again, if you would like the extended content, you can find that on my Patreon page. There'll be a link here in the little end screen if you'd like to do that. And I always have fun hanging out with you guys here in Monet Café. Happy painting.