 and subscribers and visitors to Monet Cafe, my home art studio, where I'm going to give you some lessons like I've done many times before and you can enjoy them from the convenience of your home or your little home studio. And today I'm going to be doing something I've never done before, sort of an experiment, but if you've watched my channel, you know I like experiments and I can tell a lot of you do too. We've talked about them in the art group on Facebook. And pardon my bedhead. I have just been running around today dreaming of getting in here for some painting time, but that's one of the great things about having a studio in your home or your little place wherever it is, corner of your kitchen or whatever, is because you can just roll out of bed and paint. You don't have to brush your hair, but it does get easier if you're a parent, when your kids get a little older, you have a little more time hopefully. So welcome and let's get started with this. It's going to be different and fun. Let me describe it. Okay, so the subject matter that I'm working on today is this, these two beautiful parents that I took a photograph of when we were on a company cruise. My husband's company had a trip they had to go on. How nice, right? And if you followed my channel, you know, we very much needed that break. We've been through a lot over the past few months or so. So anyway, I thought this would be neat for the purposes for today's lessons because when you do anything with animals or people, you want to make sure you get an accurate drawing. You want things proportionally right. If something's off, it's going to look amateurish. Now that doesn't have anything to do with things being loose. You can have it loose and free, but your main structure of your drawing subject matter should be correct from a proportion standpoint. So this is going to be a little neat thing that we do to try to help us break out of a habit. We all tend to do this early, especially in our art career, is we tend to draw what we think we see rather than what we see. In other words, often especially with human faces or even animal portraits, we draw things the way we think that our brain sees it instead of what's actually there. So I'm going to try to untrain our brain from that and teach us to see the actual shape and the actual proportions rather than even thinking about what the subject matter is. For example, when I go to draw the things in this parrot, such as his beak and this eye and these little areas, I need to forget I'm drawing a parrot and literally just compare the relationships between things. I'm drawing shapes and then same thing works with painting. You're doing values and you do the same thing with the painting too. Sometimes we draw what we think, we see a tree. Oh, it's green and it may not be green. You know, it has some purples and some other colors in it and everything. So this is a great little trick to do with the eye and with the brain to try to break out of old habits. So what we're going to be doing, the way we're going to do that is something I've never done before. I kind of like it cropped in like that. I might change my crop before we get started. But what we're going to do, that's really pretty. That might help better, is this loop. I'm going to draw them upside down. And what that's going to do is it's going to force me to not think of it as the parrot. I'm going to literally have to rely on spatial relationships instead of what my brain is telling me that it is. So I've never done this before. So it could be interesting and I may not even record this video if it doesn't come out or upload it. Anyway, so we'll give it a shot. But I think I am going to re-crop it a little bit because I do like it in like that. That's much prettier. Alright, so let's go over the supplies I have right now to get started. First of all, I have a prepared board that I've made. This is just some mat board. I had extra mat board from some mats I had made years ago and had a bunch of big sheets of it. So I cut it down to standard sizes and I have a video on how I actually prepare my own pastel surfaces. If you're just beginning in pastels, you may not know this. One of the first things I had to learn was that working with pastels is better to work on a sanded surface, almost like sandpaper. Otherwise, your pastels just fall off. You can't get layers. So that's what we do with either buying them already pre-sanded like UART paper, Sennelier, various others, Color Fix, Ampersand. There's so many different things. Just keep at it. You'll learn all of them. But you can also do homemade surfaces like this. This I have a video on how I make my prepared boards. I have a couple of different ways I make them. So this is one that I just did that. I sometimes experiment with colors. I like this really lime green. I like to use colors that allow the luminosity of the paper to still show through. So we keep that brightness before getting to the pastel. So this is an 8 by 10. Okay, that's a standard size. I've already cropped my photo to an 8 by 10 so that my proportions are going to be accurate. And I'm going to talk a lot as I'm drawing about spatial relationships, okay? Meaning you're comparing where one thing is versus another. And that's probably my main method of drawing accurately. I just see spatial relationships much better because I've been working on that for years. I wouldn't say I'm the best drawing artist, but I have had to learn some skills to get better at it. So that's what we're going to try to do today. And flipping it upside down is going to cause us to do that. We're going to have to see the shapes, okay? Because we don't recognize it as well upside down. This is a pastel pencil I'm using. I recently had someone ask me, they said they noticed I don't use pastel pencils a lot and that's very true. Typically when I'm doing landscapes, I don't do anything with a pencil. I might use a harder pastel. I usually block in big shapes with a landscape. But often with portraits, animal portraits, or people, I will use a pastel pencil just to get the drawing in accurately because it's a little bit more specific, okay? Now what I did with this one, this is a Carb of Fellow Stabilo. You guys know I always pronounce things wrong. But it's just a type of pastel pencil. I also have more that are a Giaconda soft pastel pencil set. I've had these for years because I don't use them very often, okay? But you've got all your different colors and things to work with. So it's a nice little thing to have as a pastel artist. But the way I sharpen these, I find I can't sharpen them very well in any type of pencil sharpener, even if it's four pastel pencils. I don't know why. Maybe I'm buying the wrong kind. But I get an X-Acto blade and I shave it down and then to get the point sharper. I just get an old piece of, this is UR paper, but sandpaper or whatever. And I just do it on its side and try to get it to where it will do the pencil oil here to get sharper, okay? So because it's kind of important to have a sharp edge. So while I'm doing this, I may have to sharpen it a few times because the sanded paper rubs it off quite a bit. Oh, and some of you may have noticed. This is just my little makeshift dust catcher, okay? Because if you don't put anything underneath when you're working, it'll all fall down into your pastels that you're working with or all over your floor or wherever you're working, okay? So this is literally just a piece of aluminum foil. I just kind of put behind the board and curl it up like a trough, okay? Alright, so now we're gonna get started. As always, we're gonna have a reference photo here for you to watch while I'm doing this. And I think I'm just gonna draw and I'll do a voiceover talking you through it for the video. Now, you will obviously notice from the get-go that I am speeding this up a bit. And I do know, like I talked in my last video, a lot of people like the real-time videos. But trust me, this would have been incredibly boring. And the goal of this video is just to get you to try this yourself. It's not gonna do you a lot of good. To watch me do this, it's gonna help if you try it and practice it yourself. I mean, it will do some good watching me do it because I'm gonna give some tips along the way. Now, one of the main things I'd like to point out here is the advantage of using a similarly proportioned or cropped picture, photograph, and drawing surface. For example, I mentioned before that I have an 8x10 board that I'm drawing. Oh darn, look at that. My husband calls it gets in the way. Don't you hate it when that happens, when life gets in the way of your painting time? But when you return to your easel, you can take a nice, relaxing sip of tea in your Monet Cafe coffee cup. I've got something stuck to my cup there. I don't know what that was. Anyway, back to drawing. Yay! As I was saying before, you have an advantage if you happen to have your drawing surface the same proportion to your reference photo. For example, my drawing surface is 8x10. I cropped my image to be 8x10. Now, of course, on your iPad or whatever you're looking at, it won't be 8x10, but it'll have the same proportion. The advantage of that is you can very easily look at distances just according to the side of your paper. Like, for example, that log I had drawn or the perch that he was on I was drawing before, I could easily see that the circular part there on the left-hand side was almost in the middle, you know? So if your paper and your reference photo are about the same proportions, you can measure a lot more easily. Sometimes that doesn't work that way. Sometimes I'll have a reference image that does not have the same proportion as my paper. I'll try to do a video on that later. That's when you really just have to find where you want the top and the bottom of something to show up and go from there. Now, right here I'm measuring. I happen to know that the dot on my iPad is in the middle of the iPad. So I'm just kind of eyeing the middle of my board. I'm not doing a grid. Like, I have done the grids in the past. I think it makes your drawing look a little bit too mechanical and not as free. So I find that the free-hand method is a little better, but you still measure, you still make points for reference. And that's what I did with that middle point. I kind of could see where the parrot's head was. I'm looking at the distance also from the edge, bottom edge of the paper or the surface up to his head. And constantly, you just see me constantly making little adjustments and making little points. Now, also I like to mention that I am not putting anything set in stone here. This pastel pencil is very erasable and I'm not going to get into a whole lot of detail. For example, I am not going to try to draw all those feathers. I'm not going to try to even draw all the stripes around his eye. I just want to get things about where they are. Through some of my, you know, measuring before, I didn't want to draw the feet in until I kind of got some of the other things just kind of lightly in there. So again, I'm just kind of working on this area because I have my proportions the same and I'm a little bit more confident about getting those things in accurately. All right, so continuing to work on this, I'm going to just play this a little bit and then I'll jump back in here with some commentary about spatial relationships and negative shapes. That's also another great thing about drawing. Now here you'll notice, even though it's fast, that I'm correcting. Don't be afraid to keep correcting. Don't keep going on something if it's off. Stop, get it right because it's drastically going to affect the accuracy of your drawing. So I was a little off with the distance from his head to the bottom, which when it's flipped over will be the top of the drawing surface or the reference image. So I'm adjusting some things because that's going to make the whole head off if I don't have that right. So again, I know this is sped up, but it would be really long and again the goal is to get you guys to practice this and try it. Hopefully we'll get some of you guys in the Monet, Cathay Group, Art Group and Facebook to give this a try and maybe share your results. It doesn't even have to be my same image, but just something practice drawing upside down to strengthen those spatial relationship skills and I guarantee it will make you a better artist. Definitely good drawing skills is a core for good art. Now I wanted to move the reference image away for a minute so I could show you what I'm doing here. I'm looking at the negative shape between those two heads of the parrots. It's going to have a geometric shape that I am emulating and I'm focusing on that more than I am focusing on the positive shape and I held the iPad up just for you guys to see, but if you could see my head I'm constantly looking back at my reference image to make sure I'm getting those shapes right. That's another important thing. Keep looking, you should be looking at your reference image more than you're looking at your drawing surface because I wish I had a photographic brain, but we have to keep looking back, comparing, looking back, comparing and maybe it's good for the neck muscles, I don't know, but you certainly need to do that to get an accurate drawing. That's a very, very good exercise and a habit to get into. Okay, this should be far enough long for me to use to continue painting and it's time to flip it over and see how close it is. I can tell it's pretty close, you know, just from looking at it upside down, but when I flip it over I'll be able to get a better idea, but I think like I said I've never done this and I definitely like this. I really, all I could focus on was the shapes. I wasn't even thinking about it being birds, so this might be a technique I use more in the future, but it's definitely, I know it's going to be a technique to help people and artists understand, especially if you're beginning, how to start thinking of spatial relationships versus what the thing actually is. So let's flip it over and see. All right, so let me flip it over and I think I've talked before about my little technique of how I tape the back and it makes it real easy to, especially if it's a board like this and not paper, makes it easy to take off and on and there we go. Yes, I like that. I think that's pretty darn close. It's definitely close enough to start a painting and I may flip the original back over again and compare a couple of things. I think his neck really is reaching out this long, so a few more comparisons and yeah, I was very happy with doing it this way. It was actually kind of fun too. So anyway, hopefully that'll help somebody out and I am going to go ahead and finish this painting as part of the demonstration, but that was the main point of this lesson. Was to learn about spatial relationships and how to create a more accurate drawing to begin your painting, especially with animals and people. So anyway, let's get going and do more now for color and fun.