 Hello, artists, and welcome to the month of December in Monet Café, a new theme for this month, which I'm calling, Let It Snow. Now I live in Florida, so it's 80 degrees here. I put on the sweater just to get in the mood, but I know we have artists from all over the world in Monet Café, a lot of cold climates, so it promises to be a beautiful month and I'm excited to see your work. If you're in the Monet Café art group on Facebook, you know to submit your work in our album for that month, the monthly theme, and if you're a patron of mine, I'll be seeing your work for sure. So get ready to have lots of fun in December and here we go, Let It Snow. In today's pastel painting tutorial, we'll be painting a beautiful country barn nestled in the snow in this beautiful scene and I also will be sharing with you how to take a kind of white, drab, gray snow scene and punch it up with color with a very fun and creative underpainting technique. This warm underpainting works perfectly when adding soft pastels with beautiful snow colors. Now let's dive right in and talk about these products. The pastel surface that I'm using is called Fisher 400 soft pastel paper. It's a sanded surface, literally feels like sandpaper. I get it from a company called ProArtPanels.com. The surface is nice and sanded. I actually just did a simple little pencil sketch to get started. This is so simple and if you're a patron of mine, you'll get a copy of the sketch. You'll also get a copy of how I printed this out to be the same size as my surface. I'm going to share those files with my patrons and to create this beautiful, vibrant, gorgeous underpainting. I'm using this product. I love it. It's called Neo Color 2 Water Soluble Wax Pastels. This is kind of an enigma for me when I first started. How is this going to work? They look like coloring crayons, but when you apply them and then add water, they burst with brilliant color. These are the color choices I've used. Nice warm colors. I also add a magenta that's kind of when I show back the palette. There's a magenta at the top corner. That's that second one down from the top right corner. And for the pastels, I will almost exclusively be using this set of unison pastels. It's the 120 half stick set. I love the set. I've got a couple of colors there that I've misplaced. There's somewhere else in my studio, but I used to talk about the set all the time. It's one of my favorite sets because of the way it's laid out. I love unison pastels. Also I just made my own DIY pastel dust catcher. It's literally just from a box, one of my pastel products. And as I mentioned, the reference photo is a beautiful snow scene of this country barn. I got the reference image from pixabay.com. I will have that link in the description of this video. But we're going to go from drab boring gray snow to brilliant vibrant snow by using these neocolor two, not neocolor one. They won't work like this. Water soluble wax pastels. Of course you need water and a paper towel. And by the way, you could do this same process with soft pastels, just using similar colors. You can add water to soft pastels as well. I actually only used two of these brushes. I did not use that one. I used the first one I showed and then this smaller one just to get in some of the detail. I almost exclusively used that large brush to add the water, however. So whatever you have, that's what I always say. You don't have to have these pastels. You don't have to do the underpainting with these products. Again, you could use soft pastel. You could use watercolor. So here I'm applying what I'm seeing as my lightest lights in the photo. And it's definitely the sky and the snow. So I'm putting a warm underpainting, literally underneath the painting. It is what it sounds like. And I have so many questions as to why you would do this. I think with this painting, it will be evident that this underpainting will really cause the painting to come to life and keep it from just looking like boring white or blue snow. Now I'm taking, it's kind of the reddish one that I had shown in the little dish. And I'm doing my darkest darks. You notice in the reference photo that the darkest darks are those ruts in the road. It looks like it might have been just a black top road and the snow is kind of pulled away from the tire tracks. Of course, the house, the trees that are behind the house. You can squint your eyes and it will easily let you see what are the darkest darks in the painting. And with this one, it's pretty evident. Vertical elements are almost always some of your darker elements in your painting. Now that tree as I loved this composition, by the way, I felt like it just, it just worked. The house is kind of in a lower third of the painting, not quite centered. Things seem to just kind of envelop that house. Like nestled in there just right. And now I'm going to my medium values. These are things that they're a little further away. Things tend to get lighter in value the further they are. So that's why that second band of trees I didn't do as dark as the ones that are right behind the house. Now I'm just filling in the rest of the sky with this nice yellowy color, a little bit on the roof. And this is going to get covered up. Oh, now's where I'm adding that little bit of magenta. Remember I said I used a magenta. I chose it because it was a little darker in value and a little cooler in color temperature. All right. So I'm almost done here, a little bit of warmth there to some areas kind of around the sky. And I sped that up because it's kind of easy. Lighter values, darker values, middle values, and then we're ready to go. And here's where the fun begins. As I mentioned, I'm using that wider brush that I had almost for the whole underpainting for wetting these. And I'm controlling my water. I don't want it too dry and I don't want it too wet or it just drips everywhere. Some drips are great. Just embrace those drips. Like with this tree, I'm just letting things be kind of soft, impressionistic and moody. And I'm using some of the dark. When I have it on my brush, you can see to make some additional branches. With an underpainting, you don't have to have everything just so. It's really just creating a beautiful base of color for your painting and a value study and foundation and a roadmap for your painting process. So when you're done with your underpainting, life is so much easier as an artist when you create a beautiful and loose underpainting without a lot of detail. You want to just get things, you know, generally like they need to be. But see still, I've used this big brush for everything in that magenta color pretty when you wet it. And, you know, I failed to mention, wow, look at this color. Now you can see what I mean about these wax pastels. But like I said, you could use watercolor for this underpainting. You could use pastels and wet them almost exactly the same as I just did here. You literally would just layer the pastels on their sides like I did with the neo color wax pastels. So keeping it really loose, loose strokes, energy, movement, drama with color. And this beautiful warm underpainting is what's going to give this cool snow a nice underlying glow to it. If I was to take this surface and just start painting with the colors of the snow, it would be so much more boring and this ends up feeling more like, like really what happens. You can get the sunlight shining on a snow scene to where you have warm tones as well. Just look at this. Isn't this already looks like a neat painting if you like things really loose like I do. So it's a great beginning and a great way to get started. Now if you've liked this video so far, I would love it if you would hit that like button. Subscribe to this channel and hit that notification bell to be notified of future videos. And as I've been mentioning, I have extra content for my patrons on my Patreon page. It's only $5 a month to support this channel and get the extra goodies and join the Patreon family. We have such a nice, lovely group of artists. So once the underpainting is dry, it's time to add soft pastels. I'm choosing some nice, cool, beautiful blues to add to get started and I'm keeping a super light touch. One of the things that's challenging when you first start painting with pastels is or it was for me. You feel like you have to cover everything up or it's like, whoa, this isn't covering very well. Look how splotchy it is. Don't worry about that as you layer. That's the beauty of soft pastels. As you layer, things start to come together, color starts to apply more smoothly. So just embrace that. Don't be afraid of it. It's going to go through a little bit of a wonky, weird teenager stage for a while. So I love to take a color that I'm using and incorporate it throughout the painting. It's called Echoing Color and it will make your painting feel more cohesive. I tend to work my whole painting. I think for me that helps it to feel more cohesive and I look, if I've got a pastel in my hand, a color, I look for other areas that I might see it. It's also quite efficient. You're not wasting picking up multiple pastels. You're going ahead and using it in other areas of your painting where you see that value and that color might work. So this is similar to how I started the underpainting. I'm kind of working some of my lighter values. I'm looking for some of those shadowy areas in the snow and now I'm going to, I would say this is more of my middle value. I chose one of the purples that's in this Unison 120 half stick set. This is such a nice neutral, almost a gray purple color in that set. I really like it. It works great for distant trees. Things get lighter in value as they recede into the distance. So that's why that band of trees is not going to be as dark as the trees that are right behind the barn. So now, again, like I said, I'm looking at other areas. I could use this pretty gray purple middle value and I'm looking at some of those little areas to the lower left of the painting. There's all kinds of debris. There's branches coming out. So I'm just making general shapes. Now the middle ruts of the tracks are going to be the darkest value. You can see in the reference photo, but they're gradually get lighter. There's other little bits of snow kind of scumbled upon some of those areas. That's why I used some of that gray purple there. But now I went ahead and went to my darkest dark or I would say there's only one other dark that I'm going to use besides this. I'll talk about later, but I would say this is definitely the darkest dark in the Unison set. It's a dark purple. It's a really nice dark and I'm using it for some of those areas I see. You don't want it everywhere. I like the expression. I think it's artist Marla Baguetta. I heard it from. She said if it's everywhere, it's nowhere. So I'm looking for those areas of contrast. My darkest darks next to my lightest lights. And that's what just by nature, our eyes go to those places first. It's just a law of nature and physics. So I don't want that contrast everywhere, but I'm looking for those compositional vocal point elements where that might benefit my painting and the composition. And so that's why I added it just in some of those ruts. Now there is, you can't see it in how I've cropped this, but there is one fence post and there was only one fence post on this side in the reference image. But it was a little bit darker because it was closer. So later you'll see me. I use my artistic license to just add some other leaning posts in that area. But for now, I knew it was one of the darker elements. Another darker element, of course, is the barn. You can see that so obviously in the reference image. Again, it's a vertical element. So it's going to be a little bit darker than things that are flat. The lightest elements are almost always the sky and the ground is often light because the sunlight is shining down onto the ground, especially in the distance. So those are just some little tips to keep in mind. And so I'm just using that purple to get in the main parts of the building. And now I kind of wanted to make it like there was either, I think I later turned this into a square instead of an arch or a rectangular shape, but I kind of wanted that door. I couldn't see it really good in the reference image. It's really far away or you don't want to add too much detail when something is far away like this. But I thought it looked a little bit darker like you could see inside the building. And I added a little bit of a shadow underneath the eaves and underneath that part where there's a lean to on the side of the building. Now this is all going to lighten up. I'm just kind of getting in some of the darker elements and you'll see me layer over that. Just keeping a hint of the hint of a darker value in those areas. The same thing's going to happen with these trees. I am putting in, you can pull up this reference image on Pixabay by the way. I know I've cut mine off as I'm painting here, but pull it up and take a look at the trees. You'll see that they're definitely darker. And I'm doing the same thing I did with the house. I'm getting in the dark, oh by the way I meant to mention, this dark is the Terry Ludwig eggplant or it was when I had it in my hand. It's V100 made by Terry Ludwig and it almost looks black but it's really a dark, dark purple. That's the only other soft pastel I used other than at the very end, I'll talk about some finishing marks I used with something else. And the main set, the 120 unison half stick set is 98% of the pastels in this. Alright, so I'm using my opposite hand now, I'm left handed, but I recommend learning to paint with your other hand. I think you'll find you have really nice loose strokes and it's kind of convenient. Sometimes when you can't reach in a certain area, it's just nice to be able to use your other hand. So my point with the building and with these trees is that I got in that eggplant color but you're gradually going to see as I layer, it's not going to be as dark. I wanted it to be darker but not quite this dark so the layers will soften it up a little bit and give a little bit of that underlying deeper value, especially where some of those tree trunks are down closer to the ground. And you can see here that I'm scumbling over it with that darker purple and I'm also taking that darker purple and putting just a little bit of it, putting. You like that word? That's the southern word, putting, not putting. Putting a little bit of it down like where there might be some darker areas of those distant trees down in the roots and or the trunks I should say. And I'm using that same dark purple that's in the unison set to get in. Looking at the tree, the foreground tree that has lots of crazy branches coming out. I'm going to show you my technique for doing those but it also has areas where you can see the shadow. There's a shadow kind of on the back side of the tree or the left side of the tree and on the left side of many of those branches that are coming out. So I'm working the hole again as you can see that I don't stay stuck in any one area too long. This is where I'm taking that gray purple and I'm giving a hint of some vertical boards on the building and this is where I was saying how that dark element got lightened a little bit but you can still kind of see where the darkest darks are. Now I'm taking that pretty middle purpley gray color and I'm getting in some of the other tree trunk values. Getting it on its side, notice the finesse of how I turn. I'm not drawing lines. You see how I'm just making little shapes and I'm turning it to get kind of those little twists and turns that happens in branches. One thing that will quickly cause your painting to look amateurish is if you have curvy lines not just in the tree and the tree trunks and the tree branches but even in the road I find geometric bends and curves look so much more artistic. And I meant to mention you can obviously see I've sped this up a bit. The entire painting I think it was about an hour and a half to create and I've sped it up to make the video not so long but I think you can still see what I'm doing and also YouTube allows you to slow it down. You can watch it one time through to hear all my commentary but then go back and slow it down. You just go to the little gear icon below the video lower right and just pick your speed. Do turn the sound down because I sound really weird talking slow but that's a nice option that you have with YouTube. Now as you can see I'm getting in the majority of the sky now. I'm using a combination of colors that lavender that I have in my hand right now. As I said I used it in the sky so I'm going to see where I can use it on the ground but the combination of colors in the sky is going kind of from a little darker up high in the sky and gradually getting lighter as I come down closer to the horizon line. I'm picking colors and values that are similar but at the very top it was a combination of a blue and a lavender and the values were almost identical but the colors were a little different and that creates a neat color energy. It's called fractured color and it works really great when painting skies. Now I'm getting a little bit lighter and a little bit warmer. I was just using a tissue there to kind of clean off my pastel. Now why would I be getting a little bit warmer as I get down to the horizon line? Well that's typically how it works in nature is the horizon line is a little bit warmer because the sun is hitting the ground things are bouncing up and things get darker and cooler as they go up into the heavens. I mean think about space it gets darker and it gets cooler. You don't see a lot of warm colors if you look at the way up high especially in the sky at night are just images of space. It's cool and it's dark so that's kind of a neat thing to keep in mind. Now I'm using some of the same pink and I'm squinting my eyes and I'm looking where are some of the lighter values that's the lightest value I've used so far and I'm just looking at where they may be in the painting keeping in mind that when things are far away they tend to be more in horizontal bands rather than vertical things flatten out in the distance. Now I know it's going to get a little cooler over kind of behind those trees so that's why I went with a little bit of a darker value and a little bit of a cooler color. Same thing over on that side beside those trees. Now I'm going to zoom in a little bit here so you can see my treatment of the roof. I have learned over the years that when doing structures in a landscape well for me it I love it because it adds a warmth and a hominess or coziness to a landscape but I have found that less is more especially if it's something in the distance like this you you're not going to see a lot of detail. When things are far away you can't see all those boards and and elements to the building so you're really just suggesting. Now I'm suggesting a little bit there was like a little bit of snow almost that it had fallen off of the roof and was just underneath that edge of the roof so just suggest things. Sometimes I fiddle around so much making sure the perspective is right and you do want to get that right but just little gestural marks are often the best bet when doing structures in a landscape and that's really what we're doing when we're painting especially with an impressionistic style like I lean to is we're suggesting things. We're not spelling everything out. We have this beautiful ability to lead the viewer to the places that that we thought were beautiful when we first looked at that reference image and what I've been doing here is kind of cooling off those trees. Remember I put down that gray purple then I cooled it off to make them look further away which exactly is what that did. Now I'm using this blue that I just added to the distant trees and sneaking it in behind some of the tree shapes adding a little bit more warmth to the sky here. This is a little bit more of a peachy pink again when it's down closer to the horizon I'm shaping that into some of the tree shapes giving them a little bit of distinction and really just honing in that focal point is where that house is nestled between those two different bands of trees and that beautiful warm tones in the sky. Now even though this was a cool scene I decided to add a little bit of warmth to the tree. I'm imagining with this warm glow that's underneath this is kind of a snow scene where things have to begin to thaw out or it maybe had a first snow and it didn't stick the next day was sunny and some of the snow is melting revealing maybe a little bit of green still underneath those trees and I went a little bit lighter here. Notice how I have a little area that's taller and a little darker in value there that's like a a segment of trees I was imagining that's just a little bit closer. So by adding a little bit of that neutral green there I got another little element of a middle distant trees not the ones that are quite furthest away. So adding that warmth I think created interest but I'm not going to keep it quite that that warm green I'm going to just glaze over a little bit with some of these cooler colors so the end result will be just a little hint of that green peeking through. I'm doing what's now called negative painting you're literally like painting the spaces between things rather than painting branches I tend to create a big large shape of like the dark element and then carve things out in between and now I'm going and covering up a little bit more the underpainting I like it to peek through but it's peeking through a little much at this point so I'm coming back in with a pretty blue lavender and layering it in areas that are in the sky echoing it down onto the ground and giving that harmony like I mentioned working the whole painting and now I'm going to work a little bit more on some of the darker snow values which are going to be the ones that are in shadow. There's some of them that are kind of by the edges of the road there's little ruts in the snow there's ruts in the snow that's in the middle portion of the road there where I'm working now and I am not being specific here you see you can see I'm not trying to photo or do photo realism and duplicate everything this is a painting this is impressionistic we're just suggesting and all I really have to do is to get an idea of where some of those colors are and just kind of scumble them scumble just means kind of little random marks here and there and getting that little hint or that little suggestion and often making directional strokes kind of looking at is the ground curving over which it kind of is where the snow is curving over into the ruts and what would happen another thing that's going to help you as an artist is really learning some of the laws of nature what does happen when things curve down or or have a slope or shape well often some things are in shadow and something else that's great to do at the beginning of a painting is identify your source of light where is the sun and that's going to really give you an idea of where the shadows are now something to keep in mind with snow scenes is sometimes they are very overcast which is the case in this photo it's it's kind of hard to tell where the sun is coming from but I just kind of used my artistic license and imagined it that glow that's happening kind of behind everything there as it was either a kind of a early morning or sunset going down with a lot of cloud cover in the sky so that's the neat thing about being an artist is once you learn a few simple rules about how nature works and and you paint a little bit I mean it does take a while to get the hang of everything and to even just understand the medium and and the color theory and things that sound so complicated but they're really not once you do it but once you get the hang of those things you have the ability to go you know what I don't want the scene like I'm doing here to be just gray I want to give it some life I want to give it some color and if you're a newbie to all of this keep in mind I have learned everything I've learned with soft pastel painting online I've only had one in-person course workshop that I did but other than that I've learned everything by doing probably what you're doing right now I didn't have the financial means I was raising my family I was a single mom for a while and so I my art was kind of like I I wanted to do something to give me a little bit of a break from things mentally you know so I had to try to hunt and find ways to learn and I chose soft pastels because of their user-friendly quality I loved how they didn't dry up it wasn't a wet medium like oil or acrylic I could literally just lay my little sticks of color down and walk away if one of my kids needed me had to go to football practice or guitar lessons or whatever and I found they were very practical I also just love holding the color it just feels almost like you're sculpting with color so that was pretty neat for me so don't be frustrated these things seem like a lot at first I did everything wrong I almost stopped pastel painting I bought the wrong products I used the wrong techniques I didn't know about layering I didn't know any of this stuff about color color temperature value nothing so that should be encouraging that's why I started videotaping myself so I could share with others what I learned and that was the beginning of Monet Cafe so I'm so blessed that this channel is it's getting close to 80,000 subscribers right now and I know soft pastel is not a medium that all artists use but I think I've helped a little bit for people to learn about soft pastel painting I do love other mediums by the way I just find I have a fan base of people that are really loving learning about soft pastel so there was my little tangent you know I gotta have one in every video so I am I'm going to eventually cover up the yellow in this road okay even though I think that's kind of cool I like some of the colors happening here but I did want it to finally look like it was a snow scene so I'm going to add some music to this I'm just going to keep it at this little barely sped up speed and keep watching but I'm going to be back when I start to add the fence posts and the tree branches I want to share with you some little tips about keeping them really painterly looking and not over detailing them but I did want to mention I think I missed just a little bit of footage covering up the the yellow part of the road but it's the same principle of just kind of layering some of those cooler snow colors in that yellowy area so enjoy this to music don't go anywhere again if you haven't subscribed hit that little subscribe button and if I don't say this in the video comment I'd love to hear what you have to say I read your comments I can't always respond to all of them but that's one of my fun things to do is to read what you guys are saying I love learning more about you sharing your journeys so okay I'm really going now here's some Christmas music relax enjoy and I'll be back with more instructions soon here I'm working a little bit more on this foreground tree which I thought was a wonderful focal point element it's just kind of a lead-in to the rest of the painting but I want to be very careful and to keep it very impressionistic also because it's on the edge of the painting I want to keep it not too detailed and not so much focus that the viewer gets stuck if you have if I put so much detail and things elements in this tree it would be a hindrance to inviting the viewer in that's a good word I want to invite the viewer in and that caused them to get just stuck here so I have this darkest purple what I've been doing even though it's a round pastel I'm just kind of laying it on its side and I'm creating some little twists and bends and turns just in general once again like a suggestion as to how some of the tree branches are and then I'm doing the same thing down where all of this tangle of branches like a lower maybe another tree or something from the root of this tree is growing up again kind of like pulling the viewer in pointing that's a focal point element uh called pointing there's another more technical word for it but now I got a little bit lighter value now why would I do that well that's because the branches are getting thinner and also just a little bit some of them are a little further away so I want to give that suggestion that some are closer some are thicker and some are further away doing the same thing this is kind of like just a beautiful dance you're just kind of following along where the tree leads you these branches and these limbs need to be very gestural and what that means is almost like a quick little movement and have a feeling of energy not heavy and stiff so keep them light and airy and again kind of like they're they're dancing and leading the viewer in now I'm using this darker purple of the actually you know this is the one that's the medium gray purple I think and I'm just giving these little suggestions of fence post when I was first learning to paint I would have taken these fence posts and I probably would have measured them I would want to make sure they were standing straight up and down and guess what that does that makes your work look amateurish especially with a country barn snow scene like this this is an old farm or barn and we're going to have fence posts that are leaning and broken now here's what I said at the beginning that in the reference image there's just one post there so I decided instead of wrapping it all the way around and having more fence posts there I decided to make it like it's um it's coming in it's leading the viewer in but almost like it got broken and one of them's falling down kind of just letting the viewer go around that corner and at this point my snow was um still pretty cool so I decided to bring in some of that pretty peachy color from the sky give a hint of it onto the roof and then uh just suggest it in certain areas where that sky will be reflecting onto the snow that's really what happens in nature often we forget that things that are in the sky get reflected down not just in water but also on land all right now here's what I mentioned about one of the other pastel products that I used these are called prismacolor new pastels built in u pastels they are quite affordable actually you can get a set of them and they're they're great for things like this these little they're harder they're just a little bit harder so you can get finer lines um they're also great for doing under paintings you could have used these prismacolor new pastels to create the same underpainting I created with the neocolor wax pastels um I bought a set I think it's 72 or is it 90 something anyway it's a big set of prismacolor new pastels and lots of colors in it and it has lasted me for years the marks I'm making for these fence rails and posts are similar to what I did with the branches trying to avoid curvy shapes but rather have more broken lines sort of like a press and release having some areas where it's a little thicker a little thinner and again very gestural and loose now you're going to see me adding little bits of snow to the tops of the posts or the what are those called the rails um of the fence and for the distant ones I didn't want to go so quite because they're far away I chose a bit of a gray prismacolor new pastel and now I'm using one that's a little bit leans a little pink on the side where the sun may be hitting the tops of those and very similar to how I made the rails I just suggested it broken lines thicker thinner and just little quick little marks really I reinforced a little bit of that snow that was kind of coming off the eaves of the roof again just a suggestion we don't need anything too hard or thick and I chose one of the lighter blues that I used here it's almost a white and I thought it would be a nice bright white to pull the viewer in with that right side fence now I'm using some of this medium to light blue to fill in some of the areas that are still rather showing the underpainting a lot in the in the road and here I am using that lighter color again almost a white to suggest little bits of snow maybe still resting upon some of the branches and I I used my common sense as to where I thought it would be probably on thicker branches and probably not on branches that were laying down or pointing down it probably would just fall right off especially with this morning glow I'm thinking of this as morning you know like like I said the snow's kind of starting to melt the sun's coming up maybe this isn't a super cold day it might have snowed the day before you can really get into your paintings with a little bit of a story too that's the wonderful thing about being an artist now just my little easy signature and there you have it taking a really gray boring snow scene and brightening it up with color using our artistic license to have some fun and create a scene that tells a story I hope you learned a lot in this tutorial and also maybe just had some fun coming along with me on another painting journey please like this video comment I'd love to hear from you you can find this original and many more in my Etsy shop I pray you all have a merry Christmas and as always happy painting