 Well yee-haw! Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and here today we're doing the last in a series of farm themed paintings and today's painting tutorial is of a barn and a beautiful farm scene with mountains so I'm glad you've joined me here today. I hope you learn a lot. I hope you'll subscribe if you haven't. Hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. And if you would like to become a patron of mine to support Monet Café and get extra content it's only $5 a month and it's easy to find. Patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. Alright let's get started. I was enjoying that country music. I have some serious country roots in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Okay so I've been using this Paris collection of Sennelier pastels a lot. You may wonder why I've used it a lot. I'm away from my home studio since my mom passed away still with my dad staying with him and I'm a little more limited in my pastels. Now this is Sennelier the same company as the pastels pastel paper. It's sanded paper it's Sennelier Le Carte pastel card. It's called pastel card because it's a little thicker. I love this surface and I am doing kind of a long format landscape with this. I actually altered a lovely reference photo that I cropped it quite a bit and made some adjustments in Photoshop's to get it the way I want. I want to show my patrons how I did that and this reference photo is actually from one of my patrons Patrice de Dominic. She is from my Patreon page and my patrons that's her calf painting there. My patrons get to submit their work into a homework album and I get to see all of their creations from my tutorials. I just love it. Look at all the duck paintings. You can tell it was farm theme this month. Oh gosh and poor Ian. He had a leg injury so he painted sunflowers on his cast. That was creative. I am so proud of my patrons and it's such a blessing to see what they're creating from my tutorials. Alright let's get to painting. My last tutorial that focused on getting a loose painterly look with loose and painterly edges was of a hen and it was all real time. The entire video with the exception of the sketch and a teeny bit at the end. Now I am speeding this one up a bit. A little bit at the beginning. I'll speed it up a little bit more towards the end. The painting was oh gosh probably less than two hours long so I want to be able to upload it. I have kind of slow Wi-Fi. Anybody else out in the country you kind of that's one of the disadvantages of being out in the country is you sacrifice fast Wi-Fi speeds but that's okay. I like the fresh air and sunshine. But I'm going to be providing commentary especially here at the beginning portion and I want to talk a lot about of course a painting this scene but also I get a lot of comments about how when you first start applying pastels you feel like you're not getting a good application and notice my pastel strokes here. Can you see how the surface of the paper is still showing and that's okay. If you are first starting out with pastels and that's frustrating you try not to get frustrated that's just the process. Pastel painting is a gradual process. It often takes a while before it starts coming together. A lot of artists talk about it going through an adolescent stage or teenage stage so it sometimes does look a little unfinished and perhaps not quite what your goal is or aim until you get a few layers down so don't get discouraged at that. It is best to keep a light touch. See right now I'm using this kind of cool green. I'm getting in some of my darker values and it's okay that I've still got that paper showing through because I'm going to be gradually adding layers. Trust me the pastels start to layer themselves as you work. Now the disadvantage if you go ahead and press hard and you try to get a solid application is you're going to fill up the grit of that tooth of that paper. The paper is sanded for a reason. It's sanded so that you're able to get a lot of layers and really get creative but if you fill it up early on you're going to lose that layering ability. Your color is going to start to look flat and muddy and you also don't get the color mixing. That's another video I'm going to be making soon about how you really can mix colors with pastels on the surface but if you're not keeping a light touch that just doesn't work. Now you can see how I'm taking a warmer green and I'm keeping a really light stroke here and I'm layering it over some of the darker value I've already put down and gradually these pastels will start to combine and make new color combinations and a lot of fun color energy. I'd also like to add that I really love using Sennelier pastels on Sennelier pastel card and of course it's made by the same company so that makes sense but the Sennelier pastels are soft and buttery and awesome color. In my last video of the hen painting was it that one? Actually I think it's the one just before that with some crazy chickens. I talk a lot about pastels consistency, how they're made, why certain pastels are more expensive than others, and why some pastels get much more vibrant color. I give kind of my recommendations on what types of pastels to buy. I'm trying to remember what that video was called but it had it's just two videos back. Maybe I can put a little link up here somewhere where you can see it and you may have noticed at the beginning where you could see my initial sketch. It was just a charcoal pencil where I laid out the basic shapes. You see here now I'm not getting into any detail right now. Everything is basically just the largest shapes and I actually recorded my process when I was altering the photo in Photoshop and I'm gonna try if I have time to create a video. If you're one of my patrons and you're listening here I'm gonna try to create a video where I show you kind of how I broke down the photo to its basic shapes and simplified it. That is what I totally recommend. I would say almost always when you do a painting is to get your big shapes in your values, your basic values and colors in first and then you start working honing it in with the detail towards the end. So big shapes to small shapes, values first of a good value study and then you're just really ready to get going in your painting and start having some fun putting in the details. You'll notice at the very end of this I'm gonna show you how I even put in a fence at the end but I'm not even worried about any of that stuff right now. I'm just getting in big shapes, value and a basic color palette. I'd also like to mention that even though it's early on in the painting still I'm trying to create directional strokes. I wanted the sky to feel like it was radiating out. What would you say the focal point is in this particular reference image? Well I would say it's the barn and kind of that tree and I still wanted the painting, it felt a little heavy on the left side with that barn so I still wanted there to be some interest on the right side of the painting so as it goes on I create those trees a little bit more on the right. Also I create the fence and everything in a way to where I think I hope it's working with my focal point. So the energy that I'm creating with the sky with my directional strokes that just means take your stroke in the direction that you want the clouds to go or the viewer's eye to go and I wanted that to complement my focal point strategy and just create a composition that had more energy and drama perhaps. Now I use my finger to blend a little bit there but I usually don't like to over blend on the surface because like I said the pastels blend themselves so beautifully when you give them a chance. You will see me later actually use a packing peanut. It's like a piece of styrofoam to do a little bit of blending but I try not to over blend. I'm going to add a little bit of music now and let you watch and think about the things that I've talked about already but I'm gonna be back when I get to blocking in the barn and give some commentary there. I'm still keeping this just barely sped up at this point. I'll only speed it up a little bit more towards the end so enjoy. I'm keeping this with the farm theme and some good old country kind of blue grass music so enjoy. Here I'm developing a few of the clouds. I didn't want any really distinct clouds. I wanted them really subdued because I didn't want to draw too much attention to edges in the clouds or in the sky so I'm just really just making some lighter cloud shapes all emulating a little bit from the photo but like I said before mostly trying to keep that energy where things are radiating out from the barn and giving a little bit of drama to the scene. All right now I'm going to move on to actually getting in the value. Really I'm focusing on value which means the lightness and darkness really more so than color. I know it's going to be a reddish or burgundy color, deeper colors. I had to put my glasses on but really what I want to do is I want to get those darker values. If you look at the reference photo where's the sun coming from? Well you know it's going to be kind of the upper right. You can look at the tree and see that there are lighter leaves towards the top but you can look at the barn and see that the side that's kind of facing us is the shadow side where I'm painting right now and it's a pretty dark value so really again like I said at the beginning I'm focusing on shapes here and not getting any detail so I purposely avoided the barn with everything because I knew I wanted to take my time with it and when it's an architectural structure something with perspective you have to get right. Those are things it's not like a tree you can't just you know with a tree you can be a little bit off with a leaf or a branch and that's okay but with a structure like this you want to make sure you get your angles and your perspective right so that's why I wanted to take my time and kind of focus on that separately. In a second you'll see me start to develop the roof and the values of the roof which is receiving sun. I wanted to mention to the notice the dark that I put kind of under the eaves of the house that's because a shadow is being cast so that's definitely going to be darker even though kind of the front side of the barn I said house of the barn is brighter because of the sunshine make sure to get those shadows under the roofline and now you can see I'm just using kind of a medium to dark gray and I'm cooling it off a bit with a little bit of purple I wanted to add a little bit color interest rather than just that gray and purple is a good color to use sometimes when things are in shadow and I'll reiterate that it's best just to think of these things as shapes I'm looking at my reference image I'm seeing like the roofline where I'll be painting right now that's really like an upside down triangle if you look at the reference image you can see that shape and so try to really pay attention to those things and also of course the value I know that the that area right there is lighter than the other roof lines and I created a little darkness down lower where the tree was to create some depth now this is the fun part I loved the bright sunshine on the front part of that barn and also to notice I don't know what it was coming from but there was a little shadow being cast to the right side of that barn face there I decided to leave it there I wasn't sure if it was maybe from one of the branches of the trees but I thought it added some dimension and I played around with some colors here but I did decide to make this part of the barn the brightest you'll see in a minute that I actually make it even a little brighter and warmer there I'm just adding a little warmth like it's kind of peeking around this corner of that barn face there now here's the brighter it's actually kind of a coral pink color and there's where I wanted to just add that differentiation and sunshine hitting it you see how that really just brightened that up now this part of the barn top part of that barn is not as bright it's in the sunshine too but you can see in the reference image it's just not quite as bright as that little part below so I wanted to keep it accurate and it makes it more believable so you'll notice that the color that I'll use to lighten up this side of the barn is not quite as light in value or bright in color as the one on the lower portion there and I thought that was effective I took a little break and wanted to start painting again and I wanted to share that I love to burn essential oils or it's a diffuser you're not really burning them but I love frankincense and darn it's so expensive but I just sometimes even put it on to smell it while I paint now I'm gonna add a little music again while I paint and don't go anywhere because I will be back towards the end to talk about this fence that I'm gonna put in and I'm gonna give you some little tips and techniques on how to effectively create a fence often we give too much information when creating fences and I'd like to share that with you so here's some music and I'll be back fun they had some pretty crazy titles too I hope you guys enjoy the music I get some great feedback suggesting that you do so I like to have fun with these tutorials now I'm adding a little bit of that same light I added to the grasses to the the top of that tree it's really starting to give some things to mention I wanted to show you this I'm using I believe this is a terry Ludwig pastel I brought out my box of neutrals to show you that I did grab a few other pastels other than the Paris collection by Sennelier and I like using the edge of those terry Ludwigs because they're a rectangle they have a little edge and it makes nice grasses so now I'm back to the Paris collection and just kind of fine-tuning the clouds but I'm gonna jump ahead just a bit I'm almost done here and I'm gonna talk about the fence and creating a believable fence what I'm using here is another one of the Prismacolor new pastels I have them in really small pieces because this is my travel set since I'm out of town and they make almost the perfect little height of a fence post all I want to do at this point you know when things are far away like this you really just need to suggest things often well early on in my art career when I would try to do things like a fence or whatever I try I got up my ruler I tried to line everything up just perfectly and made my fence way too noticeable and in cases like this you're gonna have light reflecting off of things and you don't always see every line perfectly straight or smooth and with regards to straightness it's actually good to vary your fence post it's really gonna make it look believable especially in a case like this like it's an old farm if you saw the reference image I'm veering away quite a bit from the fence that was there it was thicker and not in the same oh there's my dad's dog barking sorry adds to the farm theme right and it was I've put my fence in a different place once again to balance out like I mentioned before the composition I added a fence on the opposite side kind of coming in to draw the eye into the painting see how suggestive that is you don't need a whole lot I hope you guys enjoyed this this is the last in the farm theme for the month of July and I'm gonna have a new theme in Monet cafe art group and I can't wait to announce what it is I hope you guys enjoyed all of the farm theme paintings and as always happy and blessed painting