 Hello artistic friends and visitors and welcome to a very special lesson in Monet Café. Today I'm going to be doing a pep portrait that is for a dear person who manages and moderates our Facebook group. If you haven't joined the group you should. It's full of great people and Katrina is such a great moderator and unfortunately her sweet little karma passed away recently and I just wanted to do something special for her and she has already seen this so now I can share the video and I wanted to share this because I don't just do landscapes on this channel. I happen to love pet portraits and wildlife so let's get started on this lesson. It's going to be fun. Now here are my supplies. I'm using Sennelier Le Carte pastel card. I love the surface. It's very gritty. I recently bought this smaller pad and I like it. I'm not quite sure of the measurements but it's around 11 by 14. They have one that's bigger but I like the size. Notice that they have, I can't remember how many are in it but they've got samples of various colors and sometimes the color just sets the mood. Oh I love this kind of bluish green color that they have here. So again I make note when I use this paper don't add water to this paper. It is not water-friendly. Now I want to show you a little trick. When doing pet portraits or people portraits you want to get things precise so I try to get my measurements correct on my photo and my working surface and I'm going to show you what I do. What I'm doing here on the iPad is I'm clicking the power button. I'm trying to find it and the little round button, the select button at the same time. What that does is it gives you what's called a screenshot. It just sent the screenshot to my photos. Now I'm going to an app. It's just called Photo Editor on iPad. It's free and I like it for its cropping feature. I picked the photo and the reason I did screenshot is I wanted to kind of crop it but I picked the photo and it allows me to pick all these different standard sizes. I want to do around an 8 by 10 size so that's what I picked and see I can even move the crop around to get it just how I want it. I can actually kind of I think I can increase the size of the the picture too if I want it but I liked that. I'm done with that. That's what I want and that's the basic composition that I want. Now I'm simply going to go back to my photos. That's where the app saves it. Oh that's another reference photo. It's going to be the last photo that it saved in the cropped 8 by 10 crop. Now I have a nice 8 by 10 format. What I need to do now is to get an 8 by 10 format on my Sennelier LaCarte pastel card. I have a neat little trick that I use. If you happen to have any mats that are 8 by 10 or 11 by 14 or 5 by 7 whatever size you're using just take a mat. This happens to be an 8 by 10 mat. It's actually the opening is a little bit smaller than 8 by 10 but it's proportionate to the crop I just did with the photograph. So now all I'm doing is basically that's just a piece of charcoal, a little charcoal. I'm just marking out on my pastel card the 8 by 10 size. Now I'm going to share a lot in this video. At some point I'm going to do a little music and because oh yeah you got to have your Monet cafe coffee cup and coffee to get started but I'm going to be sharing a lot at the beginning of this video even though I play music later in it about technique. Now I just use a simple pencil you can use whatever and I'm just getting in a light sketch here and what I want to emphasize in this video is how important it is with portraiture work be it animal or people portraits to get your drawing, your sketch, your proportions correct because it's going to not look like that person or animal if you don't get these things right at the beginning. It's just like having good soil to plant in. You've got to get the basic sketch and image in right. Now here's what's the reason for portraiture I'm stressing it is I'm not just painting a dog I'm painting someone's dog just like if you're painting a person I'm not just I like the sketchy app I like to paint people I don't know but I'm not it's not a commissioned work so it can just look like sort of like the person not just like the person but if you're doing a portrait animals even have individuality and personality and it's not just this breed of dog I'm painting it's this person's dog so I hate to belabor that point but it is very important and it's so neat the more you start looking and studying the more you start realizing wow dogs really do have an individual look to them you know so it's it's really really great to get your sketch in right now what I want to share here is how I'm working is the reason I like to get my proportions right with the 8 by 10 on the crop and the 8 by 10 on my surface even though my reference photo I've just put up here is not correct proportions to fit what I do a lot is I use what's called negative drawing or painting and I'm looking at in getting this sketch right I'm looking as much at the negative shapes as I am the positive shapes I'll mention that a little bit more as this goes on and I'm also working just kind of quickly but sketchy I don't want to get too tied down in one spot too long because I'm I'm really trying to work on the whole you know I don't want to start doing the toenails exactly or anything like that this is just a basic sketch to get ready for the painting now let me mention a little bit let's see if it's about that point here like right in that area that I'm pointing at right there I'm seeing that negative shape meaning the shape of the floor if you look at the reference image where his ear is our left his right ear our left there's a negative space in there as much as the black dog there's a shape if you can see that shape and you've got your crop image of your photograph and your reference I mean and your painting surface the same proportions you can accurately get your sketch in by using those negative shapes and it really helps me as an artist just to kind of look at the positive and the negative and so anyway I'm gonna really probably blow this out of proportion in this video but we have to have to get these things right now you're gonna see as we go on I'm gonna just play some music here and finish the sketch you're gonna see how even this I'm trying to get accurate I know I'm gonna have some things off and I'm gonna go back and fine to that tune that so you'll get to see me do that in just a minute alright enjoy this process I thought I quickly mentioned here that the white that you see there it was just a pastel pencil sometimes I make little color notes this is more value notes as to see where that shiny part was on his face kind of helped me in measuring now I'm gonna share a little trick with you here that I do in photoshop this is the initial sketch that I finished and I knew it was going to need some tweaking I stepped back away from it and I could see pretty quickly a few things that were off I thought I had the the shape and the size of the head pretty good but I thought the mouth may have been a little high and off and and I felt the legs were too short so what I did I'm gonna share this for anybody who is computer savvy with Photoshop I know not everybody has that resource available there are other ways that you can do this but tweaking your photograph I mean your sketch prior to the painting process is really important so whatever method you use I mean I could have just done this by hand but you know why not use some of these tools if you can so this is to help anyone who has that but again make sure you get your sketch accurate it's very important with a portrait of a person or an animal okay so let's get into this and I'll let you know how I did it basically Photoshop works you may be interested in this even if you don't know Photoshop because it's kind of cool the way Photoshop works is you put things in layers so I already have my initial sketch layer here and behind it I have my photograph that I worked from my reference photograph and so what you can do in Photoshop is it's really like layering a cake this is the bottom layer that you're seeing behind it you can't see it because this one's on top of it and this is the top layer so what I did is I already pre did this I lined them up accurately where they're you know lined up on top of each other in the right place and what I'm gonna do this little thing over here to the right is called the opacity it's the ability to make the image that you're on it's this one highlighted the dog sketch it's the ability to make it more translucent less opaque and more translucent so take a look at how again I told you I already lined it up at how you're starting to see through the sketch to the dog photograph now I'm gonna leave it right about there because that's pretty good to see both and like I thought I kind of got most things of the head right but I was right the mouth was off the mouth should be more down here a little more at the nose size is pretty good but the mouth needs to come down here more okay you see that and the chin is lower than I had it I also noticed I thought the the reason I thought the legs were too short is I could tell the chest wasn't long enough but let me work top to bottom again I kind of got the eyes right which is to me the eyes are like totally the personality of the animal or the person that you're drawing so you want to make sure you get those eyes right so it was pretty good I took a little bit more time on that but then I noticed the ears were good basic shape of the body is good but as I came down again I noticed this needed to be lower which in turn made the tag need to be lower now this is where you know again I really got this pretty good I was happy to see but the chest is lower down you see how far that goes down here where that lighter part of his fur is and of course then the feet are lower here I got the general positioning of them but they're lower down here which in turn of course the shadow is going to be lower with the feet so gotta get that corrected I was pretty happy to see that I pretty much got that if you want to call it a me on a dog I don't know if that's the back is that's a correct terminology for dogs leg but it looks like a knee to me and and I got that foot pretty close so so a lot was going right but you definitely want to get these things fixed so all I did is I just printed this out I'm gonna take it back over to my sketch and correct these things so there's a little tip for anybody who might have Photoshop or any other way you can come up to tweak your sketch to get it right all right so now it's time to come repair this or improve this sketch and get started now that I have things basically and I'm gonna start working on the eyes I'm using Giaconda pastel soft pastel pencils this is a set of 48 that I have had for years because I don't use them very much so little teeny places like eyes and things like this are sometimes it's it's handy to have the soft pastels because it's kind of tricky and I make sure I have them very sharp we've had a lot of people in our Facebook group ask about the best pastel sharpeners and I have one that pastel pencil sharpeners I have one that works pretty good it's a metal one that I have I don't recall the name brand but I have something else that I do I actually use an exacto blade I'm gonna be showing that in a minute of how I sharpen them now just because I'm using the pastel pencils here doesn't mean I won't go back and add soft pastel in some some of my really softies at the end to get that color in soft pastel pencils are kind of hard and it it's good for getting details in like this and it's also good because you can still layer soft pastels on the top of them also this Sennelier pastel paper card is very gritty so it allows for quite a bit of layering so this is kind of just to make sure I get those eyes right and if you keep watching this video you'll see I realized this after I got a man that the eyes were too big now they may be okay for you know just a dog in general but this dog happened to have eyes karma happened to have eyes kind of like my son's dog named diesel they're they're not real big but they're they look wise and they look human like intelligent but they're they're smaller so later you'll see how I correct the size of the eyes and again this pastel card Sennelier Lecart is very good for being able to correct things because I didn't have any problem in putting some soft pastels on top of them here's my technique I mentioned for sharpening my pencils I don't always use this method but if one is really soft like this kind of reddish pink one was my metal sharpener wasn't working all that great so I just have an exacto blade you want to have a sharp blade and you want to be careful but you're really just working in kind of thin layers you're just shearing off bits of the wood until you get a kind of a sharper point and then I use a piece of actually this is piece of the Sennelier Lecart card because it's kind of sand it works like sandpaper and I continue to sharpen the pencil from the pastel card so it works quite well and having these sharp points is really going to help me getting the details of the eyes in I wanted to show here how I'm using my these are great American pastels that I have it's a new set I haven't even taken the wrappers off of many of them but I often like to go ahead and get in my mood for the background I decided actually you'll notice to keep that little almost like a window the square that I did originally the 8 by 10 so the final excuse me the final painting is not going to be an 8 by 10 it's gonna be a little bit bigger than an 8 by 10 but I kind of like the feet kind of sticking out of that little cropped area like that so I thought I would play around with that I can always at the end if I didn't like that just go extend the barrier of that square that I had done but I like to get in my values early because the value will of the surrounding area of the dog will determine the value of what I paint on the dog so values very dependent on each other and so is color if you've ever noticed you've probably noticed this if you're ever picking out color like at Home Depot or whatever to paint your walls if you ever notice how you pick out a particular swatch or color you get at home it looks totally different but it's because the color is dependent on the light and the colors in your house which may be different from the light and the colors that it's next to when you're standing in Home Depot so the same thing works for a painting a blue will look more blue next to certain colors than it will others so again that's the reason that I like to go ahead and get my values and it kind of sets the mood for the painting I don't know what I was pointing out there but it really just helps kind of get things going and and kind of get my direction settled so I'll just let the painting process continue here and I'll admit looking back at this doing the voiceover he does look a little off right here but again I'm working big shapes and fine tuning things as I go so fortunately he starts to take shape soon so here's the big finish and fortunately Katrina loved it thought it really resembled her sweet karma and I'm going to be getting it out in the mail to her very soon I love doing memorial pet portraits because I know how much being an animal lover myself how much these sweet babies mean to us so rest in peace sweet karma and I hope you guys enjoyed another lesson in Monet cafe please subscribe come back soon and join our Monet cafe art group on Facebook happy painting