 Welcome to Monet Café, your virtual art studio where you can learn about art from the convenience of your own home. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and you know there's a lot going on in our world today and I thought what would make us happy? Let's paint an adorable kitty cat. I've had some requests to paint cats anyway so I thought I'd share this cat painting tutorial with you and I think it will brighten all of our spirits. Now here's a little personal message from me. Welcome artist, friends, visitors, subscribers to Monet Café. I usually hide behind the camera you know and do voiceovers but I thought at this particular time in our world it was good just to talk to you guys and and I wanted to share that we are experiencing something worldwide obviously that I think can be as beautiful as Monet Café. What do I mean by that? We have been so blessed in our group, I know so many of you know this and feel this, to have a place that is beyond differences. We share in the commonality of art, we put differences aside whether it be political, religious, whatever and it's just such an amazing beautiful place to be and I think the world can experience it that now. That feeling of something bigger than all of those problems, something that we can come together and share our hopes together and work together with each other. So I just wanted to say thank you to all of you that have made that possible and I hope the world can emulate what we already have. Okay now I feel like I'm getting a little emotional right now but anyway so I'm doing a cat portrait and I saw this and the reason I think it was a neat video to do now is because I didn't plan it this way. Cats are the most popular thing on social media it's just crazy and awesome and I think it's just the sweetness, the curiosity of cats and just their adorable mannerisms that people love so much and I saw this photo of a cat that a friend of mine on Facebook had posted and she lost the sweet little kitty and I just thought the face was so adorable and I thought you know what someone in our group had asked would you please do a cat video. So it all just kind of came together too perfectly and now I think it's a perfect video to create during this trial in our world because cats do make us happy. So I wanted to share with you a little bit about what I'm using for this cat portrait and some of my techniques of how to create fur and you know lots of things that I think maybe some of you would like to learn. So what I'm using here is pastel matte pastel paper and I am coming to growing to love the surface. It's not as sanded as you art paper or some of the other sanded papers. It actually feels rather smooth but it takes, oh and I'm wearing my Monet cafe artist designer series bracelet. I love my bracelet there's three styles and thank you to all those who have already ordered. It really is helpful especially at this time in the world with so much craziness going on for me personally and the designer of the bracelet. But anyway this surface I like it even though it's not super sanded. It takes so many layers and it's really awesome for portrait work. I'd like to try a person portrait on this as well. Very very happy with doing portraits on pastel matte. Also too I'm using a majority in this painting of this Terry Ludwig set that's called Umber, Shadows and Shades. I've used this in a few other videos. I got this set at Christmas time along with some others. I love it. It's a gorgeous almost neutral type of palette. The ones that are sticking up here are ones that I've already used in this particular painting and I love this set because it's got these nice neutrals but they're still colorful and it just happened to be nice colors for this particular portrait. So this is a great set. The Terry Ludwig pastels behave beautifully on the pastel matte. I did I'll share as I work obviously gonna do some commentary and voiceover of the whole process but I also use quite a few of the new pastels. These are great for getting in small places. They're a little harder. I love my new pastels. They're not they don't get the attention that the softies do but they're very useful and valuable in a studio. So with that said let's get started on this sweet little kitty. I'm gonna finish this painting of course but you're gonna see the process all the way through and my prayers are with everyone. I'm so thankful for Monet Cafe. Keep doing what you're doing. We have a beautiful place of wonderful artists and people and welcome newcomers. Subscribe to this channel. You're gonna love it. Alright guys let's do it. To get started with any kind of a portrait I usually like to do a pretty decent sketch and this is just a charcoal pencil just a medium darkness and once again here is the pastel matte paper. This particular pad comes in four colors there and it's nice it has a piece of glassing sheet a sheet of glassing in between each page. I guess because if you worked in the tablet you could protect it. Now I took the little kitty photo and I put it in Photoshop and I used a feature called cutout. I like it sometimes because it simplifies the edges. I'm speeding through this sketching part because I have quite a few other tutorials on sketching. I have one that wasn't too long ago on sketching dogs and that's one that I slow down. I talk about my process and give you some tips and suggestions on sketching and ways that hopefully would help you out with that. Now I don't always do a grid. I usually just do dots on the side of my page you know to kind of get my eye or to get a gauge of where things are in the reference photo when I transfer it to my drawing surface. But in this case I really wanted to get that little face right. It was kind of a long format too so I went ahead and did some light grid marks just into thirds. I just divided my my surface into thirds and also my reference photo. Now I zoomed in a little bit here. I like to get started with the eyes a lot of times when I do a portrait whether it's pet or person. I just feel like the eyes are the soul of the painting and I don't always finish. I typically don't finish the eyes. I just like to get them kind of in there and to get them right it makes me feel better. Now getting eyes correct is crucial. If your eyes are off a bit it really decreases from the quality of your painting or you know the how pleasing it is. And here all I did was get in really the general colors the pupils and eyes even with human eyes. They always have a little shadow kind of under the lid and usually around the edges you have to remember the eyeball is a sphere. You know so you're painting it like it's a sphere with the highlights and the shadows just like you would a sphere sitting on a tabletop. Of course it's encased but anyway so I usually like to get a little fun with the colors with the eyes. So I'm just kind of having fun with this and then pretty soon I move along. But when I feel like I've got kind of the a little bit of the eyes and the personalities usually when I move on. Now here's the set of the umber shadows and shades or shades and shadows I can't remember from Terry Ludwig. I find these work really well on this pastel matte paper. I usually like to kind of carve in a little bit of a background as with landscape painting. It's good to go ahead and get in basic values and big shapes first. And I knew I didn't want to do everything just like what was in the reference photo. That's the beauty of having an artistic license. We can you know take it out and use it where we see fit. I did like some of the general values going on but I wanted to you know me. I like to enhance the color when I can. Purples always make great shadows because the the cat is really just kind of like a fluff ball. I thought that was what was so cute about her. Her name's Maggie and I can't wait to share this with the owner. Her name's Julie. But it was just a big old fluff ball kitty and the fur was fun to do. A little bit challenging in some places I'll talk about. But I'm getting in just like I do with a landscape. Big areas of value. I'm kind of looking at where my darker values are. My medium values are and my lighter values are. And I like to maximize when I've got a pastel in my hand to just go ahead and get it wherever I see fit. And this is again just like a landscape painting. I don't like to get too fussy too soon. I usually will work on the face more after I get the the basics in. Again I just feel like if if I don't get the face right there's to me there's no sense in going on with a person or an animal. It's it's very different from a landscape painting in that there is a little bit more specifics you have to get right. And especially if you're doing a portrait for someone in particular. Now I wasn't hired to do this one. I just love this picture and I saved it. But if you are hired to do a commission for a pet or a person portrait then you definitely want to get that right. You want to get who they are right. You know their uniqueness of their face right. So those it was what was I was going to say was interesting about this fur. It was kind of hard to see where things were because the cat was really like a little fluff ball which is so cute. But it was kind of hard for me to see where are those lower feet. Is that black part underneath it the feet or or just the color of the fur. So that part was a little interesting. Now the whole painting probably took me about three hours. I worked on this and little segments as most of you know the craziness that's going on in our world. In case this video is watched away later it happens to be March of 2020 when we're going through the whole worldwide pandemic coronavirus situation where so many people are out of work having to self quarantine a lot going on. So that's again at the beginning of this video one of the reasons why I thought this would be a lighthearted fun video. So so that's I was still taking care of a lot of other things while doing this. So I came back to my easel multiple times to finish this. And you see up there on the top of the head. I often like to add purples or blues and shadowy areas. One of the things that I like to do in a portrait or landscape is to not have everything super detailed. You're reserving your detail to areas of interest. In this case for me it's the cat's face. And I'm going to try to keep the rest of it a little bit more subdued. But again I'm getting in my darks here. I've gotten a little bit of the some of the other values in there but I thought I'm gonna go ahead and start working on this face since I've got a little bit of a color roadmap going here. So I'm using a Terry Ludwig dark. I think it's the eggplant. And if you squint your eyes and look at the reference photo you'll be able to see that I'm putting the darks in where the darkest parts are on that cat. And the way this works now this is what I wanted to talk about a little bit more with painting fur. I had hoped to actually just not on this painting but get another piece of pastel paper and do a little example but well too much going on right now but I can explain it as I'm working. The way it typically works with fur is really not much different than it works with a lot of other things in landscape paintings. For example you know we talk about getting your darks down first. Like if you're painting a tree you can really paint in the big massive shape in a darker value and then you gradually layer your lighter values on top. Well that's the way it works with fur. I actually do end up having to darken even what I'll put down right there but you you get your darker values in and then you gradually and you keep them very loose. Don't don't worry about doing individual strokes at this point. I have seen paintings that are where people really focus on every little hair or individual whisker and everything and I focus more on impressionism and I like more of that artistic painterly feel. So that's usually how I end up teaching more that way. So again big shapes darkest values and gradually layering upon that and what happens is when you get your darker values down even if they don't cover up the whole surface that's okay. You don't always have to blend. Later keep an eye out though. Later I actually do use my little tool. It's a chamois cloth that you would use to wash your cars and I found it works great for blending on this pastel matte paper but I want to make it clear. It doesn't work very well. I tried it on UART paper or Sennelier La Carte pastel card. It's too gritty. This pastel matte like I said at the beginning is not so gritty so the chamois cloth just kind of glides right across it. It's really great. Again so still you can see I'm not focusing on individual hairs of fur in it yet. I'm just it and it goes through very much like we say in landscape painting. I find you know my paintings even portraits go through like an ugly phase or a I think some artists has called it like goes through puberty you know when everything feels a little awkward but that's okay. I have seen some artists that I've watched work that do portraits of people or animals and for some reason they look great the whole time but mine definitely go through the the puberty stage and then you know no matter how long you paint there's times when you still doubt yourself and you're like is this really gonna go somewhere you find yourself doing that with so many paintings. But anyway so still I'm also too not just getting in the big shapes I'm still refining the face. I'm wanting to get where those little line you know the dark places in between the whiskers of a cat. I'm trying to get them fairly accurate you know when I'm getting them down and where the little mouth is I think the little kitty's nose and mouth is just as important as those eyes. They in this particular kitty Maggie had such a little smushed face so you want to make sure you capture the personality and the uniqueness of that particular breed. Now I'm going to be working on the head a little bit more getting a little creative with color and just getting a bit more detail in with the face so I am gonna add some music at this part or this point. I also I apologize for speeding this up but because it was about three hours long I knew that my Wi-Fi upload speed out here in the country wouldn't accommodate a three-hour video so I apologize sometimes I have to speed it up but sometimes I think it's a good thing because some things can get a little monotonous I mean you can kind of see what I'm doing here and if you watched every single stroke for three hours it could get you know oh tiring so I think I will zoom in a little bit on the face here so you can get a better idea and I'm gonna add some music for your listening pleasure but don't go away I'll be back with more commentary. I thought I would show some footage of my ring light I have some of you asked me about the light that I use in my studio it's called a ring light I got it on Amazon and I like the fact that it allows you not only to increase the intensity of the light the the button there you can turn it and it makes it whether it's a hundred percent illuminated I come around so you can see it or when I turn it down it's lower so you can control the intensity of the light it is an LED light and the bottom if you pushed a little button in the middle I had the hardest time figured out how to do this you can change the temperature of the light that 5800 K the letter K stands I think it's for Kelvin it's the warmth or coolness of the light so you do have some temperature control as well I find this light cast a really great overall illumination and doesn't create a lot of shadows when you paint and you put your iPhone right in the middle of it to or your camera so it's a great light and I am thankful I'm thanking my patrons I was not able to purchase that until I started getting some support from my patrons so thank you thank you patrons all right now at this point you can see I've gotten in more of the dark for the the body I've gotten the basics of the face in I do have to kind of fix or rectify there's that place in the face there where the first kind of come over top of it but again getting the darks down first and then just gradually layering over top of it and once again you do not have to do a whole bunch of individual pieces of hair on the cat I do a little bit more on the face again because that's where I want the attention drawn it's kind of that way in the photo too you notice the fur of the body is a little more vague and looks velvety and soft so I work on trying to keep that not as the focal point of the image I also didn't want the background to be too distracting you'll see later at the how I how I work the background I don't want to blend it but at the same time I don't want it to be quite so chunky as it was as you see here all right a little bit more music and I will be back with more commentary here's where I'm using the chamois cloth it's just a little piece I cut off of a larger piece and again it works great on the pastel matte surface not not so on you art or Sennelier the grit in the in those other papers seem to hold the cloth and you can't really blend with it but I did want to get a softer look a more velvety look to the first so that's why I did the chamois cloth blending to it and it worked really well at this point you'll be able to see the concept I was talking about with getting your darks down first and then layering on top of that for the fur I was kind of playing around with the color palette the the body was just mostly gray but you can always add a little bit more of purpley or magenta to create shadow and interest and just like I added it a little bit on the ears there and a little bit on the nose you want to make sure your paintings consistent so if I use a color in one place I try to look and see where else I can use it so the painting has an overall cohesiveness to it so you'll be able to see now as I layer that the the right now it looks very flat on the body so I gradually just take those Terry Ludwig pastels and just move my pastel in the direction of the fur I do have to kind of correct a couple of times and add a few more darks but you see how that's just giving that kind of blended look to it by adding not not individual lines some kind of wider chunky marks I'm either using the side of the pastel to do that and this was I've never done a cat that was this furry so it was a little challenging for me to try to represent that way but it was fun still I enjoyed who wouldn't like looking at this cute little face all the time in the reference photo so okay more painting and I will pop back in when I get to a little bit more on the eyes and the whiskers here's where I began to work the background again I like to get an idea of some of the background colors but not get it in not commit to it right away until I'm done with the painting because I might decide I want to kind of change up the colors a little bit have a little darker in value in different places but I really did like the look of the turquoise in the background because there is some of that orange color of the cat some of the reddish little bit of magenta shadows and I thought that turquoise looked really nice so again the cat sitting on the tile floor it was kind of hard for me to see where the shadow was so and also where again where his feet are what part I mean I could see that little front foot this is a little cute little foot but the rest of it's all kind of just like I said it's just like fluff which is adorable but I trying to reconcile that in my mind was a little harder so anyway so I just get basic darks in and then just gradually start layering on top of that so I I really enjoy backgrounds now I used to over fuss with them and over blend them to create a lot of times when you blend something it pushes it further into the background but if you over blend it it just looks dull and flat and so I've over the years I've gotten to where I usually try purposely not to over blend them I did do a little more blending on the part at the bottom near the fur or kind of to the lower left hand side but again don't don't overdo it walk away I I like to do this when I paint but I had to kind of I I did this not purposely in this particular case because again I had so many things I was trying to do because of the life changes with just the whole virus situation and how gosh not only my life being impacted financially in other ways but also lives of my children and family members and other things you're dealing with you guys know I don't have to tell you guys you've got your own stuff and man isn't it great to be able to paint I hope you're getting some painting time and it's just a way to get your mind off of everything okay you can see now here again how I'm just kind of layering on top notice how I have the darker colors down first and then gradually start adding the lighter on top same same as with a tree you know so that's a good thing it's not a lot different but there are some things like I said that aren't the same as a tree a tree is very forgiving if you get a branch or a leaf in a place where it I'm close to finishing up and I also I'm going to have a face just a minute so you can see another thing that really makes it look realistic is this is just about to get finished up and I think I'll add a little bit more animal and a little reflection like wherever the light source is and it's always hard for me to do on camera and film it because of my vision I have to get so close to the surface of the pastel paper that my head gets in the way but I try to do it here you'll see I try to get close enough for you to be able to see oh I'm not there yet I'm still working on the background see how I'm kind of blending with the pastels I'm not blending with the chamois cloth or anything and again I'm trying to figure out how that fur is laying on the floor it was rather interesting and still adding a little bit of the using the new pastels for some of these pieces of fur towards the end okay now I'm getting close I've got a new pastel it's a harder pastel I've already done the eye that's to your left you see a little white dot now I've got a little yellow highlight on the eye that's to the right but I also want to add that little white highlight now I'm found a I'm gonna move my head I found a little sharp point to this new pastel so I've got to look really close to get that you got to get this in the right spot and so I kind of feel my way and get that little you see that that little highlight it really just makes a difference it makes it look actually it gives a wetness look to the eye you know so because our eyes do have our our natural tears on them now I was also using a new pastel I see some artists that always get the whiskers just so perfect and right but I don't know mine mine don't look as perfect but I feel like it's okay because I do like that textured look a little bit but anyway just getting in a few of the whiskers that are just so signature for that say cat you know and it's the same with dogs and cats they usually have more whiskers than you think and you know you don't want to overkill but just remember they've got whiskers on their little snouts they've got whiskers on that whiskers but fluffs in their ears that stick out and they've also got the little whiskers on top of like almost where their little eyebrows would be so you know it's the neat thing about being an artist is it really causes you to examine and look at our world more than we normally do I never knew how big my dogs ears were until I drew him you know it's then cats ears are usually very big too so or larger than you would think now I'm getting a little of those whiskers underneath the chin you know it has a little highlight on that little cute little chin and cute little face oh my gosh just a cute little kitty cat so finishing up here and I hope you guys have learned from this I hope you found it therapeutic even I find it therapeutic just to watch other people paint so I tried to pick some soothing music and by the way I'm going to be adding some music from my son's music he is an entertainer and he is totally out of a job right now I mean that's his main job he plays and sings all over our area in Florida and and he has zero work right now so he's starting a YouTube channel to offer quarantine music therapy he plays some awesome music he's a one-man show by the way he does live looping which means he literally loops over himself there's not one pre-recorded bit of music and so so he's quite the entertainer and I'm going to be sharing his brand new YouTube channel really soon but I'm going to be using some of his music as background music to my videos I didn't quite the right one for this painting but I will soon and I hope you guys will subscribe to him I'll share I'll share that later so anyway I'm just trying to help my son you guys know I'm sure you have lots of family members that are really challenged because of all of this all right gonna finish up this kitty oh it's finished look at that so anyway I hope you guys enjoyed this I hope you're blessed I hope you're hanging in there I hope you're healthy and well I pray protection over all of these things thank you guys happy painting subscribe if you haven't become a patron if you'd like to only five dollars a month and be blessed