 Do you dream of painting those absolutely beautiful, distant, bluish purple mountains? Well, you've come to the right video. I love the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. My entire family is from that area. I was so blessed to see views like this from my great grandma's back porch. So in today's lesson, I'm going to give you four easy tips for painting those Smoky Blue Mountains. This is a soft pastel painting tutorial, and I think you'll be pleased to know that I used a pastel surface that's very affordable. It's an unsanded pastel surface. Some artists just love the sanded surfaces, but I find I can get really good results on this Kansan Me Tants Pastel Paper. This is a large pad. It's a 12 by 16. It's their gray tones pad, and I used a sheet of the darkest color in this pad. Also, a shout out to one of my patrons from my Patreon page. His name is Trey. He gifted me this pad and other art supplies. What a sweetheart. God bless you, Trey. Thank you so much. And here's that dark gray color that I used, and I almost always use the backside of the paper. It's a little smoother than the front side. You get more texture. And now I'm showing you my pastel selections. I started out with this palette, obviously a lot of purples and blues for those distant mountains. And I have some beautiful greens. I have some cooler greens and a few warmer greens. I'm going to have a road that has some warmth to it. And also I have some nice darks, that dark green and that dark blue. I also added a few pastels from some sets that I love by Diane Townsend. This set is called Smokey Blues, and it's 12 blues that are nice and neutral. You've got some nice grays and blues. This set is perfect for those smokey blue mountains. It's also anything muted and neutral in the distance. And also great for clouds, like some thunderstorm clouds and skies. And I also used another set of Diane Townsend Pastels. It's called the Landscape A set. She has two, a landscape A and a landscape B. And I happen to be very fond of this set because many landscape sets have all these muted neutral colors in it. These have some of the most vibrant colors for a landscape set that I've ever seen. And I'll use a few of these purples and blues from this set. They're a little brighter and bolder than the Smokey Blues set. And I love some of the greens in this set as well. There's a gorgeous dark green here. I just love this. It's a wonderful dark color. And some of the other greens in the upper left there I used as well. Now, I always say this in my videos. You do not have to buy these sets to participate in this lesson. Use what you have, but I will have links to all of these products in the description of this video. Oh, I love some of these greens. So gorgeous. Now I want to show you my set up real quick. And one more product that really helped me during this painting. I need extra light all the time. And this company, I don't know if it's lit ones or light tones, but they were generous enough to give me this light to demonstrate and I really like it. I like the fact that it has three color temperatures. A cold light, a white light and a warm light. Also different degrees of brightness. Not only is it really great for painting, but it's also very helpful for like video conferencing or if you just need some extra light at your desk. It's also very adjustable, which I'll show you in just a minute. So now let me just show you, this is where the camera can go on that portion. That's actually adjustable. And also the height of the light is adjustable. And here's the controller. Again, you can just turn it on. It comes on to the white light automatically. And here's the warm light and now the cool light. So it's really nice to control temperature that way. I needed more light for this particular painting on the left side. And so it was perfect to be able to get that additional lighting and the head is so adjustable. As I said, other than using it for painting, filming yourself, you can also use it as a selfie light. Here's silly me. So a link to this light will be in the description of this video. Oh my, what is this? This is the reference image that I used to paint from. I actually created this using AI technology, along with a few others you're seeing here, from a program called Adobe Firefly. You literally can give verbal cues as to what you want to create, and it's a lot of fun. I've given my patrons on my Patreon page some instruction on how to use this, and many of them are creating their own reference images in this way. It's a lot of fun. Now I'm going to get started here, but the image that you're seeing on my screen is not that reference image. You'll be seeing my actual painting as the reference here, just because I don't want to have any issues with Adobe Firefly. I love to share about them if you want to try it yourself, but just want to be safe with that. So what am I doing here? I'm just getting in a basic sketch. This is a super easy composition. We've just got kind of a distant mountain shape, a distant tree line shape, and a road surrounded by some grasses. So I'm speeding this up a little bit, and I'm just using a Prismacolor New Pastel. This is a pastel. It's a harder pastel, and because I'm working on an unsanded surface, it doesn't allow for a lot of layering, and harder pastels like this don't take up that much tooth of the paper. These are very affordable too. You can get them in small sets. I'll try to put a link in the video. All the two dark colors I held up, same ones that you saw in my little palette at the beginning, I'm using this darker blue. I believe this is a Sennelier pastel. I love Sennelier pastels. If you're a beginner artist, their Paris collection is so affordable for quality pastels, that is. And you can get 120 half-stick pastels of Sennelier some gorgeous colors for around a dollar a stick. I'll try to put a link for that in the description of this video as well. Now, I just got my basic darks in for that distant tree line. These grasses on the sides, especially in the foreground, are dark. Particularly, where would you think the sunlight is coming from? You can tell from the shadows. Our sunlight is from the upper right area, so I'm getting a shadow cast on this road, and I just loosely got those darks in there. Now, I'm getting in. This is going to be tip number one for painting smoky mountains. We are layering our values in an order. I often layer things dark to light, dark medium to light, but with mountains, I like to go ahead and just get in my middle value first, and that's a nice middle value blue. I'll be talking more about the layers as I paint the mountains, but I went ahead and used some of that blue on the little shadowy sides of the grasses anywhere I thought there might be some shadow being cast from the direction of the sunlight. Now, I've got me a really pretty blue. I believe this is a... I believe it's a unison pastel. This stage is what's called blocking in. I'm blending with my finger here. I'll talk about in a minute. Blocking in is where you just get your general values and colors in all over the whole surface and create a nice moody beginning before getting too crazy in any one area. So I did just use my finger. It's an unsanded surface, so it was kind of easy to soften it. That's what I wanted to do, just soften things up a little bit. And now I've got this green, this pretty earthy green. That's a nice dark. Now, I wanted to layer the green on top of the blue because trees are usually darker, especially if they're closer to you. So I got my darkest value in first and then some of the green is warmer because the sunlight's hitting on the outer leaves. And of course, I used some of this pretty dark green to get into the grasses that are all dark and shadowy. And if you're a patron of mine, you had access to that AI reference image to be able to see it while I paint. And you can see exactly where all these shadows are. Now, I got a little bit of a lighter green. It's not too light, but I'm catching some of that light in the distant trees. They were pretty dark, but I know that they're getting some warmth from the sun. And so we're getting somewhere now, right? Now, in the foreground, you can see my strategy of working dark to light. I got my darkest in first, the shadows, then the green. And you'll see me gradually lighten those greens up as I move into the distance or the tops of the grasses. Now, I wanted to go ahead and get in some of the colors for this road. Again, this is called blocking in. I'm blocking in my general colors and values. The reason I wanted to get it in before adding too many grasses is I want my grasses to kind of grow over the road. I don't want a hard line on the road, so you'll see me later create my grasses that do that. Now, I'm going to use one of these smoky blue colors from the Diane Townsend set. This is 46D. And I love this blue. I also love the size of Diane Townsend pastels. They're like the perfect size, and they layer so beautifully. So this is still part of tip one. I got my middle value in. Now, I'm using a little bit of a darker value. Not too much darker, and it's a little brighter in color. I want my distant mountains to have some color. You might want yours to be a little more muted or neutral. You know, everybody's got their own tastes and styles, but I'm going to make my mountains really pretty blue and add some purples. Okay, so I got a little bit of a darker layer in on the mountain, and now I'm getting an even darker layer. This is my painting reference that I have down there. It has some rolling hills to it. A lot of the Appalachian mountains, the smoky mountains, they're not jagged peaks, like in Colorado or somewhere. They roll and we have sides that are in shadow. So that's why I added that darker pastel on the shadowy side, kind of in the valley part of that mountain. Now, I'm using some of the same blue. This is called color echoing, where you use colors throughout the painting. I often say if I've got a pastel in my hand I'm going to be practical and go ahead and use it rather than putting it down and picking it up again and just see a place where I might could sneak it in. And these trees, the bases of these trees are a little bit darker so I got it in there and in the shadow and it really does connect things in your painting. Now I'm getting some of these warmer greens and just keeping my strokes super loose in the AI reference image. Most of the grasses were just vertical and tall and but really just kind of free and loose. And now you can see I'm working into a little bit of a lighter green. Notice I turned my pastel more horizontally when I got to the distance. Oh, sometimes it can get a little dirty. You can pick up some color from another part of the painting so just kind of be careful of that. But when things go into the distance they get flatter. You don't see tall grasses far away. You see more of a flat blanket of color. So that's why my strokes change from vertical to horizontal. Okay, I'm just going ahead and including this. I had a praise the Lord moment. I was listening to praise and worship music and it happened to be my mama's birthday who passed away two years ago and the song was just so hopeful about that beautiful hope we have knowing we'll see our loved ones who are in Christ again. And I decided to give a description in Adobe Firefly and lo and behold this looks just like my mama from behind. I am going to paint this image. And so I just thought I'm going to go ahead and include this in this video. I love you mama and I can't wait to see you again. By the way she's from the Appalachian Mountains so it's pretty appropriate. I'm going to get back to painting but now might be a good time to ask you if you liked this video so far. Click that like button. I love to hear from you. Leave me a comment and of course subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and get lots of free, hundreds of free videos. Also if you'd like the extra content I'm always talking about you can do that by becoming a patron on my Patreon page. This version of this video on my Patreon page is all real time and I give about over an hour of commentary. So I'd love for you to join my Patreon family. It's only $5 a month. Alright let's get back to painting. Now I have one of these gorgeous Diane Townsend greens and now you can see I'm starting to add some of the lighter greens to the tops of the grasses. I didn't like that transition though. It went dark to light too soon so you'll see me work on that. Now there was a nice little highlight which made a great focal point interest on the grasses right beside that shadowy part of the grasses. The reason it's a good focal point is our eyes are in our brain is drawn to high contrast. A light element next to a dark element and so by putting those light grasses right next to that little shadowy part of the road it's going to draw the eye down or into that painting and down that road or up that road it's a hill. Alright here's another one of the Diane Townsend greens and I'm just so lightly with my pressure barely getting in some of these green grasses I didn't want to go too much pressure too soon because once again I'm working on an unsanded surface. Now if you're a beginner artist let me tell you what that means. Unsand is like regular paper okay it's it does have some texture to this paper but pastels only allow so many times you can layer one on top of another when you're working on an unsanded surface. Now the good thing this surface is very affordable it's a lot cheaper or somebody commented one time and says don't say cheaper say more affordable it's more affordable than the more expensive sanded pastel papers. Now why do the sanded pastel papers take more layers? It's because they have a grit to them which allows the pastel something to hold on to. Now let me zoom in here I'm going to talk about still in tip number one with painting mountains. Remember talking about my layering of values. I start with the middle value then I get my darker values in and then I gradually get my lighter values in. Now this one isn't the lightest that I'll add but my mountain was still a little bit blank in some spaces so I added a little bit more of that blue there. You'll see me work on that more coming up soon and now I'm using some of this blue to bring my tree line down a little bit a little short. You'll notice sometimes as you work with soft pastels sometimes you work and you lose certain elements and you go back and reestablish them every so often. I noticed on this left side in the distance there was almost a little bit of a bluish tone in the distant grasses and so this is a really pretty neutral almost a bluish purple so I added some of that in the shadow. Shadows are cooler. Okay so now I'm adding a little more blue filling in that mountain still and I'm going to get to those sunlit valley areas soon so I'm using a little bit more of this blue to get some more shadows in areas where that value makes sense. That helped with breaking that division from dark to light there. Alright now I'm getting back to this mountain again like I said real soon this is a little bit of a lighter value just a hint lighter and I am using it actually looks lighter applying it you'll see then it does in my hand and you can see from the zoomed in image of my painting here where the sunlight is hitting some of those areas remember the suns coming from the upper right so it's casting a shadow on that right side of that first mountain you see and then light is catching on some of those middle areas too. So to reiterate tip number one was how you layer your values usually first for the mountain then get your shadowy sides and then gradually work to the sunlit areas that will be lighter values now I'll continue to work on this painting with the grasses the trees the sky and I'm going to add some nice music for you until we get to tip number two for painting smoky blue mountains and it won't be long I'll be back soon and now let's talk about tip number two which has to do with color temperature and it's pretty typical of how we deal with color temperature in other areas of our painting things that are in shadow will be cooler such as the shadowy sides of the mountains I've created more at the base and areas that receive perhaps a little bit of sunlight will be a little bit warmer it's a very subtle difference but the pastels that I've used to glaze into those sunlit valleys are just a hint more towards purple than blue and I chose to make my mountains primarily blue and purple and lavender I just wanted that blue smoky mountain feel but of course you could add hints of green where the sunlight is hitting that's a warmer color I'd keep it very neutral though and once again remember principle number one or tip number one you want to keep those values lighter where the sun is hitting and a tad warmer alright so now you can see I have re-established a few of my darks I had lost them a little bit there and I want to create a little bit of drama and impact so I'm adding some darks in areas that I want to engage the viewer to enter into the painting where those dark grasses are go down that road and explore the treeline and the mountains so here is where we are before adding the flowers which we'll get to in just a minute but I thought I'd share with you real quickly this is my great grandma's house and that porch the front porch on the other side has this gorgeous view of the smoky mountains and absolutely breath taking and there are times when it really does have that beautiful blueish purple feel I felt like a grand explorer running all over those mountains playing in the brooks and streams and having some great home cooking from my great grandma what a beautiful time with family these are my two boys this is a few years old and my husband has a porch there and this is my beautiful mama standing on the hillside isn't she pretty and also too I have a book that explains a little bit about my history and the mountains it's called the mountain queen it's a children's book on Amazon and in my Etsy shop I will have a link to that in the description of the video if anyone is interested and I'll be getting to tip number three and four on painting the mountains in a bit but now we've got to add these flowers oh my goodness I wanted these to be just so gestural and free I didn't care what variety of flowers they were I just wanted some blue and white flowers to kind of go along with the blue mountain to compliment them and you know color echoing like I'm saying it really made the painting feel connected to have this color of flower as I mentioned before my typical layering of values is dark to light so I got in my darker color of my flower first kind of like what is in the deeper shadowy parts of the flower and then I grabbed this pretty blue Terry Ludwig pastel and added a little bit of light to the tops of some of the flowers I don't want them all to look the same so a few of them and then I add some of this blue as flowers just by themselves without any dark base to them but some of them are peeking up over the grasses and catching some of the light one of the things with flowers is we want to keep them random and not patterned when flowers are patterned they look very artificial and kind of fake and contrived and nature doesn't do that nature I call it a spontaneous harmony it's harmonious but it's spontaneous and also too flowers also have even if it's the same variety of flowers they have different shapes to them often based on the fact that they're turning in different ways some are reaching one way and the other way and of course like I did with the grasses I turned my pastel horizontal to give the illusion or impression of flowers the same kind of color of flowers in the distance it becomes more like a blanket of flowers when they're far away so just glazing your pastel can create that effect now I'm getting a little bit lighter again I started the darkest color then I got to the light sometimes I will kind of press and roll a little bit and I want to get flat look how light it looks when I put it on the paper versus it in my hand it really is an illusion that happens value and color is relative as to what it's next to so that's kind of fun and interesting so now this is some of the Diane Townsend Pastels from the Smokey Blue set and I thought these were just lovely for some of the neutral flowers I want some of them to be bright and bold like the first ones I put down and then some to be a little bit more neutral now here we are at tip number 3 it's the meeting of the mountain and the sky this should have a very soft edge almost to where you can't tell where one melds into the other in other words there's no line it's what's called an edge it's a value juxtaposition and so it just really makes your mountains have that illusion of being far away there's no line in between the mountain and the sky in other words it's called a lost edge now I'm just adding a little bit more brighter lighter values to the road it appeared in the AI image that I created that it was kind of like a road that had some rich clay kind of like up on the mountain where my grandma lives can you tell I like that purple ooh that's so pretty I think it was color number 12 and I'm using it in some of the little shadowy areas it's a little bit lighter value but there is a little bit of lavender in the shadows but the road did have some rich dirt and look like little pebbles or maybe things on the road so you'll see me lighten that up even more soon now I'm using I believe this is a Terry Ludwig pastel for just some idea of some of the grasses they are vertical but I'm trying to resist the urge from having so many vertical grasses straight up and down so every so often I just make one a little bit crazy and pull it out into the road and then as the grasses recede into the distance they obviously get shorter you just kind of see the tops of some of them until they eventually go back and get that horizontal motion that I shared or demonstrated before and this painting I'm telling you I enjoyed it so much because I had my praise and worship music on because it was my mom's birthday because I love the scenery and I was also just loving the fact that I was getting such results with unsanded paper again very encouraging for beginner artists that you can get started with soft pastels and not spend a fortune now sometimes I will mention that using unsanded papers if you're first starting will feel a little weird because you're just learning everything about soft pastels so sometimes some sanded surfaces give you a little leeway to to be able to layer more now this is where I'm continuing to develop the mountains I wanted to add a little bit more of that lighter value in those crevices and here's tip number four I don't have a lot of layers of mountain ranges in this particular image but mountains do get lighter you know those images where you have mountain ranges all receding in different levels into the distance they get as they go back and they also get cooler as they go back here's an image that demonstrates that beautifully notice the mountains in the front of course they're darker things are usually darker in the foreground they're greener can you see that then those middle ground to the lower left they're still a little green neutral but they're getting lighter and gradually everything's getting lighter in value as it recedes into the distance and the color temperatures are getting cooler as well so I thought that image might help describe that especially since my scene didn't have all those levels of mountains it was more like just one mountain range now these are the back to the prismacolor new pastels the one that I used to sketch with at the beginning these harder pastels are really great for doing like grasses and just some wispy grasses and I'm getting to the final of this painting there's a few flowers that I want to accentuate a few more of the blue flowers I also want to carry some things into the tree line above the horizon line in other words so I use some of the prismacolor new pastels to give the feeling of some maybe seed pods or grasses reaching above a few of the flowers I wanted to be a little bit larger I'm pressing harder and here is the final a perfect painting for remembering my mama on her birthday with those beautiful smoky blue mountains I hope you learned a lot and if you recreate from this tutorial I would love to see it you can find all of my social media links in the description of this video and of course join my patreon family where I can see your work and we can communicate I love that alright everyone God bless and happy painting