 Welcome to Monet Café. I think you're really gonna enjoy today's lesson. If you are a pastel artist with limited pastels, I'm going to be reviewing the Paul Rubin's 72 set of soft pastels. We've been waiting for this set to come out and I'm happy to announce that I really love it. I've loved their other sets as well too. And the supplies are simple. I'm using unsanded paper. The demonstration is going to be kind of a study and I'm going to specifically talk about how to unlock the power of using value over color. And that is going to really help beginner artists if you have limited sets of pastels and to create more dynamic color in your art. And if you've been enjoying these free lessons on Monet Café, I'd appreciate it if you would like this video. Subscribe to this channel. And if you would like to support this channel and get extra content, would you consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page? It's only $5 a month and you can cancel at any time. So this set obviously has 72 soft pastels. I love the sizes of these. They are not too big and they're not too small. And I love the fact that they come with no labels. That's a pet peeve of mine. I do not like taking off the labels. If you've been a subscriber to Monet Café, you may have seen my previous videos on the Paul Rubens 36 set and the Paul Rubens 40 set. I have video tutorials on both of these sets and I'll have links to those two videos in the description of this video. The Paul Rubens 72 set comes with its own color chart for you to fill in the colors. And I went ahead and filled in any duplicates that are also in the 36 and the 40 set. And if you're a patron of mine, you're going to get a copy of this just to see what duplicates are in the set. There's not that many. It's totally worth getting the 72 set. Now I don't particularly love when pastel sets lay out their color guide. Not the same as the palette. So I've redesigned it to be laid out with 12 across the top. It makes it so much easier to find the colors because my chart is the same layout as the pastel palette. If you're a patron of mine, you'll also get a copy of this new color chart as well. And now real quickly before the painting demonstration, I want to do a subscriber spotlight. I love doing these. This subscriber wrote, her name is Loretta Potts. I love to see you make the cow come alive with his own personality. This is only my second lesson and I'm beginning to learn about values and color temperatures. Can't wait to get my own pastels and work with the colors for better understanding. I'm a 74 year old grandmother that may live five more years than was expected awaiting an operation. So I thought I'd do this pastel painting for fun. Thank you so much. This is just one of the many beautiful messages that I get from followers and subscribers just like you. And I just want to say your comments really bless me. So leave me a comment. Give me some feedback. And here we go using the Paul Rubens 72 set of soft pastels, which are available on Amazon for a really great price. I'll have a clickable link in the description of this video. If you are a patron of mine, you will get the all real time footage of this lesson, including my commentary, a full lesson. And if you're watching on Monet Café, I am going to speed it up, but you're going to get a lot of information as well. The products for this tutorial are easy. It's just this 72 set of soft pastels plus one dark, one dark green I added. That's it. And I'm using a very affordable unsanded pastel paper made by Strathmore. In this pad of paper, it has different colors and I'm using this kind of a creamy color to create this painting. And because this paper is unsanded, you don't really have the ability to get as many layers as you would on a more expensive sanded pastel surface. But I really enjoy working on unsanded surfaces. And I considered this almost like a study playing around with this new set of pastels and I had a lot of fun. The reference image is one of my own from a beautiful field of sunflowers that is not far from my house actually. And I've just marked off a 10 inch by 8 inch area using a charcoal pencil. Now I'm just going to get in a quick sketch of the general composition. And this is something we want to keep really simple. The composition is pretty simple. Anyway, we want to focus on the big shapes. The horizon line is in the upper third. We've got a few tree shapes. The road is actually really wide in the foreground. I like to create paintings and drawings that are similar in proportion. In other words, my reference image and my painting surface is approximately the same proportion, about a 10 by 8. That makes it really easy to measure things. And that's it. Now let's take a look at this set of pastels. I noticed that there weren't a lot of darks. I mean, we've got that really, well, it's a black. And then we've got a few darks. There's a dark purple. I was happy to see there were some purples in this set. A lot of sets are lacking purples. But there are a few other pastels that could serve as darks. So I'm lifting up a few of them here. And this is one of the things that I mentioned. I wanted to talk about some of the benefits of using a limited palette and one set of pastels. What I'm going to have to do is substitute some colors just based on their value. I need some darks for some of these elements. One of the darkest elements in almost every landscape is going to be trees. Trees are vertical or perpendicular to the landscape. And they're almost always the darkest thing in a landscape painting. Especially things that are close up. Trees get a little bit lighter in value and cooler in color temperature as they recede into the distance. But I had to grab this purple. I wanted to resist the urge at first to just grab the black. That is usually color that's just kind of dull. So I love using other darks. And this will result in your painting having some really creative color. So that's definitely one of the benefits of using a limited set of pastels. You're forced to come up with creative color decisions because of limited color choices. So you want to focus on value over color. So as you can see here, I'm just using this darkest purple to get in the basic dark values. Pardon my hands moving all around. My Patreon version is all real time with my actual voice as I was painting. And I'm doing a voice over right now. So that was what I included for the purple, the darkest darks I could see in the painting. And now I want to have a little bit more color interest. And now I'm choosing one of the pastels in the set that also is a little bit on the dark side relative to the set. And it's this magenta color. So what's happening here is because I know I want to get my value right and there aren't really any dark greens, I am forced to choose more creative colors. And I think it actually results in a more dynamic colorful and interesting painting. And I noticed that this side of the road was a little bit cooler. It's dark and it's cooler. And also it's a little cooler in the shadows where some of those sunflower stems and the grasses are. And also in the center part of that road. Can you see it's a little darker in the reference image where I've added the magenta and the other blue color. And can you already see how that is becoming more interesting? And I've got a general little layout now just using three colors of pastels. I wanted to add a little bit of this turquoise color to some of those distant trees. Remember I said colors cool off as they go into the distance. Often trees, mountains, things like that will get cooler. I added a little bit of this magenta to some of the larger trees that are kind of bordering the road there. And I'm really just using it now to, oh, it's a little bit dirty. Let me wipe it off, to glaze across that field. Notice how I've left that part of that field blank because it wasn't as dark as that purple I originally put down. So now I'm using a really light touch. And why would I be using a horizontal stroke here? The reason is because grasses and elements in the foreground that may look vertical, they flatten out in the distance. They're far away. Things get closer together. When they get really far away, they almost become like a blanket, a horizontal type of mark. All right, so now I've got my general composition with some values in, but I want to get a little bit more dark in these trees. Again, look at the reference image. The trees are darker than all of the other elements. So I did resort to getting some of the black that's in the Paul Rubin set. And I'm keeping a light touch, but I'm just kind of scumbling in a little bit of this dark. And that will now look more like the reference image. You see how the reference image is definitely has those darker trees in the distance. I'm going to use a little bit of it to get in some of these really dark little nooks and crannies within the sunflowers, like that mass of sunflowers growing on the left side. And I'm just using really little suggestive, very gestural marks. I'm speeding this up just a little bit more. And now I'm using that really pretty lavender purple to get in some of the shadowy areas in the road and also some of these kind of darker cloud areas in the sky. And I'm trying to keep the clouds coming out, enhancing the composition and the feeling of depth. Now I did need to add some color to the ruts in the road. So I chose this pretty blue. I wanted it to be a lighter value. Notice I didn't go for gray. I don't even know if there is a gray. I think there might be a gray in the set, but I want to have interesting color. So I also used the blue in the sky. And color also echoes in it's or it's a good idea to echo your color in a painting. So that's why I choose to often use some of the same colors in the sky and in the landscape. Often skies will, their color is cast upon the landscape and it does give a little influence of color. And at this point you might be saying, wait a minute, isn't this a majority of a green reference image with green grasses and trees? So yes, I'm actually going to use some of the greens that are in the set. Now that I have many of my values already in place, what I've done so far is really what's called like the blocking in stage. You're just getting in your values and your big shapes. And now I can go in with some of these other greens and start to lay in some of the color. I'm keeping energetic marks more in the foreground, more vertical, and then I'll do the same technique in the distance and flatten them out like I mentioned when I did that magenta. And I'll go lighter. I'm going to get one of the lighter greens to give that feeling of distance. Keep in mind things get lighter as we move back into a landscape painting, lighter and cooler, typically. So here you can see how I'm using that lightest green. It's not quite the lightest, but it's one of them to suggest those grasses far away that are more flat. Now I need to choose something to begin to suggest some of these sunflowers. So I'm once again going for one of the darker magentas in the set, and I'm not going to start immediately painting the flowers and the actual petals and everything. I just want to get in some shapes as to where the flowers are and keep it very spontaneous, trying not to keep too much of a pattern, much like they already are in the photo. They're just positioned really lyrically. I'm adding a little bit of that magenta into some of the grassy areas to connect the painting. I really liked some of the blues and the lavenders in the set, which were nice additions for the sky. And here is where I grabbed my one pastel that was not in the set. It's a really dark green. It's super small. You can hardly see it in my hand, but it just added that little oomph of a dark that I think gave the painting some depth. Also, too, if you're on a budget and you have limited funds to spend on pastels, I would say that the Paul Rubens sets are excellent. I was so pleasantly surprised to see that. Oh, let me pause real quick right here. I want to show you what I'm doing to blend. I literally just have a piece of a paper towel. I fold it into where I can get a little corner, and I'm blending the sky. I wanted the sky to be a little bit softer so that it didn't get too much attention. But as I was saying before, the Paul Rubens pastels are not just affordable. They're really a great quality pastel. I've been very impressed with their quality and their ability to layer. Alright, so here's where I'm going in with a surprising color. Why would I be using like such a bright, it's still kind of a dark, a darker magenta pink, just kind of going around some of those little circular sunflower shapes I had made. And now I've got kind of a red. I'm going around even wider now. And I am building these flowers up from the darkest to the lightest. Now I'm actually using I think that is the black maybe to put a little bit of a suggestion into the centers of the sunflowers. And now I'm going to start using some of these gorgeous yellows. This set has such a great arrangement of yellows perfect for a sunflower painting. And so I'm working dark to light. I realized the yellows were a little bit too light right now. So I grabbed an orange, you know, it's kind of in the same family and sunflowers do have a bit of orange in them. So I'm again using the principle of going layering darker to lighter values. That's typically how we work with soft pastels. Now I'm finally going in and getting some of those lighter sunlit petals of the sunflowers and if the sun seemed to be coming from the top right, so the undersides and the lower left of the sunflowers I kept in shadow. And like I said, this was a bit more of a study trying out these pastels. And I'm almost done. So if you want the full real time version of this along with all of the extras that I mentioned, you might consider becoming a patron of mine. Like I say, it's only $5 a month, a month, not a week, not a day, but a month, $5 a month, and you will gain access to hundreds of other lessons on my Patreon page. It's a lot of fun. You join the family of artists. And the great thing for me is I get to see your work through some of our sharing platforms. So this was really fun. I did add a little bit more dark to the centers of the sunflowers. I plan to paint this again as a more serious piece. And I hope you will try it and share it if you do. If you're not a patron of mine, you can tag me. If you share on Facebook, you can tag me at the art of Susan Jenkins. If you share on Instagram, you can tag me at Susan Jenkins Artist. I know this is the speed version, but I hope you learned something. And if you did, please share in the comments. I just love hearing from you. And here is the final with all of the pastels that I used. I lifted them up. That's something else. My patrons will get all of the references to the colors. Here is the final and I really enjoyed this one. I think it's neat sometimes to just realize I'm just going to have fun with this and create a study. I think it helps you to not be so serious sometimes. Thank you for joining me in today's lessons. You can find all of my contact info here on this end screen. And as always, God bless and happy painting.