 Welcome artists to Monet Cafe Studio! I'm excited to teach you my four easy steps for painting animal fur. I'm gonna begin with a beautiful springtime palette and I'll also be using these gorgeous grays, gorgeous Diane Townsend set. I'll be teaching you also how to choose the right surface and why it's so important. You'll also learn the simple stages of layering and essential technique for painting animal fur. And I'll share with you how to create beautiful loose backgrounds and oh so much more. Won't you come on into the studio with me? And here we go. This month in Monet Cafe and on my Patreon page we're painting furry friends. Anything with fur really. This is an album I've curated for my patrons on my Patreon page. They have access to this album and they can use these beautiful reference images from unsplash.com to paint animals this month. And I'm gonna be using some of these, of course, for my tutorials. And aren't they cute? Look at some of these animals. I love them. I gotta do some of those mice. And for today's lesson I chose this beautiful, it looks like a Persian cat. I want to thank photographer Reba Spite for this beautiful image. She has some gorgeous cat photography on her side as well. Check it out. And I love the springtime feel of that photo. So I chose a springtime palette. These aren't all the pastels I use but these are the ones that I started with and used primarily for most of the painting. Oh and this is obviously a soft pastel painting tutorial but these techniques that I'll be sharing could be used for multiple mediums. I find that many artistic principles convey across the board medium-wise. And I also loved this little Diane Townsend set. Thank you Diane Townsend. She gifted me this set of smoky blues and I thought these were some gorgeous colors for that beautiful gray Persian cat. I loved the blues and I'll be sharing more about this set soon. For step number one in this lesson I'm calling it Choosing the Right Surface. And for this painting tutorial I'm using La Carte Pastel Card. It's made by Sennelier. It is such a nice, it's a sanded surface but it feels kind of soft. Some artists use velour paper. I've actually never used that for animal fur but I think this Sennelier La Carte Pastel Card is absolutely gorgeous for animal fur. I'm able to get multiple layers but it just lends itself to a feeling of softness which is perfect for animal fur. Now you can do animal fur sketching on regular sketch paper. These are just some of my little dog portraits or sketches that I've done and you can of course give that illusion of animal fur. This is just a pastel sketch on some regular drawing paper. So while you can paint animals of course on any surface I find sanded surfaces in general lend themselves to achieving a depth and a softness to animal fur. This bear painting was created on the surface I'll be using today the Sennelier La Carte Pastel Card and I believe it's the perfect surface for creating the beautiful softness of this lovely Persian kitty. So let's dive right in. I first began getting in the form of my cat with one of the gray Diane Townsend pastels and I could immediately tell you know what my audience isn't going to be able to see this so I chose to switch to a pencil. So I'm going to speed up a little pencil sketch here but I'm going to talk you through some of my concepts for getting the sketch in. And by the way animal portraits and people portraits definitely take longer than landscapes so this painting I think it took me almost three hours to do so I am going to have portions that are sped up but I'm going to have a special segment or lesson on my Patreon page about animal sketching in general so if you're a patron of mine you'll be getting a slower real-time version of just some general tips for animal sketching but let me give you some here while I'm speeding through this. I find it's very helpful if you get your painting surface in the same proportion as your reference image for example what I mean by that is you can see in the reference image to the right it's a vertical it's called portrait style versus landscape which is wide so I have my surface obviously in that orientation but I have the proportions the same in other words the cat is going to fall on my surface in the same size ratio to how is is in the reference image and I have a neat little trick to show you how to make your painting surface the same as the reference image I'm not going to take so much time to show it here but I have an idea to make a video you guys let me know if you want it I want to do I have like I don't know eight or ten of them ten art hacks or my favorite art hacks or art tips of general things that I do kind of like that little example I gave you and questions I always get like how do you adhere your paper to your board I have this little hinge technique I use so things like that so what I'm doing now is I can see that I'm kind of doing the silhouette of the cat here and the positive shape of the cat is the same proportion wise as the reference image and so are the negative shapes the negative shapes are the area around the cat and I've learned over the years to pay as much attention to the negative shapes as the positive shapes I have lots of lessons on negative painting and sketching and that is just really a great little sketching principle and as I mentioned painting animals definitely takes longer than landscapes you've got to get these features and proportions of the face correct if you don't get them correct your paintings can look very amateurish and I'm getting in just the basic positioning of things with the sketch I'm not focused on too much detail and that will start to take shape more as I paint but definitely make sure you get that proportions right in the shape of the face and by the way when I'm painting my angle is a little different from my camera because I have it off to the side then what you'll see with the reference image pasted on the right side and by the way patrons if you're patron of mine on my patreon page I'm going to be providing for my beginner artist a little template for you to work from to get the sketch kind of in place before you start painting and as you can see here I'm correcting things I'm constantly tweaking things I want to make sure I have my ears in the right place and I should have enough information at this point to get started with the painting now we'll be talking about step number two remember step number one was choosing the right surface and step number two is getting in that depth and building up the layers prior to creating individual hairs on an animal's fur I call it the under fur or the undercoat of an animal especially a furry animal like this cat or a bear or a dog there's an undercoat that they really have an undercoat but or most animals do especially the ones with thick fur but that's a great concept with painting we want to get the deepest layers first and typically deeper layers it's very similar to how I talk about painting trees or fields or other elements we want to get that under layer of darker values and shadows in first because the fur painting process comes in stages we don't go and start right away painting individual hairs on a cat or a dog as a matter of fact with this method you'll see by the end you're not really creating individual hairs at all you're creating more directional strokes and it lends to more impressionistic paintings overall and more believability and at this very beginning stage here I might lose a few of you if you're not used to the layering process if you're kind of doubting this because it really looks sort of messy and crazy right now skip to the end of the video and see what the final looks like and then come back here and you'll see it really does all come together but these beginning stages do look very messy at first so if you're brand new to pastel painting this is just kind of that process of learning a new medium you've got to really learn how it behaves and I remember when I first starting with soft pastels I wanted it to really start to look like something right away and so I overworked everything and I was the type of artist that would try to paint every individual hair and that's really not the way to paint especially if you want to paint with that very impressionistic and painterly style but let me talk a little about the process here you notice I've been using primarily those diane towns and smoky blues I think it's called smoky blues yes and I've used about three values this might be the fourth value here and they all have to do with the light notice I've chosen mostly cool colors right now and that's because I'm working on the cool side of the cat mostly and thinking of those under layers of the cat that will be in shadow and if you examine this photo you can see the sun is coming it's this cat is kind of back lit meaning the sun's behind the cat kind of shining through the fur I love back backlit photos but there is definitely more of an influence of light and warmth on the left side our left side of the cat and so I'm getting the blues and the deeper blues in mostly on the back and more to the right side gradually getting lighter blues and lighter lighter values on the left side that is catching more of the sunlight and the left side of the cat is definitely warmer that light is actually kind of creeping around or maybe a little bit a little bit in front of the left side our left side so you'll see me turn on the sunshine towards the end of this painting again this is about the layering process I'm not trying to get those values and colors yet I want to save my lightest lights to the end for those final top layers I'm sorry sometimes I cropped a little out of my viewing area there you missed a little bit of the tail but I'm still just working with these cooler and three or four values to get this under painting basically you if you've been on my channel much you know I talk about under paintings and this is kind of an under painting before adding some of the lighter values of the fur and I'm let me pop this over in Photoshop I want to show you a little bit about the color that I'm seeing here and I've got the reference image pulled up and what I'm going to do is grab this little tool over here you don't have to be familiar with Photoshop to follow what I'm doing here but this one little tool come on show me it's called a color picker oh I'm in the wrong one here it is it's called the color picker or I call it the color picker it's actually called the eyedropper tool I always call it the color picker so I'm going to click the eyedropper tool and it literally looks like a little eyedropper I know it's real teeny here but what it does is if I click anywhere on this cat it will show me the color and the value over here in this little gauge of color and value over here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on some areas I'm going to click this little you see how he has the white that wraps around his neck and it goes back it's got a little dark coming through it but right in here I'm going to click this color picker or eyedropper tool right here oh my goodness look over here what color that is in our brain we say that's a white white hairs underneath his neck but look how cool it is look at how turquoise blue it is and you'll later see me in this tutorial I didn't do this before I painted it's just been over years and learning to see color and value that's really there instead of what we think of in our mind that I I knew to pick a cool really cool color let me go on the back side of his neck here and it's about the same yeah that's about the same it's a little dark well it's a little darker and a little brighter I think or bolder so let me now go to like some of these areas well let's go in the middle of his back where it's kind of dark okay that's pretty dark right I didn't go with like a black black I didn't want things that dark in this painting but let me gradually come over and watch how things lighten up as I continue oh look that's even a little bit of that turquoise green family as I continue to move and at this point here I want to mention that's why I chose the cooler colors underneath this cat they're going to serve as those shadowy areas you can see we're very on the cool side now as I gradually move to the left I'll click oh my goodness this is what I'm talking about that I said I'm going to turn on the sunshine at the end of the painting not now look at these warm colors now I'm right here where the sun is kind of wrapping around it's gray fur but the sun is hitting it now the value just got lighter you see how that color gauge went up lighter in value and it's going to continue to do that it's going to get lighter and warmer oh look how light that is these are like in the whites oh there's even a little warm oh this is interesting me doing it after the fact I chose some pinks to put in the fur just by instinct and sure enough I there are really some pinker lighter pink very light pink values in here because these are almost all on the white end but look how warm they are and if I come down here I'm trying to find like maybe yeah there's definitely some warm sunshine coming around so now I'm on his side of his face here so anyway I hope that helps you that's why a lot of cooler colors are going underneath the fur and later you'll see me add some of these warmer tones I hope that was helpful so all right let's hop back this is so fun I want to keep clicking around let's hop back oh look at that green hop back to the painting right now I promise so now hopefully that helped it make more sense as why I'm choosing these cooler bluer colors for the underpainting of this cat and I hope these just few little suggestions help beginner artists especially because I remember how frustrated I was in trying to get started on my own without much information and I almost gave up I mean I just started I got a set of pastels and I started playing with them it's when my kids were getting a little older we're talking 15 18 years ago and I started thinking I got a little bit more time for myself oh I noticed the the form of this cat was not quite the same um I'll get back to the story about my kids and painting in a minute but um so what I did is I did this is the negative painting I was talking about I'm painting with some pastels to kind of form the cat and get a little bit of this background in to shape the cat so often even if we don't have something right or if something's a little too large we can kind of carve into it negatively to reshape it just kind of get in the shape of the backside of that little um a pedestal that he's sitting on and now you might understand why I actually see that as turquoise even in the photo it's kind of turquoise a little bit of purplish color in there too but uh I'm not going to um while I'm here working on this I'm not going to overwork this pedestal the focal point is not this pedestal it's not even all of those flowers in the background there's going to be a few that I'm going to have um kind of shining or saying hey look at me but it's mostly about this cat so um you'll see me trying to get the perspective of this pedestal correct and the basic shapes and values but I'm not going to overwork it um I'm I'm purposely trying not to now I'm going to just get a little bit more of this background in I typically like to work the whole of a painting I feel like it produces a harmony and um just a connected feeling to everything otherwise things can end up feeling very segmented so I like to get a little bit of the background in and I'm treating that background see how I'm carving into the cat now with that uh negative painting I'm doing but I'm treating the background similar to the cat I'm getting my cooler colors in first and later I'll add the sunshine um you don't always have to start with cool colors like this but um I find it's um in general kind of a good way to work especially when you're working on an area that is not in the sunshine you're definitely going to get cooler values and this side of the pedestal is not in sunshine either there's a few little parts of it that are peeking out and catching a little bit of the light but in general it's still very cool now we've talked about step one choosing the right surface and step two building up the layers I'll be getting to step three and step four soon but this is the point of the video where my patrons on my patreon page will get slower speeds and all full commentary so I'm gonna give you a lot of info here though on the Monet Cafe YouTube channel but real quickly if you would like to become a patron and get all of the extra content and extra goodies and join my Patreon family it's real easy it's only five dollars a month you can cancel at any time and you join such a great family of artists I get to see your work I just love it and real quickly if you wouldn't mind go ahead and hit that like button if you like this video leave me a comment and subscribe to this channel these little things really do help YouTube to share my video more often and I'd really appreciate it now back to painting and even though this is sped up I think you'll be able to follow along with my process of layering here actually sometimes when you watch it fast you can see it happen right before your eyes so what I'm doing is you know I originally got that deep blue down part of the Diane Townsend set now I've gone with a little bit of a darker value it's a kind of a dark purplish blue color so I used it to get some of the really shadowy areas on this cat and I like to work the whole so I got enough of the cat under layer down to be able to start working on this background a little bit and the reason I like to work the whole painting rather than just doing the whole cat and then switching to the background is because you end up with a painting that feels very segmented if you don't work the whole and I love to incorporate colors that are in one element of the painting throughout the painting it's called color echoing and I find I do that more when I work the whole I was trying to correct a little bit of the shape of that cat the chest area with some negative painting with the pastel and I decided to get my stiff bristle brush to kind of carve into the area and I discovered a happy accident I blend sometimes on initial layers to soften things up to get rid of all that paper showing through but I haven't often blended with a little brush like this and I just kept going with it and I realized it was really giving me such a soft effect on the background and then I decided let's go ahead and use it on the cat and look at how it's just softening that fur now this leads me to step number three which is called directional strokes when we paint fur we want to keep the strokes going in the direction that the fur is going so I know I was using a brush at that point but the same concept applies when you're using a pastel I'm making my marks in the direction and little gestural marks of how the fur is curving you can see it each time I add new marks and even when I'm using the brush so I was having fun with this happy little discovery and playing around with the brush technique I really liked that now I'm just going to let you know in advance I worked on this cat's face now these pastels are big and chunky so they were kind of hard to get into some of the more fine details of the cat's face structure and I did a lot of work on it but I'm going to jump ahead here and show you where I actually brushed out the cat's face I realized I had his eyes too low before and trust me with anything with animal or people portraits you've got to get those face structures you don't have to have a lot of detail but you've got to have elements in the right place so I raised the eyes and corrected some things with just a little pencil sketch and that did the trick now you're going to see me later work on these eyes more I was kind of avoiding them because I knew these pastels were just too large to get into some of those spaces so I'm going to end up going to a or some pastel pencils that I don't often use but the only time I use them is typically for small elements and things like eyes like this so now I can work on the cat's values I'm doing more of that layering process again I thought I'd go ahead and put in some of the color of the eye but realized yeah I'm going to have to go to the pastel pencils later but again I'm layering these values and what I'm doing now is getting some of the darker values in the areas of the face around the eyes if you squint your eyes and look at the cat's face in the reference image you can see where the dark areas are and if you get that value differentiation correct the cat's face is really going to start to feel three-dimensional so now I'm feeling pretty good about the placement of the face and the eyes and the nose and the mouth so I'm starting to add some of the lighter values this is a pretty gray from the smoky blues set and here's more directional strokes do you see me making those marks and I'm doing I love creating these the light coming through the ears with animals their ears often like lambs and pigs even and cats if you've got a backlit subject like this the light will shine through their ears they're very thin membranes there and I think blood vessels go through there so they end up looking very pinkish so I thought that just made a neat fun color contrast and so I got some of the lighter notice on the left side here it's lighter than the right side and that's because the sunshine is coming from the back like kind of coming around the front of the cat so that's why we're getting that pretty light on this left side our left side of the cat now why am I using these oranges or kind of peachy colors and pinks do you remember the photoshop tutorial when we started looking at the color that's wrapping around the cat it started getting very warm now I'm going to connect the dark and the cool and the warm together soon with some more layering but now I'm starting to add this backlighting this to me is just the icing on the cake where everything starts to really just feel like this cat is the focal point and I love backlit subjects and so I'm adding a little bit more of the turquoise and the purples and just making this cat come to life now this leads me to step number four less is more I've got a lot going on here with the cat I feel like he's coming along now it's where I'm kind of blending a little bit more with some of these grays but I don't want to paint every piece of fur or hair if you want to call it that I want to keep it very loose I like impressionistic style and often we just need to suggest things not paint everything that you see in a reference image all right so now I'm back to the background again I loved this background I loved painting this background and the background is easy peasy compared to the cat so I was like I'm getting home free now I've got to do the cat's eyes and a little bit of that pedestal but I'm definitely feeling more confident about my cat it's his form and really how he's coming to life and I wanted to add a little more color pizzazz remember again in our photoshop demonstration how there was that turquoise coming around his neck so I added some of that I'll do a little more layering on that in a minute but now I'm going back to the background remember how I said I love to work the whole now look at the reference image there's some really distant purples in the background but they're very pale and very neutral that's because things far away get lighter in value they're not as dark and they get more neutral in color so things are coming along with the cat and the background and I decided let's go ahead and tackle these eyes if I don't get the eyes right I'm going to really mess up the whole painting so I had a dark Terry Ludwig pastel that had a little bit of a point to it and I tried to get that pupil in the right spot it's just was too big and chunky so here's where I started kind of correcting things with my pastel pencils and having a sharp point is very crucial I will show you my sharpener here this is my favorite pastel pencil sharpener it's called Mobius and Rupert it's a brass pencil sharpener I'll have a link to that in the description of this video gotta have a sharp point for this and you could see how that was so much easier to get these pupils in and here are the pastel pencils that I use there's various brands of pastel pencils I have had this set for years because I don't use them that much except for little fine details like you just saw and I'll have a link to that in the description of the video as well so I used the pastel pencil also to get in a little bit more of the darks in the nose and the mouth and a little bit of that the cat looked like he had kind of like eyeliner on just kind of the top outside areas and a little bit underneath and I used some greens and some golds to get a little bit more of the reflection in the eyes so I felt thank goodness I got that over with and now this is at home free time to work on this background and oh my goodness like I was saying this was so fun for me because I just loved how beautiful these flowers were in the reference image and to me it's real easy to paint real soft impressionistic things like this because it's just so suggestive and now I'm going to give another important element to this kitty cat his whiskers he's missing whiskers right now so I got my pastel pencil again it's a white pastel pencil and a gray pastel pencil and I examined my reference image and just made quick little gestural marks in the general area where the whiskers were and on the right side is where I use the gray pencil because it's more in shadow and this is fun making more of this backlighting and I cut out my my cat I made a big print out of it and I cut it out just to be able to hold him up next to me that looks kind of funny right but now here's where I'm doing more of the directional strokes and more of the layering and this part is really fun where I'm getting in some of the flowers that I want to stand out a little bit more I don't want too many of them there's going to be some that are central focus you know they're the darker purple ones and there'll be some that are a little more buried some that are a little more magenta and I added layers of magenta on top of some of the darker purple it's really all about layering not just with cat fur or animal fur but with lots of elements in pastel painting and other mediums too acrylic and oil so this again I was having so much fun I'm just a color freak and I was like oh boy I get to play with all this color in these flowers and softening things up in the background still to make sure that's not getting too much attention and taking away from my sweet little kitty cat I added a few more whiskers with a softer pastel to capture some of the light that was really hitting on the whiskers and to give some brightness and my kitty cat is done and here I hope you can see that some of these steps that I've shared with you really do create an outcome that feels like animal fur so I hope you'll give it a try you're always welcome to share your results if you recreate from my tutorials on Instagram or Facebook but be sure you mention me or Monet Cafe YouTube channel and I'd appreciate it I'd love to see your work too and if you would like a little more you might consider again becoming a patron it's only five dollars a month it's a great place I love my Patreon family alright everyone as always god bless and happy painting