 Welcome to Monet cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and this tutorial is going to be so sweet I will be painting Lily of the Valley flowers in soft pastel on unsanded paper Oh, and if you would take a moment, please like this video go ahead and do it right now Subscribe to this channel and hit that Bell icon so you don't miss anything. You'll get notified of future videos Also this video and many of my videos is only brought to you because of the faithful support of my patrons on My patreon channel. It's five dollars a month to support this channel It's really what keeps me able to do what I'm doing here So I appreciate it and you get extra content if you become a patron now Let me give you a backstory as to how this painting came to be back in 2014. I think 2015 the local news Commentator Anjali Davis isn't she beautiful? It was a local Fox news station that did a story on me That they called illustrating faith I had been through a battle with cancer and I had started a project where I was donating some free artwork To a local orphanage and it was these large paintings. I did an acrylic with hidden images. It's called finding Jesus They all had these hidden images and I couldn't finish them because I got cancer. I started one painting and I went through this battle with cancer with chemo and radiation and praise the Lord He obviously wasn't done with me yet I was able to finish the paintings and even finish a children's book that I illustrated some of you may not know I have this book the mountain queen that I wrote and illustrated it is on Amazon So what does all of that have to do with these paintings? Well, Anjali and I we just hit it off You know, you just connect with somebody. She's precious. I've stayed in touch with her on social media And she commissioned me to do these Lily of the Valley paintings because she's pregnant with her third child Oh my goodness her children are beautiful So she wanted it to be very earthy and really neutral colors And she wanted three paintings of course because this is her third child and I love this unison 120 half-stick set because it's arranged so beautifully by color and value I knew I could easily grab neutral colors and I actually decided to use an unsanded pastel paper This is kansen me taunts pastel paper the gray tones pad And I know I use sanded surfaces all the time and many artists brag on sanded surfaces But unsanded surfaces really can produce some really nice work as well And they don't get quite as much layering but because she wanted this earthy and simple I just felt like this color background and the unsanded surface would work very nicely So I began sketching now I apologize I don't have any reference images What I did is I just got online and started looking at lots of Lily of the Valley flowers and kind of came up with my own Interpretation composition the little one that you see to the upper right now I am speeding up the sketching part here is just kind of a small concept sketch or painting and I like to do these if I'm doing a commission project just to make sure we're on the same sheet of music and She she loved the composition, but she wanted the colors even more neutral and even though the ladybug was kind of cute for a child Or a children's room She just really wanted to focus on these Lily of the Valley flowers So if you ever do a commission work, you know, it's a good idea to kind of give your client An idea of what's in your mind so they can share and you don't waste your time on a painting That may not be what they have in mind So I'm just using a white charcoal pencil and I'm just sketching in on this Kansen paper You can see I have it marked off. She wanted them to be eight and a half not eight and half eight by eleven and Vertical all three of them. That's another thing you want to Finalize before you get started little things like that. It's crazy I knew an artist who had done a big commission piece and She completed it and it was one way or the other horizontal or vertical or vertical and the client wanted it the other way So these are just little things you want to put on your checklist if you ever do commission artwork So you can see I'm just Wanting this to be a pleasing composition, but I know I've been talking a lot about this in my latest tutorials I know that something in this is going to be the focal point now because I've already done the little one That's another reason for doing a concept sketch is that if you're pretty close To what your client wants you've already done it once you kind of have an idea of What your strategy is and my strategy was to make some of those flowers more Dynamic more the focal point than others and it's going to be the ones that are larger They're a little more in the foreground and as I paint I'm going to talk about some of the Strategies I use to make that happen and I am using the smooth side of the Kansen Paper and now it's called pastel paper, but it is not sanded. It is just paper. It has some texture to it and when you open the pad the The page that's facing you is going to be the one that has a little bit more of that texture The paper has little bumps in it. Some people do not like that side at all I actually work on both sides, but I thought I wanted this to be soft So I decided to flip it over and use the side that's a little more smooth without all that texture And I know I'm not going to be able to get a lot of layers And if you're new to pastel painting That is Really one of the advantages of using the sanded surfaces and I'm talking yeah like hardware store sandpaper But it's very Fine. You can get it in different grits. You can get coarse or fine And of course, it's artist grade. It's archival So, you know, don't go to your local hardware store To paint on sanded surfaces. I mean you can but it won't guarantee the longevity of your painting And when you paint on an unsanded surface I've found that my success on unsanded surfaces has gotten better as my skills have gotten better over the years I got very frustrated with it to begin with I saw all these works by other pastel artists That were just so great and had such vibrant color and my painting paintings were turning to mud Well, one of the reasons is because I was overworking them and I was having too much pressure You want to keep a light touch whether you're working on unsanded or sanded surfaces But most certainly on unsanded surfaces. So because I kind of have a roadmap. I know what I'm doing here I'm doing what's called blocking in I know that I want to have background that's a little bit darker and especially with respect to focal point like I was talking about before One focal point strategy is contrast and now I know I've got really light flowers And the light flowers That I want to be my focal point are going to show up even more as focal point areas if I have Them surrounded by dark, you know a dark background with a light flower and it's not really dark, but darker So that's why I want to get in a little bit of dark and I know I can layer a little bit so there's some areas that I will be lightening up and On this one too. I added some Leaves you can see I just you know, I was just looking at it and I thought I want this to Flow and feel very fluid and have the eye move around so I kind of blocked in some large I don't know kind of artistic looking leaves to enhance the composition Now you'll see here this what I'm putting down this darker blue I'm keeping a super light touch and the painting or the Paper still looks very textural. So I have a little trick that I do this works great on unsanded paper And even on some sanded surfaces. I use a chamois cloth It's spelt either chamois c-h-a-m-o-i-s or It's become known as chamois sh-a-m-m-y you can get it I got mine at the dollar store a big old thing of it for a dollar Now you see how this just blends so nicely So I'm just kind of blending in and around and it's taking away all of those little Um, I don't know textural areas of the paper and making more of a smooth background I'm speeding up this blending part quite a bit because you get the idea So get that layer blended in and now I did find this really neat green that was in a dyan towns and set It was had a little bit more of a foresty green. It was a little warmer Not a lot warmer just a tad warmer and what I'm going to use that for is getting some of the darker areas in the leaves those kind of artistic leaves that I did and now I've got a Um a pastel that has a little bit more green to it. It's a little warmer still And notice that I'm or you will notice I'll even grab something lighter For the final layer of these leaves and that is my typical method and a lot of artists for pastels is to work dark to light And even though I'm working on an unsanded paper. I do have the ability to get I don't know four to six layers down But again back to my point about you'll find probably you get better on unsanded papers as your skills get better That's because you don't have to over correct you get better at and because I've done this painting before too you get better at um What I call I've never heard anybody else say this so maybe it's my own thing. I finally have something that's mine Is uh efficiency of stroke and what that means is Your strokes aren't wasted They're pretty purposeful and right when you get them down now. I'm not saying I'm great at that but um You are able to work better on unsanded surfaces when you don't have to keep going back over and over again to change something to correct it and you will definitely lose the vibrancy of the color And it will turn muddy and flat So those things get better as the more that you paint and the more experience that you get So I'm doing the same thing with these other leaves And I've only sped this section up Or the the rest of this painting is only sped up slightly So that um, I can kind of talk you through it. Trust me. It would probably get pretty boring if I'd it totally real time the whole time and um, you might get bored and just stop watching so But the other two paintings I am gonna just briefly show you at the end I'm gonna speed those up, but you'll see a little bit of my painting process um three videos in One would be a lot So now I'm using my chamois cloth again, and I use kind of the corner I cut little squares and I turn the corners I turn them when I need to use uh or blend a new color And I don't want to contaminate the previous color and by the way, you can wash these I got a little uh like a little lingerie or delicate laundry bag That has a zipper that you can put these in and wash them in your washer So you can repurpose and reuse these And now you can see I'm still in the blocking in stage. I haven't gotten to the flowers yet But I really did like This kind of a teal color now I knew she didn't want it as bright and if you've been on my channel much, you know I love color have a tendency to over exaggerate color maybe too much But because the client wanted it neutral and I'm happy I happen to be loving more of a neutral palette Now there were my color notes. I plopped up there real quickly I have got to find those now I always tell my patrons or on my videos if you're a patron of mine you get extra goodies Almost always you get my color notes I try to make little notes and I take a photo of it and I share it in the patreon post of this same video Sometimes my patrons get extra content But I I'm not sure if I can find those color notes. I I've got to find those I forgot that I even did them until I just rewatched this video. So patrons I hope I can find those color notes, but you guys are always so great even Yeah, you're very forgiving and kind. Thank you so much patrons And now I'm just going in and giving a little bit more Color a little more vibrancy now. That's another focal point strategy too Neutral colors get more pushed back Vibrant colors are more focal interest. They your eyes notice them more So I'm making my greens a little bit more vibrant for some areas of the stem And Now that's why I went a little darker with this one I didn't want these other ones the lilies that are lily the valley flowers on the left and on the right Especially that one that one's pushed back the furthest it's the furthest away And now I'm adding a little of that same color Consider your light source. I know the light is hitting kind of from the upper right So I know I'm going to get some little shadows underneath the stems So I'm using that dark to kind of give that idea and then I later even add an even lighter light on one On the right side of the stem and I keep that light Concept of where the light's coming from in mind the whole time while I'm painting And you're going to see me when I do the flowers really talk more about that as well So you can see I've gotten kind of a long way with this blocking and stage this painting I don't know. Maybe the maybe it took a little more than an hour But again, it would have probably taken longer if I hadn't already done the concept sketch It definitely would have taken longer. So I'm I'm refining and and defining Areas here and you can see now how the focal point is starting to come out based on some of my stroke work With my strategy of that middle vine is going to be Definitely more of the interest the center of interest And you want to also too make sure you don't have too much Focal point right along the the edges of your painting. You don't want to pull somebody's eye right out of your painting That's another dye in town. So and you see it's lighter. Remember I mentioned I would lighten up highlight where that sunlight is hitting on some of those Um little kind of viney things and by the way, I thought it was perfect that angeli chose lily of the valley flowers To represent her three children And hang in the in the children's room And I thought so because they're so delicate. They're just so Gentle and feel innocent. I just love that and the theme this month Even though I didn't paint this this month. I painted it like um in march, maybe so But the theme this month in monnaie cafe is new life Well, how perfect to share this video this month because the most precious new life is that of a child Or possibly um, definitely being born again, not just being born But you know what I mean if you're a believer in christ being born again is the most amazing new life So I just thought these little flowers were just so precious for this month's theme And the beautiful blessing of a new baby. Oh my goodness And notice how I have resisted the urge to get too detailed Anywhere I find that when I work the whole work overall getting blocking in first then gradually refining and working all of the areas almost simultaneously when it comes to Gradually getting to that final crescendo of fine tuning at the end And putting in your your final um Marks like icing on a cake or or sprinkles on a cake would like be the final I find that your paintings will end up being more impressionistic more Overall have a a connectivity to it and it will just feel painterly And harmonious. I'm always comparing music and art. I think there are so many similarities Now I'm using some of the Diane Townsend's again and just kind of working the whole like I said And looking for areas where I can add a little contrast that dark In that center portion of the leaf Is uh going to create some contrast with that one Lily of the valley flower that's kind of at the top It stands out more the white flower or the neutral color flower that I have Will show out more with a little bit of dark around it So those are just little things to keep in mind and it seems a bit overwhelming I remember I was totally overwhelmed. Like how can I remember all these things while I'm painting? But you just take it one step at a time Every painting is a success And it's because you learned something even if that painting is one that you want to throw in file 13 That's something I learned a long time ago. It's the garbage can. I don't know why they call it file file 13 But even if you toss it and trust me I have tossed. Oh my gosh, probably hundreds of paintings and studies But you learned something you learned what not to do or you learned what you liked about it You might have learned how you overworked it, but it's a success and I part of monnaie cafe and my philosophy of painting I don't paint for the the praises or or for contests or Um anything other than I love to share. I love to teach. I love to get better. Don't get me wrong I want to get better. I love seeing my work and feeling pleased with it But I like to stress that There is joy in the experience of painting Don't forget that and even if it's a failed painting. I've had times where I had the most joyous Painting experience and I wasn't happy with the final But I don't forget the fact that that was a moment that I had that was beautiful So I hope you guys can learn to embrace that trust me. It's hard to do it first. We're all kind of uh overly picky with ourselves But you get better at it. All right, so you can see I'm still kind of developing using my little chamois cloth technique Now notice too. I have not done anything to these lily of the valley flowers And they're already starting to stand out because of like I said the contrast now we can see them Now I wanted to make sure this is another thing too that I wasn't Um getting outside if she's going to make this an eight by 10 I had to make sure my composition. I wasn't you know veering too far out of my parameters that I had there Now I got a a nice dark. This was also one in the unison. I believe this is in the unison set still Um, and this is also once again creating that contrast. Do you see how it automatically gave the feeling of depth And a three-dimensional feel and I'm lightly adding it to some other areas not everywhere Um, and I like to share in a lot of my videos I have efficiency of stroke in another way too. I try to efficiency of the pastel I'm holding meaning that if I've got it in my hand and I see where else I can use it I go ahead and add it there and it creates again that cohesiveness And and you can paint faster when you're not going, you know, let me use this dark now Let me lay it down. Let me pick up another color. So you paint a little bit faster that way Now here are some of the colors that I'm going to use for the lily of the valley flowers They're all very neutral blues. That's going to be probably that one is going to be my lightest highlight But why am I starting out with blue? Aren't these flowers white? Well, I know that there is a coolness in the shadows And when you think of cool colors, um, just think of how you cool off in the shade And colors cool off in the shade as well And cool colors are more at the cool side of the color wheel, which is blues lavenders purples And so this nice kind of a neutral blue It's kind of a teal blue got a little hint of teal in it And I'm using this color kind of as a base Especially for the flowers that aren't my main focal point And I'm having a real light touch with that. Notice I'm not pressing real hard and getting a lot of that color down These guys are not the central focus Now I've got a lavender. It's a it's a really neutral It looks a little dark in my hand, but it doesn't apply quite as dark And I'm getting that shadowy side. They they do have a shadow side Um, not the upper right like I said is kind of where the light is coming from So the lower left is going to be more of the shadow not that they're going to stay this dark But again working dark to light now on these flowers I got plenty of layering even on this unsanded paper because I haven't applied any pastel to the flowers yet Now I wanted to get a little bit of a warmer lavender. Maybe a little bit more of a A magenta neutral color And why would I do that now? I'm not doing this on the underside of the flower I'm kind of doing it a little bit on the top. Well, this color is a little warmer on the color wheel It's going more towards the warm side reds yellows oranges And um, so I'm adding a little bit more of that warmth and I did add a little bit of that to the lower side of some of those Oh, it's the little they have like little tails the little lily of the valley flowers That kind of stick out and some of those were catching a little bit of the light that was kind of filtering around So I continue to just develop these And again, I haven't put down any of the lighter colors Now how many of you if you were beginner artist would have immediately tried to grab a white or a pretty light color If you started painting lily of the valleys and what that does is It doesn't really give you any depth. You have no contrast Your flowers are going to feel very flat if you just paint them white Um Or light color so by Layering the colors dark to light considering the light source considering the color temperature You're going to create things that are more three dimensional Now I'm going to show you some of the colors for my final colors Now notice this also isn't white. Do you see how it's kind of a a neutral beige And I wanted these to be again earthy like angeli wanted And I didn't want some of them to just stand out So bright like totally white And so I thought it gave a little bit of warmth and notice I am strategically choosing some not all of them and my touch is getting lighter As my focal point is getting more diminished when I add it to an area. That's not the focal point I keep a super light touch now. This one's a little bit darker. It is even more a little bit I guess you'd call it more of a goldy yellow, but still very neutral very light And uh just hinting at it in some other areas, but I haven't noticed I haven't gone to some of those other lily of the valley flowers They're not the focal point and they're not getting quite as much of the sunlight Oh, I guess my hair gets everywhere. Sometimes I have to pull it off of my my pastels. That's crazy Um, so now I believe I'm getting a little lighter and some of those flowers You could they didn't just come right out of the stem some of them You could kind of see the flower going behind the stem So there's a few of them that I you know kind of develop that a little bit and um, I also eventually add Some of those little those little tails. They have like um three or four little um Like a bell shape and that that's really kind of how these were shaped I had never painted lily the valley flowers before so that's the beautiful thing about being an artist We are constantly Being called to observe nature and learn things we never learned before or look at things in a new way I'll never look at lily the valley flowers the same way because now I've painted them now This is a prismacolor new pastel. It's a harder pastel It's kind of a nice pastel for a little bit of a finer line some final marks if you want some Um gestural marks So what I do is it's a little bit lighter than the other colors I used So this is going to create That final focal point some of that final like I said sprinkles on the cake Um, and now I'm using it to create just some of those fun little um tails on the little bell shape Shape of the lily of the valley flowers And to just kind of have a little bit of gesture to them a little bit of liveliness to them And uh, I think this is fun. I do this often when I'm finished with the flower painting I I kind of go over them with almost like little illustrative or fun marks and uh, I thought that made these uh, almost feel like they were blowing in the wind They weren't quite as stiff when I added these marks and it's really pretty close to being done at this point I do add some contrast and some darker values in some of the areas on the stem And I'm going to go ahead and speed up this end part here So I can be sure to share a little bit of the footage from the next two paintings But I wanted to purposely make sure I didn't overwork this I knew that angeli wanted this to be very organic And she really liked the idea of like a brown paper So if I overworked this too much, you wouldn't get that influence of the paper Kind of peeking through so and she did already frame all of these and sent me a picture She framed them so nicely So here you go. You can see I'm speeding this up now and also at this point I think you can probably very subtly Observe the focal point strategy Do you notice that there is a little cascading part of some of those flowers coming from the middle? Kind of bottom to the top where they have more They're lighter and they have a bit more detail than some of the other ones And that helps to keep things Or to define your focal point I did go back and add a little bit of that prettier lighter blue I just I thought there was a little bit more color But once again, she wanted this very neutral So I had to resist the urge to grab some bright and bold colors And I wanted to just confirm again and check again that my Cropping will work. Okay for framing an eight by ten This is just a mat that I've cut so that I can adjust it pretty much. However, I need to Um, it almost wouldn't big enough But you know what I'm saying you could move it in or out to make a five by seven a six by eight a four by five Whatever by simply adjusting the two cut sections of the mat So I was happy with this one and here's the final and even though I think the video would have been too long if I included all three of these in Um real time or slightly sped up the last two I'm going to speed it up a bit But it's the same concept getting in my darks Of course, I got in my little sketch with my white charcoal pencil This one I wanted to make them a little bit Like tiny a little sweeter And I had an idea to have some in the background or oh no that that background effect Someone gave me the term for that on my last watercolor tutorial bokeh Is that what it's called and then I changed my mind. I thought no, let me just add some flowers back there So you can see these are more dainty and delicate I wanted also I think it's almost always a great idea when you're painting flowers to vary their direction And I noticed in the first painting a lot of them were kind of facing the same way And none of them you couldn't see the center So with this one I wanted to have a few of them kind of turned towards the viewer and the centers to lily of the valley flowers They had this little yellow Little polyp or something in the middle and you know as I said before I love how much you learn as an artist just studying nature And so this one was also a lot of fun And I am just so happy that angeli really I mean she loved them So I was just oh my gosh. Have you ever done a commission piece? That's kind of like the stressful part of a commission piece. You're just like on pins and needles Wondering is the client really going to like it or not. So that's always like a whew kind of moment So uh, these were also very fun. And now you can also see here's this final of number two You can see too how how you get really good results on unsanded paper When you plan things out and you don't overwork things and you keep a light touch And now you can see same strategy Get the sketch in get in your background blend it with your shammy cloth or whatever blending tool get in a very loose Light overall cover cover your surface get everything blocked in And then you reserve that urge to get too detailed until the end And with these really nothing got really hard marks except for maybe just a few Gestural marks on a few of the flowers And this one too they all had kind of the same theme But they were Varied a little bit on the composition. I actually really liked this one. I thought it came out probably The most organic looking. I think I like how I did the stems and it sort of reminded me of the Does anybody remember the autobahn like botanical prints? And I didn't think of it until afterwards But uh kind of to me had that kind of real earthy flair to it But of course this was my third time painting the lily of the valley flowers So it's like I always say paint a lot paint daily if you can you will definitely get better with every painting So I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I hope and pray that the lord blesses angeli and her sweet little family And i'm glad the lord kept me around long enough to be able to do commission pieces like this All right artistic friends as always. I pray blessings upon you in art and in life and happy painting