 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I am so happy to bring you this free pastel painting course that should benefit artists of every level and get you on your journey towards pastel painting. In part one we'll talk about the birth of a painting and why a value sketch is so important. Good paintings don't happen by accident and take planning and preparation. In part two called crucial first steps we'll discuss the planning stage and we will complete a painting on unsanded paper to further develop our composition color palette and gestural quality. Part three is what lies beneath and no it's not the scary movie of the same title but the concept of an underpainting and why a proper underpainting can bring life and energy to your painting. Part four is called a painting comes to life. This is where all of the principles are pulled together and your preparation and hard work pays off. With a painting that is no longer haphazard rushed or frustrating this process will cause your art to become more enjoyable as you approach the final with confidence. And now it's time to get started with part one in the series called The Birth of a Painting. And if you haven't yet subscribed to this channel I hope you will click that bell icon to be notified of future videos. Also this free four part mini course is brought to you because of the faithful support of my patrons on my Patreon page. It's a place where you can support this channel to keep the free videos coming and get extra content. As a patron you also gain access to many of my private sharing platforms where I can see your work and we can all learn and grow together as artists. Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and if you're a beginner and you want things a little bit more simplified and broken down to begin your painting journey then this is going to be the video for you. Now I also believe which is why I'm doing this myself that no matter what level you are as an artist it's always good to go back to the basics. Sometimes we lose some of those foundational principles that make art art and beautiful. So let's dive right into part one The Birth of a Painting and I'll be sharing with you why simplifying your image with value sketches also called notans is so crucial to good painting. Early on many artists including myself produce artwork that suffers from TMI too much information so how can we solve this problem and produce artwork that has harmony and beauty. One way is to simplify your composition that's where a notan or value study comes into play. This will help you to identify a more clear focal point and reduce the tendency to have too much information in your paintings resulting in a painting that has a more clear direction simplified value structure and focal point. As we observe the typical landscape our brains don't have any problem interpreting the information however it takes a certain skill to be able to translate this information and reduce the complexity into a more visually pleasing image composed of simplified shapes and that is where the power of the notan comes into play as a simple and yet powerful beginning to your painting. And what about this word notan or notan? It's basically the Japanese design concept of the play between light and dark elements in a composition and now let's talk about why at the beginning stages of a painting seeing less is actually more. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as we begin this lesson. How do we simplify? We want to reduce the color of the image and simplify the big shapes. One way to do that is to squint your eyes. We're literally taking light away and light is the source of color. If you don't believe that try turning the lights out. Also you can use low lighting. I often like to paint in low lighting but really at beginning stages it's a good idea to be able to see the values. Also you can work from a small thumbnail. I often say we can see more from a small image with regards to composition than a large one. Another convenient trick is to simply convert your color image to black and white. And finally you can use a really handy app. It's called the Value Study app. It's free on iPhone. I'm not sure about Android so let's talk about that. It's real easy to use. When you open the app you are going to be presented with the ability to either take a photo or choose an image. I'll be choosing images from my phone. The first image will be just a simple pear shape. In the squares at the bottom you'll first see black and white with the ability to use the plus or minus to add values. Here there are three values. You can add a fourth value and thus changing the image. A true notan is only black and white but these are called levels. Different levels of values. Now let's move on to another image. Oh I have so many in my phone. Let's do my granddaughter, my son and daughter-in-law's dog Lola. Here it has multiple levels and I'll be reducing them. Therefore showing the darks and the lights. Now you can tweak this as you want but it is important to be able to see just the darks and the lights at the beginning stages. And you most certainly don't have to have this app to be able to simplify values. Once again you can simply squint your eyes. And here's some good news. The supplies are simple and very affordable. I like to use index cards that I keep in this little index card holder. I've recently started labeling them and saving them all in these little tabs or categories. And the neat thing is you can use these value studies over and over again with different color palettes and you'll definitely find ones that are your favorites to use over and over again. Some more good news is that you don't need expensive supplies. I often just use charcoal pencils. I also love these Tombow dual brush markers that come in different values of gray. And for the next few value study exercises I'll be using some of these, not all of these, Arteza gray scale markers or gray tones markers. And they're hanging out with me is Bob Ross and Leonardo. They're often practicing their karate moves together. Now I won't be using all of these like I said. I do love this set. I like working sometimes in the value scale of warm tones, sometimes cooler tones, but usually only three values. Now let me talk a little bit about this because Arteza is so great. Sometimes they send me products to review. And like I said there's 36 of them and Arteza's packaging is always top notch. I love this container. It has a little magnetic tab there for opening and it's really really nice and substantial. I also love the fact that you don't have to try to reach your neck over and crane to look at the numbers. You can flip the back over and actually lay the whole box down so you can very easily see all of the markers. Now as I said before, this is not to overwhelm you. I just liked the set, but you only need three values. Even if you just use a charcoal pencil, you can get the charcoal pencils that are dark, medium and light or you can just apply pressure, heavier, medium and light. Here are the three values I'll be using. I'm sorry, I can't even see the numbers there, but basically dark, medium and light. And now an image I'll be using is one I took out at my parents property. It was some beautiful trees and a field. And as I've said before, there was a lot of information going on there. So when you convert it, I think in this particular one, I didn't use the value app I had mentioned before. There's another free app called the Notanizer. I think that's the one I used here. But again, you can squint. That's typically what I do just so you know this looks all fancy what I'm doing here. I usually just squint my eyes, dim the lights and I can see the big shapes and the darkest values. Often I like to identify the really dark values first, but lately I've also been kind of working middle and then dark and light. So I find people have their own unique ways of doing this. But one of my main strategies is to reproduce what I saw as beautiful in the actual image. And it was totally these clouds reaching up and the trees almost like they were observers of this beautiful day. I also liked there was some lines in that field. It wasn't a road, but I kind of created it to be more like a road. And so this looks pretty simple and perhaps even a little childish and you can create more complicated value studies, trust me. But I find as beginner artists, just to break these shapes down to simplified forms and basic values is so crucial and it's so easy. Isn't that good news? I continued with the looseness and did some fun color studies. Another thing to really simplify your image is to do a monochromatic color palette. That's basically different values within the same color family. You can see these are all like in the teal or aqua color family. And I did four of those and it really helps me to explore the direction that I want to go with my painting. And we'll talk more about that in part three of this course as we explore different color strategies for under paintings. And now as a precursor to part two, we're actually going to create a little painting study. Now I've got my index card here and I've got my little image that I've converted to a value scale. And I'm going to show you a trick to make your index card the same proportion as the painting that you're working on. Basically, I just taped it up to my iPad here. This could be a printout as well. I take a ruler and I put it from corner to corner of the reference image, not the index card. Then I just make a little mark at where the ruler hits the index card. You can see kind of like it about 16, where it says 16 inches on my ruler. That's kind of where it met. Now if I simply cut off the bottom at this point, my index card will be the same proportions as my reference image. So I'll be doing this again later in the video and you can probably get a better idea of it. And here I'm choosing three different values, dark, medium, and light. And with these I did see the numbers. It's the cool grays 01, 05, and 08. And here I'm giving just a little example of each of the values. So you can have an idea whether you're using different products. Basically, you know, pretty simple dark, medium, and light. My light actually could have been a little bit darker. Really for you guys to see it as well. So now I'm working with the middle gray marker. And I'm just getting in the basics of this composition. The reference image is actually another image from my parent's property, a beautiful lake behind their home. And I have converted it using the value app to get a more simplified value structure to work from. And by the way, if you're a patron of mine from my Patreon page in this mini course, all four lessons, you will be receiving a downloadable JPEG of all of my reference images. So just one of the perks for being a patron of mine. And I am speeding up this portion a little bit here. But there is going to be some real time after this. I just wanted to talk through this. And once again, stress the importance of this first step. It may just seem basic. And I know we all just want to jump right into painting and into color. But what I believe is one of the most important things for me when I do these, always, I can tell you 100% of the time my final painting comes out better when I take this step or do this value study ahead of time. But of course, we are establishing our values. We're getting a better idea of our composition. We can tweak things before committing to the painting. But what I find is one of the most beneficial aspects of this exercise is the fact that I feel I establish and generate more life into my value study sketch and thus my final painting when I take this step. I can feel when I work small like this, I can feel what I liked about the original image better and represent it more clearly. And now to take our little value study and create a little painting study. This is part two, which is actually putting this value study to work using color. And in this second step, I find it's again always a way that helps my final painting. And I'm showing you once again how to mark your drawing surface or painting surface the same as your image. Once again, you saw me put up the image on top of my paper, do a diagonal of the image, mark it on my surface, resulting in a painting surface that's the same size as my reference. Here's my setup. I'm just using a little tabletop easel with a black piece of foam core board. I have my little hyalmin box. This is the mini hyalmin box. A few videos back on Monet Cafe, I did a little review of this box actually show you how I packed it and give you a whole lot of information on it. And now I'll be choosing my color palette. I want to talk about the surface a little bit though. The surface I'm using here that kind of tan paper you see is a piece of sanded, it's like sandpaper, but a professional quality pastel paper. And this one is called Sennelier Pastel Le Carte. Pastel card, that's a long name. It's made by a French company Sennelier. It's a pretty coarse sanded paper. So if you're just starting with pastels, you will see in part two of this video where I do the second stage on just regular drawing paper. So don't think you have to have these expensive pastel papers to begin with. I just wanted to have a little fun with color and I found this piece that was almost the size of my value study anyway. In part two in this course, I'm going to talk a little bit more about color strategies and picking out a color palette. But basically for this little study, I wanted to choose like autumn colors. Kind of have a nice warm feel, but have some blues in there as well. The pastels to the right there are my darks. You definitely want to have darks. You can see in my little value study where the darks are. And in part two, I'm going to go into good placement of darks, lights and middle values and where they typically are in a landscape and where they typically are with regards to subject matter as well. And you once you learn these little rules, you can really paint just about anything. It's really not as hard as a lot of people think. It might seem like a lot of information at first. But again, once you learn some simple rules, you are ready to go. And here's my little color palette. Again, darks to the right, sky colors to the left, some various colors in the middle. And it's a good idea to convert your pastel palette to black and white if you're having a hard time determining what values are light, medium and dark. I often like to make a little mark of my colors on the surface that I'll be painting on, basically because the colors can look very different from what's in your hand and what is actually on the surface, especially if you're working on a colored surface like this. I'm using now, this is a harder pastel. It's still considered soft pastels, but it's harder, it's more dense. And it's a pastel made by Prismacolor. Prismacolor new pastels spelled N-U, not any W, new pastels. It's a great set. I have the whole 96 set, but this color is really great for sketching. It's called Spruce Blue. And I just find it's a nice little way to sketch out your composition. And here's a reason you want to use a product that works with pastels. If you use pencil, I found this out early on when I was painting, I would use a pencil to sketch my basic beginning sketch. And pastels don't apply very well over pencil. So it's best to use either a charcoal pencil or something in the pastel product family like this Prismacolor new pastel. And in this beginning stage, I'm going to be talking more about this in parts, I believe three and four, about capturing the energy in your reference image. Most likely, I would say always, you choose an image because something about it excited you and you felt it was beautiful. And so in these beginning stages, even before doing your little value study, it's a good idea to remember, make a little note about what it was about that image that drew you to it originally. And for me, it was the energy of these clouds radiating or actually coming forward from a far perspective in the back, coming forward overhead, also the energy in the reflection and that foreground coming forward. So I imagined the harmony of those two elements, one's going in with the values decreasing, and one's coming from behind with the values increasing with the clouds overhead. So that is just a little suggestion that's actually not little. It's actually a very important suggestion for the initial stages of your painting. And once again, the point of this video is about simplifying. We have so much information in front of us in a landscape. We want to simplify it. That doesn't just mean the elements of the painting, the values of the painting and the colors of the painting. It also means the energy, the life of the painting, and your concept of the painting. We need to simplify that. In other words, we don't need to say, oh, the trees are important and I want to accentuate the reflection and I want to accentuate the clouds and the foreground. I mean, that is just going to make your painting, your final, very busy and leaving the viewer with no clear indication as to what you're trying to represent. And I like to call this your passion. What were you passionate about regarding the image and reduce your goal to that element alone? And the other elements in your painting should serve as supporting characters, enhancing what drew you to the painting in the first place and giving the viewer a clear idea of your focal interest and passion for the image. And now I'll speed this up only slightly while I finish the rest of this little color study. And I'll also add some music for your listening pleasure. And notice as I work that my effort is to keep my original passion about those clouds and the water. And I use directional strokes to pull the viewer in and bring those clouds forward as well. So enjoy and don't go anywhere because I will be back at the end. I'll talk a little bit more about part two coming up and more. By the way, this song is called Waterfall by Akash Gandhi. And it's from the YouTube audio library. I hope you've enjoyed part one in this four part mini course offered on Monet Cafe for free. And I am just overjoyed at all of the responses I get from you, my subscribers. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe to this channel. It's a lot of fun. If you're a patron of mine, God bless you. You're the reason I'm able to bring these things on Monet Cafe. It really is because of the support from my patrons. So part two, we're going to have some exciting learning where I'll be sharing some of those simple concepts I mentioned before about values and the structure of where they are and when to apply them in a painting. Also, we're going to talk about creating that energy within your work. So get excited about that. That should be coming soon. And once all four videos have been created and uploaded, I will have a playlist where you can watch them all in succession. All right, guys. Happy painting. God bless you all. And thank you for being part of the Monet Cafe family.