 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm very glad you're here for this lesson. I think will be helpful. And I'm calling this lesson soft pastel techniques in action. It's a bit of a continuation from a video that got a lot of great response called 12 soft pastel techniques for every artist. So in this video I'll be providing painting demonstrations where I put these techniques to work and show you how to apply them in an actual pastel painting. I'll also be sharing a lot about the products I'll be using, more about this Canson black drawing paper, and yes there's more at the end of this video if you stay tuned your bonus is to see other things that we can do with pads of black drawing paper. So be sure to stay tuned for that. And if you're a first-time visitor here in Monet Cafe I really think you're gonna like it here. I do a lot of pastel work but most of these techniques and lessons really go across all mediums. So if you haven't done so yet already please subscribe to this channel and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. As I typically do I'll provide product links in the description of this video for many of the products I mentioned. And as I paint I'll be talking more about this black Canson drawing paper and really about painting on black surfaces in general. Now it's still tree month here in Monet Cafe so I'm featuring mostly paintings with trees as subject matter. I've conveniently saved albums with lots of trees in them from copyright free reference sites and I'll have links in the description of this video where you can access both of those albums, find the photos I'm using for these paintings, and maybe create some of your own. Because I'll be creating multiple paintings I will speed them up a bit except for the section where I feature the techniques. However if you're a patron of mine, God bless my patrons, you're going to get in separate videos some of these paintings slowed down with more commentary. So thanks so much to my patrons. I truly appreciate your support of this channel. The majority of these paintings were created with two products, the black drawing paper and this set of Giro pastels. I love this set. I'll be talking more about that as I paint as well. Now as I said I'm speeding up the majority of this until I get to a section that features one of the techniques that I would like to give more instruction on. Now this is one of the things about black drawing paper you sometimes have to paint a little bit negatively. I'm preserving or reserving the black areas. I know this particular reference photo had kind of like a silhouette of an oak tree so I kind of negatively paint it around it. Now what would you think this technique is here? I've slowed this portion down to real time and take a look at the chart to your upper left of the screen and you may notice that I'm using kind of a combination of two maybe even three techniques. One would be the side stroke. Notice that my pastel is laying on its side. That's the second one down in the middle on the left there and I'm also layering colors. That would be the one to the right of it. The side stroke layered and what happens when you do this, they actually start to blend themselves so it's a bit of blending as well. That's the upper left option in the chart there. So notice as I'm speeding it back up again how I'm blending the color using the side stroke and layering side strokes. So you're getting kind of three of these techniques all in one and that's why I thought it would be neat to do a video like this because we're often combining many of these techniques in one painting. Towards the end I'll get to another technique that I think is really fun. Oh there's my bracelet I wanted to share. It's from the Tim Tebow Foundation and also I can use this kneaded eraser. It's spelled K-N-E-A-D-E-D eraser to actually reshape the tree if you need to remove some pastel. Yes it really does kind of remove the pastel and also I am doing a little bit of sky hole painting. It's also a bit of negative painting where we're painting not the silhouette, not the form, but the negative spaces between just some of that light shining behind the tree. Alright I'll get in some general gesture for the road. This was a very dark image so I didn't want to give too much bright value and one of the reasons is because of this final technique that I'm going to do on this painting is we need it to be dark for these stars to show up and I discovered this technique oh gosh years ago and I was so surprised that it actually works. Okay this is back to real time. How about I make these stars? This is actually a little lemon zester or hard cheese grater and I'm taking some of the pastels, yes again I am going to be talking more about this brand of pastels soon, but I wanted a small star and I decided on a grater that was small rather than large. Of course I washed this before I grate something with it but I'm just real delicately grating some of the pastel not real hard and I'm moving around to strategic areas. What this does it gives you more of a random pattern than you could ever get by trying to make these marks yourself. Also it keeps the brilliance or the lightness of that pastel. Notice I didn't choose white. The painting is already so dark, the surface is so dark. White might have been a little bit too bright so I chose this really light blue. So they're going to appear brighter than if you tried to push down with the pastel to make these marks especially on unsanded paper. So here I've zoomed in a little bit and occasionally if you want you could make a larger star. You could go in there with a white in certain areas if you wanted to make a more of a brilliant star somewhere but now you may be thinking how is this going to stay? You're just going to leave it flat forever. Here's the neat trick. This is a piece of glassine. You could use tracing paper. You could use wax paper. I've used wax paper before. Lay it down on your surface. Get something like a rolling pin. I couldn't find one. I found an empty wine bottle so I am just pushing this wine bottle and rolling it and I am pressing hard. Now I'm trying not to wiggle it you know to where the pastel gets dislodged but I'm just pressing rather hard and a few passes what this is doing is even though this is unsanded paper it's setting that pastel down into the painting and yes you're about to see it will not blow off. I'm tapping it and now I'm giving it a little blow even though you can't tell that I'm doing that. Right here I was just blowing on it and they're staying so nicely in place. So that is now it's time to sign it but that was obviously a technique called dusting. So you got four techniques in this one painting. Wasn't this fun? The next painting reference is also from unsplash.com. Once again check the description of this video for links and sometimes with a subject matter that's a little bit more detailed I'll take a pastel and just get a general sketch in just to give me a roadmap to get started. Now in this particular painting I'll be using the techniques of broken color and a bit of scumbling. Now of course there's going to be layering going on and maybe a few other little random techniques but I want to really talk more about those two techniques. You may have just noticed that I put a little bit of dark down that was actually a Terry Ludwig eggplant color. Terry Ludwig is a soft pastel that makes just beautiful pastels and they have such a nice dark that you notice it's even darker than my black drawing paper. So that was a way for me to get in some of the areas that were of the darkest value. So you can see in this tree here if you notice the category up there called broken color. It's really a bit of laying colors next to each other and they sort of create a new color or some color energy and I use this also you will see me use this technique in the sky as well. Now with these colors I'm doing a little bit of blending and layering here but specifically in those trees is the broken color. Also scumbling is a little bit more, I would say, random and smaller strokes but I would say I use a type of a bit of scumbling in almost every painting. I'm usually putting down just little random short strokes. Something I talk about in a lot of my painting demonstrations is using directional strokes similar to kind of how I'm doing with these grasses. You want to keep your strokes in the direction of the general direction of the element that you're painting. And of course you know this video is not about reflections but I'm adding reflections and I'm working on the water. We will be having some water tutorials coming up soon. That's for my patrons in some upcoming story time lessons. Those are always a fun patreon favorite type of lesson. Alright here we go with the sky. So I am getting in one color of the sky. Later you're going to see me add a lighter value of the sky. So it's a bit of broken color and it's a bit of layering as well. Alright here's my lighter color. Now I wanted to mention that I've often talked about something called a fractured sky. What a fractured sky is. I love this technique. I use it often. Is applying colors in the sky of similar values. That means the darkness or the lightness of the the pastel that you're using or the color that you're using. And you lay down those values in a broken pattern and they create almost like this color energy almost as if they vibrate. So you can see I've got a little bit of broken color going on in the sky. Definitely got some broken color going on in the leaves of that tree and lots of other types of stroke work. But in this one I was specifically focusing on the broken color. And you may have noticed I did a little blending to pull some of the reflections down. It's a technique I use often with a blending tool. And that's in a lot of my videos that I talk about. And I don't want to overwhelm everyone. I'm going to keep this more about the topic of using one or more of these 12 soft pastel techniques. So that one was a lot of fun. So here we go with the next painting example. And in this next example it does take me a little bit to get to the technique I'd like to talk about. So I am going to finally talk a little bit about these pastels. And you may see a box that I've just added to my right here. These pastels are called Prismacolor New Pastels built in U pastels. And you see how they're kind of long and rectangular. Now these they're still considered soft pastels but they're harder. And they're really pretty good for what I like to call pastel sketching. They work well on unsanded surfaces. So I'm using for this particular painting these Prismacolor pastels and some of the Giro pastels that I mentioned at the beginning that I used for the previous paintings. The Giro pastels I really like them too. They're kind of an in between a soft and a hard pastel. They're not too hard and not too soft. And they're also great for this pastel sketching. The great thing about pastels that aren't too hard or too soft like these is that they don't crumble as much and they don't make as much dust. So they travel well and they're great for linear work. So I really enjoy using these pastels when I'm doing any type of sketching. And they work great on sanded surfaces as well. So I'm still just working here. I didn't get much of a sketch in on this one. Sometimes I'll put a sketch in, sometimes I won't. But I usually work by really big shapes and looking at proportions of things. Now I'm really going to speed up this portion until I can get to the part of the painting where I want to discuss the technique. But once again about the Giro pastels the set that I'm using you might have noticed that beautiful wooden box. It's called the Elizabeth Maori, what's it called? Poetic landscape. I love that set and I loved Elizabeth Maori's work. Now I did use the pastents loved because she passed away. Oh gosh what's it been now? I know it's been over a year but wow if you want to check out some beautiful and romantic pastel work she was truly one of my favorite artists. Now I have been doing as the other paintings a little bit of a combination of all of these techniques combined but I want you to take note of the trees. Now the other trees I felt the ones that I did in the painting just before this were a little bit more of broken color and I feel like these are kind of broken color but they're also a little bit of scumbling. I mentioned that scumbling is a little bit more random and kind of smaller strokes than broken color and I'm kind of scumbling one color over another here to develop these trees and give that beautiful fall foliage. So I would say that's more of a scumbling combination broken color technique and I did decide in this painting to I liked the sky being kind of dramatic like that but I felt like it was competing with those autumn trees. I really have been focusing a lot on focal point and I just had a discussion on that with my patrons not long ago in something I do for my patrons called critique my painting. I have a critique session and I give helpful suggestions to their artwork and one of them had to do with a focal point strategy of not having so much going on that you're suffering from too much information so in a little while you'll see me actually blend the sky and I think it gave a better focal point energy. There you go. Well that's one thing you can do too. I just got a paper towel and gave some energy to the sky and now I'm also using blending and side stroke and layering of colors so I hope you can see that in one painting there are definitely multiple combinations of these techniques that you will be using. And I believe this next image yes is from pixabay.com. I just loved these trees on the hill and I am going to be I'm going to go ahead and tell you in advance on this one using quite a bit of the technique of feathering. It's like linear strokes that you lay next to each other and overlap them for an interesting technique and effect. I liked the long or the wide format of this one and this is similar to the first painting where I'm negatively carving in those trees. The trees are the darkest thing in this image and so I'm preserving the darkness and painting around them instead once again using the kneaded eraser here to kind of reshape them if I needed to and this is where I mentioned the concept of big shapes. I just want to get in kind of the big shapes the general values. I wasn't even sure of the mood I wanted to create but I started grabbing some values that I thought were right and I didn't want to keep it exactly like the reference image. I wanted to give it some interesting color and just have fun. That's one thing I did do with all of these paintings. I had fun. I'm literally working at my kitchen table. Well it's a little buffet or a little um like an island in my kitchen and I do mean little. We've cut a small house but um so I had my my ring light. That's also in my amazon shop. I love my ring light by the way. If you guys need more lighting it's you can control the temperature of the lighting. It's a great way to paint and even to film yourself painting. It has a nice little part in the middle to put your camera in. So um so yeah I'm just sitting at my kitchen table and kind of hanging out and having some fun. So I'm adding some warmer tones here. I wasn't sure if I wanted to keep that road narrow like the reference image or make it wide. I kind of haphazardly kept a wide space there and I almost kept the road like that. But right now instead of getting to the feathering portion I am getting in the bigger shapes the values the colors and then I'll start giving some energy movement and direction to this with a feathering technique. I also tend to think that this technique reminds me of Van Gogh and I think it's because he used not only feathering but all this linear energy in his paintings and it was really a lot of fun so or his work is it's some of my favorite. So we're getting close now. I'm starting I made some changes and decisions in some of the ways the field was going in the reference image. So that happens a lot when you paint. You can you know redirect things to what you think works. Now here we go with the feathering. I am going to slow some of this up in a bit but I'm going to get some of it in in general. Now I'm just kind of looking at how the clouds are moving. I am using the reference image as a guide but not a strict guide. I am giving this feathering type of directional lines to keep the energy moving almost like those trees are looking in the direction to the upper left. And now that I have some of my general values and colors in I am beginning to do more feathering. It's on top of some of the value and color that's already there and I'm using the feathering technique once again directionally to lead my eye or the viewer's eye where I would like that focal energy to go. Also feathering in the direction of the shapes of these hills. So feathering can be an excellent technique for creating drama, energy, and direction. So it's excellent for hillsides and skies and grasses and I think it's a lot of fun. I'm really hoping you guys will explore and try some of these techniques and don't be afraid to play. I love to give that advice because I have had to take that advice myself. I know a lot of us can be very competitive or we can want results too soon and we get frustrated. So that's why I say just play. It's okay to make a mistake. It's also okay to throw your work away. Just have some fun like you were a kid again. And I'm adding some more energy here. I decided to lighten the sky up a bit and add some more color. And can you see how this is just really kind of exploratory and creative? So and you don't have to say so strict to your reference image. Now that was four paintings already but I was on a roll so I decided to do another one. I don't do a lot of desert scenes and I saw this really interesting I'm not sure if it's a tree or not. It's kind of a cactus tree and I thought I would just have some fun and play around with this one. In this one I used a whole lot of techniques from blending to broken color to feathering, scumbling and as I stated before I typically use I don't know probably like at least six different techniques in every painting to achieve the effects that I would like to achieve. So I really hope you guys will give these techniques a try and have some fun and if you're a patron of mine I will be bringing you videos that will slow down maybe not all of these paintings but give you a slower version for you to follow along or recreate from this painting with your own reference photo if you like. I've also been enjoying many of you who perhaps are not patrons of mine but how you've been tagging me on Instagram. My Instagram page name is Susan Jenkins Artist and I just love seeing what you do when you tag me on there. Now I am going to slow down and show you this is real time. I'm just moving kind of fast. This is what's called the rolling technique. If you have well it doesn't have to be a round pastel but it works better with a round pastel you can literally just roll it around to create some random strokes for grasses. Grasses usually look better when they're more random than if they are too patterned. Now here we go with that extra content that I mentioned at the beginning of the video. Here's a better shot of the Giro pastels. This one set is so nice for creating lovely paintings. I really do like this set of pastels. All right so what else can we do with these Black Canson drawing pads? Well we can of course paint in them like I've just done. I thought I'd also show. Since I'm left-handed I typically paint with the spiral on the opposite side. So if there's any other Southpaw lefties out there that's just some advice. Also too I wanted to show you how do you protect these. You actually can put a piece of glassine or tracing paper on the opposite side of the paper. I've done this various ways over the years and I really like just putting it on the opposite side because then I don't have to fuss with it as I turn the pages. You can just open it up and see your work. And here are some of my other Canson Black drawing pads of different sizes. In one of them I use it to store my pastel paintings that may not be paintings that I've done exactly in this book. It could be sanded paper or various other surfaces. And I love this presentation really. You could use white paper if you want but I really like the black. This is the technique I mentioned before where I had the pages taped actually on the same surface as the painting. And now as you saw in the first one I like to have it taped on the opposite side. But you do lose the ability to have paintings on both sides of the surface. And many of these paintings are ones that I've done from my Patreon page, Patreon exclusive lessons. Sometimes, oh now I'm hungry I want some sushi. And often they're from, even from these Monet Cafe lessons. Sometimes I'm just playing around. But one thing I like about this is it's fun to, sometimes when you put it away you kind of forget about it. And like I did here I open it up. I forgot about some of these paintings. And it's often good to look at your work with fresh eyes. Have you ever been painting or trying to paint something? You stare at it so much it drives you crazy. You're tired of it. And often when you put it away for a while you really look at it and go wow that's not too bad. So basically these notebooks, whether you use black or white or whatever kind of a spiral notebook, I think they are great for storage. Another reason I like this spiral is you can lay it flat. Have you ever had a notebook that was bound on the edge and you really just can't lay it flat? So this is really nice to be able to do this with. And I found that this technique they stay fresh. They don't get smudged just as fresh as when you painted them. Many of you have asked about ceiling artwork, pastel paintings. That's my most common question. How do you fix a pastel painting? Well that's a perfect segue to this. A video that's coming up soon. Watch what I do to this pastel painting. And I'll tell you a little bit more about fixative after this. Have you ever seen anyone do this to a pastel painting? Oh I'm proving that my hands, they may have a little pastel on them from me just painting, but they're basically clean. Look at that, nothing. My painting didn't smudge. Now how on earth did that happen? Well this is a fixative product that I'm pretty darn happy with. I'll be sharing soon. But typically I do not fix my paintings and I'm even careful with the fixative that I'll be sharing soon because it darkens your final piece. None of these other paintings have fixative on it. And I really do believe your work stays the most colorful and fresh without a final coat of fixative. So the best thing to do is to keep them either protected with some glassing or tracing paper like this or in the clear bags that I've talked about a lot. I have another video on that. So without, oh I'm going to have to share this tutorial sometime. A lot of these paintings I have the footage and I just haven't shared the actual, haven't edited the video. This one was a neat one. I'm going down memory lane here. I hope that's okay. This was on a brown paper bag like you get from the grocery store. I don't recommend this as selling as a professional painting but it's great for exercises or practice work. So anyway, I hope you guys have enjoyed this. Found some neat ways to use these black cans and drawing pads. They're not very expensive. Also they're in my amazon shop. I'll provide a link in the description of this video. And I love being able to save you guys money with things. So all right guys, I hope you had a great time with this lesson. I hope you'll subscribe and I hope you'll come back soon. You know I'm going to have more tutorials coming your way in Monet Cafe. I didn't mean to rhyme. All right, happy painting.