 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm so glad you're here with me in the studio today. I'm going to provide a tutorial on painting the night. This happens to be the monthly theme in our Facebook group, Monet Café art group, painting the night, also called a nocturne painting. Now I will be featuring a set of Sennelier pastels that I love. This is a little 40-piece half-stick set. It's a great set and I love the assortment of values and colors. I'm going to be talking about that in this video and it's a great starter set. It's less than $60 for 40 pastels. That's really not too bad and because you get the half-sticks you get more that way. Now I will also be adding a few more pastels, not many and really those aren't even needed. You could use this one set to create this painting. Again I'll talk about that and since I'm using the Sennelier soft pastels, I thought I'd use the Sennelier pastel card. It's a product, it's kind of a long name for this pastel paper Sennelier La Carte pastel pastel card. It's thicker that's why it's called card and I'm going to be talking about the surface as I work too. I love this surface. Now here's my setup on my tabletop easel. I have my Sennelier pastel card up and ready to go. I've got my iPad. A lot of people ask about that little holder I have. It's something I got from Ikea only about $15 I think and I have a little preliminary sketch that I did. You can see there at the lower right. Now this reference image I got from pmp-art.com. I can't share it here. This is small enough where it doesn't conflict with their rules but I will be sharing the image, the link to the image on my Patreon page. If you'd like to become a patron it's only $5 a month and you can do so at that link above and a clickable link at the end of this video. Alright let's get started. But first I took a couple of pics of my little art sidekick who's often just hanging out with me. What a loyal companion my Jackson. He's so awesome. Now for this initial sketch I'm just using an index card and these Tombow T-O-M-B-O-W dual brush markers. I love these markers. They're great for doing a quick little value study and if you don't know what a value study is I have quite a few videos where I go through and create them and talk about the advantages of doing them. So that's not really the point of this video but I thought I'd go ahead and speed this up and let you see me creating this. I'm basically just getting in the general composition. The great thing about this is it works out any issues before you commit to the pastels. Again I'm speeding this up. You're gonna see this whole thing recreated when I do the painting but again I'm stressing the value of doing a value study. It's really a good idea. I don't always do them but I find that my paintings are usually stronger when I do. Now if you thought that one was fast I'm really speeding this one up because again it gets redundant after a while. I decided to add pastels to this and again yes this is just index card and it's not a sanded surface that you would usually work on but I thought you know what let me go ahead and just add some pastels and kind of get my color composition idea going before I commit to the painting. Alright so now we can get started. Here I'm recreating the sketch again and on the Sennelier pastel cart card I am just using a little pastel pencil and again just giving myself some a roadmap some guidance as to where things will be. You don't need a whole lot with this and this is a broken Terry Ludwig dark. It may be the eggplant color that it seems like everybody loves so much. Sometimes the cameras in my way when I'm filming I have to work with my right hand even though I'm left-handed but that's another video I'm gonna do actually is where I stress for you guys to practice painting with your non-dominant hand. It's really a neat exercise. So again I'm just really kind of loosely getting the marks down to represent the trees. I'm working on shapes rather than them having individual branches and leaves. They're far away anyway so they're not going to have a lot of detail and typically because we sort of negative paint when we're painting our skies and anyway when we make the sky holes we our trees kind of look a little bit like a blob to begin with but that's okay again when things are far away and it kind of lends towards that impressionistic style. Now you'll notice here that what I'm doing I want to mention too even though the dark pastels that I showed are not in the set with the Sennelier the 40 half-stick sets you really could do this whole painting with just that one set because that set has a black. I'm not sure if it's pure black but it's it's a really dark color. I just usually don't prefer black but you could absolutely use the black pastel in the Sennelier Lucarte set to do what I'm doing here and what I'm doing here is really it's like another value study and I'm varying the darkness by varying the pressure. Now let's see like right here in the water I'm glazing over the surface I'm not pressing super hard so it's not as dark so you can do a value study with a pastel just based on your your pressure you know so I also wanted to mention this Lucarte. I marked my paper off I had this piece of paper anyway to be a six by eight. That's a piece of pipe foam insulation there and what I'm doing I'll get back to my other point a minute is I am blending with this it works great for pulling the shadows down. With reflections you basically just want to create a mirror image in the water and then use that pastel I mean that pipe foam insulation to drag it down. You see how pulling the trees down and then glazing over horizontally really gives that impression of water. Now here's another pastel that I'm using that's not in the set but there is one in the set that you could use in place of this it's a I'll point it out to you later it's a it's the next darkest dark after the black and before I was talking about this actual pastel surface the pastel card but I'm going to talk about that in a minute because I want to show you right now my system of how I use this little container of the set to keep track of which pastels I've used you didn't see me do it here but in a minute you'll see I literally just turn the pastels upright of the ones I'm using so at the end you'll be able to see all the pastels that I actually used out of this set for this particular painting. Now I love this blue oh my gosh it's just a gorgeous blue obviously the reference photo is a lot of blue and a lot of those rich deep blues I also was seeing purple in there and towards the end I actually add a little bit of a magenta color to it but this particular set the Sennelier half stick set has some gorgeous blues in it and actually a really great variety of colors I find it's a good set in general to create you know multiple type of landscape scenery the only thing it was lacking in a little bit basically is is some good purples it didn't have that's why I'm using that Terry Ludwig purple right there I needed kind of a darker duller purple for the foreground area of that water and again just kind of glazing over the water a little bit when you use those horizontal strokes with glazing it really does flatten the water out a lot now what you see in the water what you see in the sky will be reflected in the water so I knew I needed to add some of that purple up a bit higher in the sky and okay now I am going to talk about this paper a little bit the Sennelier Lecart paper is very coarse one of the more coarser papers that I have worked on other than when I make a service myself there you can see how I turn the pastels up now that's the next blue it's a little bit brighter and a little little lighter in value but I love turning those pastels up like that so you can just go oh yeah these are the ones I've already used but again the Sennelier pastel Lecart card is very coarse and word of not really caution but just advice I guess is when I first started working with it I was like oh my gosh you can't even cover it up you've just got to press really hard to you know get the pastel and all those little grooves because it's so gritty but actually don't don't even think about that just keep working because what happens is the pastel as you work gradually as you add layers it does cover up that now you can pick or choose whether you want to do that or not sometimes I like letting a little bit of the paper show through and those pads that I showed at the beginning they come in various colors this is just kind of a almost like a little beigey yellow beige color alright the next one that's the next lightest in value is this lighter blue now I did do a little bit of a of it down at the kind of the horizon line where it the sky met those mountains in the back and I just kind of gradually added it going up and I you know work on the sky adding a few more colors sky colors are always more interesting if you kind of do some fractured layering of different values and even different colors now you see how glazing that on top of the water again because I put it in the sky I'm gonna put it in the water now this is the purple that is I also want to point out you see that how they the senile a pastels have like a little almost like a little tail on them or a little foot and I I wish they would make them to where they were smoother I like the fact that they're round but you always kind of have to almost scrub the pastel to get it to lay flat you might see me do that in a minute with some of these adding a little more purple back in there I thought the mountains were just a little too dark they needed to be lightened in value there were also a little bit too low so I raised them up now now they're probably too light again yeah so I'm adding more dark but anyway so those senile a pastels I do wish they were smoother but that's okay can't complain because I do love them other than that they're awesome all right I'm gonna work a little bit more add some music you guys relax enjoy I hope you learn from this and I hope you'll try it if you do and you're in our patreon group please share it on our patreon page my my Facebook group for my patrons all right enjoy this process all right now it's time to add that moon and the reflection in the water I drew the moon in first just to remember where it was but I knew if I covered this guy up which I did that I could just put it right back in of course we can layer with sanded surfaces and you really get a lot of layers with this senile a I mean it's it's really nice to work with that was a warmer yellow for first put down it was a little darker in value this one is a cooler yellow I wanted you know sometimes the moon has that warm glow to it not just that almost pale white yellow we glow to it so I wanted to get the warmth down first and then get the lighter cooler yellow now I want to add even more warmth so what I'm doing is I'm using this darker orange it might set seem I'm so sorry for my head being in the way it's kind of the only way I could see it to get my face close enough to it but I wanted to get that feeling of warmth that the whole scene is so blue that it really did need a little bit more warmth to it than just a flat white moon all right so I'm getting down that that orange notice I didn't draw a circle I didn't make a circular line and fill it in I'm just using the pastel to make a circular shape but now what I'm doing is I'm lightly going around the moon the moon's going to be smaller than what you see here because I want a little halo or a little glow around it so I add that extra circumference to the moon and then I'm going to go in with a little bit of that sky blue again I totally apologize you can't see a lot that I'm doing here and I just gradually with the sky blue layer over I don't want to cover up the whole part of the yellow but I obviously don't want it glowing that dramatically now you can see I'm just kind of lightly putting that blue on top not covering it all up and now let me see if I can zoom in a little more and you can see the glow to this moon alright the resolution isn't great here but you get the idea that there is a little halo kind of around it my camera keeps focusing on my head when I get it in the way so that created that little glow you just go a little bit of outside of the moon and then just gradually put a little sky color on top of it alright now I think this is where I wanted to add a little bit of that magenta cut see how I'm sticking the pastels up upright like that it makes a neat way that you don't have to take them out and then you might forget where they go I mean or take the time to figure out where they go it's not that hard really but I wanted to add a little bit more of that warmer palette to warmer color palette to this so I decided to put a little bit of that on the mountains and actually it makes sense because if the moon has light to it and a warmth to it like it does then you could add a little bit of that warmth to those mountains for the reflection that it's kind of receiving from the light now this is that darker magenta terry Ludwig that I I showed at the beginning of this video and I just the water in the foreground was so dark I didn't want to use that one that was lighter than I used on the mountains the more of a paler magenta color alright so I'm going to just work along here until I get to the reflection in the water which to me that was the icing on the cake in this painting those little sparkly bits of reflection kind of dancing over the water alright I'll be getting to that soon here I zoomed in again to be able to see what I'm doing with this reflection I pointed to that darker really rich kind of yellow warm yellow orange yellow and I am just kind of dancing the pastel around really kind of what I see there's little random strokes back and forth almost zigzaggy and again I'm putting just like I did with the moon I'm putting the darker value down first and then I will add the lighter value now I noticed in the reference photo there was a lot of reflection coming forward but then there was a span where there was no reflection and then a little bit way further back so and those marks were really small because it you know because of perspective in the distance after the reflection I knew I was pretty much done I add a few more energetic strokes to the water and I was thankful to have this time to paint oh yes this is that really dull green it's hard to see from just the video screen that's why I zoomed in closer because it adds a little bit more of that feel that these are evergreen trees with with their foliage you kind of just do a little bit of a zigzaggy pattern to give that impression of evergreens so this was fun and it was very therapeutic because this painting was done right in the midst of getting all of the news about the coronavirus you know closings of everything and just some of the the drama that's going on I never fear I know where I'm going of course we have to prepare and plan but isn't it great that we can have art to kind of get us through these times that it take our minds off of things so I hope you enjoyed this lesson I was wearing the Monet cafe designer artist series bracelet in this video so if you would like one I have the link in the about section of this video you can also find it by going to Susan Jenkins fine art comm and if you'd like to become a patron there's a clickable link at the end of this video thanks so much guys and happy painting