 Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're gonna have some fun today and if you're new here, please subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. Now the title of this video is probably already given it away but I will be painting on a brown paper bag. I heard it could be done and yes it can. I'll be creating these two paintings, this floral and a landscape and showing you how and what products to use for this technique. Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and this is Jackson and I'm holding him because he keeps interrupting me while I'm trying to make this intro. So Jackson are you happy now? You're star. I love you. Okay. Alrighty. So today we're gonna do something that I had literally never tried before until just a few weeks ago. You know if you've watched this channel very much I love finding new ways to do things but I also love finding affordable ways to create pastel paintings because the products can get expensive. Now if you're gonna scrimp on something I financially I would say the paper would be better than the pastels. Really does make such a difference. The quality pastels. I wouldn't get the cheap student grade pastels at an art supply store. Usually they're at like Michaels and Joanne's. Nothing against those stores but that's usually where you find the cheaper versions of pastels. But with pastel papers often especially when we're learning and practicing we can find cheaper alternatives. That's why I have so many videos on how to create your own pastel surface. Well I was excited when I saw or I was actually puzzled more than excited at first when I saw the comment of one of my subscribers here on this YouTube channel and he said did you know you could paint with pastels on a brown paper bag like quite well. You know it works great and of course you know I had to try that. So sure enough I went and got a brown paper bag like a regular paper bag and I decided to give it a try. So I did two I've done two paintings on brown paper bags over the past few weeks. This one is was for a Patreon lesson on my Patreon page and this is literally just on brown craft paper. Okay I had some like brown craft paper you wrap packages with and this one was done on a brown paper bag. Now with this one I did apply some of my homemade surface to give it more grit and more texture that I've had in a past few videos but I'll talk about that more. But on this one I did this one first on this one I was like you know what can I do it just right on the bag without anything added to it and sure enough I couldn't it work quite well. Now that's exciting for me because when you do a lot of lessons that could get really expensive if I was using the expensive pastel papers you art pastel mat and many others. So this is really practical and a nice option for me. Now I know I call them the archival police. Archival just means ask it free and God bless you. I know we really do need to use quality art products especially if you're showing your piece in a gallery or you're selling your piece. You want to guarantee that that product your final piece is going to not yellow over time. That's pretty much what archival means. You want it to be an acid free product especially with your papers that won't yellow over time. So because I did some research on paper paper bags and I don't think paper bags are acid free so that would not be good. Find a practice on okay I found I threw away a lot of my beginning work and but anyway if you want an acid free product if you find you like this play around on some paper bags I did find a company the owner I don't know if he's the owner or not but he was so great he sent me some rolls I sent him some of my artwork I told him I needed an acid free like a brown craft paper product and the name of the company is Bryco and he sent me I've got another one down here he sent me these two rolls actually he sent me four rolls of these rolls of brown paper that I'm gonna do some examples on right now it is acid free so this should be fun and I just thank the company for sending me this because it not only helps me for painting I'm also going to be using this you know to package up some of my artwork from my Etsy shop sometimes paintings are large and I need a big roll of like this brown looks like packaging paper or pastel paper now so join me as I create some artwork on brown paper bags basically alright here we go I'll be providing clickable links to the two products that I received the 24 inch by 175 feet and a 36 inch roll by a hundred feet and I'll also have a coupon code that you can use to get 15% off this paper is great for so many different purposes and it's also quite reasonably priced now here I am with my craft paper from Bryco up on my board I'm going to actually I do something I call it reference photo roulette I literally just grab reference photos and and go for it and just decide to paint something and it's a good idea because have you ever taken so much time you get the urge to paint and you end up taking hours to find a reference photo because you want to find that perfect one well this is a neat way to get past that and realize not every work has to be a serious work and a lot of times we need to spend more time painting well always we need to spend more time painting than looking for the perfect reference photo so what I do is I have a folder actually have a box to where I keep reference photos and I cut them all up you'll see I pulled a few out I pulled like four of them out of the reference photo folder and so I'm just going to pick some of these and start painting and show you how this brown paper receives the pastels alright so what do you guys think which one should I do first oh I took that picture that little raccoon he's so cute that's a picture of a field out at my mom's house there's a cool tree I just did a tree video so when there's some poppies let me let me do these poppies first how about that alright so it's a vertical format so this is my quick little way to just get a frame in for whatever you're painting so I'm just I've got a pastel pencil I do I want to do it let's do it let's do it larger I'm gonna have a mark on it let's do an 8 by 10 inside of this is a 5 by 7 this is the way most mats are if you buy something that's a for a 5 by 7 picture often the outside dimensions are gonna be 8 by 10 so there's my 8 by 10 and let's play around with these poppies so I'm just gonna paint this more about just showing you how the paper receives the pastels also I'm using my unison 120 half stick set that I've been talking about like crazy lately because it's just such a great set for me when I'm teaching that I don't have to get up and go pick a bunch of pastels there's great choices for just about every painting alright so here we go the reference photo that I'm using is from pmp-art.com and I can't really share the photo other than you know the small image that you see on the side of my easel here but I will provide a clickable link in the about section of this video now I am using a pastel pencil here just to block in some of the larger shaped flowers I am also going to be blocking in some darks around it as you can see how I start it and basically I have only sped this up very slightly right now and I'm going to talk through some of the beginning part of this painting demonstration and then I'll put the rest to music but mostly I wanted to talk about in this video of course how the paper is receiving the pastels and I was once again pleasantly surprised at the results that I was able to achieve now I'm using a little piece of chamois cloth here as a blending tool I've been using chamois cloth now for oh gosh not quite a year but I discovered it that on certain papers it's a great little blending tool I'm basically just covering up a lot of that brown surface there and if you've been exploring pastels for very long you probably realized that one of the things we like to be able to get as we paint is layering capability we want to be able to layer a pastel on top of another pastel without it if you add too many layers and it's not receiving anymore they get kind of slick you literally can't even get another color on top of a color and also they just don't have the vibrancy they start kind of turning to mud if you can't get much layering now I will admit I've gotten more fond of working on unsanded pastel papers like this this doesn't have any added grit it's not like a sandpaper like a u-art paper and I haven't added any texture to it to create a sandy gritty surface but I have started liking unsanded papers like this paper also like the regular Kansen papers there's another product made by Kansen called Kansen touch and it does they add a little bit of sanded sandiness to it or grit to it to get a little bit more layering but I've I think I've learned to keep a lighter touch and so I'm able to get more layering now as my art career has progressed basically just because of my technique I'm not as heavy-handed I think as we paint we get a little bit more strategic about where we place our strokes so we don't have to do as much correcting so often when you work on an unsanded paper as a beginner artist you might get a little frustrated because you don't get as much layering as you do on u-art or pastel matte but again I actually got more layering than I would have thought on a brown paper bag you'll see as I progress here I'm already starting to add some layers on top of the darker colors that I've already put down for the flowers and by the way I typically or in pastel painting the typical procedure or technique is to work dark to light a lot of times we lay down our darkest value first and we lay the lights down on top which is why I got a lot of the darker shadowy areas even though the flowers in the photo are very light I don't add those brightest highlights until the very end so hopefully you're able to see enough here I'll try to zoom in a little bit so you can see a little more you won't be able to see the reference photo but now I'm starting to add some of the lighter values on top and once again this unison set that I have I found it so practical because it has all of its pastel colors arranged by value so if you need some salmony colors like I have here they have them arranged from the darkest value to the lightest value so you can literally work dark to light just right there from how they have it laid out in the set now on some of the undersides of the poppies I am putting some blues and purples because it's kind of a shadowy side even though the petal is the same white or light pink whatever it is in the sunshine it's not going to appear that way on the petals that are turned down or are more in shadow that's why you see me sometimes using some of the lavender's or blues and it gives it a lot more interest and pizzazz alright let me zoom in so you can see a little bit more how I'm working as you might can see better here I'm doing more layering also there's some more of that almost a periwinkle blue color again on the shadowy sides of the poppies and I've got the dark blocked in in the background and in the photo it sometimes you'll see a sky behind them but in this case there was like maybe a forest or something else that was a very dark value in the upper right hand distance so I wanted to kind of keep it true to the photo and establish that so I played around with the composition a little bit I didn't like how that the flower that I'm working on right now in the reference image it was out of the photo it was kind of like halfway in and halfway out so I moved it in a little bit which calls for me having to work from imagination a little bit and I'm I'd say I'm okay at doing flowers for my imagination but I'm not like an expert like some people who do poppies all the time but I also decided to add one up higher to give it more height and interest kind of pulling the eye in and around to make the composition a little bit more interesting and you'll see as I work I I kind of get the flowers established the way I want them and then I go in and start working on the background I'm getting a kind of a dark center in just a couple I don't want to do it in all of them because the petals aren't arranged in a way to do that but I thought that would give a little bit of interest and on some of them I'm even giving a little bit of a darker purplish blue to them so I'm gonna work here for a while add some music I hope you guys will like this video it really helps when you like the video when you make comments of course subscribe and also to be sure to click the link if you're interested in this paper and use that coupon for 15% off so I am gonna speed it up a little bit more at this point in order to not have the video so long and I have a second painting coming after this one so enjoy to the music and I hope you're seeing how I'm actually able to get quite a bit of layering on this brown paper at this stage you can see I've gotten quite a bit of layering on the flowers I've gotten the dark background established adding some grasses multiple dark values that I used in the background color there and now I'm adding the highlights on the grasses and even some more on the flowers and see I'm still getting a decent amount of layering so I really am impressed with this and I'm also going to after I finish the next painting I'm really gonna speed that one up just so you can see me do a landscape painting on this particular paper but after I get done with that painting I spray both of them I'm still in this experimental phase with this stuff I spray both of them with some workable fixative often I like to try to get a little bit of a darker value in the foreground and I kind of wanted to bury that flower I was working on right there the lower left flower and I was once again pleasantly surprised that the workable fixative was successful and now I'm going to start the next painting this reference image is of a field that's at my parents home in Live Oak Florida and they are so blessed to live on this property where they get the most amazing sunsets now the photo is pretty dark but I use my artistic license to lighten some of the values and intensify some of the colors and once again I'm starting with the darks I've got a dark kind of navy blue a deeper brownish and then a burgundy color and I'm using my little chamois cloth really just to fill in some of the blank you know background color of the brown paper and then I use the same strategy of typically working dark to light with my layering and if you haven't seen my video five ways to achieve depth in your artwork I've gotten some great feedback on that video and I think it's because once you understand the rules of how to make a three-dimensional world appear as three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface then it makes it so much easier so check that video out if you haven't because those five steps is really what I use all the time when I'm painting they just the more you do it the easier it becomes now for me in this reference image the focal point was definitely the clouds and I loved how the clouds were just reaching up moving towards the viewer and reaching up into the heavens with a real dramatic flair and often too as I'm working on some of these brighter colors also that sunset or whatever the lighting was right back in that little area behind the trees was also a dramatic effect and just so you know I typically even though we have a tendency to see that and go oh it's a sunset let me get the lightest color that I can get I've learned over the years that you actually can get intense colors rather than super light value so I didn't go for my lightest value in that sunset I went for some of the almost a reddish orangey color and then more of an orangey red and then I can kind of layer over top of them to settle them down a little bit or take the intensity away and one of the most common questions that I get or a very common question I get is how do you know what colors to change to you know if the reference photo doesn't show that how did you know to pick that color and once again to refer back to that video and and my video is not like something new I'm literally just regurgitating all the things that I've learned and try to put them together in a concise way here's where I'm kind of lightning or taking the intensity away from some of those oranges that I put down but anyway so once you learn the rules you can get bolder with color or make new color decisions that aren't necessarily in the photo I know that the the green that I put down in the distant field back there I know that things are going to lighten up back there because value gets lighter in the distance I also know it's going to be lighter in that background feel because there's a sun setting and there's going to be some reflected light coming down from there and so I talk a lot in my videos about how I'm a why person and I think when we ask those questions why is this happening we remember it and we can use it more effectively as artists now I'm almost done here with this painting before I add the fixative so you just got a few more seconds to watch of this I'm going to add some music but hang in there because in a minute you're going to see me add the workable fixative to both paintings and see what results I get okay so I am seriously impressed by the amount of layering that I'm achieving on just this brown paper from Braco and also to unison pastels the majority of what I've used they're pretty soft pastels so a lot of times with the softer pastels you don't get a lot of layering anyway so that's quite impressive now for the trick I am going to try I wanted these flowers right here to be a little bit more berry and often when I'm working on other surfaces I can give a little spray of some fixative which will give me a little extra grit and I can layer over top of it I wanted to add some more grasses but I kind of wanted to darken this it's more in the foreground it should be darker and it's buried so I'm going to spray it with fixative and see what happens I have a night I'll spray it down here first and I would like to spray a little fixative down here to layer some of these grasses in the field I know this is photo was little you can't see it so I'm going to try it with the fixative that I normally use and see what happens here we go all right oh I can tell I need more of this fixative the cans feeling a little light this stuff works great but I already know the paper is probably going to curl because I did try some of this on a different paper not this particular paper but let's spray it down here and just see what happens a little light coat I've moved my pastels by the way if you ever have fixative your spray move anything that you don't want to get that film on also being a pretty ventilated place I'm not going to spray much of it and I'll walk out of the room after I do but I here's what it'll do down here let me see I said I would walk out but okay let's let that dry oh I am smelling it well it's pretty dry and you can see it definitely darkens it which is one of the things I wanted to do I don't feel a lot of texture to it but you know I might be pleasantly surprised so let's try this one first I want this area down here a little darker I want it kind of to feel rooted and have these flowers be the lighter flowers and I purposely I like the little the little spots almost that you get I think it looks really kind of artistic when you get the little drips and spots around alright so now I'm going to do this one and it did darken it I mean even if I'm not able to layer much I think that helped it to to make that feel like it's more down in the depths of the grasses alright so let's do this now this is pretty dark already but I wanted to glaze a little bit of there is a rich kind of green I put some of these pinks in here so let me let me get a little bit of this down here especially in the foreground if you use this technique remember don't get this too far into the distance because that's gonna mess up the way value normally works anyway all right let's let that dry I worked on these a bit more after applying the fixative again very happy with the results I was able to get it a bit darker and a little bit more layering here it is in the final view where you can see the whole painting and also the same thing with the field painting also to a tip convert your photo to black and white if you want to check the values or your painting to black and white and you can see if the crazy colors you used actually worked all right guys thanks for hanging in there with all of my crazy experiments and if you want to check out how to use pastels with brown paper be sure to click the links in the about section of this video all right guys happy painting