 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins bringing you new pastel painting discoveries this time. Yes, painting on wood with this awesome product and soft pastels. So you're gonna learn a lot. Get ready to have some fun. Oh and please, if you don't mind, like this video, comment. I'd love to hear from you and subscribe. And if you would like to consider becoming a patron of mine, my patrons on my Patreon page support this channel for $5 a month to keep the free videos coming and my patrons get extra goodies. For example, you will be getting the full real-time coverage of this tutorial if you're a patron of mine. So come join the family. And enough of that, here we go. The wood panel I'm using is one that is from Arteza. They have a pack of wood panels. It's five wood panels. The price is really great too and I of course love wood panels for paintings like acrylic and oil. You really wouldn't think that pastel painting could be accomplished on a wood panel. But aha, yes it can. And a lot of it has to do with the way you prep the surface. I'm prepping my surface with a product I actually really love. I forget I have it sometimes. It's Art Spectrum Color Fix Primer. This color is Australian gray, but it comes in all kinds of different colors as well. They also even have a clear option. So you could actually create an underpainting, for example, like on a piece of water color paper, and then add this product to give a little bit of tooth or texture. You can hear the texture as I'm rubbing my fingers across this board that already has the color fix primer. I was reminded about this technique when I watched the Pastel Live 2022 event that was awesome and Dick Blick did some product review sessions and used a wood panel like this one and this color fix primer to coat the board. You actually don't even need to prep the board, for example, with something like Gesso prior to this. This color fix primer is all you need. Mine looks a little rough because I've had it for a while and it was maybe just a little bit dried out, but not too bad. So I just used a little palette knife, a little plastic palette knife to scoop some out of the container and dab it on the board. And then I'm going to use this foam brush to get a really nice smooth application. I tried to make some nice smooth strokes and some artists share that when they use this product they even, once it's dry, use a piece of fine sandpaper to sand down any of the rough parts on the surface. Now when you have a wooden panel like this, it's kind of hard to put on your easel. So I used an old paint stick, the big ones like you use for a five gallon bucket. And I just taped it up with artist tape. They look like little crosses. Praise the Lord. You can pray while you're painting. And I decided not to coat the sides of the board, as you could see there. These are the two pastel sets I used primarily for this painting. They're both made by Jack Richardson. They're the Jack Richardson hand rolled pastels. This is the landscape set. I just loved these blues and these pretty neutrals. And the other one is his neutral set. It's called Color Wheel Neutrals. Just look at those gorgeous neutral colors. I love it. The reference image is from unsplash.com. Thank you, Thomas Vogel, for this beautiful photograph. I just love the tangle of wild flowers, weeds, and that weed that looks like Queen Anne's lace, actually. As I typically suggest, it's good to go ahead and get in a value study, which really establishes your big shapes and just your basic values. And I love to start with my dark values. And this is a beautiful dark blue that is in the landscape set of the Jack Richardson pastels. And I'm basically just putting in a tree line in the foreground trees, the background trees. And then I know we've got some deep grasses that are down in the foreground. I did not sand my surface once I added the Color Fix Primer. So it does kind of eat up your pastels a little bit, especially the first layers, but then it's not quite so bad. I also used a piece of pipe foam insulation. This is a great product for blending, especially when you're working on a surface that has a decent amount of texture like this. And it just blended this to have a really soft look. And that was what I was going for with this painting, was a really soft effect and end result. I wanted it to feel like a dream. I titled the painting Morning Romance. And I was really happy with this and very happy with the application on wood. And if you're a patron of mine, I'm going to be sharing in the Patreon version of this. Of course, it'll all be real-time. You'll get all the footage if you're a patron of mine. I'm going to share my thoughts on framing this. I mean, in a perfect world, we'd be able to just hang this on the wall, right? Like acrylic or oil paints, but still not so with soft pastels. So I will talk about those options over on the Patreon footage of this same tutorial. When I blended it, it lightened the value a bit. So I just added a little bit more dark. Again, this is all just with that dark blue. Sometimes I use my fingers to blend, but never at final stages, only just sometimes during the painting process. And I play guitar, so I kind of have calluses on my fingertips anyway. And now I'm going to add some color. I'm going to use this pretty foresty green. Isn't that beautiful? Again, I used primarily these two sets. I did pull out a few other colors, specifically some purples towards the end of this painting. If you're a patron of mine, you'll be getting all of my color notes. I'm going to try to share all of these in order of appearance. So if you have these sets, you can actually follow along with the same pastels. I chose a blue for the background trees because that's the way things work in nature. It's called aerial perspective. As things get further away, they get cooler and they get lighter. So I have three levels of values. The darkest is the first layer of trees, then next level that's a little bit lighter. And then the last level of trees is a really lighter, cooler blue. And it gives that feeling of depth. I loved this pretty neutral lavender purple. It's a gray purple. And I just scumbled it in to indicate some of the tree shapes. This is a very impressionistic painting. The end result is impressionistic. And I just love the soft mood of the sky. It felt like it was one of those overcast type of mornings. Maybe a little foggy and all of the color feels very easy and neutral. It's really soothing feeling to the final painting. I lightened up. There's one other purple that's a little bit lighter in value than the first one. And I decided to make that area back there a little bit lighter and a little bit more of my focal point. Added a little, I like to give multiple colors in the sky to give some color interest. And this is a technique that you can use. It's called fractured sky or fractured color where you take colors of similar values and just kind of scumble them together and it gives some real interest as the colors play upon each other. This month's theme on Monet Café in our Monet Café Facebook group. It's called Monet Café Art Group and for my patrons on my Patreon page. The theme is called different strokes. So in the Patreon version of this lesson I'll be talking more about my markmaking and my strokes that I use to create the flowers, the gestural stems, and a few techniques and tips to help your flowers feel gestural and free. Here's a little tidbit to create more gestural strokes. Often if you use your non-dominant hand you might find some very interesting mark-making results and give it a try. It's really quite surprising that you'll break out of your old habits. I forgot to do that in this video but I have an upcoming video where I create most of the flowers with my right hand, my non-dominant hand. I did a little more blending kind of with the side of my pinky finger to soften up just some of the grasses at the top and a little bit in the background. I don't advise doing this if you have really delicate hands. I have kind of like work hands and so just use a blender or that pipe foam insulation if you want to soften things up. Again I'm going for this dreamy quality. Now I did pull the famous Terry Ludwig Eggplant color. It's really a dark, dark purple so that one is not in the set, the two Jack Richardson sets, but I used it just to establish my darkest focal point areas of interest. Kind of some buried grasses whereas almost like a little trail pulling the viewer's eye back and a little bit in the base of that foreground grouping of trees. Re- established a little bit of dark value. Again I want kind of like three levels of trees. The big trees in the front is the first level. This one that I'm blending right now is the second level and then those distant trees really far away. I love to establish a feeling of depth in my painting. Look at this pretty green. It is the most soft, easy, neutral green. Leans a little bit on the cool side. Just bringing because these pastels are round you can really get some kind of neat marks by almost rolling it but also to changing your pressure. I have over in the Facebook group, Monet Cafe Art Group and on my Patreon page, I have a link to my video that I made on mark making. I'll try to put that at the end of this video and maybe as a link in the description so you can practice different ways to make marks. I find we often get in a rut with the way we paint and it's fun to explore different ways to make strokes and marks especially with grasses and things. So check out that video and I think you'll have fun and learn a lot. I did a little bit more blending. Again use the pipe foam insulation if this hurts your fingers or your hand. Now it had this nice soft appearance. I wanted to zoom in so you can see I still have the underpainting of the primer showing through. I love that. Also too I wanted to start sharing some fun facts in my videos and since this is a field of primarily weeds let me give you a fun fact about weeds. I happen to love weeds. I think they're tough and I think they're beautiful and they're very gestural. Did you know that one weed can produce up to 10 million seeds? That's why we can't get rid of them right? And here's another fact that has to do with my subscribers on this channel. From my last tutorial here on Monet Cafe I had nearly 3,000 brand new people who had never seen this channel before who watched the video and only nine people subscribed. I think that's because a lot of people just forget. So why don't you do that right now? Click that subscribe button and now I will add some lovely music for your listening pleasure and I'm going to speed things up just a little bit more and as always you can click the little gear icon whenever I have a video that's sped up a bit and when you it's in the lower right corner of all of my videos and you'll see a little list that pops up one will say playback speed and you can choose to slow this video down. You may want to turn the sound down especially if I'm talking because I sound really strange but you can always slow things up if you like. Also too a reminder if you're a patron of mine you're getting the full real-time content and what that means I'm now able to upload videos directly to Patreon. I don't have to go through YouTube therefore there are no ads out they're all real-time and since I don't have to worry about any copyright issues I can leave in my background sounds often I listen to some beautiful music and you can hear my scratchy sounds of my pastels on my surfaces. I just love that. So enjoy this to music and I'm going to be back at 18 minutes and 31 seconds into this video because I want to share with you a fixative product in this video that I really do like and I want to show you how I use it in this painting. So I'll be back at 18 minutes and I'll see you then. Here's the fixative I decided to use for getting some extra texture to this painting. It's Spectra Fix. It's the Dega fixative. It's odor-free, non-toxic, all-natural. I talked to the owner and the creator of this product and I love the fact that it's chemical-free. So what I'm doing I'm covering up the top portion of my painting with a paper towel. I'm going to spritz on. It really sprays nicely. A little bit of this fixative and what it's going to do it will darken the image slightly not as much as some other fixatives but what it does is it's going to give me a little bit of extra ability to get some more layering of pastels and so I can get some of these final grasses and flowers on top of course once it's dry. So I really do like this product. I wanted to be able to find a fixative like so many pastel artists where I could literally just spray this pastel painting and hang it on the wall. It's one of the most common questions I get in my comments on my YouTube channel is how do you protect this painting? Well I never spray my painting at the end with fixative because it does just what it did before with this one. It will darken your final piece. I only use it to as a tool you know to get a little bit of an ability to purposely darken something or to get a little bit of extra layering. So again how to frame this. I'd actually love to hear some of your thoughts. I get a lot of interesting information and learning myself from the comments you guys give me. So give me your thoughts on this. If you've ever tried this your suggestions for framing it I'm going to be sharing some of the options and the things I discovered over on my Patreon page and discuss that a little bit more. Don't you just love these purples that I added in the foreground? Again I was able to get that little bit of extra layering because of that spectra fixative tongue twister. One of my goals for this painting was to not overwork it to have it feel very fresh and loose and alive. And if you've watched many of my videos you know the general technique for layering with soft pastels is to work dark to light. So that's why typically the lights seem to come on. The final lightest lights of paintings of mine get brighter towards the end. That's where I'm adding my lightest values and my brightest colors. I loved just the free-flowing weeds of this and really painting on wood is not much different than other surfaces. The initial layers like I mentioned do feel a little gritty and eat up your pastels a little bit. But by the time you get to these final layers it really just starts all blending together very nicely much like other surfaces. So this was fun. Did you like this? Did you learn something? Let me know what you learned. Let me know what you liked about this video because again I'm always learning from you guys. And here I'm zooming in so you can see that gorgeous texture and just some of the softness of this painting. And here is the final again I called this one morning romance and I think I'm gonna keep this one. I kind of like it. But check out my Etsy shop if you would like to find more of my original artwork. Find me on all of those links and tag me if you recreate from any of my photos. Tag me on Instagram at Susan Jenkins Artist and tag me on Facebook at the Art of Susan Jenkins. I hope you had fun and learned a lot and as always God bless and happy painting.