 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I'm happy to bring you this pastel painting tutorial of these lovely yellow flowers. And I'm going to share with you how to rescue a painting on unsanded paper. So have you ever been here where you're just getting too much texture on an unsanded surface? Well, I'm going to show you how you can get results of more color and layering by a simple little technique. The surface I'll be working on is Rembrandt pastel paper. It's the light colors pad. And this is an unsanded paper, meaning it doesn't have the little sand or the little grit on it that helps you to get more layering. But it's got kind of a bumpy texture to it on both sides, I noticed. But it is affordable and a lot less than some of the expensive sanded surfaces. So I got this pad as part of a set that came from Dick Blick. I got it on a Cyber Monday sale. And the set was these neat little micro sets of pastels made by Rembrandt in little color families. I'm going to show you some awesome fun things you can do with these. I'm going to be featuring these in the next few videos. Now, these two are also very affordable. And I don't know if this set is going to be the special set with the free pad of paper is going to be available for long. But they do sell the individual micro sets on Dick Blick and on Amazon. So not to worry, you can still buy them. I think they're like $8 each. So that's what's in store. And right now I'd really appreciate it. If you would like this video, subscribe to this channel and also hit the little bell icon. That means you'll get notified of my future videos. Also, if you would like to become a patron of mine, there is extra content when you become a patron and you help to support this channel for only $5 a month. My patrons are awesome. So here we go. Here's my pad of Rembrandt pastel paper. And I chose the paper color that was kind of gray. You can see my little micro sets behind me along with my reference image. That is from unsplash.com. I will provide the reference image link in the description of this video. Now I was examining this paper and there are some pastel papers. I think it's the Canson Métince unsanded paper that has one side is a little more bumpy and one side is a little more smooth. This one seemed to have texture on both sides. So I just picked a side and started painting. Here I'm just using a long piece of vine charcoal. Another similar charcoal to this is Willow charcoal. It's kind of the same thing. One's a little darker, I believe, than the other. But the reason I like these long sticks is it helps to keep the gesture and the energy in your strokes rather than cinching up real tightly on a pencil. It almost always makes your work feel a little bit tight and not as organic. And the theme this month in our Monet Cafe art group and for my patrons on my Patreon page is Loosen Up. We want to loosen up in 2022 and have work that is fresh and free. So we're already having fun in the group and I wanted to keep this one very loose and painterly as well. I lean towards that anyway but I'm trying to get even more loose and have a lot of movement and energy in these next few pieces I'll be sharing. Now all I did was get a few flower heads in, a general idea of some of the tree shapes in the background, and a little bit of an angle to the motion of how the flowers are cascading into the distance. And this pastel I'm using right now is not one from the microsets. I don't use these exclusively for this painting, I'm just kind of introducing them. And I'm going to share some of the reasoning why sometimes you have to go with a softer pastel with certain papers. But that pastel that I just used was the Eggplant color by Terry Ludwig. It's really a nice soft pastel. They're normally large and rectangular, but I'd use that color so much I've worn it down a little bit. What I'm doing now, when you're working on an unsanded surface, you can use a little blending tool that is actually just a little piece of chamois or chamois. It's like I think it's a French word. But this is a great little blending tool. It doesn't work as great on sanded surfaces such as UART or Fisher 400 grit paper and Sennelier pastel card is a little too gritty for this. But it does work great on unsanded papers. It also works pretty good on pastel matte if you're familiar with that pastel surface. And I'm reinforcing it now. It's kind of the same color, but I think it's the same one. It looks almost black here, but it's really a dark, dark purple. And don't get frustrated if you're a beginner artist and you start working on one of these unsanded surfaces. That's one of the points of this video is I got so frustrated because I didn't know really any difference between sanded or unsanded paper and I bought from a little craft store like a Michaels or a Jo-Ann's, a pad of what's called pastel paper. And it is a pastel paper, but it doesn't give you the layering ability or the brilliance and color as many of the more expensive sanded surfaces. So that's why I'm stressing in this video that I'm going to give you an easy little way that you can create a more desirable surface that's going to give you more layering and more color and take away that really bumpy texture look. You can see it right here, right? Now, why would I be putting this kind of orange color down for flowers that I know are going to be yellow? Well, with pastel painting, we typically put down a darker value first before we lay our lighter value on top, otherwise it has nothing to contrast. It would look very flat and the color would not show up the same. So I often go with a value that just means the lightness or darkness of a color that's darker than the final color. Now, these are the little pink flowers that are in it. Now, these are the Rembrandt microsets I've been using. The first one, the orange one was from the set. Well, let me just go ahead and put a picture in here of the color names of each set. The orange one was from the Burnt Sienna set and the one I was using for the pink flowers is from the Rose Violet set. Now, if you go to find these individually, they have more than just these eight sets. So this little image will help you to know which ones I'm using even though I use other pastels in this painting. I do have a lesson coming within a week or so where I use only these colors except for maybe a few darks with some paintings. And if you're a patron of mine in your Patreon post of this video, you will be getting that image as a downloadable image and an image I took with all of the actual individual color numbers. And this is where I had the afterthought to actually hold up the colors. And now I'm going to this color that's in the teal family. And I would say this is the darkest dark of all eight sets. Now, let me talk a little bit about why darks are important. Now, you can do a painting. It's called a high key painting where you don't have a lot of dark values. But a lot of times when we're doing a landscape painting, especially the things that are vertical like trees or like grasses in the foreground, they're going to have the darkest value and they won't necessarily stay this dark when you lay it down the same value as your initial application. But they make a great base, as I was saying before, to layer your other values on top of. You can see in those distant trees back there, it is mostly dark. I mean, it looks almost black, but there are some highlights on it, some more lush greens, deeper greens, and then some lighter greens highlighting on the trees that are kind of to the upper left. And now I'm getting some of that dark in in the foreground. If you squint your eyes and look at the reference image, there's a lot of dark in that foreground, especially the lower right. Now I'm grabbing one of the lighter greens, like I mentioned about some of the greens that you're seeing in those trees. They're usually more on the top branches and usually more on one side than another based on your light source. And now I'm scumbling some of this in. And I'm already knowing at this point that I thought, I'm not really sure how much layering I'm going to get on this unsanded surface. I wasn't loving the texture, even though sometimes I like texture. It was a little bit too consistent and a little bit too, I don't know, uniform and just bump, bump, bump, bump everywhere. Now in my upcoming videos, I actually take, I think it's about five or six different surfaces. Three of them were unsanded surfaces and three of them were sanded surfaces. You guys are going to love this video, lots of great info in it. But of the unsanded surfaces, I used some drawing paper that I've really had great results, totally unsanded, great results with pastels, but it's not as bumpy as this. And I used some black Canson paper and got great results on that as well. So I would say I'm not a fan of this bumpy side of some of the papers. I do have a little duckling tutorial here on Monet Café, where I believe I used the Canson Métants pastel paper. It's very similar to this, but it has one side that's a little bit more smooth than this is. And I probably need to flip one of these pages over and just see if it does behave differently from just a visual inspection. It looked similar on both sides. So I don't want to be unfair to Rembrandt pastel paper. But as I said in this video, I've got a little technique you'll see soon on what you can do to get not only more layering, but more vibrancy of color. Now why is layering important? You're watching me do it right now. That's how I put down the orange. Then I put down a little bit of a, it was more of a burnt sienna. Then I put down an orange and then I put down a yellow. And layering allows for the colors to interact with each other. And an unsanded surface, when it doesn't allow for much layering, the pastel literally will just fall off as you go to add another color on top. Whereas the sanded surfaces literally like hardware store sandpaper, professional sanded papers are better quality. They're archival means they're not going to yellow over time. But it's the same concept. It's a sanded surface. The sandiness allows for the pastels to adhere and multiple layers can be added to the tops. So that is just the beautiful benefit of sanded surfaces. And I'm having a hard time with it already, I can tell with this painting. I'm getting some layering. I could tell with the flowers, but I've kind of reached my max at about three or four layers. And what happens when you start adding multiple layers of pastels on a surface that doesn't receive it well, it becomes muddied looking. The color doesn't look as fresh or like I said, it'll just kind of fall off. Sometimes it will become kind of slick and you literally can't even add another layer to it. Now you can obviously tell that I have sped this up because I wanted to kind of get through this portion showing how the texture can be a little frustrating. Now you can use my technique here. Put your basic values, block in your painting first before you do the tricks that I'm going to show you. So you can go ahead and get in your basic painting or you can do an under painting of just a beautiful color. I'll show you all this in my next video where I do it on all these different surfaces. I do multiple different techniques. You'll learn a whole lot and you'll find what works for you. All right, so I got my basic idea in and I'm not happy at this point. I'm not getting the results I want. So what is this can I'm holding up here? This is Blair Fixative. It's called Low Odor Fixative and I would never do what I'm doing right now with the end of a painting because you can see it visibly darkens the image. Fixatives are used to kind of set the pastel so they don't blend as much or they don't fall off the paper. But even though I don't like the final darkening effect on a finished painting, I like the fact that it adds a little bit of texture and I often do this. I learned this technique years ago. I saw Karen Margulis doing this technique and I was like, wow, that really does help. A lot of times you want to darken the foreground anyway. You can get it just a little bit of a value darker and you need to add a little bit more layers to your foreground grasses so you can just spray it at the bottom during your working process of your painting. But I almost never spray it all over like I did here. So why did I do that? I wanted to see if the little bit of texture, the fixative adds would be enough for me to get a decent amount of more layers on this. And while I found I could get some on it, you're still seeing that texture, right? You still see all the bumps. So I was like, oh boy, now what am I going to do? And I continued to work on it a little bit and you'll see in a minute how I was able to get some more layering, especially you see where I added the dark in the foreground grasses there. I'm able to come back in just a minute. I'll jump forward so you can see it and add some of the lighter grasses on top. So the fixative did allow for a few additional layers and it's starting to lose a little bit of that bumpiness or the texture of the pattern. Basically a pattern is what you're seeing showing through. So I thought, all right, I have a new strategy. I'm going back to my little chamois cloth and I am going to blend again to get some of that texture removed or the pattern removed or softened, I should say. And you can see that's already doing it. And so that was my next strategy before I tried my final technique that worked quite well. Oh, and I did go back and add some more darks to that tree line in the back. I felt like it needed more contrast and I thought, well, why not? I'm going to go ahead and put this down because of my idea that you're going to see me do in just a minute. All right, here we go with my technique that worked the best. I know I talk about this product a lot. It really is one of the most affordable and easy and efficient ways to turn an unsanded surface into a surface that has some grit. Now, because I already had pastel on this, it will kind of run and bleed a little bit with the color, but I am not that worried about it. I'm being a little bit careful, but I like the idea that I'm going to get a really soft, impressionistic underpainting to be able to add my layers to. Now, that's why I said originally, if you're going to use this technique, just block in your big shapes and your big values before you add the clear gesso. And again, this stuff is not that expensive. Let me pop over here to my Amazon store where I can show you some of these products. I have my Amazon shop link in every video. And if you scroll down, you'll see these little sections, like little folders I have. And one's called do-it-yourself pastel surfaces. In that section, I have a lot of products I like to use for making my own pastel surface. I have a video on eight different ways where you can make your own pastel surface. But this clear gesso is in that grouping. And once again, it's clear gesso, not white gesso, because it has the grit in it. And here you can see I'm clicking on some of the different sizes. They do have a four ounce size, but it's not very cost effective. It's the most per ounce. The best sizes look like it's going to be the eight ounce. That's $1.80 an ounce. The 32 ounce is your best bang for your buck. But the 16 ounce also isn't too bad. It's $1.66 an ounce. So it does last you a long time. You don't have to get that big of a bottle. But anyway, it's good stuff. I also want to come back to my Amazon shop just to show you a little bit more about the pastel papers. I'm going to click this section here. Pastel papers and more. And the papers that I had used previously, I'd never used the Rembrandt before, like I'm using in this video. But it was these Canson Métons. It's called, it's a French word. I used to butcher these words. I think I called it Métientes. I thought it was Spanish. But these are papers that are similar to the Rembrandt papers. Now I will let you know that if you apply clear gesso to these, they'll work equally as well as the Rembrandt paper. But they will curl. The paper is a little thin. So when you get finished with a painting, if you apply the clear gesso to this surface or the Rembrandt, then make sure at the end you put it between some tracing paper, put it in a large book or underneath something heavy to keep it flattened out. And it usually will kind of keep it shape. But I also have another trick I do, a technique I do where I can mount the painting after it's completed to a board. I have that video. And by the way, if you ever want to find anything on this channel, go to YouTube, type in Monet Café at the top and then something close. Monet Café mounting. And you'll find my mounting video. Monet Café, make your own pastel surface. And I have playlist as well. So you can usually find all that kind of stuff. So just keep that in mind. It does curl a bit after applying this. So at the end, flatten it out by putting it in between some books or something heavy. So let's start painting again. And so what do I think is going to happen at this point? I didn't know. Half my life with art is experimentation. I really love experimenting and trying new products and seeing what works and what doesn't work. But I'm really hoping it's going to give me more layering, more brilliant color. And also to give me that final effect of what I think is a beautiful pastel painting without that patterned look. Of the texture there. And I believe it or not, I'm adding more dark. And I just wanted to get it down to have a little bit of dark just in the areas that are the darkest in the reference image. I use my little chamois cloth again. And I have high hopes that I'm going to be able to get some layering down that looks more like a pastel painting application. And I wasn't even sure. It looked a little bit like a muddy mess at this point. But I thought I am not going to give up. I'm going to keep trying. And my goal sometimes in sharing these things is to help you guys to not make mistakes and not get frustrated because my story, I tell it often about how Monet Café started, I almost quit pastel painting. I got so frustrated. I started working on unsanded papers with some very poor quality pastels that I got at a little art supply store. I think it was a brand. I'm not cutting down this brand. But it was Reeves, R-E-E-V-E-S. And it was just a lot of binder and not a lot of pigment. So you didn't get a lot of color and also not a lot of layering. So it was quite frustrated. And I had a hard time getting information. This was back before YouTube or if they had YouTube, I didn't know about it. And so I just muddled my way through. I'm a very determined soul. So I was like, I'm not going to quit. I really wanted pastels to work for me because they are so user-friendly and family-friendly. If you've got little ones at home, you don't have to mix up a lot of paint with chemicals and things. And I always say your pastels will wait patiently for you until you return. Often I had to try to start some kind of painting. I waited until my kids were a little bigger. But I would get pulled away, taking one to football practice, one to guitar lessons, and making dinner and everything. And I can't even imagine if I was trying to do oil painting. Now watercolor painting is a little easier because you don't have to worry about your brushes drying with the oil paint or acrylic paint in it. But pastels are really just such a great medium. Plus I love holding the color in my hand. I just think it's so cool. So that's one of the reasons I like to share these things. Even if it's a phase that I'm like, oh man, I'm frustrated or whatever. It's to help you guys from making mistakes and to help you realize that even if you do make some of these, I'll call them, have a challenge, not really making a mistake, you can find a fix. And I have to say my patrons are really great at this. I love how everyone shares their pastel painting explorations and experiments. And we all learn from each other. I just learned something from one of my patrons, one of my long-time patrons, Andrea. She's so sweet and so helpful. From her the other day of something I'm going to try. So it's really neat to learn and grow together. That's one of the whole concepts of Monet Café. And thank you, Lord, that it's become more than I ever thought. And God bless everyone. And it's not just my patrons that I communicate with. I love it when you guys leave me comments. I love to try to get to all your comments. And sometimes I can't, but I'm trying real hard. And here I just held up some of the greens from the micro set with a few other greens that I tried. This is that kind of that lighter green in the micro set. And these are all just a little bit too light right now. I may add some of these towards the end, but I like working my values kind of from dark to light. Now, this is a nice, I believe this was a perhaps a Sennelier pastel. They're softer, have more color. But notice I am indeed getting more layering down. And I think you'll start to notice as I apply more layers the colors are more vibrant. Especially when I get to the flowers. And I noticed I actually didn't have a lot of pastel application even before adding the clear gesso to that middle ground area. So I was still seeing quite a bit of the pattern underneath that. So I did go back and resort to my blending tool just to soften the grasses. And I don't often blend as much as I have in this particular painting. Actually, I hardly ever do. I usually just only blend an initial layer. But this was to get rid of the pattern. So that was my strategy for working on this paper. Now another reason I wanted to share this is a lot of us may have some of this paper laying around that you may have tried an initial painting on it and gotten frustrated with it. So this is a workaround. Now you can already start to see that it's starting to lose that consistent pattern throughout. And you know, looking back at this video, I've been creating so many paintings lately. Sometimes I lose track of what I've used. And so I'm literally remembering as I'm watching the video replay. But I really did use primarily the microsets. This one is another green that I'm using. It's a softer pastel. Rembrandts are actually known for being kind of a medium medium. I would say they're not super hard and they're not super soft. But medium and harder pastels have their advantages. New pastels. I use those a lot. Prismacolor new pastels, they're harder and they have their advantages just like Rembrandts. But sometimes you can't get the really vibrant color because they have a little bit more binder to color ratio. So but you can see here I'm using another one of the microsets, one of the Rembrandts and I do at the very end, add some sceneliers for the pink flowers and also like you saw me use the dark. But mostly it's been the Rembrandt microsets. So I'm going to be talking the next few videos about some budget friendly pastels you can get which are Rembrandts and just a few other pastels that will really make a difference for you. Because I know a lot of you guys are probably like I was when I started. I was you know really when I started it was kind of right about the time I became a single mom and I didn't really have a lot of time to paint and I certainly didn't have a lot of money. But painting was like I always say to you guys it was therapeutic for me. I just needed something to escape to if I could just sneak in a moment here or there. And so it was frustrating not knowing what to buy and not being able to afford things. So that's why I want to be able to help you guys. You can get so frustrated not having the budget to buy the things you need. So I hope my lessons can help others not give up like I almost did. Now pretty much the time I've been talking here my painting I've been kind of reestablishing things and you're about to see pretty soon how it's going to come to life with the lighter values. This is once again one of the Rembrandt pastels from the micro sets and pretty soon these are this is kind of like a golden color from that yellowy set. And what I'm doing is I'm reducing the size of the flower heads as they go into the distance. Also as things go into the distance they change how far apart they are. They start to become more horizontal rather than so spacious in the foreground. Also I like to try I wish I'd have done a little more in this painting to vary the direction of the heads. You don't want the flower heads all facing the same direction. I'm also I didn't love how I guess these are kind of like dandelions. I didn't love how I had the lines so precise and so I'm softening those a little bit and now I'm coming back in just a bit is this it not yet I'm going to come back with the even lighter yellow. Yes see that now I want to reserve this not have it on every flower and we can control our focal point by various little strategies one is color of course your most vibrant color our eyes are going to go to. One is contrast the different lightness or darkness of things and if you have something really dark next to something really light our eyes going to go to it as in that dark base I have to that that's my main focal flower I just did there. Your eyes going to go to that because that's the lightest area next to the darkest area. Also these Rembrandt Pastels because they're round and they're a little harder they are excellent for making flower stems you basically just kind of roll it you learn a little rolling strategy and it's also good to make your stems a little curvy or have a little jag here or there and not all in the same direction and when they get into the distant flowers you're not going to see them all that much they're going to become very very faint so don't over do it with the distance flowers and you really only need a few now this part was fun to me I like coming in and adding little chunky colors of texture and they don't have to be all exactly grass shaped but it makes it really fun now this is a Terry Ludwig Pastel and it's just a nice kind of muted warm color green color and it's a little lighter so it's going to pop a little bit but see how that little change of shape really made it more interesting and grasses don't have to be or they actually shouldn't be all just these skinny little grass shapes going up your painting is going to get really boring so vary the shapes of your grasses roll some this way and that way and also keep in mind that you don't need it everywhere our brains are amazing how they will interpret things without a lot of information so put your most information and that doesn't even have to be a lot in your areas of focal point and everything else should just be like supporting characters in a play they don't steal the show they support the main character and so I'm using in this micro the screen from the micro set again just to get in a little bit more in the distance not too much and a little spice here there of some value changes and this was a lot of fun now I hope you can see the difference with what has happened since I have applied the clear gesso now it did look like a mess at first because it kind of muddied when I applied it that's why I say if you're going to use if you got some of this paper laying around you got frustrated with it the first time you used it and you really don't have the money to go buy something else get you some clear gesso and just know that you can apply clear gesso just to the paper by itself if you want but I always like to do a type of underpainting even if you just put down you know your basic values or one complimentary color and like I said in my next video coming up you're going to see me do all these different little strategies on these little paintings using these micro sets on different surfaces you're going to learn a lot in that video this is a Sennelier pastel I believe it is from the 120 half stick set it's called the Paris collection I love to recommend this set if you if you're beginner beginner it's like you always or I've always said with kids they say they want a horse you don't go buy them a thorough bread you get them kind of like a pony at first and you know so don't go out if you're just starting or you don't have the budget to do this and buy some of the really expensive one unless you're rich and then go for it but um but you know you can you can play around with some of these sets that are more affordable micro sets are great and then you can just get a few of colors that pop like I said I'll be talking about this more in the next video and a few darks and you can actually really accomplish a lot you've seen this painting mostly the micro set with micro sets plural eight of them I used why didn't use all eight I used the greens um the yellows the sienas and some of those teal colors I used in the distant trees because it had a dark um and then you know like I said just a few really vibrant popping colors maybe a few more greens and some good darks Terry Ludwig has some great darks so um I'm sprinkling a little bit of this color even though um I didn't see it I felt like there was just pink sticking on top there and nothing to bring it together so I just kind of gently layered some of that paint down in the grasses to give it a little bit of color harmony um and I'm trying to make these flowers to where they're also to kind of happy popping up but they don't all have to be the same and oh my goodness I once again have talked almost this entire time um now I am making a few little very light grasses I think this was one of those other softer pastels but as I said I used mostly the pastels from the micro set now here's a little bit of a close up it's fun and happy I did so many winter scenes during the month of December these spring flowers were really refreshing now let's go back and compare the years before just using the pastel paper with no gesso on it and look at the difference so I hope you learned something from this and I hope I have given you a reason to use some of these papers you may have thought hmm I can't use this and now you can and if you've hung out with me for this long I really hope you'll click the like button and like this video I can't tell you how much that really does help these videos to get shared with others I will be putting this original painting in my Etsy shop along with lots more I really need to get busy and upload so God bless you all I pray you learn something and happy painting