 Welcome to Monet Cafe Studio. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. Did you know you can sketch in a sketchbook with soft pastels? In today's tutorial, I think you will be amazed as I share tips and techniques I've learned over the years to take my pastel painting on the go and capture some of life's beautiful moments by doing some pastel journaling in this way. This lesson is not only great for beginner artists with affordable products and easy techniques, it's great for pastel artists of every level. And here we go! Let's begin by exploring some of the sketchbooks that I've used over the years and I'll explain why I like some of them more than others. These are little ones that have a glue binding at the top. I actually prefer sketchbooks that have a ring binding and I'll talk more about that reasoning in a minute. I use sketchbooks of different sizes and shapes even watercolor paper, which will be the lesson that we're doing today. Well, yes, we'll be combining a little bit of watercolor with soft pastel. And years ago, I would only sketch in my sketchbooks with maybe some charcoal and didn't really consider soft pastels as an option. But often in life, we're forced to learn new things when a trial or a tragedy hits. And our home totally flooded six years ago and I didn't have a studio to work in. For a while, my family and I lived in a travel trailer. I started using pastels to sketch in sketchbooks and lots of my techniques really worked. So I'm excited to share those with you today. This is one of the watercolor sketchbooks I used when we were a little bit homeless for a while and that's why I don't have the tracing paper between the sheets. But this was a technique that I discovered where I laid down watercolor first and then applied soft pastel on top. It worked great and I continue to use it to this day. I love using this very affordable technique and that's what I'm going to teach you right now. I'll be using a Kansan watercolor pad, very affordable. It's a 9x12 size and we need a reference photo. I was very blessed recently to discover with my husband a beautiful field of sunflowers and zinnias. It took tons of reference images that are all available to my patrons if you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page and I chose two of them today to journal this memory and this moment. You can use whatever watercolors you have but I'm using a very affordable set made by May Lying. I don't know if I'm saying that right. I'll have all the product links in the description of this video just so you know. Now I love to do a color chart when using watercolors. They appear so much more luminous and bright when you apply them with water on the paper. So fortunately this watercolor set came with one and I really love these colors. For the price, it's really great. They even have these metallic colors. How cool is that? The pastels I'll be using for this lesson are almost entirely from this Prismacolor New Pastel 96 set. Now they do make smaller sets in 24 and other multiples but I find these pastels are great for working on regular paper. They're a little bit harder and they apply well. Another product. One more product I'm adding to this. I'm just going to show you a trick using this acrylic ink. It's a great way to get darks in your pastel paintings. And just a quick little station break before sharing my quick little trick with acrylic inks. Would you go ahead and like this video? Leave me a comment if you like and by all means subscribe to Monet Cafe. Also, if you would like the extra content that I often talk about and join my beautiful family of patrons, you can do that for only $5 a month at patreon.com. I used to always love this color which is called Purple Lake to get a good dark but I recently discovered the one that was in my left hand called Indigo. It's great. You're going to see me use them right now. I use various brushes. Fan brushes. For this technique I'm going to show you various sizes and I just want to mention all of these brushes are really cheap. I think I got some of them at Walmart and for under paintings that I'm going to show you here, sometimes it's better to have a brush that has a little bit of character. I think you'll see why in just a minute and as I always say, use what you have. So let me show you a neat way to get some darks in your pastel painting and watercolor painting by using these acrylic inks. I'm just going to make a mark of this Indigo color and scribble in a little bit of it to suggest a tree line in the distance and then I'm going to use my brush and a little bit of water to create a nice subtle and subdued line of trees. What I'm doing here is I just have a little bit of water on my brush and I control the water by just dabbing it on the paper towel. But this is a way to get in some really good darks to begin a painting if you're starting with watercolor. You might know that watercolor, you can't really get good darks unless you just layer a lot of thick watercolor down so using an acrylic ink like this is really a great way to get in some of your trees and darker elements. Now I'm just doing the same thing with the purple lake and I'm using fan brushes by the way on that one. Now I am going to show you how you don't even have to have these acrylic inks. I'm using a dark Prismacolor pastel. It's called the Spruce Blue color. You could use any dark and I'm adding water to it. You can see I get a similar effect. Not quite as dark as the acrylic ink so that's why I really like using that product. I'll be doing two 5 by 7 paintings in my sketching journal and I love using these pre-cut mats to go ahead and mark in my 5 by 7 area. I mean why measure it out? It's pretty easy using these mats. The interior area is 5 by 7. The first reference image is some of the sunflowers from the beautiful day that I had. Like I said, I kind of wanted to journal this moment. My husband said, hey, look at that field over there. He was so sweet. He knew I'd probably take forever taking pictures, which I did and he stopped and let me take this picture and many more. I got stung by a bee but it was worth it. And now I'm getting in an easy, quick sketch just using a pencil. I'm going to speed this up. You can't see it that well anyway. Just getting in a tree line. Remember the dark tree line I just created? I'm going to use that same technique to get in my darks. I also have some darks in the foreground and almost like a little pathway and some energy in the sky. So here we go. I'm going to use the Indigo acrylic ink and I'm going to use this little, it's kind of like a stiff bristle brush and I liked how some of the ends of it were splayed out. So I'm just laying down some of this Indigo color in the general area of the tree shape. I'm not worried about getting all those spaces between the tree branches. I'll show you my technique for achieving that later. We're just getting in basic shapes. And now another great thing about this acrylic ink is you think you have just one value. Well you have tons of values because the more water you add, the lighter you can make it. So I get in my darkest darks first and then I add a little more water to make this little trail or underneath pathway leading the viewer's eye through the painting and add a little more water to get in some of the darker elements in the sky portion. A little bit lighter in some of the field in the distance because value gets lighter as it goes back further into the distance. And now it's time for watercolor. I'm getting out my little color chart again and once again I use this. I stress making one even if a company doesn't provide one because you can really determine the colors so much better in the actual palette. The colors I'm using, they just look dark. You can't even tell. So I'm going to choose some cooler colors to lay down prior to beginning the pastel painting. I believe this color I chose is Sky Blue. I like to make a pretty concentrated puddle of it and sometimes use it directly from the palette to get my darkest areas. And I'm using this very similar to how I use the acrylic ink. I'm getting my darker values. It's just more paint to water ratio in my areas where my darkest values will be. And those are typically trees. Elements that are perpendicular to the landscape that stand up usually are darker. And foreground grasses where you have deep roots and things usually are darker. Foreground values are usually darker anyway. And real quickly I want to share why I like using the acrylic ink and the watercolor to begin a pastel painting that is just on paper or surface like this. Even as you get limited layers with soft pastel when you're working on surfaces that are just like paper that aren't a professional sanded surface. Therefore, I know that I'm not going to be able to layer many colors of the soft pastel and what happens when I use the acrylic ink and the watercolor is they don't take up any of the layering ability. It's like getting down two free layers of color before you add soft pastel. Now, many videos that I have would have used clear gesso to get a little texture to my surface. If you've watched my videos as much as you see, I just add a little clear gesso because it's clear you can see the underpainting underneath and it dries with a little bit of grit kind of make a little sanded surface. But the goal of this lesson is painting on the go, taking a sketchbook and having limited supplies. So I'm not treating this surface after the watercolor with anything and I'll be adding pastels directly to the surface. I'm just choosing a few of the colors here and to reiterate, use whatever you have. It doesn't mean you have to go out and buy, you know, more product if you already have something you can use. I actually love it on my Patreon page when you don't have the same colors because it comes up with all these interesting combinations of colors and paintings that are unique in their own way. Towards the end of the painting I do use a few softer pastels if you can't get many layers with these Prismacolor new pastels, they're a bit harder. If you have some soft pastels you can usually get a little bit of extra layering and color punch to your painting. Now I've just got this pretty turquoisey color and you see I'm just holding it lightly using a really light touch and what I'm focusing on is getting the energy and motion of these clouds keeping it very dramatic and impressionistic. I think there's a freedom in learning the joy and the simplicity of impressionistic painting. There's a freedom in that we don't have to follow the photo exactly but more we follow the energy, we follow the moment and that's really a lot of what this pastel journaling and sketching is about. It's about capturing a moment that you had in life or where you were even if you just take photos and come back to paint it. Now I've got a little bit of a darker value blue and it's a little cooler. It doesn't have as much green in it as the turquoise and again just keeping this nice energy to things. Now I am going to speed this up a bit and if you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page it's at this point that you'll be getting extra commentary and the video won't be sped up quite so much but not to worry Monet Cafe. You get plenty of content here in this video as well. I continue to add a few of the cooler colors to the sky and in general just getting the expression of the sky and keeping things really loose is very important at the beginning stages. Now I have a really pretty yellow green and I'm using it for the background part of the field and gradually I'll get darker as I move forward. This is a magenta that I added to some of the grasses and the trees to warm it up. Here's that darker green I used to add to the grasses and to the trees. Gradually getting my strokes more vertical as I move forward. Now here's a very important step to the painting process get yourself a sip of coffee or tea and now what I'm going to do is add the flower centers rather than the flower shapes themselves. I find this is an easy way with sunflowers just to get a general placement to where some of your flowers are going to be. Now keep in mind and I apologize for my shaky easel. I had my camera attached to my table mistakenly. It's better to have it on the floor. As I was saying, keep in mind that with pastel painting on sketch paper or watercolor paper like this you are limited in your layers. You're not going to get as many layers as on the professional sanded surfaces so I already know that I'm just going to get about 4 to 5 probably layers on this and that's why it was so helpful to get down the acrylic ink and the watercolor. That already gives you 2 layers of color and value and it doesn't affect how many layers of pastel you can still get. So that's another reason that's a really good little trick. So I gradually just add some of my darker values to the bottom of the sunflowers. They're going to be a darker orange and on the tops where the light is hitting the petals that's where I grab those lighter yellow values and I'm keeping in mind the shape of the flowers, kind of their positioning. You don't want them all just facing the same way like looking at the viewer. You want them turned in different ways and angled. That's going to make it feel more true to life and just have more expression. I'm giving some general shapes to these leaves for the sunflowers. A nice cool green, kind of a medium little darker to medium value is perfect for laying on top of the acrylic ink that I already laid down. You're getting that feeling of the deep shadows and just a few leaf shapes and that's one of the things about the sketching process is you don't want everything to be so perfect. It's impressionistic. It's remembering a moment and it's really an easy and relaxed way to paint. Also a great way to have sweet memories of places that you went moments that you experienced and more. Added a few stems. Prismacolor new pastels are great for that and starting to develop things a little bit more. I used that red magenta to get some of that color at the base of the trees and the bottom of some of the sunflowers. I worked it into some of the grasses. That magenta is my pop of color. I really like to use a color that's a little different from the rest of the palette and now I'm pressing much harder to get some of these beautiful golden colors onto some of the sunflowers and again I apologize for the shaky video. It's even accentuated because it's sped up so I'll fix that problem by the next tutorial. Now I'm going to develop the sky a little bit more adding some of this turquoise. I'm leaving a little blank spaces where I'm going to add some of the cloud shapes. Now I'm using a pastel that is not one of the Prismacolor pastels. It is a Terry Ludwig pastel and I'm just continuing to give a little bit more depth to the tree line. You see how some of those distant trees look a little more turquoise. They're not quite as dark so that makes them feel far away. And now I am going to make one of my flowers just popping up over the horizon. I think that always adds a little bit of character and personality. Scumbling in some more leaf shapes is where I actually got one of my soft pastels. I added a little bit more to the sunflowers. It was a beautiful yellow golden color that was a Sennelier pastel. The softer pastels will give you more color on final layers. And this is a Terry Ludwig it's called the Eggplant color. It's a dark, dark purple. Appears almost as black and I wanted to use it just to develop some dark centers for some of the focal point flowers and if you have just the Prismacolor new pastels that I did the majority of this painting for you can work just fine painting like this but if you have a few softies they will add a pop of color. Before starting painting number two I'm using this tracing paper. I'm going to protect the first painting I did because I have two paintings on one page I don't want to smear it and I purposely, you've noticed I'm left-handed I purposely painted the first painting on the right so I didn't have to put my hand on top of it the other way around. So I'm going to cut this cover it up and pick out another reference image for painting number two. I went back to my photos from my sweet experience I had with my husband Todd and decided on this photo here and I'm going to show you the same technique that I did with the acrylic ink using the Indigo once again but I'm going to use a different strategy rather than using a brush as I did in the first painting I'm going to show you another product that you can use with the acrylic ink that worked really well this is a sponge now I live not far from an area called Tarpon Springs it's a beautiful town and it's on the water and they're known as the sponge capital maybe of the world I don't know but there's natural sponges that grow in the water there so you can just get bags of these sponges for a really good price and I've just cut off a little piece here and I'm dipping it into the acrylic ink and I'm going to use this to make my tree line it makes some really interesting little shapes it's a little bit different than using the fan brush but I thought it was really fun do you know the sky is the limit with art you just get creative find what you have make it work and have fun that's how I roll so here I'm just basically getting a concept of the shapes of some of these trees I find when you use like the sponge or even a fan brush you tend to make marks and shapes that are more gestural I know that there is kind of a dark area that's leading the groupings of these flowers into the landscape so I'm giving a little hint of that dark trail that will be buried with grasses and flowers but it still has that influence underneath now I'm using the sponge to get a little more grass shapes and I did get the brush again to kind of give a little bit more shape to some of those trees and I use the brush to get in some of the values in the sky once again very similar to the same strategy as the first painting however I decided with this one to do something a little bit different when it comes to the watercolor temperature I decided rather than going with a cool underpainting to do a warm underpainting and I again apologize so much for whatever happened to the lighting it does correct itself especially at the end when I reveal both of the paintings but something happened made everything look a little bit washed out even my hands look a little weird but I think you can still see pretty clearly what I'm doing so I laid out colors in value light like yellow, orange and I just copied those I should have put them in the other order on my palette the lightest values in the distant grasses oranges in the middle and more of the reds in the deep roots I even add a little bit to the sky remember how I talk about echoing color throughout the painting it makes things feel connected and now I would like you to sit back and relax and enjoy this peaceful music as I create painting number two much of the concepts and principles are the same as painting number one and if you'd ever like to slow this down and watch it at a manageable speed for following along you can always do that on any of my youtube videos by clicking the gear icon it's in the lower right of every video and you can choose your playback speed so you can slow it down and watch at your own pace however I do recommend turning the volume down because if I'm speaking my voice will sound funny and music will also sound pretty weird so enjoy this now don't go anywhere because I'm going to show you at the end how I use these markers to journal a little bit of a moment or memory about this particular painting and the reference photo alright enjoy I'm finishing up with some final marks giving a little pop of color I did use a few other pastels to get some of those reds I believe they were also a Sennelier pastel now I'm doing what's called sky hole painting rather than painting the branches with spaces between them you carve in negative shapes with pastels here's the final very loose and sketchy and impressionistic and it captured the moment in my heart and mind beautifully and here's a little tip use a kneaded eraser it's really like a little piece of putty to remove any pastel you don't want around the pages of your sketchbook it works great and with pastel sketching I think it's important to write down something remember the moment the date who you were with things like that so I'm going to use these Moghian markers they come in different sizes and just do a little bit of hand lettering I once again cover up my paintings just to protect them from my weird left handedness yeah I'm one of those lefties that writes all upside down and strange and I'm just capturing the memory that this was a day on June 24th when I was with my husband Todd and it was just a beautiful moment in memory he was so sweet to pull over and let me spend probably an hour taking photos and now let me pull back and show you the final paintings in some better lighting here you can see it makes a sweet little presentation I even like the jagged edges on the sides of the sketches and you could keep an entire watercolor sketchbook in this way I have some that are filled with paintings so I hope you really enjoyed this lesson in Monet Cafe I hope you'll subscribe become a patron if you would like to get the extra content I talk about often and just to support this channel it keeps the free videos coming alright I'll be back with more lessons soon and as always God bless and happy painting