 Welcome artistic friends, visitors, and subscribers to Monet Cafe. I'm so glad you're with me today. I'm going to be creating this painting, giving lots of instruction, using a particular set of pastels made by Giraud pastels. It's called Poetic Landscape. It's a fantastic set of pastels. I'll be giving lots of instruction, but also sharing with you why I think this particular set and brand of pastels is an excellent choice for beginners. So join me in my studio and let's get started. Welcome artistic friends and visitors to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I like to think of this as a virtual art studio that I bring to the convenience of your home. I love bringing these lessons when I can while I'm in my home studio. Today I'm going to be sharing a brand of pastels that I have dreamt of getting for years and just never treated myself to them. I don't know why, but there was an artist early on in my pastel career. Maybe the artist that inspired me to even start trying pastels. I can't remember. It's been that long, but she uses this brand of pastels I think almost exclusively, and this particular set is one that she put together. So I'm going to share with you why I love them, why I think they're a great set for beginners, artist of every level, but I think there's a reason why beginners will like them. I created this little preliminary painting just to kind of get warmed up, but I'll be doing a larger painting for this tutorial, giving you lots of instruction and why I love this brand of pastel. So welcome to Monet Cafe. Let's get started. I've got my coffee cup. It's time to relax and paint. Giraud Pastels is a French company, so it took me a while to pronounce Giraud correctly, and this is the brochure that shows their entire set, which is a total of 300. And this particular Elizabeth Mowery Poetic Landscape set comes in this beautiful wooden box. I love the presentation, and it is a total of 102 pastels selected by Elizabeth Mowery, and I particularly love the very wide range of blues and purples. This set also has great darks, great neutrals, great lights. It's a full set that you should be able to use to paint any landscape. And I like what Elizabeth Mowery had to say about Giraud Pastels. Each Giraud Pastel stick has the incredible versatility of both a hard and a soft pastel. The exquisite range of beautiful colors makes it possible to capture all of nature's components, whether they are intensely dramatic or hauntingly atmospheric. While you can buy some Giraud Pastels on other sites, I was only able to find this particular wood set of 102 with the poetic landscape on a site called pastelsetcetera.com. I also thought I'd mention that I love some of Elizabeth Mowery's books. This particular one is on dakotapastels.com website, and it's absolutely beautiful. She has another book. I'm not sure if this one's on their website, but this is fantastic. Now here's a sample of some of her work, and I think you'll probably see why I fell in love with it many years ago, and I have always felt that Elizabeth Mowery just inspired my style, and you know I hope to emulate her style anyway. I mean just look at these beautiful paintings, and this one in particular I just love. Now before I get started with the painting, just a very little quick example of what you can do when you receive a set of pastels. When it comes with a color chart or reference chart for your colors, many pastel companies do this, and this is the one that came with my set. Now it has all of the numbers for the whole 300 individual pastel sticks. Now they come with a little engraved, I should say, number on the pastels, and you simply match the number to the chart. But as you can see, or maybe you can't see, the numbers are not in any particular order, so you literally have to search through every single one. I finally found that little one here. Now I'm going to do a few more here, but I'm not going to make you go through looking at me finding every single one. It finally did start to make a little, have a little rhyme or reason to it. I found that colors were kind of categorized by color and in a bit by value. So it did get a little easier as I went on. But I did go ahead and put in all 102 pastels on this chart. Now the benefit to this is, if you run out of a particular color and you can't quite remember what it is, you can refer to that chart, you know the number, or if you know you're getting low on a particular pastel and you love it, you can know exactly which pastel you need to order. So here they all are finally filled out. Here's my setup where I actually have up to the left on my board a particular Elizabeth Mowry painting just to inspire me. And you can do that. You can use another artist's work to inspire you. You're not recreating it, but it just kind of was something I wanted to kind of create a similar mood. Now I do have my own reference photo up top of the field that's behind my house. I just use this kind of tree scape a lot. And another painting of some red flowers, poppies, whatever they are to inspire me. So I'm kind of combining all of those into one painting. And the paper that I'm using or the surface is a piece of UART 400 grit sanded paper. It's a 9 by 12 pack. Now I'm showing you here how, beware if you live in a humid climate, often it will warp. So I try to sit my papers if I get them in a pack or whatever on something heavy on top to keep it from warping. I've got my artist's tape, basically a piece on the back and a piece on the front to get a full surface. I also have my little very inexpensive pastel dust catcher, which is just a piece of aluminum foil. And now I keep my pastels in general in my studio to the left of me. I'm left-handed. So in this particular case, I just went ahead and sat the whole set right on top. I'm going to work exclusively from this set for this painting, with the only exception of one little pastel I use for the sky that I actually didn't even need to use. All right, so now I'm using my own reference photo to kind of get that general tree line in the background. I'm just using a pastel pencil here. And this is very, very loose. It's just kind of a little guide to get started. I'm not doing much of a sketch at all in this. And it's really not needed. So now, after putting in the initial sketch, is when I am going to decide on my underpainting possibilities. And for this one, I chose the Derwent Intense Blocks. Okay, so I said I only used Elizabeth Mallory pastels. I should say with the exception of the underpainting. What I've done here is I went ahead and bought the whole, I think it's 72, did it say? And I break them because I like to use them kind of on their sides. But I've gone ahead and shown you kind of what they look like just on regular paper. Now, when you apply water or alcohol to these, that's a little spritzer I have just with alcohol in it. I like the fine mist to it. Now, these actually show up brighter on pastel paper, but you get the idea. When you add water or alcohol, the colors intensify. And I wanted to use these just to create a warm, oh, I added one more orange color. I wanted a warm glow underneath this painting. So now that's the only pastel I used that is not a Jiro Elizabeth Mallory poetic landscape pastel. And I wanted to get that pink glow that she kind of had in that one painting of hers in the sky. Now, I am using the Intense Blocks right now, the ones that you just saw me demonstrate. I'm getting in the tree line with like a dark, dark bluish, almost a purplish blue. And I am continuing to lay down color kind of in the directional strokes that this particular landscape would follow. I decided to make that tree on the right there bigger and bring the kind of the horizon line down on that one a little bit to give it more depth in the painting. Now, I'm giving a general idea of a trail or a path or just a little valley of flowers or something to lead the eye into the painting. This is all going to be buried by the time I finish, but a little bit of it shows through and it just makes a nice composition that pulls the eye in rather than just a flat field with nothing to generate that sense of movement. So I'm just, and I know I have to sped up a little bit here, but I actually was doing it quite quickly because you want this underpainting. One of the beauty, beautiful things about an underpainting is that it creates a sense of energy, movement, and looseness to your painting. And it kind of breaks you out of that, oh, I got to get so fussy about everything. You have a nice, loose, colorful beginning to your painting. I find, I love under paintings and I particularly love a warm underpainting. The reason I call it a warm underpainting is I'm using the warm colors of the color wheel. Now, here we go with the fun part. I have my little spritzer with alcohol and I'm working in sections because I don't want the intense blue color of those trees to blend in with the sky. It's okay if a little bit of it gets on there, you just kind of blend it in. Again, this is supposed to be loose and free. And then I start working on the darker colors now. Now, it's okay if the drips happen. The drips just create that beautiful looseness and freedom in the painting. And then I had the water shown there because I am washing my brush out between each transition of color. Now, notice how the backs of part of the field, I went horizontally with my strokes. As I move closer to the foreground, my strokes are becoming more vertical, kind of gradually and then very intensely vertical at the foreground because that's what happens with perspective in nature. We see things taller and darker in the foreground and they gradually meld and blend together as they recede to where they're more horizontal than vertical. Now, here are my Elizabeth Mowry choices for the sky. I do end up adding a few more colors later, but at this point I'm just experimenting and playing because I haven't really played with these. I think I bought an individual set of Mowry pastels before. I mean just a couple of sticks, but now I'm showing how I am using this cigar cutter. No, I don't smoke cigars, but someone in our art group shared that it's a perfect cutter for pastels. I was going to try to keep the set in full sticks, but I was like, no, I just I love to work with the sides of my pastel. So I'm cutting all of these and it just, I don't know, it's kind of my style and the way I work. I think a lot of you guys do that too. Now, the advantage of this is that you can use the side of the pastel or you can also use these pastels. Now, this is the part I was going to say that I think it's a benefit for beginners. These particular pastels are in between a hard and a soft pastel. They're not so buttery and crumbly that you can't use them at the beginning and they're not so hard that they don't lay down good color or or have a smooth application. I find they're just incredibly versatile. But what I was saying about the advantage, I can use the sides like I'm using now, but I can also turn them more upright and use the the rounder edge. You can use those to create grasses, you can make linear strokes. So you've got a pastel that's a combination of painting and drawing and sketching. So I'm just loving these pastels. Again, I I had bought I think maybe two individual Jiro pastels years ago. I knew I loved them and I knew I loved Elizabeth Mallory's artwork. So I don't know what took, well I do know what took me so long to buy this set. Just lots of life challenges and financial challenges and you know I think you may have seen that this particular set on the pastels et cetera dot com website is $495. Now that sounds like whoa that's so expensive but I actually consider it quite a bargain to get 102 pastels that are so versatile and get the wooden box. I do think this would be a set that you could use just by itself you know. I mean maybe add in a few other pastels but I found it had enough colors, enough values, enough neutrals to be able to create virtually any landscape you want. And I didn't run out of layering possibilities with this. UART does take a lot of layering. It allows for a lot of layering and sometimes if you use the very very soft pastels they fill up the tooth so quickly you don't get as many layers. Well because these are a little bit harder you get a lot of layering potential. So there's another plus for this particular brand of pastel. So I am just thrilled. I really really loved creating this painting. I was a little bit in a rush. I had some things I had to tend to but but I had a really good time. Now you wouldn't have to do the underpainting if you didn't want to. I mean you could totally do this just starting out. You could use these pastels to create an underpainting with the same technique that I used with the intense blocks. You've got so many possibilities for an underpainting. You can use watercolor. UART paper obviously is water friendly because I use the alcohol. And by the way I just use alcohol because it dries faster and I do think it has a little bit of a different effect when I when I put it down on whatever underpainting medium I'm using. I just I don't know I like the alcohol better. Now I'm adding in these shadowy areas of the grasses. Well now I'm back on the background trees but I noticed I added some blues and purples just to add some coolness. Notice how those background trees I am making an obvious value change. I had them a little bit too light but I'm making layers of trees. The four ground trees are the darkest in value. There's some that are kind of a little further back. I'm going to actually yeah now I'm lightening those up a little bit because they're a little further away but they they go in layers or stages from darkest to lightest. That's what's going to give you that illusion of depth in your painting. And I just kind of try to generally get it in at the beginning and and not get too fussy with it and kind of fine-tune things as I go on. But now back to getting see how I'm using the edge of the pastel now to create those grasses. That's what I was saying is so great about these pastels. Sometimes if you use a really chunky pastel like a Terry lug lug wig pastel you can't really you could use the edge for grasses but it's much thicker and not the fine line that you can get with the Giro pastels. So I'm going to continue to paint here add some music enjoy the process and I will pop back in when I start adding a little bit more detail. I wanted to make a comment on painting flowers in a field like this. Obviously, I mean it's pretty obvious that they're going to get smaller closer together as they recede lighter in value and duller in color. But I wanted to comment that I personally have to try hard to create a randomness to them. I don't know what it is about our brain. We we tend to want to put things in rows and columns and in order and it doesn't really work that way in nature. I mean there's an order. I always say there's like a spontaneous order but it's it's random and harmonious at the same time. So trying to emulate that with the flowers is can be challenging but you want to create movement and flowers changing direction where they're facing. So I'm I'm constantly trying to work at that and I think it does get better than more that you do it. I also wanted to mention I think in just a minute I'm going to make a choice yeah here it is. I because there was so much warmth in the foreground in the underpainting and in the flowers, I wanted to warm up the sky a bit rather than it being just pink. I thought I would make it a little more yellowy peach and the neat thing about these Jiro pastels is again because they're in between a hard and a soft pastel they layer so nicely and I'm using rather than the sides like I often do to put in bigger areas of more consistent color. I'm using the side to create linear marks and if you're right-handed your marks might go in the opposite direction but I kind of like sometimes when paintings show a lot of linear marks in one direction or another so I'm purposely emphasizing that by using the sides or the edges of the like the ends of the pastels there and and again I'm just I'm really enjoying being able to use the sides of the pastels, the ends of the pastels. I haven't at all come close to losing my layering ability here and and they're just working beautifully. All right more painting. You know there's multiple stages where I have the advantage of looking back at the videos I create and seeing the varying stages and sometimes I like it really loose like this but in this case I decided to spray a little fixative in the foreground. Fixative darkens your pastel pieces. A lot of people ask me if you fix your work at the end of the painting. I never do. It darkens the painting but you can use that darkening to your advantage in a couple of ways. One way you can get darker values in your foreground. That's where darker values typically happen anyway and you also can get a little workable fixative like this particular one Blair. Thank you Karen Margulis for turning everybody on to this product. It allows not only it does it darken in your favor in this area but it allows a little bit of extra layering. It puts down almost like a little gritty coating that allows you to put down you know this was allowing me to put down more layers but it almost makes the the pastels you put down more intense in color and so that's just a kind of a little trick that you can do and it definitely created a darker path in that foreground area and allowed my flowers to pop a little bit more on the surface. So at this point I'm adding again look at I'm using these Giro pastels to make stems for the flowers. I'm adding purple. I love adding purple in cooler shadowy areas. It just creates a lot of interest. I think if I'd have used all greens there that would have been a real boring you know kind of entrance into the painting. But again these Giro pastels see how I'm using the sides to carve in some maybe thicker grasses and then using the edges for the stems and again using the edges back there in the sky to create those linear marks. I'm still making it a little yellow. I think I felt later that that sky was a little too light. Sometimes we can have it the I did. I'm toning it down a little bit with more of a peachy color there. It was a little bit too bright in the painting so so yeah I fixed that a little as I go on. I did like in the Elizabeth Mallory painting that I used for inspiration. How she used just little hints of white flowers here and there. Now the same thing applies that I mentioned about flowers before. You want to keep them random. You want to make sure they get smaller and less intense in the background and also notice I'm using a light blue pastel but a bluer pastel for the flowers that are kind of buried in the grasses. They're not going to be as bright white when they're deeper in the grasses like that. And I'm about to finish this one up here and I think I have made it quite clear how much I love Giro pastels and this particular set in general. And no you think I was getting a commission or a kickback for bragging on them so much but I'm not. But I just love sharing with you guys the things that might help your art endeavors become more stress-free and practical and economical and and so I love to share these things when I can. And I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Please join us in our Facebook group if you haven't. It's Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook. Also please subscribe to this channel. I mean I don't charge anything for these videos but it does help the more that you comment, like, subscribe, and you know just keep coming back for more art lessons that you can have from the convenience of your own home. So I hope you had fun and learned something to make your world a bit more colorful and beautiful. As always, happy painting!