 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and have you ever been in an artistic rut? I think if anybody has painted for very long, you can raise your hand and say hallelujah to that. Well, today's lesson is going to be a series of lessons, actually, that helps you to break out of that artistic frustration or get out of the doldrums when you're not confident about your painting. Or the times when that blank canvas feels like a sea of emptiness. Feel free to follow along with this real-time lesson or use your own creative energy to create something that's uniquely yours. I would truly appreciate it if you would take a moment to like this video, comment if you enjoy it, and subscribe to this channel. Please also hit that bell icon to get notified of future videos. And a big shout-out of gratitude to my patrons on my Patreon page. My patrons are the reason I'm able to keep these free lessons coming, plus my patrons get extra goodies and extra content. Hello, artistic friends. I'm Susan Jenkins, and you're in my home studio, Monet Café, and I wanted to share something with you that it just happens sometimes as artists. Sometimes we have either artistic burnout and you're overworking if you're an artist, if you're a full-time artist, or you get in an artistic rut. They're both kind of the same. I'm kind of there. I've been working too much, and I need to just get away from anything serious and enjoy the beauty and the experience of art again. And I find that some of these little things that I do might help you, and they really are healing. So I'm just welcoming you to some things that I'm going to do today. Let me just share with you a couple of things to set the mood first before I get to creating. Well, first of all, you've got to find time, right? And I know, trust me, I know when you're a mom with young kids, that time is precious, right? So sometimes it's even hard to find that time, or I've been in that case, or you're caring for a loved one. I've been there too, taking care of family members who were ailing and even passing away. And we need that little moment of therapeutic time just to refresh ourselves. So I understand about that. Sometimes, and I've been in this case too, you are physically ill, not just tired from life, but sometimes you're going through an illness such as cancer. And when I was going through chemo and radiation, there were times I didn't feel like doing anything creative. But when I found the energy to be able to do something, that little bit of creative time and escape from just reality and everything going on in your life is so good. So those are things that we need to be able to find the time in those situations, first and foremost. So I know that's hard. Also create your environment. I know sometimes because it's a little limited moment. But if you can, tidy things up a bit, get you some supplies. I'll give you some tips and just anything to make your space easy to get to. Then try not to have anything specific in mind about an amazing painting that you're going to share with the world. You're going to be like a kid and just play and have fun again. Also, it's good. Get yourself a cup of tea or coffee. Believe me, just that little experience helps a lot. Put on a candle. In my case, I love essential oils. Put you on some calming music, often music that has no words. So you're just at peace. All right. So that's my mood. Now I am filming this, but I'm going to try to relax anyway. So let's get started with this. And I'm just going to get in the mood and bring you guys along with me. All right. Here we go. The first in this series of lessons on how to break out of an artistic rut is to limit your palette. It's going to cause you to create exciting color and to limit your time. Believe it or not, just these two simple limitations will help you to create something that is more fresh, lively, colorful, and a bit different than what you normally create. One thing I like to do when I'm painting for the joy of it or to break out of a rut is to limit myself with pastels if I'm using the soft pastel medium. And often I'll find a small set. This is a 40 half stick set made by Sennelier. I love the vibrant colors in this set. And I feel that it forces you to get bold with color rather than going for some of your standby colors or ones you normally choose. And it also helps you from having to get up and get more pastels or think too seriously about it. So I also like to work on supplies that are less expensive. Now with pastels, we know sometimes you just got to spend a little extra money. It really does make a difference. But use what you have. But again, limit yourself with a smaller selection. And this is a less expensive type of pastel paper. It is not sanded. It's made by Kansen. It's called Métance. I used to say it wrong. I said it Métiente. And it is just an unsanded pastel paper that has a bit of a texture to it, even though it's not sanded. So I'm going to paint on some of this. And I think one of the reasons that it is a little less stressful is it's not that expensive. You're not stressed that sometimes when you get out a expensive piece of sanded pastel paper, all of a sudden here comes the stress because you're worried about messing up that paper or doing something that's so perfect. And this is a way to just do some studies, relax and have fun. So what I like to do sometimes is even instead of using a whole sheet, I will often just... And this is the warm earth tones pad. And it has 24 sheets and it has different colors, which is fun. And that's what we're trying to do here. We're just trying to have some fun. So often what I'll do is I'll get a little matte. This is a five by seven matte. And I'll just mark off with a pastel pencil two different. It fits two framed out compositions to work on. And you're working smaller. That's another tip for breaking out of a rut. Just do some small studies. So I've already done... I had already done one of these without filming myself. And you will see the second one I did film, but I'm going to do a little bit more to it now. So what I did, I just put a paper towel in there to protect it while I showed you. What I did is I blocked off one and did this apple. Keep your subject matter simple. And that's another way to just chill out and relax. And by using just this one set, I had to use some fun and bold colors and I kept it very energetic. So I did this first one and then I flipped it over and did another one, which is these pairs. I loved these pairs. I got my reference images for both of these from unsplash.com. And you can see I just had really a lot of fun with color. I broke away from what was in the reference photo. And I think that's what this does in just using a limited set is you can't get up and go to your standby colors. Here's where I was choosing my pair reference image from unsplash.com. And I am going to be using the same white pastel pencil. Actually, this is charcoal, white charcoal by Derwent that I used to mark off the perimeters. So I'm just using it to sketch because the color of the paper I chose, the Canson paper, is kind of a dark color. So what I'm trying to do here is keep things energetic and loose. Oh, let me tell you a little tip. If you want to make sure you get your images within your frame, it's a good idea to mark where the bottom is of something and mark where the top is. That's those two points of reference to get the rest of the form in the right place. Otherwise, if you work for a long time on the certain area of your drawing, you may end up having it too large and the top of the pair end up right off the page. So that's just a good little rule of thumb to make sure you can fit your elements. And like I said before, it's a good idea to keep some simple images when you're just trying to relax, again, getting out of an artistic rut or just having some fun for yourself. So I'm just getting in basic shapes right here, but I'm still trying to keep my gesture. I talk about gesture a lot in drawing and painting. I loved how that one pair I'm working on now is just leaning like he loves that other pair or he or she, I always personify my objects. And I am keeping this real time, by the way. So if you want to follow along, it should be very easy. Now, I did have my filming. I was doing this, like I said, this is personal for me. I needed just a break to do something different and to do something simple. I was doing this rather quickly, talking about limited time. Like I said in the beginning of this video, I had limited time. I had to go somewhere with my husband and I just wanted to, you know, just have some fun with color and have a little break myself. So I knew I only had about 30 minutes or so. Now, I chose this interesting green. I noticed the color beneath the pairs was kind of a bluish green. But here is the beauty of pastels. We can layer them and we can create new colors by just lightly glazing them on top of each other. I apologize that I changed my filming. I think I needed to go do something and had to come back. So that broke a little bit of my creative rhythm, but I got back into it. Another benefit to this type of painting is I find the results end up more fresh and painterly, more impressionistic. And the reason I believe is when we have more time, more supplies, and we are focused on creating something serious, we tend to fiddle with things a lot more and we tend to make our strokes are even a little bit more stiff. So that is a real advantage to this too. I feel like your work at the end is going to be more fresh. We are not going to muddy it up by over blending or over layering. And also the attitude of hey, you might just throw this away. You might not even like it. But you had a moment for yourself and you just got to relax and enjoy the process. And truly, we learned something with every painting, even if it is not your favorite, there are no failed paintings. Now this is the only little section that is sped up. I decided rather than giving it a yellow background, I mean the pears are kind of greenish-yellow. Let's jazz this up a bit. And what is the compliment to green? Well, it's red. So I thought that would make this pop. And notice how my strokes are just very loose and free. And it really does give an end result where this, I don't know, it kind of had a little van Gogh feel to me at the end. Now, by limiting my palette, I am choosing colors that I probably wouldn't choose if I had more of my pastels readily available. So it's also an exercise. You're going to learn a lot with this because you're going to be forced to paint by choosing correct values over colors. Now, I chose this blue right here because there is a shadow side to the pastel, I mean to the pastels, to the pears. The pears, you can tell where the light source is. Where would you say the light source is? Well, you can see that bright reflection on the pears. It's kind of to the upper left, almost like a little bit maybe behind the viewer, but definitely upper left. So the lower right is going to have that cool shadow. Now here, once again, about the beauty of pastels. This blue isn't going to stay blue because I'm going to layer it, but it will have that cool undertone when I go to add some more of the greens. Now these stems, I believe they were the gestural energy of this. And I loved how the pair on the left felt like he or she was kind of just caressing the other one. And I'll talk more about one of the things I loved about it was there's a little shadow underneath that one that I'll develop later that really gave it a little three-dimensional feel. So I'm using some other blues now and using values that I think work. This side of the pair is not as dark as the right side of the pair. So you might not normally think of starting out with blue. So this is also just like a lesson on creativity and exploration and learning new things. Just as we typically do with soft pastels, it's best to have a light touch, especially at the beginning stages of painting. It's going to allow those other layers to interact with each other more beautifully. And also, because this is an unsanded paper, you don't get as much layering. Now, if that all sounds like Greek to you, if you're brand new to soft pastels, many pastel artists love sanded surfaces. Yes, they're literally like hardware store sandpaper. They're very fine typically, not a hard course grit to them. And they're archival, they won't yellow over time, but they're a little pricey. So that's why a little bit of the stress when you're getting your relaxing creative time, it decreases the stress because you're not so worried about ruining an expensive piece of sanded pastel paper. It does help when you're working on an unsanded surface or a more affordable surface. Now you can see I'm adding the green. Scumbling is what this is called. I'm literally just making little marks, little linear marks, and I'm also turning them directionally in the way that the pair would be. I'm not thinking of this as a flat surface. I'm thinking of the pair. It's rounded, it has form. So I'm thinking of how I would make my strokes curve or curve around something to give that illusion of three dimensions. So I've already touched upon quite a few things that I think will help you get out of the rut and start to express yourself with more joy and not be so hung up on things being perfect. To recap, we are using a limited palette. It is definitely going to cause you to use more creative color and break out of old color habits. We are using a limited amount of time. That's going to cause you to work a little bit more quickly and resulting in your strokes being fresh and lively. Another thing that is great to limit is the size of the painting. These are five by seven sizes and that will allow you to paint more quickly and also often it allows our strokes to be more bold and expressive because we don't always have the room for a lot of detail. Another thing I would like to add to the list is to use different types of strokes. Now I am doing that a bit here. Notice it's kind of sketchy and often when I paint with pastels on a sanded surface, a lot of times I will paint more broad strokes or try to do more blending than I'm doing in this case. That is actually going to be the focus of an upcoming lesson. I've already filmed it, but it's going to be try to use a style that's a little different than what you normally use. Another upcoming lesson will be to try and use subject matter. That's not your normal subject matter. Grab some different types of materials. One of us, when we start this artistic journey, we may have limited supplies, but sometimes we have supplies that have been sitting on the shelf a while, we haven't used, we bought them, and we thought we might use them and we didn't. Break out some of those and try some mixed media projects. That's often fun too as well. One of the main goals is just to have fun and bring the joy back to painting again. We can steal it away ourselves. We do it to ourselves and I think most of it has to do with our attitude of what the end result is going to be before you even start painting. I love to focus in Monet Café on bringing back that beauty of the fact that art is part of the process, not just the finished product. I always say the joy is in the journey and it really is with art as well. I've put in some more color and some of those dark marks there are kind of these pairs where a little beat up. You know how pairs can get little bruises and things. They're a little bit, I don't know, not very finished right now, but you'll see as I gradually layer over them with light strokes how they'll soften up a bit and not be so stark. I'm also going to change the angle of filming in a minute. Like I said, I was literally myself trying to just do something creative and bring back that fun for painting. It does get harder. If any of you are artists as a profession, especially if you're an artist and you have a YouTube channel, God bless you because I have people ask me quite often like, you know, I'd like to start doing that and I want to say, really think about this because there is a lot to it. It is not just the art and the production of art. It's a lot of, and I'm not complaining. I love it okay. I love being able to do what I do, but you have a lot of technical things you have to do yourself as well or hire them to be done. And that can get expensive. I edit every single video of mine. I produce every single thing that I do with, I did have a helper for a while. I don't have any more. She was simply just helping me get some of my art ready to package up to ship from my Etsy shop and helping me to photograph some of my art to market. And she had an illness. And she was like, oh, I'm going to bless her heart and I miss her very much. So again, I'm not complaining, but it's a lot of work and sometimes you just need that artistic break yourself getting away from the things that steal your creative energy. And a lot of you probably have another job if art isn't your profession and you're trying to sneak your artistic time in amongst that and family and life and craziness. And bring back the joy and bring back what we imagine it is to be an artist. Here you can see I'm finally adding some of these lighter colors or values and colors. They're bright. I notice I'm not going super light yet. I'm using brighter, bolder colors that are really going to stand out against some of the darker ones. Now the surface was already dark. So for quite a while, the painting felt pretty dark until we get to some of the lighter values. That's typically how this works with soft pastels. We typically layer dark to light. Not always, but that's a general, good rule of thumb. It's the same with oil and acrylic. Watercolor is a little different with that. You can't really get the light back. So you usually try to preserve that light. And also too, this Canson Me Tants paper has two, obviously it has two sides to it, but it has two differences to the sides. When you open up the pad, that's the side I'm using now, the front sheet. It's a little more textured or a little more bumpy. It kind of has a honeycomb pattern. And a lot of people don't like that. I work on both sides. I kind of like it, especially for something like this where I want it to be really loose and impressionistic. It's kind of fun. The backside is a little bit more smooth. It still does have some texture to it. But if you prefer the smooth side, you want to flip it over. And my shoulder is in the way. Again, I was painting just in a moment. I squeezed in. And then I think I took a break and came back and switched where my camera was. That'll help you guys to see better. But you can see how it's developing here. Now I decided my composition, my one pair was a little bit too close to that edge. Really with a composition, you don't want something just barely touching an edge like that. It just is off a little bit. So I did kind of expand it. You can see here. And here's the better angle. You see how bright it is here. So now you can see, I'm working from my camera positioning. I have evolved to, because of a lot of your feedback, to where my camera is literally overhead. So I did decide to go ahead and do that. And you definitely can see better here. So I'm just continuing to work. Now for the rest of this, which is not much longer, just five minutes or so or less, I'm going to add some music. I'm going to suggest if you follow along with this, perhaps listen to my commentary first. And then you may want to just put on some music yourself and rewatch this, turn the volume down to some music of your choice. And that will be about the experience of it. And if you're brand new, a beginner, you may want to listen to the commentary while you're painting. So that's totally up to you. But now to enjoy a little bit of this creative experience, here is some music you guys enjoy. Let me know if you're looking forward to the rest in this series. I think it's just a nice creative break that we all need some time. All right, guys, don't go anywhere because I'm going to be back at the end and enjoy the rest of this. I'm finishing up here, and I must admit this was a fun, relaxing and creative experience for me. I really just had a good time painting this. Now, this is the only pastel that is not part of the 40 set. It did have a pretty kind of a magenta color, but I don't know how this one got laying in that set. I just had it laying there. It is another Sennelier pastel. And I sometimes at the end of a painting like to bring out a color that's not in the painting a lot and just one that I think will just make it pop and be very expressive. So popping in that magenta seemed to do that for me. So here's a close-up. You can here see the texture of it, which I like. And here's the first one I did that I didn't film. So I hope you guys can see that it was expressive. It was fun. It was definitely a moment for me that I needed and enjoyed. Let me know what you thought about this lesson in the comments. And if you're excited about the new ones that will be coming soon, also become a patron if you would like to support this channel. It is really how I keep doing this. All right, guys, God bless and happy painting.