 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm happy you're here to paint these lovely red and pink poppies and I hope you'll subscribe and come back for more videos. Today I'm gonna talk about how you can prevent yourself from overworking your paintings with this painting tutorial and I'm calling these rejoicing poppies. Don't they look like they're rejoicing? So join me in this real-time painting tutorial where I will give you a strategy that might help you to keep from overworking your paintings. Hello artist and welcome to Monet Cafe. I thought I'd bring you along with me right now. I've got about less than an hour to paint before I have to be somewhere and I thought I just feel like I need to paint. I've been doing so many other things. So I grabbed me a piece of Sennelier Le Carte pastel card. I love this surface. It takes a little getting used to sometimes. It actually feels kind of like a soft gritty pastel paper but it holds a lot of layers. I think it lends itself towards an impressionistic painterly ending result and so I'm just gonna paint and bring you guys along with me. So I may be fast and furious here but it should be fun. Here is the large pad of the pastel card made by Sennelier. It's Le Carte pastel pastel card. It's called pastel card because it's kind of thick. Kind of like cardstock and it comes in two sizes of pads. You can of course buy it in individual sheets as well but I like that this pad comes with multiple colors. It's such a nice sanded surface. It's kind of soft and I really love the impressionistic outcome that you get with this paper. Before getting started I wanted to add in also that this paper is not water friendly so just be sure to use pastels only on this surface. All right here we go. I'm working from a reference image that is not my own and I'm going to be altering it a lot and just improvising making it very impressionistic. So I won't share the image but I think you should be able to if you want to follow along. I think you should be able to do that with this. It's a pretty simple layout actually. Let me get some charcoal sketch in a little bit of this. It's going to be some poppies with a background of some just absolutely beautiful background of blue mountains and we want to keep these very gestural. Don't even worry about drawing poppies that are perfect poppies. Okay we don't need that. This is just very gestural. I'll find the more loose and free you can get the better. So I kind of want some energy of it coming up this way and so you also too want to vary the size of your poppies. Some are going to be a little smaller. You can actually even do them like little rectangles. I do have a little one over here popping up and I make it kind of smaller in the background. A few are further away. One's back here just reaching up on its own a little smaller. Then we're going to have various other poppies that are small in the background and if they're much smaller we don't need to draw them and we can layer them on the top. So just getting in some little feeling of poppies like a little kind of like a curve where the eye is going to come up like this. So that's really pretty much all I need. There is one big one down here. Like I said I'm improvising this photo so let's not worry about that. Now first I'm going to work around these poppies and get a background in. There's this absolutely gorgeous kind of bluish purple mountain in the background. I'm going to get this in just to kind of show you where the, oh and I love this La carte paper, show you where the mountain horizon line is back here. It's right about here. It's a little above halfway. I got to work fast and furious here and I do, I think I want that one reaching up even higher, a little higher. I like it when they pop up over the rest of the poppies. Okay so here's my mountain and the mountain's going to kind of come in like here, a little curve down. There's just a little bit of the sky showing back here and then the mountain kind of comes up here. Alright so there's the mountain. We've got a little band of some trees going on and all it is is just a little really nice blue pastel. We've got a little border of trees going on back here and I'm just grabbing pastels from my set. I always call it my intermediate set. It's where I throw a lot of my pastels in between paintings but it ends up having such a nice arrangement of color. Okay so I'm taking this dark green and see I can just grab from this. I usually have the right kind of value and color. If you don't have these colors, don't worry about it as long as you use the right value. This could be a dark purple, this could be a dark blue, but I'm going to make me like a little idea of a tree background here. You want to vary this too. I'm gonna keep it low in here because I want some of these poppies to be peaking up and then I'm gonna make a a bank of trees a little higher over here. It's usually best, I think I heard it from artist Karen Margulis, to have your mountain. She probably heard it from another artist. We all kind of copy each other with what we learn and that's that's fine. That we want our mountains and trees smiling rather than frowning. Notice even my mountain even though it's in a section here is going up. The trees are going up so that's all I need right there. There we go. And now for this beautiful feel that's bringing our eye back. I'm gonna go ahead and get in some dark underneath. Now this is a pretty dark dark. This is that Terry Ludwig eggplant. I think it's too dark. I have a tendency sometimes to go too dark in my paintings. I'm gonna go with this beautiful purple. The paper is already a nice warm color and so I'm just letting it be kind of a nice warm underpainting. I don't want to cover everything up here. I like I like a little bit of that warmth peeking through. This area in here has a little bit of taller grasses and darker in here. Okay and I like that and we may have that kind of a little bit of this like a trail just kind of coming up and back. I think I'm gonna make those trees a little further away. That's the neat thing is once you start learning some of these principles you can just improvise. You can take a photo and just make it your own. You can also take some of your older paintings and recreate them with with different color palettes. Alright now since I have such a short period of time I'm just gonna paint now you guys enjoy. I thought I'd give a little voiceover commentary here and give you some more tips maybe about recreating this if you choose to do so. I wanted to give some advice about this paper or pastel papers in general. There's a tendency sometimes to look at all that area that looks very unfinished such as I mean look at that purple that I added you know in the foreground kind of curving around. Notice how it looks kind of I don't know scribbly or doesn't have all of the surface covered and my advice is to resist the urge to cover that or complete that because your painting will feel a bit disjointed or perhaps overworked which is kind of part of this video. If you focus too much too quickly on one area or getting it finished looking before the rest of the painting is we're working the painting overall and now I'm gonna talk again a little bit more about the advantages once again to not overwork your painting by giving yourself a time limit. In my case an hour I recommend and I I actually love to do paintings that are more like 15 or 20 minutes and not being afraid to throw them away when you're done. Okay I'm gonna pause on that for a minute and talk to you a little bit about this. That mountain in the background was so beautiful. Now it was like this gorgeous blue color but if I just chose I really like this blue that I have in my hand but if I had just picked up that blue and painted that without putting that purple down beneath it it would have been very flat and not very full of life. There's just something about nature and God's design of color that there are usually multiple colors happening at the same time and that's one of the beautiful aspects I should say about pastel painting that I like to try to embrace and I'm learning to embrace is to let the colors play upon themselves. If we overblend, overwork the colors gonna become muddy and you're not gonna see them interacting with each other and layering and peeking through as this purple and blue are doing right now. Now I'm grabbing this happens to be I think it's a Sennelier pastel. I noticed in the mountain there was a little bit of a leaning towards a warm blue or a cool green. Okay it's kind of like a turquoise color and so it was in the areas where the mountain was kind of highlighted. I noticed it was a little bit too light so I'm darkening the mountain in areas right now with this purple. So it's still not a dark value but I added the purple first as a base and typically with pastel we work we go dark to light. We lay our darker light value down first. That doesn't mean black. It just means if you're looking at something like these mountains I want to get a base down like that purple before I put the lighter values on top and so all these colors that purple the blue that I used and that kind of teal almost aqua color that I added are all going to add to make this mountain magical and have the colors vibrating. That's the word I'm looking for. They actually do seem to vibrate when you don't overwork or over blend them. Now the advantage of working quickly is we have more of a tendency to work the overall painting because we know we're on a time crunch rather than getting so fussy in one area. So that's what restricting your time may do for you in helping you avoid that habit. I have this habit so bad and I say this all the time in my videos. I see this habit that I have so often because I have the advantage of making so many videos and watching myself paint when I'm done and I'm like man why did I keep working? I should have paused, backed away, slowed down or given myself a time limit as I've done here. So now when you're just beginning I know that's easier said than done. You know there's a lot of things you're still learning so you may need to slow down in certain areas but once you feel like you're kind of getting somewhere give yourself limited amounts of time to work and I think you will find that your work will be more lively fresh energetic colorful less muddy look at all those things I've just rattled off but I it's true I know this about myself how I've worked and okay now I'm comparing some of the colors for the sky the sky is going to be the lightest thing I know that the sky upper heavens is usually darker and cooler so I'm getting down this kind of periwinkle blue and I know that the beauty of pastels is we can layer so I'm getting it in generally there's not much of the sky showing here and then I know that I'm going to work in what happens to the sky as it gets closer to the horizon well typically in our earth atmosphere we've got the Sun involved the Sun's gonna warm things up so usually lower towards the horizon we've got a bit of the Sun playing to make things warmer thus typically cool colors even blues are gonna get warmer what happens with a blue when it gets warmer it gets more teal our turquoise I'm getting a little bit of a lighter value it's still a little bit of that warm blue little teal typically it's lighter down towards the horizon now I'm using some of the other colors just to blend and back again to somehow thinking or sometimes thinking that oh my pastels aren't blending I need to get out a blending tool or I need to use my finger right now what I'm doing I'm letting the pastels blend themselves I only used a blending tool one time in this painting and it was for the sky I wanted it to be a little bit softer so that it receded in the distance I'm talking all the time about these strategies and these techniques and tactics that make things recede in the distance that's one of the things we're trying to do as artists we're trying to make a three-dimensional landscape look three dimensional on a two-dimensional two-dimensional surface so we have to use these strategies and one of them is to decrease detail which is why I blended the sky it pushed it back made it further away you'll see me later just using a piece of pipe foam insulation to blend the sky I don't know how long I'm gonna talk here I'm actually kind of tired I've had a busy day I know a lot of you guys can relate and sometimes art is our sanctuary that's my my word now that I describe my little happy place in my studio and my studio you know Monet cafe is only a 10 by 13 room and I know even before that I worked at my kitchen table I worked at my dining room table I know that's what a lot of you guys are doing but finding your little happy place in your sanctuary often art is your escape and it's your little place to relax and really when you're painting it kind of takes your mind off of all of the other challenges that you might have in life so whatever little space you have make it your own I really there's other videos I want to do sometimes just giving tips on how to do that just because I've had to work so economically my whole art career and practically and in small spaces but you know what I am coming to embrace the blessing of less is more it really is there's more freedom when you don't have too much stuff and even though we all want more pastels right we want like every pastel color in the rainbow we still can do a lot with very little we that's why do some limited palette videos where you don't have to have so much I am kind of rambling aren't I but I am going to add some music I want you guys to enjoy this and sometimes I like to add a lot of commentary but sometimes I just like to let you guys enjoy the process this is still real time I am gonna speed it up a little bit at the end right now I'm about 15 minutes into this and it did take me less than an hour praise the Lord I made it to my appointment which was with my kids we went to Costco oh our big outing that was my big thing I had to do and it was very nice though because I haven't been out of my house much since I've been home caring for my mother-in-law with terminal cancer so that's like I said some of the things that are giving our hearts and souls and minds and peace is painting so again I did accomplish my one-hour painting and it was more fresh and less muddied and overwork so that's my goal for this particular tutorials and if you do recreate this painting often I forget to share kind of what the the rules are I don't have many rules I really just ask that if you share your painting that you recreated from my painting that you just give me credit I often forget to say that I'm on Instagram and at Susan Jenkins artist and I'm very thankful a lot of you have been doing that you recreate a painting the great thing it's not that I want the credit I want to see what you've done and I can see that when you mention me like that with the at symbol Susan Jenkins artist I can see what you've done I am going to tell you here I'm going to apologize I didn't have my camera in the location I normally have it like I said I was in a rush here I had it kind of too much behind my head so when I get to the right side of the painting sometimes my big old heads in the way but I think you should still should be able to see it and also if you shared on Facebook or anywhere you know maybe just mentioned that you followed my video and I don't have any other restrictions really other than that I don't really do a lot of contests or things where my work is exclusive for me I really just love to teach and share with you guys so feel free to share and and enjoy so alright here's some music like I said a while ago it's really coming alright I'm close to wrapping it up at this point and I wanted to mention that these thinner pastels you see me using here for the wispy grasses are prismacolor new pastels belt in you pastels they're harder they're excellent for some linear strokes like this and I'm trying to keep it fresh and once again not overworked also to before showing the final painting I wanted to mention that my patrons from my patreon page it's only five dollars a month to support this channel and get some extra instruction my patrons will receive the color notes I'm going to show you all of the colors that I use for this particular painting a little perk for being a patron of mine all right it's been about an hour and I am happy I'm dirty but I am happy with the loose results and again I love this la carte paper do you see how the it has the painterly impressionistic feel so give yourself a time limit stick to it don't be so serious about it it's okay if you throw your work away because you're learning something with every painting all right I gotta go happy painting