 Welcome to Monet Café, Artistic Friends and Visitors. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I hope you will enjoy this special presentation. I also hope you will subscribe to this channel. We have a lot of fun and art is definitely better with friends. This tutorial is from a rare moment when I got to do some plein air painting that's on location painting. And I was out at the beautiful property of my parents that was prompted by my mother needing a very serious surgery. And they had not yet determined whether or not a large cyst that she has was cancerous. And so this event of me painting is after the surgery and after the great news that it wasn't cancer. So I'm going to give a little voice over on this. Some of it will be sped up. Some of it will be a little bit slower. But indeed we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. I love Philippians 413. So this is just me setting up and I want to let you know plein air painting on location painting is a lot of work. So let me talk about that a little bit. In the description of this video, I'll be including a link that will take you to Artist Network where they give lots of great information from some of the best pastel artists and their setups for plein air painting. So you might as well learn from the best, right? And even though I admit that plein air painting is a lot of work, I find that the rewards far outweigh the challenges because of the freshness of the work. Here are some of the pieces from the artist you saw before. And even though I haven't done an extensive amount of plein air painting in the moments that I got this wonderful opportunity, I found my work was more fresh, more alive with color and really represented what I saw more than a photograph. As you can see already when I sped up a bit of this, the clouds are moving and so I know my composition is going to be changing. So I snapped a photo with my iPad. I actually didn't even refer back to it, but it's a good idea. In case you have to pack up for some reason, you want to remember the moment. It's a good idea to have some wipes of some sort. I also have a spritzer bottle of water with some brushes and I brought along my Derwent Ink Tense Blocks. I thought I might like to do an underpainting. I saw that the warmth was there from this late afternoon sunset and the warm tones that I chose also made a great complementary underpainting color for all of that green. So I applied the Ink Tense Blocks. I basically just blocked in color according to value with all warm tones. Of course the trees are darker. Anything vertical is usually darker. You can see that in the actual landscape behind me. And I'm using my spritzer bottle. I wish I had brought a larger brush, but I'm just using the spritzer bottle with water and I'm spraying my, oh I forgot to tell you, my paper. This is the Fisher 400 paper. And it is almost just like UART paper, but it doesn't curl up on me like UART paper does. Alright, so now you can see I've gotten in a general composition and I really do know this field well. My parents have owned this property forever and I just love this view of when the sun set. So that's why I was trying to really hurry up and get out there for this small window of opportunity where it's just absolutely gorgeous. I've snapped a lot of photos of this moment, but I have never painted on location like this before. So I know I've got to work quickly and that is one of the challenges often to plein air painting, especially with sunset, sunrises, things that are fleeting. But one of the points about this video was just a plein air painting experience, but also to share about creating drama, having dramatic effects in your artwork and this underpainting is definitely going to do that. Alright, so now I just got a weight on it to dry. I didn't have my blow-dryer out there. I didn't have an extension cord quite long enough. So now I'm getting in my darkest darks. It's time to apply pastel. This is a, I believe it's a Terry Ludwig pastel. And as you can see, it's not black. It looks black with what's surrounding it. But it's going to be lightened up a bit because I'm going to add other layers to this. That's the beauty of pastels as we can layer them. They typically work dark to light with soft pastels. That's just a general rule. Now I just added in some rich greens. It's also a good idea. Color is everywhere. And when we paint paintings that are more like a paint by number and they just have a color here and a color there, they become quite flat. And I find it's best to paint very much like nature works. There aren't individual colors really when you look at a landscape scene. Everything is bouncing off of each other and colors are affecting each other. And so when we can learn to play with color and combine colors in interesting ways your painting is going to have a lot more life, more of a dramatic effect than looking like a photograph. By the way, I was just using pipe foam insulation to blend it. I kind of wanted to blend in and get most of the paper kind of covered. I'm going to keep that glow showing through. Notice I just lightened up those background trees with a cooler tone. Colors typically get cooler in the distance even though there's that gorgeous warm sunset back there. I mean you can kind of warm things up a bit with background trees but in this case I decided to keep them a bit cool. Now once again back to the title of this lesson which is creating drama in your artwork. Notice the color choices. I grabbed that, that's actually a Sennelier pastel. They're very soft. That orange one I put down just prior to this one. This one might be a Jack Richardson pastel. And I am not using the colors necessarily that I see in the clouds. They're kind of, you know, gray, you know, typical clouds with a, you know, like that silver lining they call it. It's actually backlighting behind the clouds. But I decided to give it some drama. And here's the trick or the tip. As long as you use the right value, the lightness or darkness, now I do typically put my clouds in a little darker and now I'm lightening them up a bit. But as long as you get the right value you can get very creative with color. Now you don't want to get so creative with color that color is just crazy. There's no harmony. There's not a good color palette that you're working with. So you want to keep things in mind. But the more you work with color and the more you start learning a little bit more about color theory, I have a lot of videos on color theory, the more it just becomes natural. So also too the way things typically work is up towards the heavens the things that are higher in the sky usually get darker and they get lighter down at the horizon line. In this case that obviously happens because we've got that sun setting back there. Now again I'm just kind of making some tree holes. Sky holes you would normally call them but there's trees behind here. So I'm kind of carving in negatively some of those distant trees into the foreground trees. It's usually better to paint that way rather than painting positively with trees. Now I'm just glazing in on top of that warmth. The greens and the grasses. I also noticed some of those background trees had a lot of shadows coming from the sun. They're a little dark right now but I lighten them up. I thought too that I would mention one of the most common questions I get in my comments on my videos is why do you do an underpainting? And sometimes the question will be you just, you know, most artists you see them they cover it all up anyway. And I attempt not to my goal is not to cover up the whole underpainting but leave bits of it peeking through. But even for artists who and even if I may sometimes cover it all up it absolutely creates a mood for you to work with. But I also know that because we layer with pastels it really is affecting the color that you put on top versus if you just put it down on white. These pastels aren't covering it so opacally that you're not getting a glimmer or a hint of the underpainting. Now I really felt like there needed to be a little bit of cooler tones behind those taller trees and I thought that teal really did it. Also add a little bit to the background there. And notice all the drama that's happening with these colors. I am not using necessarily the local color that means the color that I see in the scene. Now I'm actually going and applying some blues. I knew there were kind of some blues in those clouds. They weren't just pink. I wanted to give the pink because I knew this guy was so warm. So I'm just kind of scumbling. And now I'm going in. I know I kind of liked the sky really warm and when I get a chance to go back and look at my videos after the fact there are multiple times when I'm like man I kind of like that stage. I should have left it. But you know sometimes you just keep working and having a good time. I was enjoying this experience. But I did decide to now I'm using a real light touch here so some of that warmth is still showing through. But I did decide to make the sky a little bit more of the blue up in the heavens and let it gradually get warmer down at that horizon line where those distant trees are. Now once again using the pipe foam insulation see how it's just softening those clouds. They're looking more cloudish and wispyish. Sometimes I like the real chunky look to things and I thought about leaving it that way but I thought you know what I really don't know if I want the clouds to have that much attention. So often you can blend things in and it softens them and they don't get the attention that other elements might get. And I'm still working with some of these beautiful orangy colors that are in the distance. Now I know there's a really bright spot right down at the back I didn't want to put it right in the middle but kind of back towards the back of the tree. You see how the light is even changing right here on my surface. You can tell when a cloud goes over. So that's one of the things I already mentioned. Oh now I'm definitely creating some drama. You see that color you know years ago I may not have added that color but I know that red is just going to make things pop. And also too I know sometimes when there's orange in the sky the further you get down behind the trees it's just like one of my videos I shared on kind of the rules of painting sky holes. You don't want to go with the same light value behind trees if something's peaking through. It looks too artificial. It looks kind of like popcorn. So now look at the drama I'm adding with this red. I just decided to pull it forward and like I just made the note here I did really like the stage. Once again I look back and I'm like man that's just really dramatic right? So and I'm using big broad strokes so keep that in mind when you're working that sometimes I always say it's good to walk away and take a break. Now I'm carving and I know there is a field behind some of those tree trunks back there. I know you don't have a really close up view here and then I decided to add this interesting red. I'm not sure if I love I mean not red green. I'm not sure if I love that green or not but and then you get the now here's the advantage of plein air painting. Look at the beauty you get to see all these birds I'm not sure what variety flying in their V formation so you just got to stop and smell the roses or look at the birds in the heavens when you can. So that's a definite advantage of plein air painting. So again I'm loving the colors here and I'm loving the moment and so this was a beautiful experience for me. The mosquitoes were actually coming out like crazy at this point but it's probably good because I needed to stop working on this. This is the final I even added some bold pinks and made a real dramatic end result. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you'll subscribe if you haven't and come back often. Also if you'd like a little bit more art instruction or just to support this channel to keep the free videos coming consider supporting me on my Patreon page. It's only $5 a month and we have a lot of fun. I have a lot of benefits for my patrons. So alright guys, happy painting!