 Welcome to Monet Café! This is your artistic happy place where you can learn art from the convenience of your own home. And I'm excited to bring you this lesson today of some beautiful Queen Anne's lace flowers. And if you haven't subscribed yet, I hope you will and become part of the Monet Café family. This is the third painting in a series of long format paintings I'm doing on regular watercolor paper. I'm going to be making my own pastel surface that I'm going to show you how to do here. And I actually did one more painting after this with the same format. So there's four in total. But in this lesson I will be using Richard McKinley curated set of Terry Ludwig pastels. I do like this set. I haven't used it a lot and I actually was kind of surprised to see how many light colors were in this set. So here we go. We're gonna get started and it's gonna be a lot of fun. Oh here I am. It was early morning when I was painting here. As in the other three paintings I'm beginning with a technique. I mentioned in the last video upload I made that I was going to slow it down and show you exactly how I use this new underpainting technique or how I create this new technique. Oh don't you love that purple there? And I'm actually going to be toning the watercolor paper with pastels. A lot of times I do under paintings with different mediums like watercolor or acrylic ink. But this time I'm using pastels. I actually had one of you guys request a painting using only pastels. And I do often use just pastels and use them as an underpainting. I do like to do under paintings. I have a lot of videos where I talk about what they are. These are some of my general colors. I'll talk about those in a minute. And it really does create a nice base. There's multiple reasons why underpainting is a good idea. So I'm just pulling out some colors that I think are interesting. By the way the reference image you can see there on my iPad is from unsplash.com. Look at the light in this image. I actually want to do this painting again larger and really try to capture that light. So I am getting in a basic value study and some colors that are going to set the stage for this painting. Now once you to notice as I'm putting the pastels on you can see I'm darker values are usually in the foreground and also in vertical elements like that tree. So I'm just kind of blocking in. I decided I wanted the tree a little bit larger. And notice how textural this is. And the color is not very vibrant. You know look at the pastel. The pastel is really vibrant but when I put it on the watercolor paper I'm using the textured side of the watercolor paper. It's you know it's it's kind of dull looking. Now notice the colors I'm using here. Once again I chose a dark for the foreground and the tree. Now look at that little band in the reference photo. There's a band there's a dark element in the foreground bottom right and then there's a little bit more dark as you kind of go up to the left. But in that middle diagonal almost going from the bottom left corner sweeping up to where those tallest flowers are. There's like a light band and so that's where I'm trying to get that warmth. It's like the sun is just or that area is just catching the sunlight. So I'm making this as a nice underneath tone value study and it does influence the final painting. So also notice that it cools off a bit in the distance. The area I'm working on now if you look at that little area that's so light by that tree right kind of underneath that as you go to the left. It's almost a little purple and pink and it really cools off and lightens up back there. So I just saw a little sliver of something that looks like maybe a pink. These are all darker than they will be in the final but we work often with dark to light in soft pastel. Unlike watercolor we usually work light to dark. We always preserve the lights and watercolor but with pastels we can get our darks down. Now I know this is a little strange looking right now and it might get even more strange looking and I remember when I first started painting and I saw some people doing under paintings I thought how on earth did they know to pick those colors? I mean look at this kind of pale muted neutral green I'm putting in the sky. Why would I put that in there? Doesn't the sky look white in the reference image but I'm seeing that the color is influenced all over the whole painting. There's almost like this paled out neutrality to it and I'm getting some boldness underneath to capture some brilliance and I will layer my neutrals and my other colors on top of it. So all of these things come in time the more you paint the more you watch the more you practice and I wish there was a shortcut to all of this but it's just the same kind of learning process that I had to go through too. Being confused at times being frustrated at times but you know the determined artist will persevere and you'll definitely get better. Now this is the magic product I used in all of these. Now I'm showing you exactly what it is. It's Liquitex Matte Medium and that little blue thing you saw is a scrubby like you scrub your dishes with. I bought a whole bunch of them at the dollar store and I just cut them up kind of like I cut up another little product you'll see later. Now look at the magic. Remember how I said how dull that pastel was when I put it on? Look what this matte medium does and this little scrubby just acts as a neat little way to almost use it like a paintbrush and get it really textural. See how it makes all those little linear strokes in there and this is just blocking in. I'm still calling this the blocking in stage. We're just wetting the pastels to get that vibrancy. Now by the way pastels really are not that much different than other mediums. They just happen to be a dry medium so that when we add liquid to it, whether it's alcohol, I do alcohol with pastels often as an underpainting, or water. You can use water. We could do both of those with what I'm doing now or this matte medium. There's multiple different ways you can do this. Notice how I'm turning my little scrubby to get a clean area to work the next color, but when we wet the pastels it becomes just like paint. Isn't that cool? I'm just really playing with this color, getting a nice and vibrant underpainting to start. Like I said, I'm going to be adding a lot of neutrals to this so I didn't want it to be totally flat and boring without any color and I know there's a lot of light and brightness to this and I thought these pretty magenta purples, golden colors, and a little bit of lavenders and reds would be such a nice underpainting color for this. Again, you see how I'm doing that band? If you look at the reference image, you could almost see that horizontal band of light once again, that it's some of the grasses and the flowers catching that light. By the way, I called this painting early risers and it just came to me. I often really don't like naming my paintings. I feel like I'm just kind of out of my creative juices and I don't feel like it, but sometimes something will just come to me and I've been an early riser lately. I'm having to get up, I like getting up early anyway, but I'm getting up even earlier just to get a lot of my me time. I've been sharing the last few videos. We have my mother-in-law living with us now. God bless her. She's got terminal cancer and you know just dealing with that whole heartache and tragedy and lots of changes in life so this is my time for me to paint. Now look at that, it's textural, it's fun, it's just blocked in and it might look like a mess, but I know this is going to be a great beginning to start laying down these pastels. But first, okay it's dry now, this watercolor paper won't hold the pastels so I'm making my own pastel surface using clear gesso made by Liquitex. You can use whatever clear gesso you can find. Oh it had a little something on the top, but make sure I'm doing this for a reason. Make sure to get the clear gesso because you can't hear this or feel it, but it has a little bit of grit to it. I can feel it between my fingers. It's like a little bit of sand or pumice added to it and when I apply this to the paper it will make it a bit like some of the sanded papers that we can buy, the very expensive pastel papers. And I always mention make sure you get the clear not just because of the sand in it, but also because it's clear. You see it dried clear. You can see the underpainting. If you use regular gesso it's white. You're going to totally cover everything up. Now I zoom in often on my reference images if I have it on my iPad because sometimes you can get an idea of color better. Why did I put that purple down or that bluish purple? Because down in that bottom right corner it's cooler. It's further away from that sun and I'm just cooling it off with some of these colors. And I've got my gesso applied now so it's I've got a little gritty surface. I'll be able to layer my pastels but now I'm going to address something some of you have mentioned. Some of my patrons from my Patreon page. Thank you patrons for your support. I am so grateful for those of you who pay $5 a month to support this channel and it's really a help to keep these videos coming. So one of my patrons I think it was my patron or maybe one of my members or subscribers in Monet Cafe mentioned that painting like I'm doing right now on this surface coated with clear gesso is a little rough and look at it. It is rough. Now what am I doing now? I'm using a piece of chamois cloth. Now you could use whatever blending tool works for you. A lot of people use pipe foam insulation. You could even use a paper towel but look at what's happening. Now I turn my chamois cloth. I cut them in little squares. I love how artists always come up with their own little techniques of doing things. I just turn them to maximize keeping it clean and as I'm moving to a new area I turn it and I blend and yes pastel is falling off. Some people have mentioned a lot of pastel seems to fall off. It's falling off but that's okay. It's falling into my little aluminum foil trough I have. But look at what I just did. I created this nice underpainting to start applying the pastels. Now that was my answer to how gritty it might seem at first when you use the clear gesso technique. All right I'm going to talk a little bit more about my pastel application and now at this point I am speeding up the rest of the video to keep it manageable to be able to upload and I still think you can follow along even though I've sped it up just a bit. Notice too that in the reference photo that you can still see in the top corner there on the left. Look at that tree. Look how even though I laid the dark down it's really kind of light. That sun is really just bright and this golden color I have in the sky well it's going to get lightened up too and that's how I was talking about before we can work dark to light. The influence of this golden color is going to show through from the pastels that I lay down. Now this is kind of that nice muted light green like a neutral green. I just love it. See it's already looking kind of cool. Now I got one of the lighter colors in the Richard McKinley set and I'm just really intensifying that light at the horizon. Usually at the horizon line especially if the sun is setting you're going to get lighter values at the horizon line. Now I'm taking this kind of a lighter dull neutral green and there's going to be some contrast. These little flowers that are peeking up right over the horizon they're catching the majority of that bright light and there's a few of them happening kind of like in that tree area. So I'm just using the corner of this pastel giving a little shape to them and the ones that are sticking up that I did over to the left they're actually going to have more contrast than they do right now so I'm going to probably or I will get the value a little darker later but I'm getting the general shapes gesture and feel of where these flowers are. Now I even went in there and carved in I think I wanted to change the horizon line maybe give some sky holes to this tree so and often too when we paint a tree we negatively paint the spaces rather than painting the branches into the sky we carve the sky into the tree and that is usually so much more painterly looking and just a lot of lost edges that happen and it really looks more professional when you paint negatively with sky holes in trees rather than painting the positive shapes. Now there's that I talked about that purple I laid down I love that purple that I have I think it's a rimbrant color but now I'm putting in a little bit of darker I think I got them too green right here but it was a darker value so I just wanted to kind of intensify the contrast I had going and later I'm like oh that was a little too green but that's the neat thing about pastels we can we have a limited ability to layer and alter things you don't want to take advantage of that because you can really flatten out and muddy your colors if you just think oh I don't care I'll use whatever because I can just layer so be careful with that. I am going to be adding some music to the last part of this video the point of this video each of the four paintings that I did in this format with the same technique I kind of focus on a different teaching aspect in this one it was about the matte medium so I kept it real time and hopefully I've given you a lot of good content in the first 14 minutes that I've been talking but I will be now adding soon some music and you can enjoy watching the rest of the process like I said I've only sped this up slightly and I will apologize like I said I called this painting early risers because I've been getting up early and I've been using this time kind of for my my art therapy time myself and just when the house is quiet you know it's so awesome by the way I occasionally use my little blending technique as I work but never in the last stages these are always only in the initial stages I don't like to over blend a lot but anyway so since this was my me time in the morning I don't overly focus on teaching I just kind of turn my camera on and know I can edit it and do a voiceover later so oh let me pause station break I am wearing my Monet Cafe bracelet I show this because I love it so much I had a jewelry designer make this for me I'm using my essential oils and those little pretty colored things you see those little balls they're lava rocks and they soak in essential oils it has a little Monet Cafe charm on it and what I find is awesome my idea was I love essential oils so much I can smell them as I'm painting because I'm moving my arm around so I just want to share that with you I do have a link in the description of every video that it's down towards the bottom it says Monet Cafe bracelet if you'd ever like to get one now this is the Mount Vision uh thunderstorm gray set remember how I said there was a lot of cool colors going on in the bottom right corner and those flowers yeah there's a little bit of lighter color catching the sun on the left side of that flower but they're really darker than you think so it's always best to get the dark in first sometimes I paint with my right hand when it's more convenient you'll see me doing that later too I often find you can get sometimes more gestural strokes if you use your non-dominant hand and I know I am gonna add some music like I said but one of my points I was trying to make before was that I apologize because this was a bit of a painting experience for me and I just happened to turn the camera on I accidentally got my shoulder in the way didn't have my camera just right so there's a little bit of footage that's a little blurry but you still should be able to follow along I kind of tried to edit it after the fact um a little bit so that you can follow now I'm going to share before I add the music real quick that I often say this that I like a lot of my stages in my paintings prior to finishing them because I often have to finish things in a hurry I know it sounds like I'm complaining sometimes when I say that but I just kind of know I'm probably not going to get a chance to get back to the painting so sometimes I just keep working so this is my advice to you try not to do that walk away give it a break when you think you're about I don't know 60 through with your painting just walk away go do something else and come back to it with some fresh eyes I love the colors that I'm using here and probably about 10 more minutes into this painting I really liked where it was I think I overworked it a little but not too bad I was still happy with the final okay I'm really going to add the music at this point you guys enjoy and as always I like to say now or actually as of late I like to say now if you create from this tutorial I don't have many rules but if you share it on social media I would love for you to tag me on Instagram or on Facebook on Instagram I'm at Susan Jenkins artist if you haven't followed me yet on Instagram I would love that and on Facebook the art of Susan Jenkins is my Facebook page my artist page not my personal page so find me there and follow me there as well and of course you know we have the Monet cafe art group on Facebook I said 12,000 members the other day we're at 13,000 members anybody can join you just have to answer three questions if you want to know more about pastel painting everybody helps each other in that group it's just so awesome and here is that music I keep promising I will be back at the end so just enjoy the painting experience getting close to finishing at this point and once again I apologize for my shoulder getting in the way adding a few highlights to the tops of the Queen Anne's lace this just felt romantic to me right so if you've hung in there to this point of the video God bless you I know that we share so much together even though we're not together that's what's so cool about this channel right we have this beautiful connection all right happy painting until next time