 Hello artist! I can't wait to share with you the surprising results I achieved using pan pastels with soft pastels. Now pan pastels are very different from regular soft pastel sticks. They're like compacts of gorgeous color. They work great to use as an underpainting when combined with soft pastels. And what surprised me with this particular painting is how great they worked on this particular surface that I chose. Another great thing about pan pastels is you don't need that many colors because they're mixable. That's so exciting. Alright artists, are you ready to go? Come on in the studio and let's get started. So pan pastels really are like a little compact of color, almost like a makeup compact. They have their color numbers on the back and I love that you can arrange them in these little palette trays. They actually you can put them right up on your easel. I often clip the palette tray right to my painting board and paint with them right next to my surface. And yes I do have a lot of colors but the neat thing about pan pastels is you don't have to have so many colors because they are mixable. Now that's not the topic of this video but I'd love to know if you would like a video describing and demonstrating that further. Let me know in the comments. Pan pastels are applied with these really fun applicators. They come in all shapes and sizes and they're pretty affordable too so I'm gonna be sharing more about that in the lesson. Before sharing all of the products I'll be using for this painting tutorial I wanted to share this gorgeous reference image. I got my reference image from unsplash.com, a great site for copyright free reference images and I like to create these collections of photos of a particular category. This month's theme in Monet Cafe is marshes and we're having so much fun over on my Patreon page creating marsh paintings. They're doing such fabulous work. I wanted one of my marsh scenes to be sunset and vibrant and gorgeous colors so I found this particular reference image and I thought I could really punch it up with some color vibrancy and I thought doing the underpainting with pan pastels would be fun and effective. Here are the colors that I chose for my underpainting. I went a little overboard with colors because I had them but you don't need this many. You could really use just three values. Now the magic surface that makes this work so well is pastel matte. I'm using white because I want the vibrancy of these colors to show and pan pastels apply beautifully to the surface because it's rather soft in texture. It comes in various colors as well. For my initial sketch I'm going to be using a marker. Yes I discovered not that long ago that markers work great for sketching. I like how they stay put and don't smear or bleed when adding other products. Oh and here's something very important for your product list. It's this fabulous tea that I discovered recently. Someone shared with me this company it's called Ticino and these two flavors are fantastic. Just had to share. You know it is Monet Café. And here on the Monet Café version of this tutorial things will be sped up substantially. If you're a patron of mine you'll also get a slower version as well. And if you would like to become a patron of mine it's super easy. Patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins. It's only $5 a month. You can cancel it anytime and you get all the extra goodies I'm always talking about. Plus it's a great group of artists and I get to see your work as well. So I'm just getting this sketch in and I'm keeping it very simple. This is a pretty simple landscape anyway. Your horizon line is almost in the middle and then you've got a big grouping of trees on the left. Some smaller trees on the right in the distance and some marshy grasses in the foreground and your reflections of course. And your reflections are basically just a mirror image of what's above the waterline. So I'm just getting in a general idea and keeping this basic is a good idea to get started. Alright here's one of the applicators and I reuse these. You can actually wash them and but I'm kind of lazy sometimes so I just wipe them off on a roll of paper towels and these are some other applicators you can use and I use these a lot. You can tell by how dirty some of them are but that's for work that's a little bit more specific and I'm just doing an underpainting. So I'm just gonna be using the round sponge type of applicator. But here's my bag. No it is not squash soup. This was me repurposing some ziplock bags. But here you can see a little more closely at the different shapes of the applicators and you can buy refill packs of these as well. So pan pastels are just really fun. Now here I am with my one applicator. You can see it kind of cleaned off good because I'm just getting a nice smooth application of this kind of beige-y color and if you're a patron of mine you'll get all of my color numbers for these pan pastels that I used. So I'm just kind of blending my sky right down into the background and I'm going to get some of these pretty golden colors in the sky as well. I'm just giving some general gestural marks as to where some of these warmer and darker value colors are in the sky and you can see how it blends so well. Now let me talk a little bit about what was the surprising result. You know that's the title of my intro to this video. What was surprising to me was how softly these apply to pastel matte, this particular surface. I don't think I've ever tried using pan pastels with pastel matte. I don't know why I've been painting for so many years but I've typically used it on color fix or other pastel surfaces that are not too gritty. I find this doesn't work well on pan pastels on say UART paper and it's because it is so sanded, literally like sandpaper and so the applicators just kind of catch on that gritty surface. Now you can see I decided you know me I love punching up color. I didn't want to just make this golden you know just like a pretty golden scene. I was seeing some pink colors in the sky and in the water as well so I decided let's just have fun and make this a really golden magenta type of scene. I'm using purples for the darker value for the reflections and the trees. I do add a little bit darker value soon but this is similar to what I always talk about when we're using regular soft pastels at a stage that's called the block end stage. We're not trying to create individual anything other than shapes, big shapes and big forms and general colors and values. It's really more important to get your values correct more so than your colors and value is just how dark or light something is. So that's why I said early on that if you had three values say you had one of those darker purples that I have you have kind of a middle value magenta and a yellow for the sky you could really get a lot accomplished with an underpainting too and like I said pan pastels are mixable so even if you get a little compact of white and black you can make your values darker or lighter and again that's a whole another video so let me know if you'd like something like that that would be fun to create. So now I'm just getting in a little bit more of the sky between some of the trees and again if you're a patron of mine I'm going to give you a video where I just slow everything down and you can see this process a little slower along with this video for some commentary. Alright so I've got to get a little bit of a darker value for some of these trees so this is a pretty dark you can see some of the color numbers there extra dark actually it's kind of a purplish blue and I'm just getting some more of that into these trees that are above the water and then I'm just going to kind of blend everything in a little bit. Now an underpainting I talk about a lot I do under paintings a lot I find it gives such a great foundation for your painting and in this case it's going to provide that underlayment of vibrant and warm color. Now the first set of pastel soft pastel sticks that I will be using are the Jack Richardson they're called Richardson hand rolled pastels it's their set of 40 it's the landscape set I'm using some of these peachy tones that pretty gorgeous pink and it has some beautiful blues along with kind of some warm browns that's kind of the colors I'm thinking of this is another great set it's the Sennelier half stick 40 half stick set I love these colors you can instantly see how vibrant they are I use this set for an entire painting sometimes and I'm just getting in some of my distant trees now notice I'm layering that pretty blue over and some of that magenta over what I'd already laid down but I'm not making a really hard stroke part of soft pastel painting is allowing your colors to peek through as you add layers so that's why a soft touch is really important to develop and that's the reason why because most people ask the question why do you do an underpainting like I did with these hand pastels if you're just going to cover it all up because pastels are an opaque medium in other words they're not see-through well they're not if you press super hard but if you have a light touch like I'm trying to do here I had a um an imperfection in my paper it's like a line but I just worked around it I think I had bent my pad when I was traveling one time but as you can see that magenta is still kind of showing through some of this blue that I'm laying down because I'm not pressing really hard and that's why an underpainting can be very crucial and important to allowing some color I think of it as the colors vibrating because they're they're they're not mixed together in a traditional form like when you take you know red and yellow and you in acrylic for example and you mix them mix them to death they'll turn into an orange but I like it better when the colors just kind of interact with each other without you know blending them like crazy and that's what happens with soft pastels as you layer gently and softly one color over another it starts to vibrate and have this really beautiful color interaction all right so you can see I I'm not using the colors that are necessarily in the reference photo and I do have videos on it was like a couple of videos back that I talked about kind of how to do that and it really just has more to do with paying attention to the value the lightness or darkness if you squint your eyes and look at the my composition isn't exactly the same as the reference image but look at the general lightness and darkness of my painting right now and the reference image you can see the skies are both light the water is both fairly light the trees in the foreground are darker the distant trees are a little lighter so it's all really about value then you can really get creative with color all right so now I'm adding a little bit of that fun lightness to the sky and letting the pastels blend themselves I don't like to over blend things other than an under painting often will blend it you know the pan pastels that I use they kind of are nice and blended anyway because of the applicator that I use but uh other than an under painting I don't like to do too much blending you'll see me in a minute use a chamois cloth uh like you dry your cars with to do some blending but I prefer really to let the pastels blend themselves and they will do that eventually as you add layers now I'm doing what's here called um sky holes and it's a negative painting actually oh here's my chamois cloth I'm I'm doing this more in the distance to create a softness because things get a little more blurry far away and I'm using it to blend my reflections with reflections you really just want to pull those reflections straight down with some sort of blending tool I did soften these trees a little bit I kind of wish I hadn't done that and that's a benefit actually filming yourself a lot you get to rewatch what you've done and think what you would or would not do again and I've darkened a little bit of the sky I like my upper sky to usually be a little bit darker in value it kind of pulls the eye in and adding some more of these pretty light colors from the Richardson hand rolled landscape set and just creating a little drama in the sky but can you see how my colors in the distant trees and the trees in in general are just so much punchier in color and we definitely have that gift or ability as artists to use our artistic license here you can see I've done more of that sky hole carving into the trees let me talk about that a little bit more as I paint what we typically like to do to have your trees look very painterly and believable is create more I don't want to say blobs but tree shapes in general we're not worried about branches and leaves and then later you carve the sky into the trees you shape the tree line after the fact and allow some of the sky to peek through you can kind of see how I did that so now I'm just having fun bringing some of this magenta color I think that's a yeah that's a Jack Richardson the set is actually called Richardson hand rolled landscape set 40 I believe and it just had really some beautiful colors and you know I like to the painting at this stage I do this a lot note to self I always say back away step away from your painting and this is advice for you guys too and give yourself just some time away to come back and look at it with fresh eyes often I am on crunch time to get tutorials out and things so sometimes I don't take my own advice very well but hey do as I say not as I do I always hated it when parents would say that it's like no you should do what you say there I go in one of my tangents but as you can see I've gotten in some of the um wispiness of those marshy grasses and I'm continuing to just develop the sky adding a little bit of that drama of color and can you see how the pastels are definitely starting to blend themselves occasionally I'll use my pinky and do a little bit of blending but I would say this is kind of one of my favorite stages of this painting look how loose it is even before I add any of the glaze of flatness on the tops of the water so you guys might want to keep that in mind especially my patrons if you want to just make this more of a little bit more abstract and very impressionistic painting so now I'm going to start adding some of those blues on the water that's going to give that feeling of flatness now I sometimes have a little bit of a challenge with this if my painting surface is not super flat because what we're trying to do is create a super flat stroke you see I've added a little more darks to the foreground trees there and a little bit more in the reflection blending the reflection a little bit with my finger I realized I needed a little bit more contrast dark values to get down at the base of those trees where it's more in shadow and that's the chamois cloth again that actually blends a little bit better than my fingers did I added a little more dark down into the grasses the marshy grasses in the foreground and now I'm going to start taking some of that sky color into the water basically what happens with water is it will reflect what's above it and so I'm kind of creating a mirror image with the colors that are in the sky and it's again going to give that drama and I don't know just dramatic color and and I like this stage too this is kind of nice and now is when I'm going to flatten that water out with just some of these really light very horizontal and light strokes of some of this blue and again I want you to take my advice based on me being able to go back and and look at this video keep this very minimal I think I overdid it with some of the blue that I added on top of the water so if you're patrons of mine I know I'm going to get to see some of your work keep that in mind and oh man I can't wait to see what some of you guys do with this so you see I keep working with the blue and I do that sometimes I just start fiddling with stuff and more and more and more but I liked it better before adding too many of those horizontal marks of that pretty blue across the water now also too I like to add a little bit of like a break of water around areas where the water might be lapping against the shore so that's why you see a couple of little lighter areas of like breaking water it adds a little interest to things and these last few minutes that you'll see during this painting process is really just me trying to enhance the composition with what I call punching up color adding little places where I feel like I can give some dramatic color and mark making to just enhance the composition and to intrigue the viewer to say hey looky here or hey look at the sky over here and it's really a way that you can pull your viewer into what you see as beautiful in this image adding a little more dark around that shoreline to kind of curve the viewer right around into those distant trees and and kind of having fun this is this is when it gets to be a fun stage for me when I'm painting while I'm adding my finishing marks I wanted to share a little bit more about pan pastels and if you wanted to try these maybe some suggestions of how to get started. Dick Blick has a great selection of pan pastel sets and tools and palette trays and more and you know you can get started very simply you could even get a little five starter set they have a few of these this is the five blue starter set it even comes with those little tools you see there for about $25 here's another small set available and if you get serious about it and you want to get a little more this is a set that I think is beautiful I love the fact that it has your primary colors for mixing and some punchy colors as well and some blacks and whites for getting lighter or darker values of a particular color. Now I always like to say I don't want to be a product pusher I just like to share with you the things I learned and some of the products I use and techniques but you could totally recreate this painting using regular stick pastels you could do the same thing with similar colors or again just three values and blend them in with regular pastels I do happen to think though that these pan pastels on the pastel matte is just such a soft beginning so I was very pleased and happy with those results I'm definitely going to use this technique again so you know I love sharing that's just you know what I love doing for many years since I started doing this sharing on youtube many years ago all right so let's take a look at this final painting and by the way they always look a little bit more drab the way I have my camera off to the side whenever I get my camera right in front of the painting they seem to be more rich and vibrant and if you've watched this long here on the Monet Cafe channel would you be so kind as to give this video a thumbs up and leave me a comment that always helps for this video to be shared more on youtube and if you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page oh my goodness I already can picture what some of you guys are going to do with this it's just such a great little family of artists we have well it's good to be a big family but a very precious group of artistic souls all right everyone as always God bless I mean that and happy painting