 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins bringing you a soft pastel painting tutorial on painting misty mountains. We're gonna get started real soon but I would love it if you would go ahead and like this video, subscribe to my channel, and also click that bell icon to be notified of future videos. Also if you would like a little extra content or to support this channel it's only $5 a month. You get extra goodies and you help to keep these free videos coming to aspiring artists all over the world. Let's start with sharing my product information. You'll also be able to find the products as links in the description of this video. Now I used a set primarily that I'm going to this site DakotaPastels.com and they have everything soft pastel and right now I'm going to their Terry Ludwig sets. I used a set primarily that's their Richard McKinley set. You do not have to have this set to follow along. I just like to share what I'm using. I loved the neutrals in the set. I'll talk more about them as I paint. The surface that I used is called Fisher 400. I get it from the site ProArtPanels.com. I get the sheets. You can also get it on panels. The sheets are a little bit less expensive and they have various sizes. They usually come in either 5 or 10 quantity. I like to get sometimes the 16 by 20 size and often the 11 by 14 size. Now again you do not have to have this paper. You can use whatever you have. I have so many different ways you can create your own pastel surfaces. I have videos on DIY pastel surfaces but I just like to share with you what I use. While I paint I'll be sharing with you why I love this surface so much. At the beginning of this painting I will be doing what's called an underpainting and for that I'll be using a product that's called Prismacolor New Pastels. I'll share more about them as I paint as well but I like to share occasionally that I have an Amazon shop and an Amazon shop. I have a section where you can see product review videos but I really like these idea lists that I have made. See the videos there. The idea lists are categorized into sections. Pastel and painting products, surfaces, everything but I really like this practical studio tools section here. You can see a lot of the things that you will notice I'm using during certain videos and my little pencil sharpeners, all kinds of things. My artist tape. You'll see me using that in this video and I also love my limb tape dispenser too. So I get lots of questions about that. Oh and you'll see me using my color wheel and my grayscale finder. So that just makes it easy for you to find. I have my Amazon shop link in every video. The reference image is from unsplash.com, a great site to get copyright free reference images. I'll have that link in the description of this video as well and I loved it because it reminds me of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina where my entire family tree is from. Now I did a little value study and I actually did four of these in the video just prior to this one. Now what am I doing here? I liked the dimensions of my value study. It was kind of long and thin and this is a little trick where you can get the same proportions for your painting surface. You literally put it in the top corner. I made my corner a piece of tape there. Diagonal it and wherever the ruler lands at the bottom of the paper, that's where you're going to stop. That's the edge of that painting. So I just put a piece of tape there at the edge and now my painting size in between those white pieces of tape is the same proportions dimensions as my value study. So again, a quick little easy way to get the same proportions for your painting surface. Alright, now I'm putting down some of these Prismacolor new pastels that I mentioned earlier. I'm using a purple and I switched to a pink in a little while and I'm using some cooler colors because the whole painting felt cool. Often I like to do a very warm underpainting. This is called an underpainting. I'll talk more about that. But the whole scene felt so cool. I didn't want a lot of warmth. These are misty mountains. I was imagining it like early morning and I have truly seen mountain scenes like this back home where my whole family is from like I mentioned and the clouds really do hang on top of the mountains like this. They call it the smoky mountains and literally from my great grandma's porch, it was a view very similar to that. So what am I doing and why am I doing this? As you can see, I'm getting a basic sketch in and I decided to use cooler colors rather than very warm. Often I'll do an underpainting. That's what this is called and I'll use like golden colors or reddish colors. But this scene just felt like early morning where the sun had just come up and it's kind of cool and maybe a little bit of just crispness to the air. So I wanted my underpainting. I didn't want to use greens because there's a lot of green in this, right? I didn't want to use blues. So I decided to go with kind of purples and pinks. And this is literally what the word sounds like. It's an underpainting. It's a painting underneath your painting. And of course the questions I get and the questions I used to ask was why would you do a painting underpainting? Why wouldn't you just start painting the colors that you see, which is called local color? The colors that you see in the scene, the greens, everything in that reference photo is local color. And I am not going to use local color. I'm going to put these colors underneath for multiple reasons. One, it's a sketch. It gives me an idea of where things are. Two, it's kind of a value study, just like my little value study over to the left that I talked about sketching out on my little index card. And three, it's a roadmap. It gives me not only my general sketch and positioning of things and my value study, but I've got already an idea of where things go and kind of how they're working in the general composition. So again, why would I, you're going to see me wet this in a minute. And I use alcohol. You could use water. Again, this paper is water friendly, but I'm going to create this general color palette underneath my painting because of the influence that it will have on the painting. Now I cover up a lot of it, but not all of it. There's some paintings where I'll do an underpainting. You'll see a lot of the underpainting peeking through and it causes all these fun and interesting color combinations. I think it makes the color almost vibrate sometimes. And in this painting, I cover up a decent amount of it, but there is still going to be that influence of this color affecting the final painting. And especially, I'm going to talk in a minute about the upper part of this, where those clouds, you notice the top third of this reference image is almost all clouds or mist, if you want to call it. I'll give you a little foreknowledge here. I sketched in the little house or building and I fiddled with it. Oh, I had it. I have it too high. I end up correcting that in a minute after the underpainting. I realized that later, but I decide to scratch the house later because I felt like it was competing with the scene. I felt like there were two focal points. There were the trees and then there was the house. And I just felt like it was getting too much attention. So you'll see me do away with that in the painting. And I kept it all natural. I didn't really want any human content in this painting, just nature. A lot of times when I'm doing an underpainting, I'll just tone the whole surface one color and then start painting. But in this one, I decided to give it a little bit of value and color difference in it. And again, almost like a sketch. Now, why would I leave the top part of this blank? Normally, I would have taken that pink all the way up to the top. I'll talk about that as I add the liquid. This is just regular drugstore alcohol. I think it's 71%. I have some paper towels and a big ol' scratchy brush and a little fan brush. I like brushes that have some texture and just some character to them. And it might seem crazy to be using this big brush to get into these little spaces. But the underpainting is really more of an impressionistic beginning. So it's okay if every it's actually better if everything isn't spelled out or you have lines. So I'm alcohol dries very quickly, by the way. So that's an advantage and a disadvantage. Okay, it dries quickly so you can paint faster. But sometimes if you need to work your pastel, you might want to use water because you have a little more time. You see mine's still dry up there. But the reason I left that lighter up top, I'm blending some of this pink up there, is I didn't want to have to go and try to lighten it up again. It's really light already. So why fight with that later? So I kept the value similar by leaving it light. Now let's talk just a little bit about the medium of soft pastel. Of course, in its regular state, it's dry, right? It's not like it's acrylic or oil or water color in a tube. But when you add liquid, it literally becomes paint. I like to say I'm liquefying the pastel. So a lot of people aren't aware that pastel is paint, you know, it just needs a little water to activate the paint aspect about it. Or, you know, whatever alcohol, I've used various products to liquefy pastels. If you've watched many of my videos, I'm like a mad art scientist. I love playing. I'd probably be a better artist if I'd stop playing so much and just get serious. But I just have too much fun and we learn a lot, right? So this is what is called liquefying soft pastel. And one of the reasons for doing this is to cover up most of that surface of the paper. Now I could have blended this without adding liquid. I could have gotten, I like lately using packing peanuts, little packing peanuts. I've heard you can use pool noodles. Often I'll use it's called pipe foam insulation, you can get it a hardware store. But you don't have to add liquid, you can literally blend the pastel to kind of get that effect of covering the whole surface. But I really like the liquid aspect or technique of doing an underpainting. I find that it just looks so dreamy, you know, now I've got the little fan brush. And you can see once I get a little bit of pastel on the brush, it's literally like paint on my brush. I can take it to another spot. And now the painting is dry. You can see it dries a little lighter. This is my Richard McKinley set of Terry Ludwig pastels. These are professional quality pastels. I love Terry Ludwig pastels. Their colors are great. They are softer. Now in the soft pastel lineup, by the way, pastel, Dakota pastels dot com has something called the pastel lineup. You can see the degree or the range of softness to hardness of all these different pastels. And it's free. I believe they'll just mail it to you. So that's another great thing about Dakota pastels. I will have a link to Dakota pastels in this particular set in the description of this video. So now here's where I realized I went back and looked at my reference image just like, Oh my goodness, I got the house too high. So I did readjust it. And like I mentioned earlier, I often use other elements in the painting to see where things are. So I don't know how I missed that. I realized it's too big. It's too high. But as I said before, I ditched the house altogether later. I just I didn't like it. I don't know didn't feel right. So this is another neat thing, you know, you'd be like, Oh my gosh, I've ruined my painting. I put the house in the wrong spot. These pastels are so forgiving. There I've learned over the years. I mean, you can even use a kneaded eraser. It looks like a little piece of clay or putty to erase things out. And because sanded surfaces like this Fisher 400, very similar to you art 400, if you're familiar with you art sanded paper, they have so much ability to layer. See, I'm just layering over something. It's like you're just covering it up. Now you get a lot of layers, but but don't abuse it. Don't think, Oh, I've got plenty of layers. I'm just going to mess up all the time. You want efficiency of stroke, I call it try to make your strokes count. Not a lot of wasted strokes. But it is nice to know that it's it's a bit forgiving. So that was just my attempt to cover up the old house to kind of get the new one in. And I used some why would I use those colors that I used the minty kind of sagey, eucalyptus green, why those mountains, the trees in the distance, they look a little darker. Well, actually, if you squint your eyes, those distant mountains, the part that's a little closest to us where the like a mass of trees is, it's not as dark as you think. So values tend to get lighter in the distance, things aren't as dark, trees aren't as dark. And it's literally because we have air, it's called aerial perspective, you have air in between you, and things that are far away, you have a lot of air in between you and the distant mountains. And therefore that makes them lighter in value. And also another thing that happens due to all of this air between you and things far away is color temperatures, they cool off, they're not going to be as warm. You're not going to see warm greens on distant mountains. Mountains typically blue out or turn a cooler purple color. But that's the scientific principle, or the law of physics that causes that to happen. You can see it in the reference photo. You see the hill that's in the foreground. Look at it, it's very warm green. And the distant mountains are very minty cool greens and almost bluish colors. And what I've been doing here, I'm reinforcing these trees, when I did the, when I liquefied the pastels, I just had them like a purple. So I'm using this. It's again, it's a Prismacolor new pastel. It's called spruce blue. I love this for a dark. Guess what? They have discontinued it. I've had some of my patrons on my Patreon page sharing some information about that with me. And I found out fortunately on Dakota pastels that I've been talking about that I'll have the link to the Terry Ludwigs, they have under their section called Prismacolor new pastels, they've shared that it's discontinued, but they have some alternative colors that you can choose. If you've been a fan of the spruce blue, I know many artists are Marla Baguetta. I think she uses that color all the time. So that's good that they give you some alternatives. But I basically just got the trees darker. Now what I'm doing here is, do you see that on the reference image, you're seeing a little bit of the mountain through those clouds, see the to the right kind of mid right up in the clouds there, there's a little bit of that mountain peeking through. So I'm kind of getting the negative shape of the mountain that's kind of in between the clouds. And later I'll be coming back and adding the lighter, misty clouds around it. So rather than painting the whole mountain in the general value and color that I see, I'm getting in the parts of the mountain that are showing through or peeking through. And I'll later layer the clouds on top. I've had a lot of this real time early on and just sped it up slightly in some spots. But now I'm going to speed it up just a little more so you can watch as I develop this mountain. You see how I'm choosing some cooler colors. And if you squint your eyes, you can probably see that the color I'm using right here in this area is maybe not quite as dark as what you see in the reference image. But I'm just getting my base down right now. Later I'm going to come back and add that illusion of some of those vertical trees. They're going to be really small, very suggestive. But this is my base color that I'm getting down first. And one of the reasons I chose this reference image, of course, one of the main ones is I loved it. It reminds me of home and my family and the mountains. But another is that this month, the theme in Monet Cafe and for my patrons on my Patreon page is painting with neutrals. And this scene was a perfect opportunity to show how to use neutrals. Those distant mountains are very neutral in color. And what I mean by that is neutral just means colors that they don't have that punch. They're not as highly saturated. They're a little more dulled out. And that's definitely what happens with distance and mountains. And also this Richard McKinley set is a perfect set for using neutrals. He is an artist that's known for using his neutrals and using them so beautifully. It doesn't mean your whole painting has to be neutrals. But it makes your vibrant colors stand out even more when you have a palette of neutral to rest them upon. Now this green that I'm using here is a little more saturated. It has a little more oomph to it, not as neutral. And I know that it is too bright right now, too saturated. But I put it down because those that patch of grass on the distant mountains and the reference image, it is a bit green. It has a little bit of warmth to it. So I put in a color. I didn't have that exact color. So I put in a color that was a little warmer than I wanted. And now I use a cooler color to layer on top of it. Now you're gonna see me shaking my fist. Why am I doing that? I had I thought I was recording. I had been using these pastel blenders. They're made by pan pastel. I like this. It looks like a sponge. You can actually use some makeup sponges to do this. And I had blended a lot of my mountain and my clouds in and I missed that footage. I'm not blaming my husband, but he called me out of the room for something and I forgot to turn my camera back on. But here I'm using that I'll do more blending you'll see me use these tools plenty more times in this video. But here I'm using that spruce blue pastel again. It's darker than I need but I'm using a super light touch to get in some of these darker patches and groupings of trees on these distant mountains. And I'll blend them a little more and I'll soften them by layering other pastels on the top. There's that blender again. Now with that type of blender, you want to make sure you clean it off. If you've just worked on a dark area and then you go to work on a light area, you can buy multiple blenders and have some that you use for dark and some that you use for light, but I can wipe them off on a on a paper towel. They seem to clean off pretty good if I move to a new area of color or value. Now I'm just scumbling in scumblings just little kind of random marks to give these little groupings and indication of trees. Now you want to make sure these are vertical. Now you don't want to spell them all out either. Okay, you notice they're just kind of a blob back there. But you do get a hint of that vertical element of trees. You don't want them leaning. These trees aren't going to be leaning on the hill. So little staccato, well that's a musical term, vertical strokes. And when things are in the distance, another principle is they lose detail. And they all kind of merge together and become one. So that's why those trees don't have a lot of individuality. But you can see now how I got the dark in there. And it feels a little bit more like that general feel of the mountain and the reference image. Now I noticed something interesting about this image. You haven't done plenty of road paintings. I haven't done many where it was a road or a path that was grass. You know, a lot of times it's a dirt road or a rocky road or it's, you know, gravel. But this time it was a grassy road. So it was very subtle. So I decided to make some delineation between the grassy path and the taller grasses by giving a little bit of taller grasses on the side. So that's why I darkened a little of the foreground. Now I'm using my finger, I don't over blend with my finger. But these were just the trees that were going to be even further away. So what's going to happen on the ones on that mountain that's even further, they're going to be even lighter in value and even cooler in color temperature. You're barely going to see them. In other words, I really loved this pretty cool green that's in the Richard McKinley set. Oh my gosh, isn't that pretty? Now I'm using horizontal strokes and kind of directional strokes because when my land gets far away, like that field, it's kind of the middle ground, your strokes and elements start to flatten out. They get more horizontal. You don't see a lot of vertical grass blades. When you look in the distance, things become more of a blanket. And so I'm just layering blankets of color on that distant field. And because that area I'm working in is far away, it's not going to have a lot of warmth in it, but it did have a little. So I wanted to get a little bit of that mixture of cool and warm. Now guess what? My trees still don't have that focal point interest. They're still a little bit too light in value. And I wanted to darken them up even more. This is another pastel that is in the Terry Ludwig set. This one, I don't think I often talk about the one that's called eggplant. It looks almost black. This one is a little bit more of a dark burgundy rich. It's got a little more warmth than the eggplant color, but it was perfect for getting in the darker values for these trees. Now I am making my strokes kind of zigzaggy evergreen trees kind of have branches that go horizontal and make sure it's not too patterned though. It's okay if there's some spaces between later. You're going to see me come back. They look pretty dark right now, but this is my base of my darkest value. Later, I'm going to come back and layer some warmer and lighter values on top. And I'm going to zoom in for that footage for you to see too. Now I again, you're going to see me lose the house later because I just kept, I don't know, wrestling with it. It just didn't feel right. But right now I'm getting in some of those distant trees. I'm even going to darken them up a little bit. There's a few that are they're kind of the middle ground trees and they're going to be a little bit darker than those trees on the mountain. And to do that, I'm grabbing my little spruce blue again and I'm not pressing super hard, but I'm giving that little vertical center trunk and then a few little zigzaggy marks and also ones that are further away. They just keep getting smaller and moving further down the mountain. Now here's where I'm getting in a little bit of dark. Like I said, I wanted to kind of give the feel that there were some grasses growing taller than these were or the in the reference image on either side of the road. So I'm just giving that little feel of some depth to these grasses and you can see how chunky that looks with all the splotchiness showing through. So that's why I'm getting my little blender again and I'm just using it to blend in some of this dark that I put down and I apologize for my shaky easel. It's just a little French easel. I keep saying when I get to my new studio, I'm still in a kind of a temporary situation for four years. Is that temporary? But anyway, eventually my husband and I were trying to build our home on Six Acres that we bought years ago and I'm getting a new studio. It won't be huge, but I'll have more room. Then I'm going to buy the point was a more stationary stable easel. But you can see how I used this little blender and I did. I just wiped it off a few times and I was able to use it in even the lighter areas. So I've learned my little paper towel method of cleaning it off as I work. And as I said, this is a grassy trail. It's not gravel or dirt. So I thought, what am I going to do? That was a little different technique for me. I thought, I'm going to get in some cooler colors. If I squinted my eyes, the grassy trail did seem a little cooler and darker in value, especially the front part of that trail. So that's why I got that particular kind of cooler green and often as I do, when I have a color in my hand, I look for other areas that I can use it and I realize some of those trees in the middle ground needed to be a little bit darker and I'm just getting a slight little indication. There was a little edge to the right side of the trail. It appeared that the sun was coming from the right. So there was a little darker edge on the side of some of that trail. I gave a hint of that. I'm going to work a little bit more here and add you some music to watch. Don't go anywhere though because I'm coming back. I'm going to zoom in when I add some more value and color to these trees. Also, if you're a patron of mine, remember how I mentioned at the beginning, patrons get extra goodies. Plus, we're just a nice little happy family. We have lots of fun. Well, it's getting to be a big family. We have lots of fun and I get to see your work. This week we're having something called a critique my painting session where my patrons submit their work. I choose a few to give a little suggestions. Some constructive feedback basically. So my patron, that's a Patreon favorite. They love that. Also, for this particular painting my patrons will get my color notes. I literally take all of the colors that I use in this painting and I make a guide, a sheet, and share all of the different color selections. That way, even if you don't have the same set, you can kind of color match or I say at least value match. Even if you don't have the same colors, try to choose values that are close to the ones that I'm using. That means the lightness or the darkness. Alright, so my patrons, I love you guys. Thank you so much. You've literally helped my husband and I get through losing our jobs. We lost our jobs due to COVID and I know a lot of you guys know what I'm talking about. My husband still doesn't have a job. He's building our house while I'm doing my art business. So I'm very grateful to my patrons and your support. Okay, now I'm not going to add music because here I'm already zooming into the tree. Here's where I'm using. You see this pretty rich foresty green? I'm just layering that over where I believe the light is hitting the branches. Now I can't see it. I didn't zoom in and look at the trees. I'm just kind of guessing where, or using my intuition, as to where some of the light might be catching. Like I said, I felt like the right was kind of coming from the upper, upper light, right side. And now just giving a few of those little zigzaggy strokes. And you see how it's already feeling like an evergreen tree now? Later, you're going to see me add a little bit of a lighter green on top of that, just in a few areas. All right, now I'm going to add the music. You'll see me lose the house in a minute and I'll be back soon. And now that I have most things blocked in throughout the painting, I'm coming in to add some of those lighter, wispy, low-hanging clouds that are just caressing the mountain tops. And you can see that my initial layers were a little bit darker in value. And now I'm using some values that are just so slightly lighter. And just using the side of the pastel, now you can see how I'm coming in over some of that area where I had already painted in little bits of the mountain peeking through. And this was just such a perfect focal point to me. It was in the reference image, a little bit of that really low-hanging cloud that was just right at the end of the road, right in the cusp of those trees. I'm doing a little bit of negative painting, painting the cloud kind of in between the trees. But I wanted to get a value that was just a little bit darker. When you do, they're called sky holes. It's the spaces between trees. So I got a little bit of that lavender neutral color. And look at these beautiful neutrals in the distant mountains. Again, this Richard McKinley set is just beautiful. I love this neutral, cool, blueish green that I have here. Also a good color to sneak in some of those negative spaces. And overall, I think the effect of the low-hanging clouds was effective. And this was the first time I had done any type of clouds on a mountain like this. But I think the pastel blenders worked for the initial stages and then glazing on top of that afterwards. Now I'm getting a little bit more of the distant mountain there. I felt like there was a little bit more color to it. So I'm still playing around. But then I wanted to cool it off a bit. So you know, you kind of, you know, it's kind of an ebb and flow kind of a thing with pastel painting. You work a bit and then you step back and you analyze and you see where your values and your colors are. And it really is a good idea to take a break. If you've been painting for a while, this painting, it took over an hour. I can't remember how much longer than that. But take a break, step away, and then come back to it with fresh eyes. Because I'm at about 30 minutes into this tutorial, I am going to speed up the rest that you could pause it and kind of get the idea of what I'm doing here. You see me using the blender a little more. And I'm going to be developing that foreground. And at the end, I wasn't sure if I wanted to add flowers or not. But I do. So you'll see at the end. You'll see that house disappear soon too as well. So enjoy the rest of this. I'm going to add some music, analyze, you know, how I'm working, what I'm doing. And I'll be back with a little more about the flowers. And there I'm using the blender again. And a little bit more cloud work at the end. Alright, enjoy. Hopefully you've been able to see how I've developed the foreground by layering different values and colors. Again, keeping this very cool color palette. And now I decided I had a little bit of lighter value lavenders and blues or cool greenish blues. And now I'm getting in some of these purples. I use for, I usually kind of just make up flowers in my head. I don't know what kind they are. But I see the general shapes. So I use some of the darker magenta colors to kind of connect things in the painting. I put a little bit of that magenta in those trees. Remember that dark magenta I used for the darks of the trees. So I felt like that was a nice pop of color or in a darker value to add some interest into the foreground. And again, this was a grassy trail. So I just added a value that was a little darker. Most values are a little darker and a little bit of an indication of some strokes that felt a little bit more like a grassy trail that someone has trampled upon on maybe their morning walk with their coffee into the mountains. I would love to walk down this road. I would think I would do that every morning if I lived somewhere where it looked like that. And now just for some final little hints of clouds. A few little shapes lingering and resting upon the mountains. And it just feels mysterious to me, these types of scenes. But you can see how I glaze the clouds over and have the low hanging cloud down at the crux of that little focal point interest. And I enjoyed this. I'm going to do more mountain paintings now. I don't know why I haven't done more in the past, but I thoroughly enjoyed this painting. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial. I hope you learned something. I hope you'll become a patron if you would like to support this channel or get extra content. My patrons were, they're just such a lovely group of people. I'm so blessed to be able to enjoy art and the friendships that I get from meeting people like you. Now I do have, this painting is in my Etsy shop, the original, as long as it's available. I'll have the link in the description of this video. I also have prints and products available. I forget to say this. I put this in my Fine Art America site where you can order poster prints. You can order framed prints. Canvas prints are always nice. I like the canvas prints. And I will have that link in the description of this video as well. I hope this lesson blessed you. I hope you learned a lot. If you're a patron of mine, if you recreate from this, I can't wait to see what you do. You will be getting your color notes patrons. And as always, God bless and happy painting.