 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. In today's pastel painting tutorial, I'll take you through the stages and explain what happens when alcohol meets soft pastel. The combination of regular drugstore alcohol with soft pastels is magical. So come on in the studio with me today as I share this dreamy technique and take you through the stages to create a pastel painting of an enchanting field of flowers dappled with sunlight and shadows. And here we go. And take a look at this lovely reference image from unsplash.com. I've been eyeing this reference image for a while and I chose it because this month's theme is shadows and it has such a beautiful dappling effect of sunlight and shadows on this rolling field and the coolness and the shadows for this image dictated my color choices. Now, if you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page, you will receive a full explanation of my colors, my color choices, my products, and also I'll talk about this new set of pastels made by Jay Luda Pastels. All right, let's get started. I'm beginning with a very simplified sketch and I'm using a Prismacolor new pastel that is, they're harder. They're quite affordable too. I think these are great pastels just to have as a little set. They're good for sketching things in like this. They're also great for just laying in, you can turn them flat and block things in for doing an underpainting. They're not quite as soft as, say, like Sennelier, Unison, Terry Ludwig. So they don't take up quite as much tooth of the paper and therefore they're great for underpaintings as well. So lots of good purposes for these. Now, while I'm sketching this, I wanna talk a little bit about my reasoning for my underpainting. I wanted this to feel cool. I looked at the scene and I thought, you know, often I do a warm or a complimentary color underpainting with oranges and yellows and golden colors, but I wanted this one to feel cooler. Often I like the little bits of red or orange peeking through when I have a lot of grasses, a lot of greens and grasses and sky colors blue. I love that gold or red just peeking through, giving that complimentary contrast of color. But in this one, I wanted to focus more on shadow colors and have it feel very easy and soothing. So therefore I decided to give it a cooler underpainting. Now, this might answer some of your questions. Oh, by the way, that was a Prismacolor new pastel that I just laid down to get my darks in. I believe it was the one that's called Spruce Blue that they've discontinued. It's just a nice, pretty dark blue-green color, but you could use whatever you have. Now I'm using these cooler colors I mentioned that are going to be my darker values for my grasses and my trees. And the darkest darks I've put in so far are for the trees and that foreground area where it does appear that the grasses are not only deeper, but almost like the hill rolls forward. So we're seeing shadows in the field. And if you examine the reference image, you can see this, especially if you squint your eyes, where the deeper kind of valley areas of the field are. And it's in the foreground. There's some deeper grasses. It looks like it's lower. And there's a second level of deep grasses. It was that purple I put down before. Now these grasses in the distance that I'm laying down now are flatter. They don't seem to have as many valleys and they're further away, so I lightened up the value. Now here's one of those Jay Luda pastels. I thought it would be a nice cool color for those distant mountains. And notice my color palette for the underpainting is all of these cooler, purpley magenta colors. And I just really felt that set a nice mood for this relaxed feel of this painting. And now I've pretty much blocked in my values and colors for my underpainting. And I'm going to basically just wet these pastels, turning them into paint. That's what happens when you wet pastels. Often I'll use just water. Water takes longer to dry. And because you art paper curls a lot, I thought I want this to dry as fast as possible. So I decided to use alcohol. I've used alcohol of varying percentages. This is 70%. I think it doesn't smell as bad as like the 90%. Now I'm just using a really ragged brush. It's just an old brush. I'll need some paper towels to control the amount of liquid. I first started with the alcohol in a jar, but I quickly abandoned that. It wasn't flowing the way I wanted. So I resorted to a little bottle I keep. It's just a little fine mist bottle that I put some alcohol in. It was from like a body spray. And I dumped it all out, washed out the bottle and put in some of the alcohol, straight alcohol. And I find this method works really great to keep gravity working in your favor. The drips just kind of flow down. And I really wanted to have enough application of alcohol for it to feel really loose. You'll see me even start applying more as I get down to the grass as they really start to drip and run. Also, I am cleaning my brush when I move from one color to the other. I don't want to contaminate too much of that dark spruce blue color from the Prismacolor new pastel. So every so often I'll just kind of rinse my brush out. And now you can see where I'm getting to the grasses. And I'm working in bands. I want to keep that feeling of where the deeper valleys are in that hill versus the areas of grasses that are a little bit more on a peak. So a lot of times people are like, oh my gosh, that just looks like a total mess. But I'm a true believer that it is these loose beginnings that bring life to your painting. And an alcohol wash like this with soft pastels is a fantastic way to begin a painting and influence it to have an impressionistic and painterly outcome. And here I've blown it dry with a blow dryer and it does have some curling. It's a little wavy and warped. It does flatten out by the end of the painting, but I did have to kind of work against some of that curling. All right, time to paint. Now I'm using some of these Jay Luda pastels, but I have another video coming where I do a full review of this set, but I will say I love them. They're very similar to Terry Ludwig pastels in shape and consistency. And I wish they weren't so expensive. They're pretty darn expensive because they come from Romania. I think it has to do with how much it costs to get them here, but I did love them. And now sit back and relax to watch the rest of this painting come to life. This version on the Monet Cafe channel is sped up substantially. However, if you're a patron of mine again, you get more content, you get full commentary for this video, product information, you get an early release. Your version of these videos doesn't have any commercials and lots more. Again, it's only $5 a month to become a patron, but you still get plenty of content here on Monet Cafe. Now, be sure to subscribe to this channel. I notice a lot of people watch my videos and they haven't yet hit that subscribe button, so it's really easy to do and I certainly would appreciate it. Also go ahead and give it a thumbs up, a like. And let me know what you think about this alcohol wash. I've done this method before in other tutorials, but there are always new people watching these videos. So I love to share some of my favorite techniques and this is indeed one of them. I'm adding my darkest darks now to the trees, which are typically darker in a landscape. Vertical elements are darker and to the dark grasses. You can see in the reference image, the foreground grasses are substantially dark and then there's a band of darker grasses in the middle ground. And again, I just love this field and the light filtering through the trees. So watch this painting come to life. Please watch to the end. It really does help the success of this video and I'd love to hear what you think. All right, enjoy and I'll be back at the end with some commentary. I pray this pastel painting tutorial was a blessing for you and I would love to hear from you in the comments and tell me what you thought if you are gonna try this alcohol wash technique. Again, if you would like the full tutorial with product information and additional commentary, consider becoming a patron of mine. Only $5 a month on my Patreon page and I'd love to have you as part of the family. All right, everyone, God bless and happy painting.