 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I had so much fun painting this field of lavender flowers. I call it Lavender Forever and I'm gonna share with you a new blending technique that I loved and I will definitely do this again. So get ready for some artistic learning and fun. Oh and if you would like this video and subscribe to this channel I would appreciate it and also be sure to click that bell icon you get notified of future videos. And I'm able to keep these free lessons coming because of the support from my patrons on my Patreon page. If you would like to consider becoming a patron it's only $5 a month and you get extra goodies and extra content. The reference image is from unsplash.com a great site to get copyright free reference images and I will have a clickable link in the description of this video. I'm using a combination of pastels. You could see some Terry Ludwig's there. These are Rembrandt microsets. Rembrandts were some of my very first pastels. They're a bit more affordable and this is my general layout. Those are some of my more neutral colors. These are what I started with. I actually don't think I used that really bright green but you'll be able to see some of my pastel choices. I do tweak it a little bit as I'm painting but I'm mixed in those round ones are the Rembrandt microsets and if they're round like this one larger that's a Mount Vision pastel and I used quite a few of that Mount Vision set that's their purples. They're five purples in one set and if you're a patron of mine you will be getting my color notes and all real-time footage for this tutorial. That's one of the perks for being a patron of mine. It's only $5 a month. Now I am using Fisher 400 sanded pastel paper. I love this. It is almost exactly like UART paper. If you're familiar with UART paper it's a great surface as well but I find the Fisher doesn't warp as much which is great. Now here's my starter pastels. I do tweak these a little bit. Like I said my patrons you'll get my final color choices. Also I'm going to be using a piece of UART paper. It's a scrap piece to do a little testing on and here are the blending tools that they're not really new to me. I just forgot I had them. These are called pastel smoothies. I've had them a while. They come in a small medium and large and you can see that other large one. It's just from a craft store. It's a Waverly brand and I do end up using it because it's larger. Now you want to make sure these are clean before you do this technique. Also I'll be using alcohol that you can get at a drug store. I also put it in a little mister bottle. This is not vanilla sugar body mist. It's just a way to spray the alcohol. Now here's my tester page. I'm just putting down some different colors and on this one I even layered it a little bit. It's usually a good idea to do a little test. If you're going to start a new technique on a nice piece of pastel paper and I found the little blending technique worked. I just smoothed it out with the blender. Now I used these blenders when I first got them just on dry pastel. I had never tried using them with alcohol like this and I really liked how it created a nice blended surface and I could just paint on top of it. What it does is it takes away some of just that white or cream color in this case of the paper and it also kind of gives you a little bit of an extra layer. When you spray the alcohol it kind of dilutes the pastel and somewhat sets it into the paper. So I am definitely going to be using this technique again and it's all pastel product. Sometimes I'll use different products to do under paintings and in this case it's just all pastel. So I played around. It's also a good idea if you're starting a painting with a reference image to just do some little studies. So I used this as an opportunity just to kind of get a general idea of how this field would be. So I was just kind of playing around and also testing my new blending technique. When I start painting I'll be giving commentary on some of my techniques and strategies for creating this painting. On the regular Monet Cafe channel however I am going to do a little bit of a speed version after I give some commentary. But again if you're a patron of mine you're going to get all real time plus extra commentary. So just wanted to let my patrons know your version will have real time footage. So let's jump right into this painting tutorial and I will now share this new and exciting blending technique. Now you can see these colors that I've chosen. This one is sort of a red a warm orangy kind of red. And notice that these colors to my right are all very warm pinks mostly pinks and some that lean a little bit more towards red and orange. Now why on earth my reference image is mostly greens and lavenders and beautiful kind of teal colors. They're all very cool colors. And it seems a little odd when I first started painting about what was the reason for putting down an underpainting that's such a different color. Well that is the exact reason because it is such a different color temperature it's going to really make all of those cooler colors stand out and pop. And you'll see I leave quite a bit of the underpainting showing through especially in the foreground grasses and it creates such beautiful color interest. Now you can see what I'm doing here is I am making just some large strokes. They're going to start getting smaller. And I put down my darker values first. I did a combination of that orange the two that are at the bottom on the right. It was kind of an orange and a reddish orange color. Now I'm getting a little cooler as I go into the background. Why would I do that? Well color temperatures get cooler in the distance and they also get lighter. Another artistic principle is that things usually flatten out in the distance. Your foreground grasses are going to be vertical strokes and they're going to gradually get shorter and then eventually turn into horizontal strokes. So you see how I've gotten gradually cooler in color temperature, lighter in value. Now I'm even adding some of this really light color and I'm kind of blending the edge of that pink. But what's happening here is you're setting an underpainting. That's already going to have correct values for when you start with the other colors. Now I've grabbed the alcohol. I sprayed a little spritzer across the bottom. I'm doing this kind of in sections. And I'm just blending with my brush in vertical strokes and see how nicely it blends. Now I'm working on the middle section. Now I am cleaning my brush out in between each section that I'm working on. Now these are also going to have a little bit of vertical strokes, not quite as tall. And I sprayed a little bit more alcohol. But notice how gradually my strokes are going to change to horizontal. And even though this blends pretty smoothly anyway, you still can see the brush or the stroke work. Now I'm getting the lightest layer and I do think I went to my sink and actually washed this brush out so I wouldn't contaminate the colors. And now I'll just finish up and blow it dry. I'm usually impatient and want to paint. And actually while I blow it dry, you can see it drying. It dries a little bit lighter. It also had a brush thing on there, a little part of the brush that came off. So now it's nice and dry and see I've got already a nice value study in this beautiful warm underpainting to get started. I also want to be sure and share only do this obviously on water friendly surfaces. Now you could do the same technique on watercolor paper. And like I often do to make a more affordable homemade pastel surface, you can use watercolor paper. It's a lot cheaper than these pastel papers. Do this technique and then coat it with clear Gesso, not regular Gesso. I have actually have a Amazon product review video on the technique in my Amazon shop. So be sure to check out my Amazon shop. It's in a link in every description of every video, including this one. Now let me talk a little bit about what I'm doing here. I felt like I wanted the sky to connect a little bit with the lavender flowers. So I chose a little bit of a neutral dark, darker lavender, not dark, it's still light that was up in the upper heavens. And then I just scumbled in some lighter lavenders. And I want to stress for you guys to resist the urge to over blend in initial stages or feel like you have to complete one section. It's going to look very loose. You want it, you're just blocking things in. So don't worry if it looks rather unfinished, because that's what it's supposed to look like at this stage. Now this is a dark, obviously, it's a Terry Ludwig dark, it's from the Terry Ludwig, that's a tongue twister dark set. And I love the sets. I got both of them. Now these are not inexpensive, but they are so worth it. And even if you could just buy a few darks to get started. Like I said, this one is not the Terry Ludwig dark, it's a little bit more of a gray, maybe a little bit more neutral looking. Now I am adding one that is a little bit lighter in value. And what I'm doing is just suggesting a tree line, I'm just making shapes. And I'm actually decreasing the size to give that feeling of distance, this feel just goes way back. And I like to sometimes leave a little break somewhere in the horizon line for my trees for the eye to kind of be able to escape. And I don't like doing this in the center, it's usually offset a little bit, it just makes to me a more pleasing composition. So I'm kind of just layering a few other colors on top of that to soften it up. But later you'll see me add some greens to it and some teals. Now that first green I laid down was too light to start with. Typically with soft pastel, we go dark to light. And that I say typical because there are exceptions to that rule. But I realized I wanted to get some of my darker values in before laying lighter values down. Now why would I choose this teal on the left side trees? Well, they're further away. And remember what I said, color temperatures get cooler in the distance. Now I went for an even lighter teal. Now think of these as the underneath layers that I'm laying down now. And gradually they're going to get lighter and lighter. As I work now you see here this is an example and they're going to get warmer as they move closer to the viewer. And I'm making wide strokes. And I'm not getting crazy about thinking where grasses are. I'm just trying to create a blanket of a nice field. Later you will see me adding some little horizontal strokes to represent some lavenders that are further away. And now is where I'm adding a little bit of that. This is another Terry Ludwig green. It's a real pretty like forest green, nice dark green. And again, this tree bank is closer to the viewer. So it is going to have a little bit of warmth to it. But as I get further into the distance, my color choices will begin to get a little bit more neutral colors in the distance are not as punchy. And they will get cooler. Now I'm excited to say this is the first time I'm announcing this that I was chosen to be one of the guest artists on pastel live. This event, if you watched it last year, it's amazing. They have all these pastel artists sharing their knowledge and expertise of pastel painting. And you can sign up for it and get so much information in one event. Now I'm going to be I'm so happy about it. I'm going to be doing a beginner tutorial. I love teaching beginners. And guess what my topic is color. And I have to say, I am just such a color freak. And I feel like God gives everybody a gift with certain things. Some people are great architecturally in drawing, or just rendering things great. And I've always felt like I just, I don't know, I feel color. And I'm going to teach you guys in pastel live a lot of the techniques that I just think are going to make your art go to the next level. So I'm excited about that. So I just wanted to say that's coming. A lot of these things I'm talking about and touching on here, I'll go into more deeply at the pastel live event. And I'll be sure to share on YouTube and on all of my social media platforms. And of course, to my patrons, how to sign up for this event, when it is and all of the details. So that was just a little teaser. All right, now what am I doing? I want to make sure one of the things I definitely want in this painting, those lavender flowers are the star of the show. And I want them to be gestural. What do I mean by gestural? Gesture is when something is a lively mark or lively stroke. If you are heavy handed or cinch up on your pencil or you draw slowly or paint a little slow, just detailed mark, it's not going to feel alive. It's going to feel stiff and dead. So I'm just trying to give myself a little reminder of some of these stocks of lavender and kind of how I want them to go in a direction. I'm creating a focal point as well. Notice the break I talked about in the tree line in the back. That's kind of where I want almost like the wind blowing, it's going to sweep from the lower left up through those lavender flowers. And that one that's up above the horizon line is going to be my main central focal point of lavender and it's pointing. This is another focal point strategy of how elements will literally point your viewer in the direction going, hey, look, this is where I want you to look. So it's a really neat way to do that. By the way, I have a focal point video, a free video here on Monet Cafe. I think it's five focal point strategies, something like that. I'll try to remember to put a card. I'm trying to do that. When I talk about a video, I think will be beneficial. I'm putting what's called a card. A little thing will pop up and you'll see you can click it and see what video I'm talking about. I also wanted to ask you guys, if you like this new filming format that I'm doing right now, I literally have my pastel surface flat on my adjustable table. Another video I recently did a product review here on Monet Cafe of this table that raises and lowers electronically and it's so handy. So I have my surface flat and often I like standing up but I found I could get my lighting better centrally right over top of me and it was easier for me to paint this way. I wasn't trying to avoid my light stand and everything. So this was definitely easier but you'll see me later take off the painting and go outside and give it a good tap on the back because the pastel is not falling. It's not up on an easel so it kind of lays on the surface. I was quite surprised at how little pastel dust I got and that's another surprise I'm going to share with you soon. It's something else that has really helped me with pastel dust in my studio. So I'm excited to share that. I can't make enough videos. I don't have enough time in the day for all of my ideas and the things that I learn and discover. So now you can see I'm just adding in some of the grass colors. Look how loose and almost, I don't know, chunky and crazy this looks but that's the goal that I said before. Resist the urge to get so detailed and start drawing blades of grass and now my strokes are flattening out. Now I'm covering up my little charcoal marks I made but I still can see them. I know where they are. That was just my little reminder to myself, a little note to self there. And so you can also see the foreground colors that I put in were substantially darker than the colors that I'm using as I gradually move into the distance. I also want to mention too, one of the questions I get all the time is why do you do an underpainting if you cover it all up? I think you will see in this painting the influence of the underpainting underneath. Can you see those little pinks even in some of the field grasses in the distance that I have laid down and how you can see? No, it won't be quite this obvious when I'm done with the painting, but it really does make a difference. Now I'm sharing another little blending secret. I have been loving these packing peanuts. I ordered a package where I got a ton of these in the package. So I just saved them and I find on this Fisher sanded paper, which is so like you are. This would work great on you are as well. It is a great blending tool. These are literally just the little storage or packing things you get in a package to keep things safe. So I really, really like it. Now I did get a different one to start blending back here. Again, I didn't want to bring my dark colors into the background. So now see the horizontal strokes? I am covering up some of the underpainting, but believe it or not, it still does have a little bit of that warmth peeking through much different than if I had just started painting on the cream colored surface. I'm purposely trying to blend this foreground area so as not to lose some of that beautiful orangey red. I think you can also see remember how I chose two colors for the underpainting in the foreground? You can kind of see a little bit of the red and a little bit of the orange and it creates this color vibrancy. Now I'm using a very neutral, not not too light. It's a medium value purple. It's a neutral kind of gray purple. What I'm doing is I'm creating this painting from back to front. I don't want to have to go scumble these in between the larger lavender flowers. So I'm getting in some of my distant little lavender flowers first. And these are also just very gestural. Don't have to go crazy with them. And these will kind of blend out too. I know some of them are going to go into the distance and they're going to flatten out. This color was a little too dark to take it far into the distance, but I lighten it up a little bit with a lighter purple in just a little while. And I also decide in just a minute there's a little bit of teal that I had used in the distant kind of laying down the distant field. And I like often to add a little bit of cooler colors to grasses because what happens is we have some grasses that are on the top where the sun is hitting them. Then we have some where there's, you know, little valleys, you know, maybe in the field in the background. And that's where you're going to get some of those cooler colors where maybe even there's a hill and on the hillside things will cool off. It's not catching as much sunlight. It's really all very logical. And that's why I always say be a student of nature. When you examine nature, how light behaves, how color behaves, you can just really use your logic of, you know, being a student of how God designed this earth and you just put it to practice when you're painting. Like I often say, you cool off in the shadows, so that's what color does. And it's totally logical. So use your brain when you're painting and common sense. And it really does help. Now I'm gradually adding, it still looks like a mess right now, right? Now I'm gradually adding some purple that has a little bit more saturation and chroma. It's, it's brighter. Okay. It's not as neutral. Now why would I do that? Well that's one of the other rules of color. Again, you can examine this in nature. Color is more highly saturated in the foreground. And as it recedes into the distance, not only does it cool off, it dulls out in color. You don't see super bright purple flowers in the distance. They're just going to get more neutralized. And it has to do with what's called aerial perspective. There's literally air between you and things that are far away and the further away they get, the more air is between you and that thing. So it creates like a filter and it's going to filter out the color. So keep those little things in mind. Like I said, in the Pastel Live lesson that I'll be doing, I have just really some easy, easy ways to describe this to hopefully help you go, oh my gosh, I totally get that now. And now I'm working on another artistic principle that things, of course, get larger as they're close to you. So I'm going to have a gradation of sizes as well. Those little, well, first of all, in a very distant field, you see little bits of purple I added, literally like horizontal marks. And I'm going to refine those a little bit later. Then they gradually turn into kind of short grasses as they're getting close. The grasses and the flowers. Then they turn into a little bit larger. You can kind of see tops of them peeking up over the grasses. And then gradually as they get to the foreground, they're going to be in your face. And this was one of those angles in the photo, the reference image. It looked like somebody literally just gotten down on the ground, like in the midst of these flowers. I love that type of composition. And so some of your foreground flowers are going to be a little out of focus. I often suggest that you don't want too much detail or too much distraction from your focal point around the edges of your painting, especially right when you come in the bottom of the painting. If I had and you'll see as I developed this if I had super detailed lavender flowers right at the bottom and that first inch of the bottom, it would kind of stop your eye. You're going to be drawn to that. You want the eye to keep going. And so I purposely keep the front part or the bottom part, I should say, of the painting less focused and only give detail to areas where I want the viewer to go. We have that beautiful ability to orchestrate the dance of this painting. And I think of it like a dance and I often compare it to music. It's like we're writing a composition of nature. And it doesn't come easy at first. I'll admit first, I remember I was just trying to learn these rules and have it not look like a total mess. But the more you learn and the more you do it, that's why I say paint every day if you can. Now I know not everybody has this life. And that's why last month we focused on tiny paintings. You get a lot more ability to paint if you're painting small, but it will come. And eventually it'll all start coming together. Sometimes without you even realizing it, you'll look back and go, Oh my gosh, look at how much I've learned. Now this is the point where I'm going to speed things up for the Monet Cafe channel. I hope you guys have gotten a lot of good information. Like this video, like I said, and leave me a comment. It helps this video to rank higher in YouTube when you guys are active on this video. You know, give it a thumbs up, leave a comment. So I hope you've gotten really good information. And now I'm going to speed it up and add some beautiful music. It's a classical song for your viewing pleasure and just keep these things in mind as I paint. Also keep in mind when I go to paint the lavender flowers, watch how I go dark to light. I'm going to put my darker values down first, darkest purples first on my most strategic focal points, then I gradually lighten up, adding the lightest highlights at the end. So keep that in mind. And for my patrons, this video will continue in real time for you and some extra commentary. All right, guys, if you're on Monet Cafe channel, God bless you all. I love y'all. Enjoy the song. Watch to the end because I'll be back and enjoy the music. And here is the aftermath. And like I said, if you're a patron of mine, you will have my color notes organized much more neatly than you see here. Thanks to Unsplash for this reference image. You can find it in the description. I hope you learned a lot and I hope you will like this video. I hope you'll subscribe. Become a patron if you'd like to support this channel and get extra content. And it's such a blessing to do what I do and know that it's helping others learn to paint. All right, guys, God bless and happy painting.