 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and do you want to go to the beach today? It's gonna feel like that because we're gonna paint a palm tree. I've got Bob Ross in the studio with me and you know he was known for painting happy little trees. Here's our reference image that's from Pixabay.com. I will have it in the description of this video and if you haven't subscribed yet I hope you will and click that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm holding my dog Jackson because he's a little afraid of a storm going on outside and this is a little bit of a different angle of the studio. It's kind of like the opposite side of how I normally film but we are still in tree month here at Monet Café and today's tree will be a palm tree. We have lots of those here in Florida and really any tropical climate but they're very unique and there's a lot of neat little techniques and tips that I can hopefully give you to help you paint palm trees more effectively. Yes Jackson was a little bored with my filming but at least he liked Bob Ross. Now take a deep breath. Imagine yourself on a sunny beach smelling the salt air. Palm trees grow in tropical climates and my husband and I are fortunate to live in the Tampa Bay area where there are lots of beautiful beaches. This is St. Pete Beach. We also were very blessed to be able to go on some cruises with his company going to some gorgeous tropical places where I got lots of photos of palm trees. I love painting palm trees. I even did a palm tree mural on two of my closet doors in my house that flooded a few years back but since then I've learned some new techniques in painting palm trees that I'd like to share with you in this video. So come on to the beach with me and let's have some fun painting palm trees. One thing I love about palm trees is their gestural quality because they're tall and their fronds are light and wispy. When the wind catches them they have motion and energy. So I highly recommend doing a preliminary sketch where you try to capture that gesture and that movement even if you exaggerate it from the original photo. I liked how these fronds were reaching out up and to the left and I wanted to make sure that I caught that motion and also that I had three-dimensional aspects to the fronds. You notice some of them are towards the back more in shadow. We've got one coming right straight towards you and I'm just doing this to really get kind of warmed up but I'm also going to be providing this preliminary sketch to my patrons on my Patreon page. I'll have it as an attachment in your post patrons so if you're one of my patrons listening keep an eye out for that. What I'm working on here is just a piece of newsprint. I bought a large pad of newsprint paper. It's pretty cheap so when you're just doing sketches you know things that you're not going to be saving or anything that's a good product to use. I'm also using a little new pastel by Prismacolor. I like this one called Spruce Blue because it's just great for sketching and it's a nice dark and it works very well on the newsprint. So you can see here I'm actually going ahead and getting some of the energy of the fronds and the individual fronds that are reaching down in that comb shape that they have and I'm going to be using my finger actually just to do some blending. That's the neat thing about pastels is that they have blendability and so I'm just getting in a little bit of a value concept here by blending it in and I was pretty happy with the gesture of my palm tree and I played around with some other pastels just to get an idea of how they would behave on this newsprint. But this is what I'm going to be talking about more in this video. Notice how I just really did the whole shape of the frond without really any of the individual sections and I'm just giving it some value and color. Now what I'll be doing rather than painting each individual frond like I used to do I am carving in very much like sky holes. So this is what's called negative painting. You see how that developed from creating the spaces rather than the individual fronds. I really wanted to keep the painting as large as the sketch and I didn't have any pastel paper that was that large. So I decided to play around on a piece of Strathmore drawing paper. It's the only thing I had that was that large. So before I start the actual painting I did a little preliminary one individual frond from the palm tree and I thought this would be a neat teaching opportunity. What I'm doing is I'm just using my little Prismacolor new pastel the spruce blue color. I'm getting in the shape of the frond and really instead of focusing on those individual like I said they're almost like a comb. If you think of a comb that you comb your hair with they have the spaces in between I don't even need to focus on all of those single fronds coming down. I'm just getting in the shape and now I'm getting a pastel that is one of the general colors in the palm frond. And notice I'm just creating my strokes coming down but once again not focusing so much on the individual fronds. I'm also keeping a light touch as well. So with this I can then add more color and value before I actually do my negative painting. Now often I'll use my little chamois cloth technique. This is just a chamois cloth you know the kind you dry your cars with. It works very well on unsanded surfaces or even some sanded surfaces that aren't too gritty. So that was my general middle value and now I know there are I'm actually looking at the actual palm frond here. Still not really focusing on any individual fronds. Just kind of scumbling in some of the shapes of the darker values. You see how it still doesn't have really any real specific fronds and just blending it in. So I'm getting my value and color in first before I create the spaces in between. And I'm just going to speed this part up a little bit more because I'm still just adding color and value. And yes that palm frond even has some beautiful golden and rusty colors. And I even added that little highlight. If you look at the image you can see the sun is really making a little highlight along that rib on the top. Alright so now it's time for the fun negative painting. First I'm going to get in a basic sky color on the top part of the palm frond just to get that in and establish. There wasn't a whole lot of negative painting on that top part a little bit. But I wanted to use this beautiful turquoise color even though the reference photo had more blue. I thought it would look nice with these greens. And what I'm going to do here I've zoomed in a little bit more. If you you may be able to see on your screen this turquoise value is a little just a shade darker than what I put on the top. Reason being is this is going to work very similar to how we paint sky holes. If you haven't seen the first tutorial in this series called One, Two, Three You Can Paint a Tree. That's a great one that talks about sky holes. Now my palm fronds I realized weren't long enough so that's why I went ahead and got some of this green in. Once again still not trying to do super individual fronds. That's what I'm doing here. I'm going in with this value that's a little darker than the top and I'm carving in the spaces. I'm literally just looking at the palm frond and trying to zone out, not think about the positive shapes, but I'm looking at the negative shapes. They make interesting almost like little triangles and they've got little bins and just really neat little shapes in there. And what this does is it creates a painting or a palm tree that's going to have a more painterly, impressionistic look rather than painting positively, painting all of the individual fronds on top of the sky. Notice I didn't put the sky down first and then paint the palm leaf on it. I got the palm leaf and carved in those little spaces of the sky in between. Now can you see how that comes to life? So I really like this technique for painting palm fronds and that's basically the same technique that I'm going to use for the larger version that you'll see me painting soon. Now once you get your negative shapes in and you've got your general palm leaf, you can still go in and add some more values or some you know little bits of fronds that might be longer and I actually go in and add in the palm there were some dark bits to the leaves and do you call them leaves? I keep calling them fronds. I think I think it's palm. The frond is the whole thing maybe and those are individual fronds, leaves? I don't know. You guys always correct me with these things. I'm going in there even there's some negative spaces up a little higher in that palm leaf so and now I'm going to go in with some of the little bits of dark. You see how the palm leaf has some of those dark little almost like the tips of them might have gotten older. They may be dying so that gives it a little bit more of a little more realistic feel and I wanted to really break this one down for you. I missed some footage unfortunately in the large painting you'll see me painting soon. There's enough for you to see how I'm doing it but you know having a YouTube channel always trying to film yourself painting definitely has its challenges. My camera I guess the battery ran out or something and so I missed a little bit of the footage. Once again you'll see plenty. I did go in and add a little bit more detail and just had some fun playing around with this but I wanted to share one of my favorite styles though is very impressionistic and one of my favorite artists is Jen Evanhus. She's an amazing pastel artist. Well she does other mediums as well. Look at these negative spaces. Now this is what I'm talking about the very impressionistic feel. Okay so let's start painting this larger version of my palm tree and what I did I decided instead of recreating the sketch I really liked my preliminary sketch so I thought what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a piece of tracing paper. I'm just going to quickly sketch over the palm tree to get the shape and I'm going to show you quickly a little technique for transferring it. I don't recommend doing this from a photograph or if it's not your sketch or artwork and that's because we need to get good at sketching. I mean that is part of the process and I think an important part. So after I get this sketch in I'm going to show you how I transfer it to my larger surface. Now my patrons I did snap a shot of this so if you're a patron of mine you will be getting this image if you would just like to have something to refer to for your sketch and if you'd like to become a patron if you don't know what that is basically for $5 a month you can support this channel and you get extra content so I really appreciate my patrons. God bless you. Alright so what I've done is I've put my tracing paper up to a bright window and I just tape it up there and I turn it to the opposite side. I get a charcoal pencil or my little pastel, my new pastel works fine too and I retrace the image on the backside. Then I tape it onto my drawing surface. I line it up where I want. I get it taped up there. I'm using artist tape by the way and one of the reasons for artist tape is it doesn't leave any residue. I love my limb tape dispenser that I can just easily grab my artist tape. A lot of these products are in my Amazon shop just so you know I always have my Amazon shop link in every description of every video so you can find a lot of the things that are just practical studio tools. I think that's actually in that section studio tools or something like that. So now I've got it up here what am I going to do to transfer it. I'm going to grab my little burnishing tool that is all chewed up because my dog Jackson that you saw at the beginning thought it was a toy and but it still works. I found a flat edge. A burnishing tool is I mean you could use a credit card. It's something that came with some self-adhesive paper that I got so I'm just holding while my easel moves around. Some of you guys know I've been saying I want to get a sturdy easel and that's one of my goals as my my Patreon page grows but for now this works so I'm holding it and I'm just rubbing rubbing rubbing really hard and when I lift it up I will have a little ghost image. Now the reason it's so light is because I didn't really focus on making a really dark sketch on the backside but that's all I need. It's just a little idea like I said I really liked my original tree shape so why recreate it right this was just a quick little way that I could do this. And now I'm basically doing once more what I did to begin with. I'm kind of getting in my sketch and a little value study so that's why this part is sped up quite a bit because the video would be really long if I included all of these stages in real time. So I'm just reinforcing the sketch a bit. I'm getting an idea of the fronds and maybe where some of the individual sections are but not overdoing it and I'm once again using my Prismacolor new pastel the spruce blue and let me go ahead and put up here again this paper. It is a Strathmore drawing paper and I chose it because it's very large. That's the only large thing I had at the moment and I was so pleasantly surprised with using this with pastels so that was a good discovery. You know if you've been on my channel long you know I'm not afraid of trying new things and that sometimes might be a bad thing. I probably should stick with one thing sometimes and get better at it. And now I'm doing the same thing I did originally. I'm still using the spruce blue new pastel and I'm turning it on its side. Now while I'm still not doing really individual fronds coming out I am giving directional strokes. I'm keeping the strokes in the way that they're growing, the direction that they're growing. So I'm filling in the values here but I'm still not creating individual branches. I may be pressing a little harder in some areas but as I stated before I'm trying not to put the pastel up on its edge and make long little skinny fronds coming down. This is just really a value study which will serve as some of the general values as I begin to lay down color. Now I'm using my little chamois cloth again and I like using this as a blending tool because I'm almost using it like a paintbrush. I know that when I start to blend something the chamois cloth already has some of the same color on it so I use it to really like paint with. I pull things in areas I add a little bit of value or this color to other areas so it works really great. And now for something new do you see something different about this footage this video clip here. Can you see I have my pastel palette where you can sort of see the pastels that I'm choosing. Now let me share with you what these pastels are. This is the Paris collection of Sennelier pastels. I really love this set. It's a 120 half stick set and I love getting half sticks with pastel sets because I always say you get double the color for your money which is really true. You're gonna get a lot more color choices with the half sticks and I find they're the right size for me anyway. I usually break my pastels in half. They're a little bit too long to work with in the full stick set so I love half stick sets. Okay have I bragged on that enough? Well these Sennelier Paris collection they're so soft they're so vibrant in color and they had so many beautiful colors for this palm tree or what I perceived the colors in this palm tree to be which is look that whole row of gorgeous greens lots of blues and turquoise colors nice colors even for the sand that I add later and I hope to improve the camera angle so you can see even more clearly the pastels that I'm choosing but you can sort of get the idea with this one. I'll get better at this but please in the comments let me know if this is beneficial to you. I have the reference image that you can see down there on my iPad the one from pixabay.com. Like I said I will have that link in the description of this video. I also will have links to all of the products that I'm mentioning in the video just easy for you to click and find them and again I have a lot of things in my Amazon shop if you just like to kind of see some of the my favorite products. Now I've got a dark here. This is a dark it's actually kind of a dark brown it's not the normal dark that I choose but I just grabbed a value that was dark and I had tried to set my camera on locked focus so it wouldn't keep changing the focus and get blurry and hopefully it will be okay I did notice it kind of changing a little. Now let me talk a little bit about what I'm doing. So again I'm not really doing individual fronds you will see me develop this similar to the example I did at the beginning where I give strokes and pressure in some areas that will you know sort of give the appearance of some of the more individual fronds of the palm leaf but it's later where it gets the magic happens like with that negative painting example I did earlier. Like I said I missed some of that footage my camera battery went dead some of the upper palm fronds is where I missed the negative footage but you're going to see definitely me carving in negatively to these lower palm fronds. Alright so I've talked a lot here and I'm actually going to add some like Caribbean music for you like some reggae music. Many of you ask where I get my music from and I typically use the YouTube audio library and they have some good collections of copyright free music that way I don't ever have to worry about a copyright strike on YouTube I know their music is safe for me to use. The only disadvantage is some of the songs are short can't find a lot of long songs available but you know I make it work. So with that let me go ahead and add some music watch me develop this very similar to the first example that I did I am going to speed it up a little bit more than here I'm trying to keep the videos less than 40 minutes so hopefully you can still follow along. Alright here's some nice music to relax to. This is the point to where I will very soon begin carving in the negative painting and even though I still have a little bit of a general shape of some of the fronds now you can see how they were separated this is the footage I told you I missed how I've carved in the negative spaces to give a little bit more division between the individual palm fronds so I love negative painting it's so fun but all is not lost I did go in and finish the negative painting here so you're going to get to see me do the same thing once again not to get monotonous I'm speeding this up you got to see the example at the beginning much slower so here you can see how I'm just kind of making these long strokes in between and you don't want to do this willy-nilly you do want to pay attention to the actual palm how it grows and using the reference image is a great guide because it's going to show you really where those spaces are and I think it's just kind of fun I really did like the first example I did with the turquoise but I decided with this one to give the sky blue make it more like local color which is the color that is in the scene and I wasn't sure if I was going to go ahead and add the actual beach and everything but I thought hey why not I thought about making it more abstract but I did decide to go ahead and just go ahead and add that beach and sand and make it all sunny and happy like a place we would like to go now I really want to do more palm trees with the a little bit more abstract really impressionistic feel like the artist I mentioned at the beginning Jen Evan Huss I think that's how you say her last name she is so fantastic she seems like such a sweet person we occasionally like each other stuff on Instagram and I just love her style so I hope to create some more loose things and that might end up being a topic one day is to for those of you who would like to get really really loose I think that's kind of the evolution of many artists we start out kind of tight and realistic and the more we paint the more we really embrace the loose a tad more abstract style which I love so so that is something that I'm sure will be coming soon there's another artist a pastel artist where I love her abstract work and her name is Deborah Stewart and she's fantastic as well so those are some artists you can check out but I was really impressed with this Strathmore drawing paper once again another drawing paper that really got good results and it's less expensive than a lot of the sanded pastel papers I have heard some of the artists that are just beginning say oh it's kind of challenging and I know exactly what you mean because this is my theory when you're first starting out you're not real confident about some of your strokes and your things and so unsanded paper is not as forgiving as sanded paper you need to have a little more confidence in your strokes but can you see up there in the top those negative shapes kind of where all the palm fronds come together in the middle there you see all those interesting negative spaces I think that is what really gives a painterly look so anyway I hope you have enjoyed this painting if you try this I am loving that some of you are doing what I'm asking which is follow me on Instagram at Susan Jenkins artist and tag me I love it I'll get a little message that says so-and-so tagged you and I get to see your paintings and that's always fun for me also follow me on Facebook it's the art of Susan Jenkins that's my page that's like my personal page on Facebook where I post a lot of things now the group is also my group is Monet cafe art group and that's a place where you can share and link up with there's 13,000 plus members in that group but don't let the size fool you it's very warm everybody's very helpful there's wonderful artist of every level so don't get intimidated just give it a try and then of course there's my patreon group it's only five dollars a month it's really been a blessing for me to be able to get some of the things that I need to create these videos my goal has been for a long time to be able to do more on location paintings I want to take you to places I've got so many great places in Florida I can go to and paint get reference images share reference images with you and that's something I would really like to do so my patrons help me to accomplish these things and get some of the things that I need to keep bringing these free videos they also get extra content and they also get extra feedback from me recently we just did I have something called critique my painting please it's where my patrons put their work in an album and once a month I choose some of the artwork to give a little helpful feedback and suggestions for their work and that's a patreon favorite they really like that one and a lot of other fun things we do it's a great group there's a lot of benefits so I have just jabbered on I really hope you have enjoyed this I can't wait to see what you do I do have some more tree tutorials coming for the month of August and I better get to it though I've got some I've recorded but I tell you what the editing takes as long as as the actual paint and the editing actually takes longer than the painting process especially learning the new things that I'm trying to do now down here I am actually making the shadow and you're gonna see me turn it into some negative painting in the shadow as well so that's also something that you can do it's not just in the leaves but it's in the shadows can you see that there how I just carved in some of the same color of the sand into the shadow area now I'm just adding some of that nice white sand on the beach and I'm ready to go how about you guys you want to take a trip wouldn't that be cool so I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial I am so happy to be able to bring these videos it's a real blessing for me it's a lot of work I will tell you that but it's a blessing to see your progress and your enthusiasm so I hope you enjoyed that please subscribe if you haven't like this video make some comments and stay tuned for some silly little outtakes at the end all right guys happy painting but we are painting trees again today because today we'll be painting a palm tree hello and welcome to Monet cafe I'm holding my dog