 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm happy to bring you this video demonstration where I will show you how you can block your painting in with a fast and relatively easy method. Now this is the painting and perhaps you can notice the texture. There's a lot of texture in this piece and that's because of the technique that I use. Now you don't have to use this product but I used a product made by Arteza. It's an acrylic pad and two of the pads 11 by 14 size is about $26, 16 sheets each. So it's really a great price and a great product to begin a pastel painting. So grab yourself a cup of coffee and let's get started. Now you don't have to use this pad of paper. You could use watercolor paper. I'm using a technique to create your own pastel surface. This particular surface just happens to have a lot of texture to it but let's talk about this blocking end stage. I apologize. I do not have the reference image to pop up here to the upper left here. You can just see it on my iPad because I am currently, some of you may have been following my mother. I just hate even saying this sentence. My mother passed away less than two weeks ago and I've currently moved a temporary studio to be with my dad during this time so we can all heal and be with each other. So I am just basically using a piece of willow charcoal here. You may have heard of willow charcoal or vine charcoal. I prefer willow charcoal. It brushes off easy. It applies. I don't know. I like the application better than vine charcoal but notice just the simple shapes that I'm making. I'm trying to keep energy. These and I'm speeding up the sketch portion but I will go to some real time in just a minute. But I'm looking at all of the shapes of the clouds. I'm looking at the negative spaces of the clouds and what we're trying to do when we block in a painting. I purposely chose a reference image that's pretty basic. You know, trees, horizon line clouds. I added a little road for some compositional or perspective interest to pull your eye back. But I'm just kind of roughly sketching in just little shapes. I may have even gone overboard with the clouds here. You don't even need to do this much. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a Prismacolor. These are a little bit of a harder pastel. It's called Spruce Blue. It's a new pastel. I like these pastels. This particular color is a great color for blocking in. What I'm doing now is just taking my general composition or my general sketch with the big shapes and I'm creating a value study by varying the pressure. Vertical elements like trees are typically always darker. But you'll see how I turn it on the side and just create a darker foreground gradually getting to a lighter in the field, a little bit lighter in the back by simply varying the pressure. Now here's a product I've been using a lot lately, Matte Medium. It's a neat way actually to kind of turn your pastel into a painting. And you don't have to use this. You could use water or alcohol to do this process I'm doing. But I'm going to put some of this Matte Medium made by Liquitex and I'm going to put it in a little dish. Now it's called Matte Medium because that's what it is. It's not glossy at all. Now this is a little scrubby that I got from the dollar store. I bought a whole bunch of these little things and they actually work like a real textural paint brush. You could also use a textured paint brush if you want or whatever you can come up with. I'm always getting creative in the studio. So I'm actually just going to be dipping it and sometimes I have to change hands even though I'm left-handed to work on different areas of the painting. Now watch how fun this gets when we wet this uh the pastel with the Matte Medium. And I'm purposely trying to keep energetic gestural strokes larger more vertical strokes in the foreground okay just to emulate tall grasses things like that trying to create energy and gradually as I go back into the distance the strokes will become more horizontal and not as broad or up and down. They're going to be a little bit more flat you know just because the background field is going to be more flat. Also too I know that I want to keep the background a little bit lighter so I've added a little bit more of the Matte Medium and I'm just going to kind of scumble this in back there. And this is again just blocking in this is the point of this video. We are thinking of the shapes in this reference image as big shapes and we don't have to get overly fussy even though I'm doing some vertical energetic strokes at the foreground. I mean you wouldn't even have to do that but to me it creates kind of a nice beginning. So that's all we're doing here and the neat thing about this Matte Medium it dries pretty quickly. So I mean already working on it right now it's it's pretty much getting dry already. It's a fun product but once again you could do this with water you could do this with alcohol if you want. You could literally and this is a technique I recommend and use often just blend it. You could use this little scrubby just to blend it without the Matte Medium and just get a value study. So I'm showing you some neat little things I've learned with some of these products but you don't have to do that. I always say work with what you have. You could do the same blocking in strategy with a dark pastel on a piece of pastel paper. I just happen to be using this surface and I will be creating a texture surface on top of this to make it work for pastels. Pastels kind of need a little grit to hold on to. I mean we can work on unsanded papers. One of my recent videos was some techniques on how to get you know nice results on unsanded papers but so many of us like the the sanded surfaces because we can really utilize the beautiful aspect of pastels of layering colors so nicely. So I'm just kind of gently blocking that tree in and look at that. We've already kind of got our this is real time by the way. We've already got our our foreground kind of going here with our trees. Now we're going to work on the sky a little bit. I like to clean my pastels off if I see they're overly dirty. Now I am choosing a little bit of a darker kind of teal. I wanted to kind of go with that. The upper heavens are usually a little cooler in color temperature sometimes more cool than this teal I'm using and they gradually get warmer down towards the horizon line but I kept the sky I'd say more of a turquoise or teal feel to it. Now you can kind of see the texture of that paper. The Arteza acrylic pad and I really like it but that texture does not stay once you wet it with the matte medium. So don't worry about that if you decide to try to use this paper it will blend in you know when you use whatever blending tool or technique you might use. So what I'm doing right now is I'm negatively painting in between the clouds. I just did my little willow charcoal to get an idea of where these clouds are. Now I'm gradually before I do the matte medium again I'm going to put in some of these lighter and warmer kind of teal colors. This is definitely a lighter value as I'm getting down towards the horizon line and that's another thing that happens with color or value I should say when we get closer to the horizon line values get lighter rather than darker. All right I'm making up my mind here with this one playing around one with some colors and I decide to just give it a little bit more warmth right there kind of in the middle area of the sky and now I'm just going to do the same technique. Once again you could use a paper towel if you want to just blend this or if you have some kind of a product you want to make sure to if you're going to use the technique with water, alcohol, or matte medium whatever that you have a surface that's water friendly and obviously this acrylic pad is and of course watercolor paper would be as well. So same technique with blending in the negative areas of the clouds and I think I will speed this section up here because you get the idea I'm sure. Also notice that I'm continuing to use energetic strokes going in the motion of I wanted the clouds to feel like they were sweeping up and over your head kind of to the left there so I'm trying to keep my strokes in those directional pads and keep a sense of energy to them. I apologize that I missed a little footage you can see I've added a little bit of purple kind of a medium to lighter value purple underneath those clouds if you look at the reference image if you can kind of see it behind my hand there underneath clouds is usually where the darker sections are especially if they're kind of if they're rain clouds and it looks like they've got some water in them. So I've just added the purple in those areas where you can see where the the dark parts of the clouds are and I'm doing the same technique with the little scrubby cloth just scumbling it in keeping some directional strokes but also just making sure I don't have this too tight. Now that's one of the benefits of blocking in is we get our big shapes in first our basic values in first and what that's going to do is create a painting that feels more alive and it will feel more painterly rather than if we start getting tedious all of a sudden just in the foreground what if I had created the big block area of the grass to the lower right there on the right side of the road and I had started working on all the grasses and getting all individual grass blades what happens is your painting loses a sense of cohesiveness it doesn't feel balanced usually with value and your color palette so when you work the painting overall with this blocking in strategy I think you will find that not only will you be happier with your end result you're going to have more fun this technique is definitely more fun and like I said at the beginning of this it's faster and easier so why not embrace blocking things in rather than getting so tedious in the beginning stages of a painting and then before you know it you've got an initial stage to your painting that already starts to feel good and feel right you know you've got your big shapes and they're all working together and you got your values and they're established so definitely I think especially for impressionistic landscape painting is to block in your painting with these large shapes and keep that energy and those basic colors and basic values so that's my lesson on blocking in and why to do it now if you used a regular piece of pastel paper you won't need this process I'm using clear gesso made by Liquitex my reasoning is because this is not pastel paper and it's actually kind of got some texture to it so I want to make this to where pastels will hold on to it and a clear gesso is so interesting because it has a little bit of sand in it regular gesso does not also clear gesso hence the title is clear you'll see when I put it on it looks a little cloudy and I'm just using this textural brush again I'm embracing the texture of this whole painting process here but it will dry clear so that my underpainting basically this blocking in stage will show through it looks a little cloudy now but you'll see when it dries it's fine I am speeding this part up and I kind of keep my directions for the clear gesso application energetic as well but you don't have to you could literally just roll this on with a foam brush if you wanted to and I again I'm using the clear gesso so that my pastels will hang on to this if I tried it on just this acrylic paper it wouldn't really work all that great this is my chamois cloth technique I'm using these little chamois cloths people have asked me can you wash them well when mine get dirty I put them in this little lingerie bag and you can literally just throw it in your laundry don't throw it in with any nice shirt you like I would keep it just by itself or with some old towels or something like that so I use these little chamois cloths to blend with I'm also going to be using this is a little I call it my in between pastel palette it's a little box I made from Sennelier pastels where I just keep my pastels from previous paintings loosely stored but it makes for a nice nice palette of all kinds of different colors and values now I re-established my dark she just saw me do there to where my trees were a little bit darker the heavens of a sky you can even see it in the reference photo to the left are typically darker in value you see in the reference image they're darker up top they're lighter down below so I am going ahead and working that darker value in the sky now often if I have a pastel on my hand I try to use it somewhere else but I didn't quite want to use that turquoise in the sky yet what I got I have now in my hand is a dull kind of neutral not super dark but a darker blue and what this is going to do is going to make those trees feel a bit further away colors get cooler and values get lighter in the distance so they're going to be a little bit lighter and cooler than that one main foreground tree now we can see what the focal point is with this what would you think it is what's the focal point of this painting the main focal point is the darker tree you know you're going to be drawn to that contrast of the tree there but the focal point also is going to be that road drawing your eye in I've created kind of an S shape curve the road pulls you into the tree and then you take a curve left to follow those clouds up around that curve and up to the left out of the painting now I did use that turquoise just now you see how I created another level of trees back there they're cooler and I'm using that teal to pull it into the same colors of the sky and create a very simple this is a really simple composition of painting I think this would be a good one for beginners to try and you know just have fun don't get so serious especially if you're just starting it's playing don't be afraid to throw your painting away or brush it all off and try it again I've got a video coming up soon about how we can repurpose pastel papers we don't have to always throw away failed paintings I don't think any painting is a failed painting to tell you the truth because you're always learning something now you can see I've gotten a little bit of a lighter value warmer a little bit a little bit warmer in color temperature because colors do what near the horizon typically they get warmer more of a turquoise rather than a periwinkle you know so so anyway you can see that gradation from the sky down and you know I also missed some of the footage of the grass I apologize I life is just nuts when you try to film and do all these things but you can see I put down kind of a base of green and I already blended it in I do apologize for missing that that footage there but it's the same strategy that I used in the grass that you're about to see me use here in the sky so here I am using my chamois cloth I've got a clean piece of chamois cloth and I typically will work the lighter value to the darker value because I don't contaminate the dark upper sky into that light I want to keep that kind of light down at the horizon so it's better for me to blend from light to dark in this case once again I'm still kind of blocking in okay this is just big shapes I'm working the negative spaces between the clouds and it's really kind of fun still keeping that energy you see my directional strokes it's getting that feeling of the clouds and even the sky sweeping I mean why not you don't have to make the background sky so static and stiff we can have all this energy we're artists right we break out those artistic licenses and just have fun and even though I covered up some of the white spaces in the clouds it's fine we can layer because we put the clear gesso down now I'm giving that sense of even more distance by making some of those trees feel a little bit further away and you can see it's already starting to feel like a landscape painting and back to the point of this video blocking in big shapes don't get tied down to any one particular area too soon and as a result you'll end up creating a painting that feels more impressionistic and more painterly now the tree was the darkest thing but I'm adding a little bit of a a green it's more of a warmer green this tree is closer in proximity to the other one so it will have a little bit more warmth later I'll carve in some sky holes into this tree it looks kind of like a big blob right now but it's usually best with well pastel painting acrylic painting or oil painting to carve your tree rather than creating individual leaves we're going to negatively paint in some sky shapes into the dark value of the tree to create a sense of spaces all right now at this point I am going to speed up the rest of this video a bit the main goal was to block in and then we can start layering our color try not to get too heavy handed too soon and just have fun here I'm working in some purple you guys know I love purple I think it adds life to things especially in the shadowy areas of a painting all right I hope you enjoyed I will be back at the end don't go away please like this video comment and subscribe if you haven't subscribed to this channel it would really bless me and if you'd like to become a patron of mine I have a patreon page patreon.com slash susan jinkins it's just neat it's a way that we can communicate together I can see your work I have some homework assignments often from these lessons you get to share them in our homework album my patrons all communicate with each other and it's just really nice but your support of five dollars a month really helps to keep Monet cafe videos coming as well which when I have them here on Monet cafe they're always free my patrons may get a little extra content or commentary but Monet cafe was my original desire and goal to bring art lessons to people who may not have any other resource or means to do so all right guys enjoy the rest of this and I am happy to be painting right now even though my circumstances are still quite sad I have to try to sound very upbeat right now if I get any emotion at all I'm going to lose it so anyway God bless you all for your beautiful messages about what we're going through right now all right enjoy this here I'm sure you can see how the beautiful aspect of being able to layer with soft pastels is to be able to lighten things up sometimes things start out looking rather dark but we can layer the light we typically work dark to light with soft pastel you can see here too how I've carved in some of the sky holes I talked about in that tree and carved in some of the shapes of the background trees as well and I was tapping off the board there sometimes your pastel can build up a bit and you can kind of lean it forward or move it and tap it off a little bit now I'm adding a little bit of a lighter value green to some of the distant fields in the background creates a little bit more of a sense of distance and depth values get lighter in the distance typically plus it's closer to that lighter sky in the background so here's the final some neat texture a nice soft mood to this I hope you learned a lot I hope you'll subscribe and as always happy painting