 Welcome artistic friends to Monet Café! I'm so glad you've joined me today for this pastel painting tutorial. This is a painting that is featuring pan pastels once again and regular soft pastels and I think you're going to love the fact that I created this on unsanded paper. And before we get started I'd love to ask that if you've been enjoying this channel and the hundreds of free lessons please like this video, subscribe to this channel, and you can hit that bell icon to be notified of future videos. Also if you'd like to get access to the full version of this tutorial including extra commentary it's over on my Patreon page. My Patreon family is a wonderful place to grow, learn more about pastel painting, and to support Monet Café so I can keep these free lessons coming to hungry artists all over the world. I recently started doing a subscriber spotlight before starting a video. This one is a comment from Leslie Harvey. She says, I absolutely loved this video. Thank you for sharing. There are so many color theory videos out there but I have yet to see one where we are actually shown some of the combinations in action. Thanks for your comment Leslie. I love to hear that my videos are helping. Alright guys don't forget to comment on the videos. Now let's dive right in and talk about the products. I'm using Kansan XL sand grain unsanded paper. It has a bit of a texture to it and it's kind of deceiving because it's called sand grain but it's not sanded. It's just textured. I like the fact that it's available on Amazon and other retailers but it's a pretty reasonable price. It comes in different colors as well gray, white, natural, and in a couple of sizes. Now I am using the gray color and the size of the pad that I have is approximately 8 by 11 and my final painting will be 8 by 10 and each pad has 40 pages. You may have seen previous tutorials where I used this surface to create a pastel painting directly in the book. I protect it by putting a piece of tracing paper on top of it using some artist tape. I love my limb tape dispenser. It just makes things so easy for grabbing my tape in a hurry and it works great. I take this on trips with me and like I said I paint directly with soft pastels on the pages. Now I experimented recently by taking a set of Rembrandt pastels. Rembrandt pastels are great for travel because they're not super dusty and I literally used them in the passenger seat while my husband was driving. I don't think I'd attempt that with pastels that were too awfully soft. This tutorial will once again be featuring pan pastels which I've been focusing on a little bit this month but don't be frustrated if you don't have any because this can be followed along with regular pastels too. Just do a little bit of blending. By the way I have found that the blending tools that you see to the left there work great with regular pastels as well if you want to use them just to blend things and soften things. Here I'm just choosing the colors that I will use for this painting and if you're a patron of mine you will get my color notes. And the neat thing about pan pastels is when I show you the colors I can literally just flip each of the little pans over and you can see the exact color number. You can't do that with stick pastels. It's not like it's listed on the actual pastel stick and my patrons will have all of the color numbers as downloadable files. Now here's some of the blending tools I use. They have large blenders. The one that I love the most though is this one. It's great for blending backgrounds and these are washable by the way. This one has already been washed. It keeps a little bit of the stain on it. They also have some medium-sized blenders in different shapes that I use sometimes. And I was very happy to learn that these applicators that really feel like you're painting with a paintbrush I was able to use to literally paint the flowers. I know that now I could create an entire painting using pan pastels and some of the tools provided. Now these little applicators have covers to them. That one's empty but here's what was inside. They're the little spongy soft covers they're called in the different shapes to fit the different applicators. Now I'm gonna take an old one off and put on a new one to show you how it works. And by the way these are very affordable. So even though you can kind of clean them off as you're working they last for a while. If they start to get kind of worn or just too saturated with color just go ahead and put a new one on. Again these tips or covers are very affordable. Now I just wiggle it on. I find that they kind of want to roll up underneath themselves so kind of just turning it back and forth like this seems to be the trick. And by the way I will flip it over to use the side that's on the top. In other words when the bottom of it gets kind of dirty you can flip the top over and use that side as well. Now I've got my tools ready. I'm just going to use a little mat that you would use for matting a picture or a photo. And I like these because I know this is an 8 by 10 so I don't have to measure and draw it out. I can just real quickly. And the inside dimension is 5 by 7 so that's a fast and easy way to get those dimensions. Alright got my coffee. It's time to paint. The reference image of this sweet little bee and some flowers is from pmp-art.com. I just used a light pencil for the sketch and it's really pretty simple other than getting some accuracy for the bee. My Patreon version of this lesson does have a little bit more on the sketching process. And what the heck am I doing here? Well you know me if you've watched my channel long. I love to experiment. I had tried a stencil using a stencil with pan pastels years ago when I first got pan pastels and I was doing lots wrong with pan pastels but I really did like the fact that you can, I use just like a stenciling brush here, you can get some pretty neat effects using pan pastels with a stencil. So I thought this was lovely so I thought I'd try to apply it to the background to make it nice and muted. I didn't want it quite so obvious as that first example you just saw. And would I do this again? I don't know maybe but I do end up softening this effect a lot before the painting is finally done. So it just has a very subtle effect. You could do the same thing with just scumbling in some of these different colors in the background with some of the blending tools or using regular stick pastels and just a blending implement to blend them out. But notice it does get a really nice neutral muted soft background. So I did it a little bit all over the whole paper and I could still see my pencil sketch underneath it which was nice. So now I'm using one of the blenders just to kind of soften some of the edges so it doesn't take away too much from the focal point. So this was fun, might be something you want to play with and I will do this technique for future work when it's of a whimsical nature. And this is the portion of the lesson that I am speeding up for this Monet Café version here on my channel. And again if you're a patron of mine this is almost real time. I speed it up very slightly but I give commentary through almost the entire painting process. But you still get lots here on Monet Café not to worry. And you can also use the feature on YouTube. There's a little gear icon at the bottom of every video bottom right corner. And if you click that gear icon you can slow down this video or any video. So if you want to follow along you won't have my commentary but you can still slow it down and kind of get a better idea of my strokes, mark making and colors that I'm using. Sorry for that little bit of light that's filtering through my blinds when the sun moves that does go away. So just relax, enjoy this process, enjoy the music and I will be back to give some more information when I start painting the bee and adding some regular soft pastels instead of the pan pastels. All right enjoy I'll be back. Now that I have many of the main flower shapes and it's just about time to focus on the bee. But I wanted to just reiterate a few things that I loved about this these new discoveries. One is working on unsanded paper. It was really great. I loved this Kansan XL paper. Also just the ability to layer the pan pastels and to mix colors. You don't have to if you're a beginner to this you don't have to have every color of pan pastels. They are able to be blended and mixed together to create new colors. Now here we go working on the bee. It might be a little hard to see because I'm filming from overhead and my left hand gets in the way a bit. But what I'm doing is using the black pan pastel with one of the small applicators that it looks really like a eye makeup applicator. And I guess you could use those but these pastel blenders from Pan Pastel work so well and they're quite affordable. These small little tools so you might as well get some of those. Now all I'm doing is filling in the areas of the bee that are dark. And you know a bumble bee has those bands of black. So I'm just gently getting in those colors and I'm now adding some of the yellow and orange colors. I realize the bee was a little darker than I first thought. So I used some of that orange and now I'm getting in some of the wings. And the wings were a little bit dark too. But I'm softening it with a little bit of I think it was a taupe or a purply kind of a color. Softening the wings up a bit. I also realized I want my bee to be the focal point. So I start later you'll see I add a little bit of light around the bee. Contrast is a great way to establish a focal point. Now his feet and his antenna are really delicate so you're going to see me later go in with a charcoal pencil to get in kind of the ends of his feet that are very gestural. Just little gentle marks and his little antenna. Now I'm getting in kind of a little bit of a muted background with some of the cooler greens. I wanted to give a little bit of interest to the background and now I'm going in and working on the bee again. I'm adding a little bit of purple and blue to create a little bit of a highlight on the bee's head and a little bit on his back and then also to some of his wings. Now I'm obviously using stick pastels here you can see and that was another great discovery is that I could get quite a few layers of pan pastel down and still apply stick pastels on an unsanded surface. I mean on a sanded pastel paper that are more expensive you can definitely get lots of layering but what surprised me was just the ability to establish layers with pan pastels and regular pastels like this. I mean I got like I don't know maybe four or five layers on here as I'm layering color on top. If you've watched many of my videos you know with pastel painting and other mediums it's typically best to layer dark values to light. You build up your lights you don't start with your lights so that's why you see me sometimes getting in a darker value first and then layering the light on top like I just did there. I started with the wings dark and then I gradually added some blues and highlights. Now these are some pastels that are absolutely gorgeous and vibrant in color. I just grabbed some because I wanted a little bit more of a bright pink and sometimes with the stick pastel versus a pan pastel you can get a little more a little more punch of color and more texture. So these pastels and the little set to the lower right are Henry Roche I say but I think correctly it's Henri Rocher and they're the most expensive pastels in the world. I just have this teeny little set one of my patrons wanted to see if they were worth the price so she volunteered to pay half for this little set just because she was curious and wanted me to make a video and I gave her a painting in return so we made a nice little trade there and yes they are absolutely fantastic but I can't afford a big set of these I don't know if you guys can but I really do love some of these colors and now I'm sharpening my charcoal pencil I believe this is a dark Derwent charcoal pencil and that's the Mobius and Rupert yeah that was a dark brass pencil sharpener it sharpens pencils pastel pencils so well so again little gestural marks little thin marks for the antenna and because that's how they are they're just so delicate and the same with the little feet I reserved the urge to create all of the feet because I knew the ends taper out and they're just super super delicate and gestural. Here is the final where I've zoomed in and you can see a little more closely how beautiful and soft the pan pastels were on this unsanded surface and how just a touch of the regular pastels really adds that little punch needed for a dramatic focal point I hope you learned lots during this lesson I will have the original available in my Etsy shop for sale as well as prints and products in my Fine Art America shop. Thank you so much for joining me in today's lesson I hope it blessed you and it would bless me if you would consider subscribing to my channel liking this video and if you would like extra content or just to support Monet Cafe consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. All right artist until next time God bless and happy painting.