 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and for today's lesson I hope you just breathe in that salt air and experience this painting of a lovely beach scene. In this painting I will be using various pastels and I have kind of a neutral I'd say beachy colored palette and this is one of the paintings I'm doing for the 12 Days of Healing in my Patreon group. This is me wearing my Monet Cafe apron. It's time to get started. I'm using a sheet of UART paper it's their largest sheet that you can buy and I decided just to take a whole sheet and divide it out into 12 sections for the 12 Days of Healing that we're doing during this crazy time in our world where we're all somewhat quarantined. What a great time to paint though right? So I'm gonna lead you through this. I am going to put this one on the regular Monet Cafe channel and hopefully you will join me in this painting fun and if you're one of my patrons or if you'd like to become one of my patrons and you participate in this particular painting I would love for you to share it. I have a Facebook group just for my patrons and we're also patrons you know we're sharing just all of the paintings from this 12 Days of Painting series in the Google Album so if you're one of my patrons don't forget to put it in the Google Album I'm loving seeing them all together it's so fun for me to see you guys recreate from these lessons and again you can use your own reference photo try to keep it a similar subject matter and now let me talk a little bit about the process here. You've seen how I've already gone ahead with the typical getting in the trees the darkest shapes first and with pastels as you probably know it's a process of layering and I like to typically get my darkest layers down first and then glaze over top of them it creates interesting colors and I'm trying to keep some of the texture you'll see some tricks that I do later to keep that beachy texture and you can probably see in the little thumbnail reference photo I have up there I just have a small little one because I got this from paintmyphoto.com it's pmp-art.com and I'm not really supposed to share other people's images you can paint from them but I'm keeping it really small here I think that'll be fine but for my patrons if you are one of my patreon members then I will be sharing access to this photo so that you can use it to paint from this lesson if you would like to so just know that patrons that I'll have that available for you guys but I want you to take note that I have put down in the sky a more rich turquoise blues a little bit darker value because I'm gonna lighten it up a little bit later and that's usually the way pastels work we kind of work dark to light and I put down the darkest darks of those trees first now I'm gradually adding kind of some more earthy dark green kind of to the tips of the trees look in the reference photo you can even see even though it's small you can see how dark those trees are I do make them gradually give the illusion of them being further away by some of those ones that trail off I make them a lighter value I also noticed you can't see me doing it now but in the trees in the reference photo there was a little part where the waves of the land look like it kind of curved right there where my hand is look like the land kind of curved around made some interesting depth to the painting and again see how I picked that beautiful kind of maroon color it's darker I know there's a little darker part back there in the water that looks kind of like it's a little land sand bar or something like that back there so it's all going on much darker than the final will be but that's because I'm going to glaze over horizontal bands it's going to kind of give it that flatness and that look of water laying on top so you don't have to get carried away with getting that at first because you get your your basic values and colors down and then you glaze over it very much like some of the videos I've done where we have any body of water and we create that that glossiness over it by just glazing a pastel horizontally across from it so I'm working quite a bit just trying to get some of the composition the water was kind of going kind of like waves do they come in and then they go out and they disperse in different places along the beach once again here I am getting a richer color notice in the reference even though it's small you can see it's a really like pale washed out blue well that was you know a little plain and boring you got to punch up some color actually really like the stage right here we just that beautiful turquoise and kind of the green oh now what am I doing here I decided I wanted to smooth out the beach surface and get some more layers on top of that to give it kind of that flatness which was nice and I I liked it but I also kind of liked it before when I had it rather textural but I'm gonna add that texture back again I really liked the idea in the photo of how it was like if you've been to the beach much I grew up in Jacksonville Florida and as a kid and a teenager went to the beach all the time so I was really used to that little thin glossiness of water and I got a little reflection of the trees going on there see I made the trees a little wider taller and I added like a water kind of one third of the way up so it kind of gives that little reflection illusion there I may end up covering it up later accidentally you know sometimes that's what we do when we're working we work and we work and we work and we're like man I should have left something right there instead of working more on it we get carried away that's why it's good to walk away and unfortunately with these little paintings that I've been trying to do for the 12 days of healing you know I always think my life and schedule is gonna chill out and for some reason it hasn't been which is fine but I've been working on these kind of like just in a session and I haven't been doing a lot of getting up and stepping away to look at the at the process so just notice throughout this that it's a constant kind of carving out the water and the land with different values and colors and again I got darker values down before I do that final glaze on the water and then also there is some of that sand showing so in a little while you're going to see me kind of get a pastel that's a lighter value and get some of that idea of where the the sunlight is hitting the sand where it's dry it's going to be lightest value where the sand is dry you may have noticed on the beach when little waves come up and then they recede they leave what right here I was trying some of the Diane Townsend's I was trying to find the right color and I while I loved these colors the value was just too light for where I was at in this painting so I changed my mind now this is where I am going to be adding in some of the lighter values in the sand again where the sand is drier that's where it's going to be a lighter value where the sand is more wet there's going to be a little little bit of a difference in value will be a little bit darker all right I'm going to just go ahead and add some music I hope you like my little beach waves and seagulls at the beginning all it just made me feel like taking a deep breath and a breath of fresh air and almost smell the salty air I love it okay enjoy and in a bit you'll see me use a technique you've seen me use before on how I get the foreground a little darker with a little bit more texture so that I can get a sandy kind of a textural surface of the sand in the foreground and then hang on even after that because I'm going to show you another neat little technique for adding little bits of pebble or grains or you know anything you want to be kind of random and small so I've got a neat way to show you how to do that so enjoy until then now notice right here you won't see the can of fixative but you'll see me spraying that I just make a kind of a light to medium coating of the Blair low odor workable fixative in the foreground which definitely darkens it and again it also puts a little another little layer of grit on top of the surface so that's going to help me with that texture in the foreground now I decided to add some clouds in the sky they were in the reference photo and I was in questioning whether or not I would add the clouds or not but when I did I put down the darkest value first clouds aren't just white puff balls in the sky they have to have something to lay on to usually they have some blue or all kinds of different color shadows but they they have some darker value shadows so that's why I laid down a little bit of that darker value lavender I didn't want them very prominent I kind of liked the sky without the clouds too but anyway I was playing around with this so this was kind of an experiment okay so keep watching and in a minute I'm gonna show you after I get finished I'll show you my little technique for adding little bits of you know on the beach how they have these little dark flecks of things whether it be rock or pieces of broken shell none of them are going to be very big but so I need to get those in and there's a tendency when we try to mark it with our hand that we create a pattern and it looks kind of unnatural so in just a minute I'll show you that technique right now here we go I've got the final painting it's showing up a little dark here in the lighting I had literally had this on my dining room table but I literally just have a little like a little cheese grater Parmesan cheese grater or lemon zest grater and I grade up little bits of those three values there just a little bit and I protected my other paintings with that piece of glass scene because I had a lot of other paintings on that piece of your paper and the neat thing is these are not sticking down right now so if you need to move any of them you could literally get a little thing of tweezers but in a minute you'll see I actually cover up a certain area and there was some flex see right here I blow above my hand and I blew off some of those that got too high now how are these going to stick on here because if you pick up the painting they're just going to fall off well what I did is I got a piece of glass scene unfortunately I didn't have a roller like a biscuit roller we say in the south or bread roller so I used any any rounded smooth service will work I used my coffee cup just to roll and press down so the glass scene is protecting the painting and you're literally just applying pressure in a rolling manner which will push those little grains of pastel those little flecks of pastel into the painting and I've used this technique multiple times I've used it for snow and it works quite well they they kind of think they stick in there into the grooves of the pastel paper pretty good so now you see how that added a little three-dimensionality now I just got a little thing of I looked for a toothpick just to kind of push some of them away that I was thought were too big or whatever I couldn't find any toothpicks so I just used a little pair of scissors here but anyway this is the technique it works really well and this was a fun little painting and again I I am thankful that these 12 days of healing they're healing for me too I mean you really do zone out as an artist now here I'm doing I'm just giving the board a good tap on the back which will release any little extra pastel dust that may not have it adhered so I hope you guys enjoyed this whether you saw it on the Monet cafe YouTube channel or on my patreon page and once again here's that wonderful sound of the ocean and the seagulls and I pray you guys are all staying safe and blessed and as always happy painting