 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm happy to bring you this lesson that goes along with our theme in our Monet Café art group. We're painting with a Monet style. And if you haven't subscribed to this channel, I hope you will. It's a lot of fun. And if you would like to support this channel on my Patreon page, it's only five dollars a month. It keeps these free videos coming to an artistically hungry world and my patrons get extra content and I get to see your work. The lovely reference of a field of poppies is from unsplash.com. It's a great site to get copyright free reference images. The photographer is Laura Goodsell. She is from the UK. We're just gonna jump right into this lesson. These are my pastels. If you're a patron of mine, you will be getting a downloadable JPEG image of these pastels. Also, it's really a good idea if you're new to convert your pastels to black and white so you can see values better. I'll be talking more about value as I paint and it truly is more important than color when it comes to successful painting. I'm going to talk about my products. I'm using this is just a piece of willow charcoal. I love these long sticks of willow charcoal because they really help you to have a more painterly style when you hold it rather loosely like this. I'm actually going to just hop over to my Amazon shop. I have an Amazon storefront. You can find the link in every video, but in this particular video and the willow charcoal is actually under the category of pastels and painting products and these are really all of the products or many of the products that I use in my videos that makes it convenient for you to find and there's the willow charcoal right there and each product I have a little description in the upper right corner. Vine or willow charcoal is a great preliminary sketching tool for pastel paintings. It's better to use charcoal than pencil because it's made of the same basic product as pastels. Now the pastel papers and more section will show you the paper or the surface I'm using. I'm using pastel card. It's made by Sennelier. It's a French company and I love Sennelier Le Cart for its texture. Excellent for animal fur and I love it for landscapes as well. Now it's pretty textured. So if you're brand new to pastel painting and it's also pretty expensive you may want to try other options and I actually have made a category, another category, that should be helpful for beginner pastel artists. It's called Beginner Basics for Pastel Artist and I have sanded and unsanded surfaces in this category. This is Canson Paper. It's an unsanded pastel paper and I know a lot of artists prefer the expensive sanded surfaces, but I use unsanded as well. You basically can't get as many layers as the more expensive sanded surfaces, but you can still use them and this Canson Paper is really good. It comes in multiple colors. Another surface, this is the least expensive of the sanded surfaces. If you don't know what sanded means, it's like sandpaper. Some of them are rougher than others though. I haven't actually used pastel premiere, but many artists say that it's great. So it's, I put it up here because it's not very expensive and I thought it might be a good start if you want to give it a try. So there's many other products on here. You can also make your own pastel surfaces. I have watercolor paper up here because often I will paint with watercolor on watercolor paper and then I'll use another product to paint over my watercolor painting that will create a sanded texture and that product is this next one in line. It's Clear Gesso. It's the cheapest and easiest way to make your own pastel surface. I have a lot of videos on how to do this. One video here on the YouTube channel is eight ways to make your own pastel surface and this is one of the techniques with Clear Gesso. So there's so many options. Don't get overwhelmed because it's all here on Monet Café for you to learn. Just take it a step at a time. Alright, so pardon that station break, but I love to give you guys information. I think many of you are really hungry to learn more and you need to know about these products and where to find them. And I am now just using this Willow Charcoal to get a super basic composition in. I'm looking at the big shapes and I'm just sketching in where some of the flower heads will be. Just the ones that I think are the most important for the composition or they're larger. And I don't really get fussy over this. I'm trying to keep the energy of this composition more so than really get super detailed with anything. And if you want another series of videos, actually, I have a four-part course right now. Currently I'm on part two. It's called Pastel Painting 101 and it talks a lot about these beginning stages and a lot of it's more about just painting in general, not just pastel painting, but I think it'll give you a good foundation as to some of the things that I'm even doing here. We want to keep that life and that movement and that energy. And back to our topic, our subject matter is how to create more impressionistically. And that's one of the keys is to give it life by having gestural marks and marks that have life and movement and energy. And really, I have another video. I think it might be just for my patrons. Sometimes my patrons get extra content and extra videos. But I have a video on the beginnings of Impressionism and it wasn't received very well to begin with because many artists found it to be unfinished, messy or haphazard. And to me, the Impressionistic work, now I do appreciate realistic painting too, like photo realism. That is just a talent all it's in itself. But I think I love the fact that Impressionism seems to capture more of the moment and the feeling. But the beginning works had so much more life and motion to them. So I think that's what people are drawn to. It's an interpretation of the moment and the feeling, not just what a photograph could actually capture, you know, if we had a camera with us. So I do believe that is one of the beautiful things about the Impressionistic style of painting. And Monet, of course, is one of my favorites because my channel is named Monet Café, or that's one of the reasons my channel is named that. And also, the reason Monet Café, I'm going to talk more about this painting, I promise. The reason the Monet Café art group on Facebook, or really in general, we have our theme as Monet this month is because it's his birthday on November 14th, the month that I'm making this particular video. So happy birthday, Monet. And let me get to talking about this. You guys really do need to know what I'm doing. As I mentioned before, this Sennelier-Lacarte pastel surface is very textured and sanded. That's one of the reasons I like it. I think it lends itself to an Impressionistic style, which is why I chose it for this particular video. And all I'm doing here is using a dark pastel. Actually, I'm using two different colors. One was a little more purple and one's a little bit more, I would say, more of a mauve-y purple. And I'm basically just getting in some of my darkest values. A way to find those values, value just means the degree of lightness or darkness. Okay, so I'm working on my darkest values. But the way to see those is to squint, squint your eyes and look at the reference image. By the way, you can probably see the reference image is more of a square. And I wanted mine to be a longer portrait layout. So it's kind of easy to change things like this when it's flowers. You just kind of reach things up a little bit higher. So if you squint your eyes and look at the reference image, you can obviously see that those trees in the distance are darker. There's also darker areas in the foreground and a little hint of some sort of a valley or trail kind of going through those grasses. And I kind of wanted mine to curve. So it can start out often looking rather messy, but actually this is just the underpainting stages that lends itself towards that life. These flowers are not so stiff. They're reaching and they're moving. You know, I always think of wind when I'm painting like something's blowing these flowers in the wind. Now this tool that I'm using here is a piece of pipe foam insulation. Literally what you could buy at a hardware store and it's just a good blending tool. It works well on sanded surfaces. I have other tools I use for blending on unsanded papers such as a chamois cloth. Sometimes I use packing peanuts that you cushion your packages with. And a lot of people have said they use a pool noodle like your kids float on in the pool. It's kind of the same consistency as this pipe foam insulation. But I don't over blend because I feel like it flattens and dulls the beauty of those gorgeous pastel colors. But often with beginning layers, I like to kind of get it covered. You see how I blended it and got some of the more lighter to middle values on the field a little bit. And it might look weird with those trees where I'm working right now. But remember I left some space for some of those poppies to reach up. I'm going to be painting over the trees anyway and I do have layering capability. But I really wanted those few right there where the trees were to pop. So I didn't want that dark background behind those stars. They're the stars of the show, some of those upper poppies there. And now I'm just continuing to blend. And now I've just got me kind of a little basic under painting beginnings of a value study. And now I'll start adding in some of the poppy heads and get kind of a general direction and a feel for these flowers. Also too, all of this has been real time with the exception of the sketch at the beginning. But I am going to speed it up just a bit to be able to keep my video size or time not quite so long. This painting took a little over an hour to paint. So this way I'll have it maybe like 30 minutes or so. So now I've got these gorgeous Terry Ludwig Pastels. I think I've been using all Terry Ludwig Pastels so far. If you're used to Terry Ludwig Pastels, you'll be like, why is it so little? I often will break my pastels sometimes to be able to put some in a travel set. And I find these little half sizes are actually very good for the way that I paint. You may want to keep the sticks whole. But I decided to lose that one poppy. They were all too much in a row. And so I'm going to kind of reposition them. But that's the great thing about this pastel paper. You really have a lot more flexibility than people would think. You see how that red went right over that dark? So you still have the ability to add pastels or add poppy flower heads. If you didn't leave room for them, they'll go right over this other pastel. But I basically left the blank so I'd remember where to put them. And I'm just really giving these loose gestural strokes. Notice these are just shapes. That's all they are. Don't get overwhelmed with anything other than just a general shape of what you see. I often try to express and share that something I learned through my painting journey is try to paint what you see, not what you think you see. Often we think we have an idea in our head about what a poppy looks like or a certain flower variety. And try to look at what they look like in the photo. Not that we're trying to do photorealism, but I'm talking about the gesture, the motion, the movement, how they're turned. We like to have variety in where our flowers are facing. I think of them as having faces. And so we want to make sure we capture that in our painting. And we don't have to spell everything out either. That's part of Impressionism. Photograph tends to focus everything unless you have your own camera and you're able to adjust the aperture, shutter speed, things like that. You can change what it focuses on. But typically when something is on an auto setting, a camera is going to try to focus everything. Well that's not what we want to do in our painting. We want to choose the area of our focal point. And like I said, for me it's really the flowers that are reaching up above the kind of horizon line there. And then give some, you know, supporting characters, other things in the painting that you might want to get some attention. But the things that are your focal point are going to have the most detail. Not that it has to have a lot, but more than what's in the rest of your painting. They're going to have the most contrast. And typically they're going to be, you want them to be, in an area of interest, like in an upper third, usually not right in the middle of your painting, just for composition, interest and beauty. Now I'm adding some of the more magenta colors. These are going to be the poppies that are in shadow. Now if I had every single poppy that bright red, like the one I'm using now. By the way, this is a different red. You may have noticed, what you can see in my little color notes over there. You see like three that look red. Well, they're different varieties of red. It's a little hard to see with that. By the way, if you're a patron of mine, I'm going to give you a copy of these color notes, along with the picture of my actual pastels. And I'm going to give you a key, or a clue to the key, the T.L.s and some of the other notes that I'll make there. You'll know what all of the pastels are. But anyway, so these magenta burgundy kind of colors down low are where some of these poppies are going to be buried. They're going to be in shadow. Remember, there's lots of grasses growing up, and we kind of have that little perspective of being down low in the grasses. And if every single flower was that bright red, they would feel like they're pasted on top. So we've got to give that impression that some of the flowers are buried. And also that's taking away from, purposely, taking away from them getting too much attention. We really don't want anything other than a suggestion of many of these flowers. Right now you see how really lightly these are totally just little suggestions of poppies. Now later you're going to even see me, even suggest more. The flowers that are in the distance, they're really going to be more of a band of flowers, not even individual flowers anymore. Because things in the distance, they lose their detail and they also get closer, or they appear to be all closer together because they're far away. So you're just going to have little bands of poppies in the distance. And now I have a little bit of a roadmap as to where things are. And that was really pretty easy, right? It's really not that hard once you learn some of these rules. Most of the learning is learning what supplies to get and learning how to layer and, you know, general rules. But really often we overwork our paintings. They are more beautiful when we can learn to simplify and not overemphasize or detail things. And you can see I'm obviously adding some greens. Notice I'm not painting individual blades of grasses. I realized I wanted more contrast where those poppies are reaching up there. So I'm adding a little bit more of this Terry Ludwig dark color. It's called Eggplant. It's a dark, dark purple, even though it appears black. And I've added, I think a little bit more of it into some of the deeper grasses. But that green that I added before, notice that it's a deeper, not a real yellowy green. It's a cooler green because if the grass is being buried, they're in shadow. I often say when we're in shadow we cool off if we're in the shade of a tree and that's exactly what colors do as well. They get cooler. They get less towards the warm side of the color wheel. Not as much yellow or orangey tones. So these are cooler greens that I'm using. This is another cool green because this is kind of the back side of these trees with respect to the direction of the sun and that's why they're keeping the cooler temperatures and a little bit of the darker greens. And all you have to do is suggest with this too. I just basically look at the tree and think, where is it not quite so dark in the deep shadow? And I just add shapes. Once again, it's just little shapes and little directions of color. And now I'm going to pull in some of those, still a cooler green. Notice it doesn't look real yellowy green. It's kind of a neutral green, but it's a lighter value. And values with pastel painting, we typically, as a general rule of thumb, we can work dark to light. For example, when you're doing things like trees. In my latest videos that I've been doing, a pastel 101 course, I talk about how vertical elements are usually darker in value, such as trees. And with pastels, we paint our darker value and then we layer the lighter values on top. And basically, the reasoning for that is it causes the lighter values to have something to contrast against. These greener, cooler green grasses that I'm laying down wouldn't even look the same if I just put them on the surface without a darker underpainting underneath it. It makes them show up, you know, and it makes the color more interesting. And now I'm adding some of these gorgeous blues in the sky. Isn't that a beautiful, it's kind of a teal turquoisey blue. And this is an example of what's called negative painting or what's often known as sky holes when you're painting trees. Notice I didn't try to get the tree shapes just right. I basically just got my darker value in for the tree and now I'm negatively carving in the little spaces. And I don't need a lot because these are far away. And again, this is what's going to lend to that impressionism. When I'm not spelling everything out, I'm leading the viewer where I want to lead them and leaving everything else a bit more subdued. Now, the way skies typically work is things in the upper sky are usually of a darker value. Now, keep in mind, skies are lighter altogether in general than the foreground. The value will just be a hint darker as it goes upward into the heavens. And I think so far I've only used three different colors. You can see them on my little color notes over there. And I'm going to add in, I felt like it needed a little bit of purple in the sky up there. So I grabbed me a couple of purples and I'm just going to lightly layer some purple kind of up high. Now, normally skies are cooler in the upward areas of the sky and they get warmer down closer to the horizon. But that purple is actually kind of a warmer purple, but I still thought it would look nice. Now, I'm lightening up the sky a little bit with a lighter purple down as you get closer to the tree line. And I just thought it added some color interest to the sky, not to have just the turquoise alone. I thought it was kind of fun. Now, let's get some of these warmer grass tones. Notice how this green is leaning more towards yellow. And also notice I'm still not really doing individual grass blades. I'm giving directional strokes that could suggest grasses. But I resist the urge to give any individual individuality to the grasses until closer to the end. I also am not bringing those lighter greens down into the painting, the lower part of the painting because remember, those are in shadow. Now, I did what happens often. Sometimes, often our brains have a tendency to put things in patterns, even when we're trying not to. You know, it's really interesting. And we don't want our flowers to look so patterned like that. We want them to have some spontaneity and randomness. So that's all you have to do to get rid of some pastel. I just used a stiff bristle brush, brushed off the red, and just put a little bit more dark in front of it. And now I'm going to relocate this flower just to be somewhere else. So they're not so equally distanced apart. And now I've got some of the, more of the main flowers in. And what I'm going to do now is I know there's a lot of poppies in this field. But I don't want to paint every poppy head. So this is what I was talking about before, where I'm going to be layering poppies in the distance and suggesting that there's a whole lot of poppies just all real close together. And again, I'm not giving them too much detail or individuality. They're just basically suggestions. And to me, if I had to come up with one word or concept when it comes to impressionism, this is just the Susan Jenkins definition here, okay? So I'm sure there are many out there. But it would be to suggest. And if I had to pick a second one, it would be to keep the life, to keep the gesture and the motion. And even if that means veering away from the photo a bit, to give that more energy. Once again, that's in my pastel 101, pastel painting 101 free videos that I have. I'm still only on lesson number two, even though the rest have been created. I'll have them uploaded soon. But it's a four course lesson on, again, painting in general, but also a lot of it is geared toward how to create that life that we're trying to get in our artwork to create a painterly end result. So check those videos out if you can. And now you can see these are just poppy shapes. And some are a little bit more spelled out than others. And I will be adding some stems to these flowers so they're not flying off into the air. And also I will be adding some centers, but not to all of them, just to a few. And to some specific few that will lead the eye into the painting and up to my focal area. And now here are some more cooler greens that I'll be using for some of the grasses. And really, there's not a lot more to it than that. I end up at the end giving more grasses than I had hoped I would. I have this advantage of being able to look back at my videos and go, oh, aha, I should have stopped there or I wish I'd have taken a different direction here. And I did want to say something about these reds. I mean, it may appear from this video that there's just one color red, but they're really three very slightly different values and color temperatures of red. And I typically put the darkest one down first and then I use the lighter or brighter, I should say. They're not necessarily lighter, they're brighter in color. I put those down to where the highlights would be, to where the sun would be hitting on a petal here, there, here and there. And so that's also going to give focal interest to some flowers rather than others. And these Terry Ludwig reds, mostly the ones that I'm using are from the Terry Ludwig Dark set. Terry Ludwig makes a wonderful pastel. They're made in the United States. It's a great company, great people. And I believe this is a warmer value red right here. I'm just adding to some of the tops. It's going to make them stand out a little bit more and especially the ones that are reaching up over, they're going to have a little bit more light on them. Oh, and back to the Terry Ludwig Dark sets. There's two of them. I believe, I may be wrong on this, I believe the reds are in set number two, but you can check that out. But it has some wonderful reds in it. I think also too, I have got to get the, it's a Karen Margolis curated set of Terry Ludwigs and she does so many beautiful flower paintings and I think she has to have some great reds in that set because she does a lot of poppy paintings too. So I believe those are some good sets if you want to get some good reds, but there are plenty of other great reds. I love the Sennelier Pastels. It's the same company that makes this paper. I love the set. It's called the Paris Collection. It is a great price right now. Now I don't know when you'll be watching this video, but I have it on my Amazon shop under Pastel Pastels and other painting products or something like that. I also have it in the beginner, beginner basics for pastel artists set, but it's the Paris Collection Sennelier set. It's 120 half sticks, which I like, and you get double the color for your money because they're half instead of the full stick. And I believe it's like $160, which is really a great buy for a pastel of that quality. So if I'm not mistaken, they're on sale, and they're still on sale if you see this video relatively quickly. But I love the reds in that set. And so a lot of this is just playing around. And I can tell you, every set of pastels that I've ever bought, I still use today. They may not be always my favorites, but they're different reasons to use them. I still use my Rembrandts that I bought as my very first set. It is a good starter set to use. They're not quite as soft and as vibrant as some of the softies, but a lot of this is trial and error. And as I always say, have fun. Don't get so caught up in it and frustrated and, you know, it makes your work look tight also. But just remember, it's all a learning process. You learn something with every painting, even if you're not happy with the final result. Okay, now you can see I've got one of these warmer greens. These are going to be more like for the little bit of the stems. I'm just suggesting them. And some of the tops of the grasses, those tops of the areas of the grass where they're kind of sticking up, and they're not down deep into the, where the roots of everything are growing from. And I think you can see this already has an impressionistic feel. And I hope kind of a Monet feel. I love the impressionistic artists and pieces. And I am happy to see how many people in our Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook and my patrons from my Patreon page are taking up the challenge. The challenge, this month's painting challenge, was to paint with a Monet style, kind of like this, which is loose and impressionistic, or to recreate from a Monet painting that you love. And I find that often you think, oh, we can't copy other people's work. Well, no, we can't copy it and sell it or claim it as our own. But we can learn so much from emulating another artist or recreating one of their pieces. And that's what a lot of the artists are doing in the Monet Cafe Art Group. And they're sharing their work and it's so fun to see. And my patrons, oh my goodness, you guys have shared some great work in our homework album. I love that the Monet Cafe Group, the Facebook Group is so big, I think it's 14,000 plus members. So I love to look at everything, but I don't have time to go and comment on your work and all of that. But with my patrons, it's a more intimate group and I try very hard to give feedback on your paintings and it just blesses me. We're like a little family. So anyway, you can see this isn't even lighter and a little bit cooler red that I'm just gently layering on some of the tops of the poppy. It's really giving some color interest. I'm going to see if I can zoom in a little bit so you can see this a little bit better. Okay, so this should help you to see things a little more clearly. You see I'm just giving little hints of that cooler red just here and there. It's a little bit lighter in value and a tad cooler in color temperature and I just sort of liked it. I thought it was a pretty color. Now I've got some brighter, even brighter reds that it's a little bit more of an R&G red. It's got a little more warmth to it and I'm giving it to little areas. I am looking at the reference photo and I'm seeing where some of the lighter highlights would be on some of these poppies and I'm just kind of sprinkling it here and there and it is kind of giving some differentiation from some of the flowers and that's what we're really doing. We're picking a few that will stand out in this amazing composition and the rest, like I said, are supporting actors. I did even grab a little bit lighter of, it's almost like a coral color. It's not super light and that's one thing I want to stress. You can see where I made a mark there. We have a tendency to think, oh, the sun's shining on it. Let me get a white, you know, or a really light pink and it's not going to look really natural. Now I wanted to kind of bring some congruency from the sky to some of the other painting and I think this is where we can break out our artistic license. I know there were some cooler areas of these grasses so I took some of the teal from the sky and I just kind of filtered in there with some little gentle strokes and I think you can see it gives more interest to the painting and I will admit this is a stage of the painting if I had done just a little bit more, I do kind of wish I'd left it at this because to me this is more of impressionism where everything's not spelled out and the color is just working together and there is not a lot of detail but I did add more grasses and more little poppy heads and I was happy with the final but these are always my little notes to self. It's a good idea to take a little break when you've been painting for a little while, walk away, do something else for a minute and come back and then you seem to view your painting with fresh eyes. So now I'm using a Diane Townsend pastel and well I was. They're big chunky pastels and I really like using them. It forces you not to get too detailed because they're large, you know and you're making more broad strokes rather than skinny individual strokes. Now you can see this is kind of a purple color and what I'm doing is some of those poppy buds or heads that are buried within the grasses they're a little darker so I'm just sprinkling a few of those here and there and now I've zoomed in so you can see how I'm adding these little highlights on the tops of some of these grasses and poppy buds that are sticking up over the flowers and other grasses and this was a lot of fun. I'm painting out into my yard because I felt like the lighting was better. It was one of those overcast days and those are really the best days if you want to photograph your art. So I hope you learned something from this. I hope you'll try this loose impressionistic style. I hope you'll subscribe if you haven't already. Become a patron if you'd like to support this channel and if you create from any of my videos find me on Instagram and tag me. I love to see your work. I am at Susan Jenkins Artist. Thank you for joining us painting.