 Welcome Artists to Monet Cafe Studio. I think you're going to love today's lesson. We're going to learn how to paint with expression in soft pastel if you've ever wanted to take your art to new levels with energy and excitement. This is the video for you. Welcome Artists to Monet Cafe Studio. We are continuing with this month's learning theme that I'm calling Make Your Mark and we're focusing on learning different mark making techniques. I find that we can sometimes get a little stale or stagnant with doing the same types of marks all the time and it's a great idea to stretch ourselves. And one of the things I love to do is find an artist that I'm particularly drawn to their style and then just try to emulate that style. Not their painting. We don't want to copy their painting but we can emulate the style of another artist and often bring a new freshness to our work. I have so many artists that I just love but I wanted to focus this tutorial on a particular artist Richard Suckling. His mark making technique is so lively and energetic and I'm on his website right now and I'll have a link to his website in the description of this video but let me just browse through some of his work here. I think immediately you will see the life, the movement and the energetic gestural style that he has. It's so fun. I am reminded a bit of Van Gogh with some of his mark making techniques and you can do this technique with any artist that you admire. Basically browse a lot of their work, look at some of their mark making techniques, perhaps practice some of those little strokes and gestural quick movements which really brings life to your paintings and this is one of my favorite paintings of his. Just look at that light on the water all achieved with very minimal mark making and strokes with dynamic gestural energy and while I create my painting in this tutorial I will keep this dynamic energetic style in mind and bring life to the floral painting that I'll be creating in this lesson. I love this painting too as I scroll down look at the marks in the water just pulls you right into this painting and before we get started as you're enjoying viewing his work I wanted to give you a little bit of artist etiquette for recreating work from other artists. If it's an artist that basically is just creating their own paintings yes you can emulate their style but do not recreate one of their paintings and then share it. Now you could do it in the privacy of your own home or studio if you're just trying to learn of course you can recreate their painting but an artist is not giving you an open invitation to recreate their work and share it so don't share unless it's an artist like me who is creating tutorials and I say share away. However on that note if you share from another artist tutorial it is also artist etiquette to give credit to that teacher whether it's me or another teacher online so just some general art etiquette rules to keep in mind. So I'm gonna focus on his style for this particular painting and create a floral something I don't often do of like a still life some flowers in a vase and I think you're gonna learn a lot I think it will inspire you to of course follow along with my tutorial but even find artists that you admire and emulate their style as well. Real quickly I wanted to let you know that the version you're seeing here on the Monet Cafe channel is the free version the full real-time version of this tutorial is over on my patreon page it's only five dollars a month to become a patron and you unlock hundreds of lessons and if you wouldn't mind go ahead and like this video leave me a comment and also please subscribe to this channel. The surface I'm using is pastel matte I love the surface it takes many layers of pastel it's actually water-friendly and I'm using the color sand in this particular painting also too I have it taped to my board and I have various pastels I didn't want to pre-choose colors I kind of wanted this to be a little spontaneous and I thought since Richard Suckling's style is so sketchy and a lot of linear mark making I thought I'd grab my set of Prisma color new pastels these are harder pastels they're still considered soft pastels but they're harder than most and they're long and thinner and good for sketching and mark making and I have a set of Jack Richardson hand rolled pastels this is his landscape set these are wonderful pastels I really like the size too this is the full size it's not a half stick and it's just perfect size for painting and this is what I call my in-between palette it's where I take a lot of my pastels when I'm done with a painting and I don't feel like putting them all away into my workshop set I put them in this little temporary place by color and value and it often makes a nice little palette of various colors and values for me to choose from lovely reference image is from unsplash.com a great site for copyright free reference images I did tweak this image in Photoshop and if you're patron of mine you will have access to my edited version I'm going to start with a Prisma color new pastel and this is kind of a middle value pink color I don't want to use any really dark lines right now and I'm just going to get in a really loose sketch for this keeping a general idea where these flowers are but also not being afraid to interpret things and to just kind of have some fun with this. For my initial sketch I'm focusing mostly on the shape of the flowers in their positioning I made a mark at the top of my surface to get my proportions of my painting surface similar to the reference photo and I actually do go outside of those boundaries to create some lively sprays of flowers towards the top you'll see that later so I'm just getting in my flower positioning here again I'm not bound by the reference photo but it is already a really lovely composition I do like the positions of most of these flowers and this sketch will serve as a roadmap for me to start beginning value and color application afterwards this sketch is not a drawing per se where we're trying to capture individual or detailed elements of this reference image we're basically creating the life of the image and letting the mark making style begin with a feeling of looseness and life this particular stick of pastel the Prismacolor new pastel is a little bit small but notice how I'm holding it I'm not holding it like a pencil or a pen and if it was longer I'd probably be holding it even further down on the pastel but let your whole arm do the motion not just your hand notice my hand is moving but mostly my whole arm is moving around versus my wrist moving so that's another good way to get some energetic mark making is use your motion from your shoulder and your elbow to capture your gesture and mark making and the flowers can be a bit wild and free and interpretive but when you're creating an element such as a vase here there are some perspective issues to keep in mind things can be loose and interpretive but we do want to capture the correct dimension of things overall and that's really all that you need to get started I'm going to start applying color focusing first on large blocking in shapes of color I want some of my roses to have a little bit more color and value than other roses some are going to be a little darker little pinker some will be a little lighter a little more cream colored and some are even deeper red like some of those red colors I just got down and what I'm doing first is focusing just on getting my middle range values in I'm not going really dark and I'm not going really light and the green elements within the flower arrangement that's kind of inside parts are going to be darker in value so notice my mark making is real loose and sketchy I also know that I want to give some color and value to the tabletop so I decided rather than going with gray I choose this really pretty blue I also put the blue inside the vase I don't paint all the way to the edges of the inside of the vase to account for the thickness of the glass I decided on this really beautiful lavender color for the background and notice my marks are very loose and sketchy at this point I actually had a comment from someone on Instagram that said she was a compliment it sounded like where she said she loved how my work looked almost childlike at the beginning and then it would evolve into a painting and an impressionistic style painting and actually that's a very accurate observation that's actually how we want to work as artists unless you're going for a super realistic style is to work in basic shapes which might look a little childish at first and then gradually layer more value color and detail as we progress as I'm doing here you see how I had put down that original kind of neutral medium value peachy color then I start adding my lighter values giving them these loose energetic strokes again in the flair or flavor of artist Richard suckling who makes just lively marks and it really does bring movement I believe to your painting it can take a painting that feels stagnant or stiff and really bring it to life so I think this tutorial if you apply these concepts to your work with loose gestural mark making especially some of your final marks you'll find that your work is more exciting and has more energy and movement and now I invite you to observe this process to some music and notice how this painting comes to life as I continue to add more layers of color and value and I'll be back at about 13 minutes and 12 seconds into this video for some more commentary until the end of the video and again you can learn so much here on the Monet cafe channel with all of the free content that I have but if you ever want to step it up a notch or hear all of my commentary and see this lesson in real time where I talk through everything then you might want to consider becoming a patron of mine again it's only $5 a month not a week or a day but a month and very affordable and you unlock hundreds of full lessons and I would love to have you as part of my patreon family it's a really sweet group and I get to see your work all right enjoy I will be back now that I have many of the elements established and I'm feeling good about things it's time to add some more energetic mark making and just some life and fun to this painting I decide to as you can see I'm varying from the reference image and getting interpretive I decided to add some nice little fun almost like baby's breath types of flowers some more little spirally squiggly marks some random stems or twigs in the arrangement and still just those energetic marks around the roses as well I was going to put some petals on the tabletop but I changed my mind and I wanted to add a little bit more energetic mark making to the vase I wanted to make it feel connected and now I'm just putting that final little glaze of reflection onto the glass you really just lay your pastel kind of sideways and glaze over it and here is the final the painting took me less than an hour to create it and it was really an enjoyable painting experience for me I'll probably end up putting this in my Etsy shop but I put it on my kitchen in the light where I could see it and I think I might just keep it a while it makes me happy now the light makes it look a little bluer here than it is but you get the idea alright artist if you recreate from this tutorial and share it anywhere please make mention that you saw the lesson and recreated from me Susan Jenkins and the Monet cafe channel that's just good artist etiquette keep making the world more colorful and beautiful and as always artist God bless and happy painting