 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and this lesson should be a lot of fun and I think you're gonna love it. I used only one set of pastels. What is this set? Well you're gonna find out. I was actually awarded this 30 half stick set of this particular brand of pastels and I actually decided to gift it to one of my patrons on my Patreon page and I found out who didn't have a lot of pastels and so I loved it so much I thought you know what I'm gonna send her a new set and I'm gonna keep this one. So you're gonna learn a lot in this lesson and it should be a lot of fun. If you would go ahead and like this video go ahead and subscribe if you haven't already and if you hit the little bell next to the subscribe button you'll be notified of any future videos I post. Also too as I mentioned my patrons are so special to me from my Patreon page. They contribute five dollars a month and it helps me to keep these videos coming, the free videos and my patrons get extra content. Alright here we go. I recently posted something on my Instagram page by the way find me and follow me at Susan Jenkins Artist that showed a little bit of the behind the scenes of what I have to do to record myself and so many people were interested in that that I thought I'd show my setup before starting this painting and a lot of you have mentioned you like the overhead footage which I think helps you see things more clearly. Oh and a must have in my studio is my little buddy Jackson. Before I get to the pastels let me share what surface I'll be using. This is pastel matte. I like to get it in these pads that come in different colors and the color that I'm using today is kind of that gray color but you can see it's got a burgundy it's got a blue it's got the and I love working on that blue paper it's got the gray that I'm using here and it also has kind of a beige color and I decided they have two sizes of the pads. I'll have all these links in the description of the video of the products and now let me talk about these pastels and yes I used only this set of pastels for this painting and it is as you can see it's unison pastels this is their 30 half stick set it's called the starter set and I actually won this set because I entered one of those unison contests they have you enter it and then you share their link and if other people click the link you you get entered again so you have more chances to win and so I shared the link on my Monet cafe art group on Facebook and there's like 15 000 members in there so I thought well that wasn't really fair for me to win plus I have so many pastels that's why I gifted it to one of my patrons and oh she's so excited but like I said this set was so lovely I loved the colors and the values so I decided to keep this one for myself like I said and just send her a new one oh and I have some more products in my art store I have links underneath every video on youtube that will take you to my art store I recently uploaded this new Monet cafe coffee cup with my painting on it and I have some fun t-shirts in the shop as well all right here we go when I initially analyze the colors in the set I could see very quickly that they would really be great for a poppy field painting and while I would love to get all of my own reference images I don't get out a lot just my life and and my art business of course so I resort sometimes to sites like unsplash.com to get reference images I don't live near any poppy field so I'll have the link to that in the description of this video now what I decided to do I want to keep this very simple and kind of a beginner lesson I decided to use only soft pastels you know sometimes I'll do an underpainting with a different medium but I'm going to use only pastels and I decided to use I thought about using that one but it was too light really those four really peachy earthy kind of colored pastels to create an underpainting I'm going to create a base to lay down my poppy field on and because pastel matte surface is water friendly this is a piece of vine charcoal or willow charcoal um I like to sketch with sometimes and because pastel matte is water friendly I knew that I could lay down some pastel and liquefy it now I decided to use I've been using this a lot lately airbrush medium uh you know what is it parents sometimes they'll say do as I say not as I do well don't do as I do in this video because I wasn't happy with the airbrush medium on this pastel matte the way I used it uh just use water or alcohol substitute that for what I'm using as airbrush medium and this was another technique I had used in a previous video where I used a stencil brush for blending and they also make these things called pastel smoothies but you can just use a stencil brush once again if I did this painting over again I would use just water or alcohol and a paint brush the stencil brush with the airbrush medium didn't work that great I had used it previously with alcohol and it was awesome so there's my little um preface to what not to do but you'll totally be able to get the point when I get to adding the liquid to it now what I like to do is just to get in a very loose sketch I'm going to be laying down some of these pastels for the under painting and a lot of people wonder why do you do an under painting well look that's a big old piece of gray paper there and I really just think it's kind of boring and that's a lot of gray to cover up so an underpainting is a way to lay down some values and some color that's really going to complement your final painting and it also too breaks the ice because a lot of times when you start or when I did as an artist I had a tendency to get so specific and tight up in one area and an underpainting allows you to go ahead and get started and to get a base in of some lovely colors and values now I like to use the reason I chose these colors I like to use some complementary color what that means is the opposite on the color wheel if you have like greens like grasses if you look at the color wheel and you look at greens your compliments across from green are going to be reds they're going to be warmer tones or oranges and also like artist Karen Margulis often says she likes to lay down the dirt it happens to be the color of dirt anyway okay it's going to be a brown or warm tone so think of it that way and also know that a compliment color is going to make the color you lay down on top just really sing and look so much better so I love laying down a warm underpainting like this and I sometimes will just tone the whole surface with one color and that works too but in this case I decided to do kind of a gradient of values we know that values in art will go from the foreground to the background they go from darker to lighter the foreground is usually darker then it gets a little lighter lighter and your lightest is going to be more like in the sky so that's why I often will do an underpainting that has kind of that layering effect and I thought these colors were great for that now I did decide to add a little bit more of this more a little bit more brown to it orangey color on top of the the first color I laid down I thought it would make it more interesting and I am going to speed up this underpainting portion and again share with you why not to do it the way that I did it still do everything like this but I would recommend to either just use water or alcohol and a large brush and you can get a better effect I would have definitely gotten a better effect so here I am this experimentation I can't help it I don't know why I have to always try new things but I'm using my stencil brush and my airbrush medium and you know it looks like it's working here and and it was but what happened was the airbrush medium it's like it didn't dry right and it almost dried with a little film to it on top of the pastel matte so I found myself having a little bit of a harder time applying some of the pastel to it so that's why I wouldn't use the airbrush medium on pastel matte again now I'm testing some of my colors now I've got it all dry and I had to use a blow dryer because it took a while to dry and I'm testing colors now the only darks that are in this set was a black which I don't I hardly ever use black and a dark blue but guess what we can mix colors with pastels often people think you can't well it's not like wet mediums you know like watercolor acrylic or oil but you can layer pastels on top of each other especially if you keep a light touch and you can get the illusion of a new color so I didn't want black and I didn't want just that blue and I knew that my foreground had a lot of deep grasses so I just followed my reference image and just had a a general idea of where I was going to lay down some of these darks again a nice light touch and by the way the reason I left the blank spaces where they are for the flowers in the sky I wanted those colors to really show not and I could have I actually should have taken that light colored peach up into the sky I didn't realize I thought I had gone up into where I had the mountains but you'll see I kind of wrestle with getting the sky to cover some of those marks but I wanted those flowers to be so fresh and red colored without that peachy coral color kind of showing through so and I know I can layer some of my smaller flowers on top later so I really just focused on the largest flowers now I know I have this mountain range in the back so I'm going to kind of get it in and I'll share with you ahead of time I sort of copied the mountain range that was in the photo but sometimes we have the artistic license to change things after I was done with the final painting I realized this mountain range was high on the right side and it kind of just sloped down to where it was low on the left side where I am now and I decided later I didn't like that I didn't it felt like it was kind of falling off the page so I ended up raising up the mountains on the left side as well now this is a point where if you are watching on Monet cafe of course it's always free but remember how I mentioned sometimes my patrons get some extra content because of their support I'm going to continue this video in real time with extra commentary for my patrons and don't worry though if you're just watching on Monet cafe you've already gotten a lot of content and I am going to speed it up to some music and I'm not going to speed it up so much that you can't follow what I'm doing once again you'll have the reference image and a link to this description and links to the products and all kinds of useful things in the description of this video so enjoy if you're patron hang on you're getting more content and real time all right guys blessings and don't go away I'll be back at the end for everybody as I shared in my little comment I added while the music was playing I did like it with the little flowers there was a few hints of yellow and white flowers in the reference image but I sort of liked it when it was just the poppies too but again I had a lot of fun with this I add a little bit of red in the field in the distance a little horizontal bands to suggest maybe some of those poppies growing further away it kind of connects the painting too so this one oh my gosh I loved this set of unison pastels I love giving you guys ways that you can paint with for less money I think this set is about $80 now this is an extreme close-up I actually shot it vertically and had to really zoom in on it to show you but now you can kind of see some of those marks and the fresh color that's another good aspect about not overworking a painting the color stays more fresh and here's the final I went back and found the title I called it a time to dance and I got it from Ecclesiastes 3 verse 4 it says a time to weep a time to laugh a time to mourn and a time to dance and here's that little Monet cafe coffee cup and I have some other fun products in my shop if you would like to check it out and I hope you learned a lot and as always God bless and happy painting