 Hello, artistic friends and visitors. Welcome to Monet Cafe. Today I'm going to use a limited palette. I got back in my studio today after the craziness of Christmas and everything that goes on during the holidays and getting ready for a new year. So I was cleaning up my studio from some previous paintings I did and I just didn't feel like putting my pastels away. So I grabbed a little tray of a limited palette. I'm not even sure what I had used these pastels for and I thought, you know what, what a great idea for a lesson to just work with what you have as long as you have the right values. So let's get started and we're gonna have some fun here. I thought I'd show you a product. I don't even think I've shown in my videos before. This is a way you can make your own pastel surfaces with Art Spectrum Color Fix Primer. I literally had an old board. I had done this too. Sorry for being out of focus here. But it creates a grit and a roughness and this was a board I was experimenting. What am I not experimenting? That I had bought from Home Depot and got my husband to cut them up so I could have paintings on a board. Now this is the little palette of pastels that I used and I wasn't even sure what painting I had done that I use these pastels for. But I noticed they had a nice harmony and I had a good assortment of dark medium and light values. So I thought this will be a neat way to just show how color is not necessarily king but value is if you've got the right values. So now here's this board I'm working on again. The photo I'm using is a photo I took in my own backyard where we had a home we were temporary living in. It happens to be where my studio still is right now and my home studio and I want you to take note of the board and the texture. I literally just put that Art Spectrum Primer on this board. Years ago I have so many little pieces of extra supplies and things all over the place and while I was doing some tidying up I found this old board and I was like oh my gosh I forgot I even had this. But I applied it really loosely and quickly. You even see the lines in it still and I'm not going to get a lot of layering with this which is actually sometimes kind of neat. It forces you to be a little bit more careful and have what I like to call efficiency of stroke. You're really paying attention to getting your marks and your strokes correct. So notice how good this is just a little new pastel I'm using here and notice how just using the side of it works quite well for laying in those grasses and even that tree in the background I happen to think it I had almost looked like a building when I first made the marks I almost changed it to a building but I thought no I'll keep it a tree. But see how great that was just for getting in your general value and an initial sketch with that new pastel. Now I'm going to start working on some of the darks in this and I'm switching a lot from my right to my left hand because my tripod was kind of sticking out where my foot was and sometimes working right-handed was more convenient and I apologize if my hand gets in the way of the painting a little bit I usually set it up. I'm primarily left-handed we actually had a neat survey in our Monet cafe art group on Facebook asking what everybody was right-handed left-handed and you know there were a few people who were both like me but I find that a lot of left-handed people are a little bit more ambidextrous because we we live in a right-handed world we're kind of forced to do a lot of things right-handed but it does come in handy in handy with painting. I actually recommend you trying painting with your non-dominant hand it really it you might surprise yourself it forces you to be loose of course but sometimes you paint differently and maybe a little bit more unique so it's kind of fun. So anyway I'm just getting in my values here again I'm having to be careful about not getting too much down too quickly because I don't have the layering potential that I would with like maybe UART paper or some of the other surfaces because this is a homemade surface but I actually kind of like that texture but I wanted to reduce it a little bit so in a minute I use a piece of pipe foam insulation and and kind of scrub that front grasses in but for now I'm just gonna go ahead and speed this up just a little this has been real time so far and just pay attention to the fact that I'm really using a limited palette and eventually I do add in I didn't have many of those golden colors so I do add some of those later but enjoy this I might pop back in and just admit. At this point I could tell I was losing a little bit of tooth for pastel application at the front foreground there so in just a second you'll see how I use a technique I learned from Karen Margolis where you use a fixative I never use fixative at the end of the painting but you can use it as your tool to apply it where you want to like darken the foreground or get a little bit more tooth the fixative has a little bit of grit to it so you can't see where I'm spraying it here but I'm actually just spraying a little bit on the foreground and it darkens it up a little which is actually good in the foreground values are darker and then I'm able to get a little bit more of the pastel layering down with that really pretty blue I just wish I just left that blue there but anyway so I hope you enjoyed this please subscribe if you haven't already this was a fun painting and I encourage you just to have fun sometimes don't get so serious use some supplies that are you know just kind of laying around and grab some pastels and have a good old time happy new year everyone and thank you so much for joining me today