 Welcome artists to Monet Cafe Studio in today's lesson. I think you're going to love it. I'm going to share with you secrets to mark making in soft pastel. Here we go. Welcome to Monet Cafe Studio. I'm artist Susan Jenkins bringing you pastel painting tutorials and education for years now. I have hundreds of free lessons here on the Monet Cafe channel and if you're a beginner artist or you're wanting to get back into painting after many years I highly recommend the medium of soft pastels. So you come to the right place and this year it's the beginning of a new year 2024 and I want to focus this year's lessons on many of your requests and one that you guys have highly requested is learning more about mark making in soft pastels. Now I have a video that's quite popular on it's very basic on 12 different mark making techniques in soft pastel. You might want to check that one out. I'll put a link in this description. But in this video I'm not only going to demonstrate or give examples of different mark making. I'm also going to create a painting so you can see those different techniques in action. I think you're going to learn a lot and the video here on the Monet Cafe channel will have somewhat limited content but you'll still learn a lot and if you want the full lesson it's over on my patreon page. It's really easy to become a patron of mine. All right guys are you ready to learn? Let's do it. Much like you can achieve different brush strokes with oil acrylic or watercolor painting based on the brush you use you can achieve different mark making techniques or pastel strokes based on the brand of pastel that you use. Now there's really just two different shapes for most pastel brands. Some of them are more round and some are more rectangular or square with edges on the sides and I like to play with mark making for both types or both shapes and I'm going to show you a little bit of both of those. Let's first talk about the different parts or sides of the pastel we can use. I'm first starting with a brand of pastels that's quite affordable. It's Rembrandt pastels and they do have the rounded shape. These are little sets, microsets I think they're called of different color families. I have eight of those little sets here and again these are like the rounded shape I was talking about and I'm going to just show you one of the basic things about soft pastels is often in my tutorials you'll see me and other pastel artist using the broad side of the pastel. I would say I make 70% of my marks this way and I also typically break my pastels to be smaller. This is already a half stick. I don't like the full sticks are almost too wide to make broad strokes so often I work with half sticks and a broad side stroke is basically just what it sounds like. It is a stroke that is using the broad side of the stick and that is versus a linear stroke that might be using the edge of the pastel. These are better for making lines obviously making tree branches and this is a rolling technique that you can use for grasses so that's really a great thing about using round pastels is this nice rolling technique. Now let me show you the difference with a more rectangular brand. Two of the brands that I use mostly for rectangular style pastels are Jay Luda pastels. They're a company out of Romania. I'm going to be working on a Monet cafe starter set with that company. I'm very excited they're awesome to work with and another brand that I use all the time a US based company that I love are Terry Ludwig pastels. These are just so gorgeous and apply so beautiful. They're very soft. The softer the pastel the more application you can usually get and the more you can add pastel after you've layered a lot. So I'm going to get one of these Jay Luda pastels. That's a really pretty color. They also put their color number on the stick. So now I'm going to use with a rectangular pastel a broad stroke on the side and these also just apply beautifully. So that's more like for blocking in and for larger areas and now I'm going to show you how you have an edge on this pastel. This is also a great way to get some more linear marks. We can also use kind of a corner of a pastel. Often I work on the flat side and occasionally on an edge to get linear marks but also often I use kind of a corner, a little portion of it where I'm kind of scumbling some shapes in and scumbling is more like just varied strokes to create more of like a pattern and you can do that type of markmaking with either the rectangular or the round pastels. Again I'm just kind of not letting the back end of the pastel come up and I'm just scumbling in little shapes with a little bit of that that section at the corner. I'm going to show you another little trick here. This has a little bit to do with markmaking. A question I often get is say I'm doing an eye of an animal and I have to go add that highlight to the animal's eye. People ask all the time how do you get that little mark or know where you're putting your pastel with such a big chunky pastel. Let me show you what I'm talking about with this portrait of Oreo the cow in my backyard. I am adding a little bit of a blue to the highlight here. See how big that pastel is and I really just have to feel my way. Let me show you. So for example let's say that we have an eye of an animal and let's just say it's got a dark area and you want to add a little highlight. I'm just going to grab a lighter Jay Luda. Now this one already has a nice corner to it. What I do typically is say I'm going to add it right there kind of at the top right corner. I usually kind of feel, I can't see where the pastel is. I know I'm using this corner. I can't feel, I see where it is but I can feel where it is and I'll make a little test mark. And what happens is the more you do this the more you learn to feel your way of knowing where these marks are going. So that's another thing I get asked a lot. How do you know where you're putting your pastel down? It's kind of a tap method to where you kind of feel where the pastel is going to go. Now let's talk about the pressure applied with soft pastels. One thing you may have heard a lot if you've been trying to paint with pastels for a while is having a light touch. Now here I have a Jack Richardson hand rolled pastel. I love these pastels and I'm going to show you this is very basic. The difference between a light touch and a hard touch. A light touch is basically just really lightly layering just so gently. And you want to create paintings that initially have a light touch because you're really just building the different layers of your pastel painting. And when you keep a light touch another thing you're able to do is mix colors. Yes, you can mix colors with soft pastels. Not exactly like oil and acrylic but say that's a kind of a blue that I just put down. Let me get more of a yellow now. This is a Rembrandt and I'm going to just gradually layer some of this yellow in. Now I'm working on a kind of yellow buttery surface but you'll you'll start to see how this mixes into green. And if I had a hard touch or a hard application you wouldn't get that layering and a new color of combining the two layers. So that's a light touch. I've heard artists say I think it's Karen Margulis. A light touch is the right touch. And you definitely want to start out your painting with more of a light touch. And of course we can make a mark that is more bold and has more pressure. So this is a really pretty little blue-purple color. And I'm going to take this one and make more pressure with this one. Okay, I'm pressing. I'm trying not to press so hard. I knocked my board over here. But that's going to obviously make more color application and a broad and and pressure to stroke so you get more color down. So that's the difference between pressure, light pressure and heavy pressure. This one is best for mixing color and for your initial pastel application. Now let's talk a little bit about pastel strokes and how it's really more painting than drawing. Drawing is more linear and pastel is actually painting because we're laying down larger areas of color. Let me show you the difference. Let's say we're doing a tree, all right. So we do a tree and we think we're just going to do a tree and make some shapes for the tree. And then we'll make some a trunk for the tree. And there's our tree, okay. So that's a linear drawing. That is not a painting. And now let me make some strokes that are more of a painting style versus a drawing style. I'm just going to go within the shape to show you the difference. I'm going to get me in some dark. This is a dark green. And this is back to using the broad stroke, okay. And I'm just getting in kind of, I always say I paint from the inside out like the innermost dark parts of this tree. And then I'm going to come in, I kept a light touch, all right. I used a broad stroke and a light touch. And now I'm going to come in with some greens to suggest like a highlights where the where the light is hitting. And I'm going to get a green that's a little bit cooler green. Let's say the light is coming from this side. I'm still using a light touch and I'm using kind of a scumbling technique. Remember me talking about that? I'm just kind of scumbling in some of this where maybe some of the light is catching on some of these outer tree leaves and branches there, okay. So I just layered there. I did a little layering technique. I did a little scumbling and I did a broad stroke. Now I'm going to come in. We often work too dark to light with pastel. Again I painted the inner darkest part and I'm gradually layering to get to the light. Now light is warm. So I want to give a little bit of a lighter. Now this is again just using the broad, not quite scumbling but little staccato marks. Staccato is a musical term where I'm just catching some of the light. And I think you can see the difference of the linear stroke versus broad strokes with painting. And we can even come in with even some more light highlights. This is a really bright pretty color. Let's say this has hard to again like to feel your way technique here where I'm having to kind of feel where some of the pastel is actually hitting the paper. Now we've got a little idea of a tree and the same thing would apply to like the trunk. Working dark to light again, a little dark brown for the trunk and a little lighter highlight applied. And now I'll share with you more mark making techniques that make fun effects in pastel painting. I really like this one for creating tree branches. All right this is a Rembrandt pastel and what I'm going to do kind of what I did here is I'm going to do a tree trunk and I'm going to do a press and release technique. This is another type of mark making you can do. What I'm doing is I'm using kind of the edge or the corner of the pastel here. I know tree trunks aren't usually blue but this works for flower stems as well. I'm going to press hard and kind of release my pressure. Press hard again and just move my pastel in different directions. Press and release. You see how you get kind of that broken line? And again this works great for tree trunks and it works great for flower stems. Another technique that's often used in pastel painting is something that's called broken color. It's sort of the scumbling technique but adding one color on top of another. So let's combine some colors that might look really pretty together. I'm going to take this pretty pink here and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to make little random marks of this pink in various places and I'm pressing it with a medium pressure. Let me get a lighter color, this lighter yellowy color and I'm going to do the same thing and make little broken color marks kind of in between the spaces there and you can choose how much you want it to soften it. The pastels will actually start to blend themselves and you can make some nice techniques with this or nice effects with this for even flowers. Now let's do a couple of different colors with this. I'm going to pick this color here and let's do more broken color with vertical strokes. Another thing you want to keep in mind when you're painting is the direction of your strokes and often what I like to say is your stroke should follow the object that you're painting. It's not exactly what I'm doing here, I just wanted to make sure I mentioned that. Now let me get a pretty color to add. Well I'm just going to add a blue in the same kind of analogous color family. I'm going to add some blue strokes. I'll try to keep them the same width and what can visually happen, it's an optical illusion, is you actually kind of start to get another color similar to this layering technique but with different mark making. So that's kind of fun. You may notice there's some artist, old master artists that use this. It's kind of similar to pointillism. Pointillism is where your marks are even smaller and you're really doing a painting using just little small marks and combining things to make a full painting with. Now let's talk about blending with soft pastel. There are various blending tools that you can use, even your fingers and that's a whole another video in itself but I want to share a little bit with you here. So let me lay down. This is a Jack Richardson pastel. Let's say we're making kind of a cloud shape here. I have to resist the urge to you know get carried away with the painting. Now let me add kind of a lighter value. Say that the, it's catching some light here so I'm going to add just some. Same same as with the layering of the tree. I'm just adding where I think the sun might be hitting some of the parts of the cloud that are kind of you know sticking out and then what we can do is we can either use our finger or some other sort of blending tool. I'm trying to wipe it off to kind of just soften that cloud and you can choose the degree of softness you want. You see how that just made a nice wispy dreamy cloud. If you'd like to learn more about blending clouds you might enjoy my video where I use a three color method to blend clouds and get a nice neutral cloud color. And yet still another technique is called feathering. Now I'm going to grab this Rembrandt pastel because it's a little bit harder and feathering is a little bit more like you're just making kind of some linear marks that are a little bit random. Similar to the broken color but you're using more linear strokes and this could this could be used like it for a field of grass and again you can use that rolling pressure or rolling technique with the round pastels a little bit. You can vary some of your strokes. That's what you definitely want to do in your painting and that's what's going to happen when I create my painting. You're going to see a lot of this come together. So that is feathering but we can add another color to it. So we can feather. Let's say there's some really cooler colors of this grass kind of down beneath so we're kind of just feathering that color together. Let's get some of that light grasses that are reaching up over the top and that's a bit of a feathering technique. One other thing I wanted to cover before we move on to the painting portion is the direction of your strokes. Now I don't have a whole lot of room left here but I'm going to uh I'll make this work for me. Okay we've got let's say we've got a landscape here with some grasses ignore that tree all right. We've got some grasses in the foreground. See that's another thing you can see how much how easily I can blend. All right here's our here's our landscape. We've got some darker trees in the background. Bear with me while I just develop this a little bit. We've got like let's say we've got some dark tree shapes in the background. Maybe we have some really far away on a hill back here. All right and we've got some some foreground grasses here. Now you see how my strokes are vertical here. If you're like in a field and you're kind of down low you're going to see grasses that are vertical and they're usually a little darker especially in the deep shadowy areas. But then as the grasses recede into the distance they're not going to be as tall for one so my marks are getting shorter. They're still a little vertical getting a little shorter and then at some point they start to stop being vertical and start being a little bit more horizontal and they flatten out and then gradually in the distant field they will become totally a horizontal shape. And then I'm going to come back in and add some highlights on this field. And when fields flatten out often the sunlight will just hit on them and get more light as well. So keep that in mind that your strokes in the foreground will gradually go from vertical and as they recede shorter, shorter, shorter and then eventually horizontal. Let me see if I can get an even lighter green to really, oh this one's really light, but let's pretend like that is a really bright sun there and it's just catching a little bit of that hill back there. Maybe a little bit right here and then maybe a few little, same thing happens with flowers by the way. Let's go ahead and talk about that one. Let's add us some pretty pink flowers okay. Let's say we've just got some, who cares about the variety of flowers. We've got some of them that are reaching up. This one's still in the foreground. It's reaching higher, just taller and nice little flower shapes here and then, I sound like Bob Ross, and then gradually as these flowers go back into the distance, let me get a different color here, they are going to flatten out and they're going to get smaller of course. Maybe see how they're getting just a little smaller, a few little flowers back here and then eventually, smaller smaller smaller, eventually you get a blanket of some of those flowers in the distance layered over the grasses, just like we did the distant grasses. So gradually your strokes will go from bigger to smaller and flatter in the distance. So hopefully that example gave you an idea of when to transfer your strokes from vertical to horizontal. Now let's actually create a real painting using these techniques. And now that we've learned a little bit more about mark making techniques with soft pastel, let's put it to work with this soft pastel painting that I'll be creating. I'm using a surface that I really love. It's Sennelier Pastel Cards. Sennelier is the same company, the French company, that makes the Sennelier Pastels I used for the mark making demonstration and they also make this surface that I really like. I fell in love with this after I'd been painting a little while and it's a sanded surface. If you're brand new to pastel painting, you'll learn eventually that a lot of the really good quality pastel papers are sanded, much like sandpaper, hardware store sandpaper, and it allows for multiple layers. You don't have to use sanded paper, but many professional artists like it. And I love this surface. It's not water friendly. Some are, many brands that I use of papers are, but I didn't want to use any liquid medium with this pastel painting because I want to keep it very beginner friendly. So this will only be using soft pastels and no liquid medium. But I love this because it is, it's a soft type of effect that you get with this paper. So I really love it for landscapes that I want to have that romantic impressionistic feel. So let's get started with this. I'm going to mark off an 11 by 14 or 14 by 11 size for this. And here we go. The reference image I'm using is from Unsplash.com, a great copyright free site for reference images. I will have a link to this beautiful photo in the description of this video. And now let's put these mark making techniques to use. This version that you're seeing on the Monet Cafe YouTube channel will be sped up substantially, but I will slow things down to describe different mark making techniques that I'm using. And once again, the full version of this tutorial, which is mostly real time with all of my commentary, will be over on my Patreon page. It's easy to become a patron. Not only do you support this channel for only $5 a month, but you unlock hundreds of lessons and become part of my Patreon family. And it would be great if you go ahead and like this video, give it a thumbs up, please subscribe, and leave me a comment. I love to hear from you. I'm first beginning with a little Prismacolor new pastel. I actually did not use this one in the demonstration that I did, but they're hard little pastel sticks. And they're really great for this stage that I call blocking in. Notice I'm using the broad side again. I'm laying it flat, but you might can see that the pastel actually has started to get a little point to it. And it's because I kind of lift up on it a little bit. I'm not using the whole broad side of the stick. And for this stage, I'm basically doing a value study. I'm looking at my darkest areas in the painting, my middle values and my light values. And I'm creating a roadmap for myself with this first initial stage of the painting. I call blocking in or establishing my values. And I use the broad side of the pastel for the majority of this blocking in. And we work with pastel painting from large to small. We don't start out with little teeny details. We block in our biggest shapes and values first. Now once I have this done, I want to create kind of a more moody effect. I'm using a piece of pipe foam insulation that you can buy at any hardware store. And it works as a great blending tool. So I think you'll notice as I blend how it softens things. And I am making my strokes directionally. And now I have a great roadmap to get started. I'm first beginning by establishing even darker areas by using this brand new set of Jay Luda Darks. They created a set of darks based on my recommendation. It's really been great working with them as I'm curating a set for the Monet Cafe channel. And it's a father's son team. And they're just the sweetest people. So here's this luscious, gorgeous little set of darks that they now have available. And this is the darkest in the set. And it really is great for establishing the areas of your painting that really have those darker values. And it's almost always vertical elements in the painting, such as trees and foreground elements, such as deep grasses, as you see me developing here. I continue to use some of the Jay Luda pastels from the dark set. This one was great for getting distant trees. It's a nice neutral bluish purple and values decrease as they recede. So it really worked out great to get in some distant tree lines. Also too, I am using some of their other colors to block in some of the grass shadowy areas. I once again used the same color. And notice how I'm changing my strokes from vertical at times to shorter vertical, as we did in the demonstration, and then sometimes to even horizontal bands. This is a little bit of a lighter bluish purple. Pardon my hands moving. That's from my Patreon version where I gave full commentary during the painting process. Now notice my bands are becoming horizontal in the distance. See that? And now I'm going to be using some pastels from a Jack Richardson hand rolled set. I love this little set. It's called his landscape set. And I wanted to go ahead and get in my lightest value, which in pastel painting is almost always going to be the sky. I am still using the broad side of the stick as I have with this entire process. And I'm turning it in ways to kind of carve into some of those tree shapes. And those tree shapes will start to take form by a process called negative painting that we also call sky holes. We're carving in the shapes between the branches rather than painting them positively. Now I'm back to this little Jay Luda set. It has some nice greens. They're a little bit darker than a lot of the bright greens and a little bit duller. So these are really great for getting in your initial grasses that aren't really getting that bright sunlight. And watch again as I change my direction of my stroke from vertical to horizontal. Now this is another set of Jay Luda pastels. It's actually not a set. It's one that I chose my own colors, which the company does allow you to do. I'm speeding this up even more to get to the flower portion where I start using different marks. But notice here, even in the grasses, I changed my mark making a little bit more of kind of that scumbling or those little staccato short marks to give that feeling of grasses. And things do get a bit more detail as they move forward from the background to the foreground. So you'll see me start to develop more detail as this painting progresses. That's just a scumbling technique I'm doing over those trees to give the idea of some light hitting the trees. And now I'm developing the clouds a little more, still using the broad side of the pastel, but shorter marks. Now let's get to these flowers. I'm going to slow it up a bit here. I am making, remember how I talked about a light touch? My pressure here is not super hard. I want to give an idea of some flowers that are kind of buried underneath these deep grasses. And they will not be as bright or colorful as the flowers that are on the surface. So I'm, you see, I'm directionally going more horizontally as I get into the distance and I get more vertical and delineating a little bit more flower shapes as I move into the foreground. And once I have a few of these darker flower areas buried, I'm going to go a little bit lighter. Now these pastels, even that darker red that I used, are from the Jack Richardson hand rolled reds set. Now notice my mark making here. Do you see how it's more punctuated, more of that staccato pressure I was talking about, little, almost like the broken color? Remember that example from the beginning? I'm adding bits of brighter red into the areas of the darker that I've added, not everywhere, just in suggested areas. And my marks are getting more horizontal in the distance to suggest bands of flowers. We're not going to see those individual flowers in the distance. And now I'm going to go even lighter with some of these reds. And it's again from the Jack Richardson reds set. And what happens when things get into the sunlight, they get warmer. So this red is a little bit warmer, little leans a little bit more towards orange. And I'm again, just choosing a few flowers that may be peeking up a little bit higher than some of the others. And my mark making is a bit firmer. And I'm still establishing some of my darks. Notice in the reference image how dark the foreground is. Doesn't mean I have to make it that dark, but I realized it was a little bit unfinished at the bottom. So I reestablished some dark so that I can add more grasses on top of it for some of my final marks. Now I'm holding my easel because sometimes I press so hard I'm actually moving my easel. I'm speeding it up a bit again to be able to get to some of the grasses I'll be making using some different types of mark making. And notice the process though, I work from large or basic to detailed. I still have not gotten in any of the really specific detail for any flowers. Everything is very loose. Oh, I wanted to work in some of this pretty periwinkle color into the grasses to echo the color from the sky. All right, here is some of the different mark making I'm doing in the grasses. I've turned this J. Luda pastel vertically. And I'm using the edge of the pastel to get in some more of these grass shapes. Notice I'm not drawing or making marks that are these long vertical grasses like you would think of painting grasses. What am I going to do? I'm going to make drawing marks that are vertical. I'm instead suggesting grasses reaching above the tops of some of these masses of flower groupings, ones that are just kind of peeking up over the tops, which will catch the light. And that's why this pastel has gotten lighter and a little warmer in color. Just think of the logic of it all. Sunlight does lighten things and warms things up. So that's why the tops of grasses follow that rule. And now notice how I'm making these little horizontal bands to suggest some of the grasses in the distance. And I'm speeding things up a little bit more now until I get to some more textural marks I'll make in the foreground. But do you see these lighter bands of grasses I'm adding now? These are the grasses that are really reaching up higher than everything else. And I'm doing the same concept with the flowers. Another thing you'll notice is not only do elements get more detailed and individualized in the foreground, they get larger. So that's why I have made some of these flowers a little bit larger. Notice I switched from my right hand to my left hand a lot. I think you'll find, we've done this on my Patreon page before, that if you work with your non-dominant hand, often you get refreshing marks that are just a little bit more energetic and lively. Plus it's convenient when you're working on one side or the other of your painting. So as you can see some of these flowers have gotten more punctuated, pressing harder and not so much in the background but more in the foreground. Now here we go with this mark making for some of the grasses and leaf shapes in the foreground. And what I did was I took my reference image and I zoomed in on it a lot to look at just some of the shapes of the petals or leaves that are in this image. I'm not necessarily trying to create the exact type of flower, I'm just getting a general idea. Now here are marks that are a bit more of that broken color or pointillism idea. I'm just getting little short marks that are lighter for some of the little shapes that I saw in the reference image. If you look at the reference image and zoom in, a lot of these marks I'm making were more of a yellow, like yellow flowers. But I decided just to make them, I don't know, just little greenish colors. And now I'm going to show you how I'm working in the sky. I used a pretty little almost turquoise blue color that I'm carving in some shapes into the sky between the clouds and also carving in to the tree line. This is what I mentioned before about what's called negative painting, also called sky holes where we're really shaping the tree from the outside rather than building it positively. And a few more final marks I made on this painting. Notice the glazing of horizontal bands of red flowers in the distance. And this is where I was adding a little bit of a lighter value to some of the clouds just to give a little bit more interest into the sky. I also wanted to give a little bit more of that blue influence, that periwinkle color, into the foreground. Again, this is called color echoing, where I'm taking some of the colors from the sky and putting it into the landscape. And I think it gives a more harmonious feel to the painting. I often like to get a matte and crop my image just to see. Often one painting can have various crops that work quite well. I definitely am going to keep this one as the 14 by 11 size though. Here is the final. I hope you learned a lot. I hope you'll subscribe to this Monet Cafe channel and become a patron if you'd like full content. It's only $5 a month. And plus I get to see your work and we have a great community of artists. It's really a happy place. All right, everyone. God bless. Happy New Year and happy painting.