 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. Oh, I loved creating this happy snowman. He looked like he was praising the Lord in this lesson. I'll be featuring pan pastels. I don't use these pastels often and I'm gonna be using them a lot more. I learned so much myself in this video and I can't wait to share it with you. I'll be sharing with you how these pastels work so beautifully to create soft effects on a surface that I highly recommend. So grab yourself a cup of hot cocoa and let's get ready to have some snowman painting fun. Now let's talk about these products. As I mentioned I'm using pan pastels that the most unique pastels I've ever seen in that they are literally the pigment, the pastels in these little circular compacts almost like a makeup compact and it comes in assortment of colors. What's really great about these is you're able to mix them and blend them with some special tools provided by the company. I'll be talking about that in just a minute. Now I have a pretty decent set thanks to a patron of mine. She gifted me many of her pan pastels and some other art supplies that was so sweet. Here's an example of how you can buy them individually. This happens to be an iridescent type of color and you can of course just buy the little individual compacts of pastels but you can also buy the plastic palettes like you can see how I have some of these arranged and you can put whatever colors in design the palette yourself or you can buy sets of these as well in color family. So I'll be talking more about that but just look at these. Aren't they fun? I love how I can literally set these out like I would painting with a palette of oil or acrylic and it is such a unique way to paint with soft pastels. Before getting started let me talk a little bit more about some of the other tools that you can get to use with pan pastels. You can blend you'll see me using many of these during the tutorial with these art sponges which are large. You can also get smaller art sponges in different shapes and you can use these tools that work very much like a paintbrush with different little tips that you can buy to put on the ends to paint with like a different brush like a flat brush or a pointed brush or round brush. So it's really neat that we can paint with pastels much like many other artists do with other mediums. These little applicators are good for getting into small spaces. I love keeping things organized and I love that Pan Pastels has these nice little round containers to hold your extra supplies and refills for your applicators. When you purchase Pan Pastels you'll get one of these nice little catalogs that has some of the techniques and more things that will help you in using their product. Now I was very blessed to come to meet one of the inventors of Pan Pastels. Her name is Bernadette Ward and she was so sweet. I was doing a video sharing some about Pan Pastels and I was very blessed to get to meet her. She was such a joy to work with and so you can use this catalog to get a wealth of information. They also have a website that makes everything easy with some tutorials and you are not left stranded not knowing how to use these products because the company has so many resources for you including this catalog. And I must say one of my greatest discoveries in using Pan Pastels was trying it for the first time on this particular surface. It's a surface made by Art Spectrum. It's called Color Fix. It's a sanded pastel paper and it comes in different colors. I like this cool pack. They also have a warm pack and I chose the color Leaf Green Dark. Now the reason I think this surface works so great for Pan Pastels is it's sanded but not overly sanded so the product applies like butter really beautifully. I'm just showing you a little behind the scenes here. I have people ask all the time how I film myself and what I use for my lighting. This is my ring light. I got it off of Amazon. It holds my camera. You can turn it vertically or horizontally. It also allows you to control not only the brightness of the light but if you press this little middle button it allows you to change the color temperature so I can warm up things or cool them off a bit. It's really one of my best studio accessory purchases I've made and I have it in my Amazon shop. I have my Amazon shop link in every video. So here are the two palettes that I chose to start with and just used a few colors out of each. Mostly just the blues and lavenders within each set. Also some teal type of blues and I'll be showing the actual color numbers to most of these pan pastels that I use for this tutorial. You'll actually see the backs of this little compacts show the color numbers so I'll hold it up so you can see my color choices. I found some copyright free reference images but I decided to make a combination of a few of them because I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for. I liked this little snowman because he was a blank slate. He didn't even have any hat or face or anything but I liked the background of this scene. Having the snowman in front of some trees. So I won't really have a definite reference image to go by because it kind of came up with this myself by combining a few images. And this is the sketch that I just did in pencil on the color fix surface. If you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page you will be receiving a JPEG image of my sketch so you could use that to get started if you like. Alright let's apply some of these pan pastels. I'm first beginning with it's kind of a pale lavender color and I'm starting with one of these large kind of oval shape applicators that I pretty much used to get the whole background in except for some of the trees. And I do this strategy and technique just as if I was using a stick form of pastel. I like to cover the entire surface beginning with my big shapes and values. It's called a blocking end stage. And the goal is to cover your surface with your large general shapes colors and values. Now I am using two blues the next two colors I'll use. One of them is ultramarine blue and the other is phthalo blue tint. And another great thing about pan pastels is because you have the ability to blend them quite a bit better than you can blend stick form of pastels on a surface. The great thing is that you don't have to start out buying so many colors because you actually can blend them together. Again like oil or acrylic paint. And you can get other colors to do a tint or a shade to lighten or darken. You can get a white and a black to get lighter values or darker values of some of the colors. So it really is quite a fascinating product. And I'm going to again brag on using it on this particular surface the color fix because I've found that that's the phthalo blue tint there. I have found that when you apply pan pastels to pastel surfaces that are very coarse or really sanded the applicators kind of stick and you don't get a smooth application. And as I said these just applied so buttery and soft to this particular surface that it pretty much reignited my excitement for pan pastels. I'm going to be using them a lot more now. By the way if you would like to see another artist work who uses the pan pastels. You should check out the work of Dawn Vanderstope. I hope I'm saying her name right. This is a sneak peek into her studio where you can see her pan pastels laid out. She works with other pastels as well but her work is very much like fantasy like a dream. And I'm just fascinated by how she uses the pan pastels in combination with other mediums. So again you might want to check her out. I found her on Instagram and you might just get inspired by some of her work as well. And now back to painting. So I'm using this large sponge applicator again for the majority of the underpainting. I'm only speeding this up slightly for this underpainting portion of the pan pastels and then I will be adding stick pastels to the snowman and some of the larger darker trees and some of the snow. Now if you do not have pan pastels that does not mean you can't do this tutorial. You could absolutely do this tutorial by using whatever soft pastels you have. Most of you have seen some of my videos before. If you haven't I hope you will subscribe. I have so many hundreds of videos literally on my channel but many of them show my techniques of creating an underpainting just like this with soft pastels. You literally can lay them on their sides block in the color and then you can blend them with a paper towel. This particular color is turquoise and I am using it to get in some of the cool areas in the snow some of those nice shadowy cool areas. I wanted to mention another advantage of using pan pastels is that I find that they don't take up as much tooth of the surface by applying them with these applicators. In other words they don't get a lot of pastel down into those areas in the sanded paper so it allows you for more layering. So you'll see me continue to work here still working the whole trying to get in my big shapes values and colors before getting too much detail. I did love how this one sponge applicator was able to be used for the majority of the painting. I could even make some strokes with it kind of in that foreground snow there and doing a little bit of negative painting here working around the snowman. In my imagination this snowman was in a setting where there was a sense of depth or distance to this field and there was a bit of the field very far away that you could see receding back to some distant trees and I wanted to get some darker trees rather than it just being white all around the snowman because I wanted to develop some contrast. I wanted the snowman because snowmen are typically white to have some contrasting element behind him and I thought it gave a nice composition which is why I'm using this color ultra blue extra dark and I'm using it to get in some dark trees behind the snowman. His head's going to be going up into the trees a bit and I thought that difference in contrast would really make a nice focal point. Evergreen trees are for me fun to paint. I like to think of painting them in kind of a zigzag type of stroke keeping in mind that you don't want every space between the branches to be equidistant. You want to give some variety sometimes there'll be a branch missing or one will be facing another direction so keep that in mind and don't just do a pattern of a zigzag when you're creating evergreen trees. So again like I said getting this dark element behind the snowman's head is going to help with a focal point. I decided later you'll see me in this video to make the snowman a little bit larger. His head wasn't quite going up into those trees so things are very versatile with soft pastel painting and with these pan pastels you do have the ability to change things up. Now this is a nice green that I'm using it's phthalo green extra dark. What I'm doing now is I'm giving a sense of the trees receding and what we want to do to develop that illusion is to go a little bit lighter and often a little bit cooler with our color which really gives that feeling of things getting further away. Now on that note now I'll be using this turquoise shade to develop some of the trees even further away. This is where I'm changing my little sponge applicator. I'm using the little triangle one and I just try to find an area that's kind of clean but if I don't I just rub it off with a paper towel to clean it. I'm pretty sure you can just I haven't done it yet but wash these and dry them. They work over and over and over again so and they're pretty affordable too and now I'm going back to that phthalo green extra dark and I'm going to use the pointy side of the applicator and which has really got a nice little fine edge so I'm able to even get some linear marks. So it's really so much versatility that you can do by using pan pastels and like I said before I'm just reignited and passionate about creating more with these. I'm going back to the ultra blue extra dark. I want to get in a little bit of a darker base on some of these middle ground trees. Often trees will be a little bit darker close to the trunk and down at the base and it kind of made them a little bit closer so that those distant trees really feel far away. And now you will see me reshaping the snowman. I basically drew his head a little bit higher. I know he's going to have a toboggan on. I decided to give him a toboggan and basically make him a little bit more dominant within the scene. I knew I didn't want him right in the middle and I also knew I wanted to add some arms so I had to make sure I gave enough room so don't put him too close to the edge but also don't put him right in the middle. And now I'll be using a color called violet extra dark. I wanted to give a little bit more depth to those trees right behind the snowman and this is a nice purple, like a dark purple. And while it's not a lot darker than the blue, it's probably about the same value, it added some color energy by using two colors. I often do that just to kind of mix some colors together like that. I also put some of that same purple down into the snow. I was imagining in the scene that the sun is coming kind of from the distance where those trees are but a little bit more to the right so that the sun can kind of be shining on his face. And now you'll be able to see how I grab a little bit of a lighter color and I add it on top of some of that bluish or teal blue snow showing you that you really can just keep layering with soft pastels using these blending tools. It's really a lot of fun. So I am going to I add a little bit of shadow. That purple gave a little bit of shadow under some of those trees and at the base of that distant rolling hill to see how that purple just really is a lovely addition in snow. Snow is not just white. Now I'm back to this ultramarine blue. This is the what I think of as primary blue and I'm giving it you might think why are you doing that? The snowman is any supposed to be white? Well this is the same principle I talk about a lot in my pastel paintings that you layer dark to light with soft pastels and I know that the snowman is in shadow as well. Now this is the teal blue shade that I just held up a second ago and I'm using it for a little bit of a darker blue. You see it's a little darker for those shadowy areas. Think of this as like your basic drawing and sketching. You know a circle or a sphere to make it look like a sphere. You've got to add those shadows and the shadows are going to be on the lower left side because of the source of the light. So I'm just blending a little more getting everything in. I've almost totally covered the surface. I'm using one of these greens. I wanted another tree that was kind of a little bit closer to the viewer so I made another evergreen tree to give a little bit more of that perception of levels or layers of trees. And now I'm going to move on to a different tool. You have different handles for these little applicators and I chose this one here. I thought it would just apply nicely in my little spaces between the trees. So I slipped it on and I'm back to using this violet tint which is sort of lavender, a light lavender. And look at how just wonderfully, I'm going to zoom in in just a second so you can see, it applies so nicely here and I'm able to paint negatively in between some of these branches and leaves of the trees and this was so fun. I never had my pan pastels that I've used in the past apply this easily and beautifully. And I'm almost done with my pan pastel application for this base underpainting before adding the stick form of soft pastels. But I did do a little bit more of spacing between those trees with this. See how beautifully that worked and it stayed so nice and loose and impressionistic? But I'm also going to add a few more little finishing marks in the snow and you can see how I'm still able to get layering and just continue to work this painting by building the layers. So yes, I am super excited about my discovery in using these pan pastels on the surface that worked so well in showing off their capabilities and I'm definitely going to be doing more. I want to do some paintings with using only pan pastels and give that a try. Alright, so now is the portion where I'm going to be moving on to the stick form of pastels and I'm going to be speeding this section up quite a bit here on Monet Cafe and if you are a patron of mine, however, you're going to get real time footage of this remaining portion of this tutorial. Also, if you're a patron of mine, we're having some fun this month over on my Patreon page. My patrons are basically going to be dressing this snowman. Any of you old enough to remember? Was it called dress up Sally? Something like that. You had the little cardboard form of a doll's body and you could add a hat, gloves, dress, whatever and that's what my patrons are going to be doing with this painting or coming up with their own snowman scenes altogether or it could be a snow lady or a snow kid or a snow family but I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with already. Many of my patrons are excited about that. So that's just a lot of the fun that we have over on my Patreon page and on that note real quickly before showing the rest of this tutorial. If you haven't yet subscribed, please do so and like this video and if you would like to become one of my patrons on my Patreon page, you will be not only supporting this channel to keep the free videos coming for only $5 a month but you'll be joining the family and getting lots of extra instruction as well. This is my basic selection of soft pastels that I'll use for creating the snowman and layering some of the colors and values in the snow. I also chose a few greens, uh deep kind of rich greens to add to the trees. Also, if you're patron of mine, you will be getting my full color notes along with which brands of pastels I used and as I said, this is sped up. Uh you could follow it also on YouTube. There's an option to slow motion things. You basically go to the little gear icon and just choose the speed. So that's a really neat way to slow up not only my video but any video that is sped up. Um once again, if you're a patron of mine, you will get real time footage of this along with extra commentary from me. And of course, if you're a patron of mine, you will be able to share your recreations uh from this tutorial or any of my tutorials in our homework album. My patrons have ways that they can share their work and I can see it and I love that part. But if you're not a patron of mine, feel free to share if you recreate from this tutorial. Uh but just be sure to tag me or mention me. That's kind of artist etiquette and I love to see what you do. So, if you share on Instagram, you can tag me at Susan Jenkins Artist. And if you share on Facebook, you can tag me at The Art of Susan Jenkins. And go ahead and follow me on both of those places too. I also will have this original painting available in my Etsy shop. By the way, this painting is nine inches by twelve inches. And I've already added it to my site, Fine Art America site, where I offer prints and products of my work. So you could buy a print, a postcard. This would make great little greeting cards or all kinds of other products. Coffee mug. So, it's a lot of fun. Alright, I'm going to add some Christmas music here. Enjoy. I will be back at the end. Don't go anywhere. Remember, like, subscribe, and I'll be back soon. And I'm getting close to the finish. I lightened them up a bit and also decided to add some snow. I mean, why not? I used basically a really soft pastel. This is a Terry Ludwig. I also use, I think that one's a great American pastel. And perhaps a unison. So those are brands that are very, very soft and excellent for adding snow. Sometimes I'll do a little dusting technique with snow. But in this case, I wanted the snowflakes to be kind of large so you could see them. And make sure if you do this to vary the size and the location of your snowflakes, you want it to look random, like snow really falls. Oh, and that other snowman painting you're seeing there to the right is another painting of mine. I printed it out just to remind myself about the scarf and the face a little bit as a reference. So that is also available as a print on my Fine Art America site as well. I really hope this painting and tutorial brought you joy. It did for me. I loved his happy spirit and how he had his arms up in the air as if he was praising the Lord, which is what I hope you will do this holiday season. I mean, what a reason to celebrate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. So I pray you're all blessed this Christmas and holiday season. Thank you so much for being part of the Monet Cafe family. And as always, God bless and happy painting.