 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. Happy to bring you this pastel painting tutorial and in this lesson you'll be learning about painting on a homemade surface. I'll give you the recipe. You'll learn how to use acrylic ink to create a nice initial value study before painting and the beautiful textural quality of painting on these homemade boards. I'll also be sharing how painting with your non-dominant hand can create some beautiful results. I'm happy to bring you this free version of this painting tutorial and I'd really appreciate it if you would like, comment and subscribe to my channel to keep these free videos coming. You'll learn a lot in this lesson, but if you want a little bit more I encourage you to become a patron of mine on my Patreon page. My patrons will get all real-time content, extra commentary and more. Here's some of their beautiful faces and I'd love to have you as part of the family for only $5 a month. Now, let's get started. Welcome friends to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins bringing you a pastel painting tutorial where I will be using a rather large, this is larger than I normally work, prepared board that is a homemade pastel surface. I love making my own pastel surfaces. Not only are they affordable, more affordable than the professional sanded papers, but you can express your creativity with color and texture. So I'm going to be talking a lot about this surface and also I'll be painting a lovely scene of some wild flowers. So I hope you'll come along with me. I'm going to share a lot about products, techniques and more. All right. Here we go. The board is actually a 16 by 20 size. I actually love working large. I'm just in a small studio and sometimes it's not practical for shipping. So I'm excited about this one and it is a piece of matte board. I will give the recipe for how I prepared the surface and talk more about it during the video. But I'm excited about this not only because it's large, but because it's purple. It's not my normal underpainting color. A lot of times I'll do warm under paintings because they work really good with the it's a compliment to a lot of landscapes that have greens and blues in them. But this purple I thought was nice for a reference image I chose from unsplash.com that had this soft just kind of a late afternoon feel. The greens weren't really green. Everything was kind of cool in color. And I just thought this purple would work well for that. I used a variety of brands of soft pastels and as you can see I kept it fairly cool. Oh, that was a gray hair in my little palette there. I have a lot of beautiful purples, some really pretty neutral blues and very cool greens. I wanted this to feel like a early morning or late afternoon scene with some soft and neutral colors. Also I'll be using to create an underpainting. Well, it already is kind of an underpainting. But for my first value study I'm going to be using this acrylic ink. It's made by Dayla Rowney, the one that I use. And this is called Purple Lake. It makes a great dark to get down your darker values. And I'm going to try to regulate it with a little bit of water. I'm going to make a value study with just this on the board. And the reason I'm doing that is because when you make homemade surfaces a lot of times you can't get quite the amount of layering that you can with some of the professional very sanded surfaces. So I'm constantly trying to think how can I do things to not take up an extra layer. Well, if you use acrylic ink and there's a few other mediums you could use for your first layers then you've still got that texture to add pastel to. So that's my strategy. But I'm going to be using a little bit of water. I used a Tupperware container here where I can hopefully regulate it. I'm going to use full strength for my darkest darks with the acrylic ink. And then I will add water to it when I need to lighten things up. I'll be putting my acrylic ink in a little dish to be able to use with a brush and maybe even with a sponge. I want to get some neat texture here. So I'm just kind of experimenting like I always do and bringing you guys along for the ride. So I hope this painting comes out okay and I hope you learned something. Once again my reference images are from unsplash.com. I love that site for copyright free images. I actually use two images for inspiration and you'll be able to find the clickable link to both of those in the description of this video. If you're a patron of mine this is the portion where the remaining content will be real time with all of my commentary. But not to worry those here in Monet Café because even though this free content is sped up a bit I think you can still follow along and on YouTube you can actually play this back at slow speed. So here I'm just getting ready to start with the acrylic ink to create my initial darkest values. Also I will have the recipe for how I created this board in the description of this video along with lots of other helpful information. So I want you guys to comment and let me know if you've ever tried a homemade surface and or and if you have what did you like did it work. Also I have another video eight ways to make your own pastel surfaces. Of course you could use my same painting techniques here on any surface as I always say whatever you have available but if you've been on this channel long you know I love stretching the boundaries and learning new ways to do this because it really is a way to save money when you can create your own surfaces and boards. I love painting large and this one was really a lot of fun for me. I also really loved how this board and this technique lends itself towards that soft romantic painterly style and I in my Patreon version of this video I talk about some of the things in working with homemade surfaces how it can feel a little odd at first and some little tips and things to get past those initial first layers and then things just really start to come together. You can see how I've used this acrylic ink. The link for this ink will be in the description of this video. It's a Daylor Rowney acrylic ink called Purple Lake. It's a wonderful dark and I've used it in different strengths. I've been diluting it a little bit with water in some portions of this. Also I'm using a sponge right now dipped in water to kind of blend it a little bit. So many fun things you can do and a lot of it is just self-discovery just play try something and often it works. I learned like 10 new things in painting this painting. Also too I'm going to dilute it a little bit more to create the sky. There needed to be a little bit of depth to the sky so I used this Tupperware container. I had never done this before. I had water in one side where I could kind of control how diluted I make this. Again I'm encouraging you like I'm doing here to try using both hands when you paint. I think you can find not only is it practical when you can't get to it with one arm it's really a neat way to get some nice gesture. This month's focus in Monet Cafe has been called different strokes. We're trying to break out of our old habits and come up with new techniques and a new style and often emulating another artist is a great way to give that a try. Now I do use a paper towel quite a bit in this video not only to kind of soften some edges of the acrylic ink but also to blend things when with the soft pastel. A paper towel works great for blending on this particular homemade surface and once this is dry it's time for the soft pastel application. Now the rest of this video will be sped up somewhat. Again you can slow it down on YouTube with the playback speed option but I think you can still learn a lot. I have so much other information over on the Patreon page but I still love bringing these free videos and this is totally how I learned. I am a self-taught artist totally learned everything I know from the internet. A lot of YouTube videos a lot of finding other artists that I admired and that was not only because I couldn't really afford a lot of workshops or art education but it wasn't practical for my life either working and having children so that's why I love continuing to bring the free content because I know there's lots of you out there. I know there are because you tell me. I love your comments and share what you're learning here. I get so much joy from that and also too if you've been coming to this channel a while and you haven't yet subscribed I'd really appreciate it if right now you'd hit that subscribe button. It truly helps how often YouTube will share my videos and how much success this channel has by the comments the subscriptions the likes so I really appreciate it when you do that. So here's some music for you to enjoy the rest of this. I think you're going to learn a lot and stay tuned because I'm going to be back at the end with some more commentary. All right enjoy. I'm getting close to the finish here and I really liked how my goal was to leave a lot of this purple underpainting showing through. I mean why cover up all that beautiful purple right and I was very happy with the looseness and how I didn't cover everything up so it's time to sign and this was really a lot of fun. I liked the romantic quality again. I love working on homemade surfaces. I hope you learned a lot. Please let me know in the comment section. Again like this video subscribe become a patron if you want more commentary and real-time content. My Patreon family is a beautiful family. Also I made this available as prints on my fine art America site if you would like a print canvas print a framed print and I might put this in my Etsy shop for sale but I'm kind of enjoying looking at it right now and you can find me at all of those links in this end screen. Also I have hundreds of free lessons here on the Monet Cafe channel on YouTube. Check them out and as always God bless you and happy painting.