 Hello and welcome to Monet Café. Subscribers, visitors, newcomers, friends, I'm artist Susan Jenkins. Ever want to get more impressionistic with your work? Well today's lesson is for you. Oh, and if you haven't subscribed, please do so. I would love that. Now let's get started. Achieving a loose and impressionistic style is probably one of the most popular goals for many artists who visit Monet Café, and today I'm going to share with you how you can do just that. Probably one of my most favorite mixed media combinations with soft pastel is watercolor, and it works so beautifully using this pastel matte surface. Now you can buy them in different shades or tones in pads, but I like to use the white when I'm doing a watercolor underpainting. The pastels I'll be using will be primarily this Paris collection by Sennelier. I love the soft, buttery application of Sennelier pastels, and while you can use any pastels that you have, I wanted to let you know that DecodaPastels.com has a special on this Paris collection set, which includes a pad of Sennelier La Carte pastel card, which is such a beautiful combination with the Sennelier pastels. And this little beat up looking set of 36 watercolors is a set I love to use by Arteza. It's 36 wonderful colors at an affordable price. And by the way, I have an Amazon shop for the Monet Café channel, which has many of the products I use in these videos. There's always a clickable link to that shop in the about section of this video. Here is my set up. I'm actually not in my home studio, but we are caring now for my mother-in-law who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer in Tupelo, Mississippi, and it's cold here, but this is proof you can paint on the go. My supplies are some brushes, nothing very expensive, a piece of willow charcoal, some water, and of course some paper towels. I'm going to talk a little bit through the sketching process here. I wanted to let you know that the reference photo, these lovely pink roses, is actually a photo from a friend of mine from high school. And boy, that's been many years ago, but I want to talk a little bit about this surface, the pastel matte, the white surface as a watercolor surface. I was so pleasantly surprised the first time I tried to apply watercolor on pastel matte, and it really applies very much like watercolor paper, and I think I might even prefer it to watercolor paper, but the neat thing about the surface is it's already prepared for soft pastel application, whereas if you've seen me create my own watercolor, I'll talk about these colors in a minute, where you've seen me before use watercolor paper, I create a watercolor underpainting, and then I have to apply something to give the paper some grit if I'm going to apply soft pastels, such as the clear gesso that I've used in the past, but in this case, it's everything already to go. The pastel matte paper receives the watercolor and it's already ready to receive the soft pastels. All right, what I'm doing here is mixing up a combination of colors, and the goal here, like I said at the beginning, is that impressionistic feel, and when you do a watercolor underpainting, it really lends itself to that, once you learn some of the watercolor techniques for keeping that loose and very painterly beginning. You may have seen me mixing up a combination of some pinks and some reds. I know there probably would be a tendency just to look at the flowers and go, well, they're pink or they're peach, and just work with one color family, but actually it's going to be much more interesting, and there are different subtle hue changes within the roses themselves, based on whether they're in the shadow, whether they're in the sunlight, and most typically with roses. I haven't painted a ton of roses, but I'm always just so amazed at beautiful rose paintings, and I'm really drawn, no pun intended, to painting them, and I've been analyzing them, and I'm trying to come up with better rose paintings myself, but I've noticed that the centers of the roses are typically the darkest in value, so you're going to have your deepest colors within the centers, and then there are also some shadows from how the petals bloom outwards. There are going to be some shadowy, cooler colors such as purples, lavenders, even blue hues at times. Now, I'm grabbing a little bit more neutral peaches right now, and I'm going to let you guys watch me now as I paint on the Monet Café channel. I'm actually going to make a separate video for my patrons with an exclusive section for just the watercolor portion, and I know a lot of you and my patrons have been very interested in watercolor painting. I don't consider myself a watercolor painting expert, but I sure have loved it, and I feel I'm getting better, and I also, once again, love how it lends itself towards impressionism, when you can learn to paint outside of the line, so to speak, and not be so tight with your watercolor application. So as you can see, I've sped this up a bit to not make the video so long, since I'm working with watercolor and pastel later, and I haven't sped it up so much that you can't get an idea of what I'm doing. So I'm going to add some music here for the Monet Café channel here on YouTube. Once again, patrons, if you're listening, I'm going to give you a real-time section with more commentary for this watercolor portion. But don't go away, Monet Café. I didn't mean to rhyme there. When the watercolor portion is done, I'm giving more instruction here on the pastel application and the completion of this painting. Enjoy this lovely song. By the way, a lot of you ask where I get my music from or what the name of the song is. I get a lot of my music from the YouTube Audio Library, and the reason is because my videos will get a strike against them if I use music that has a copyright. So I can be pretty sure with the YouTube Audio Library that I don't have any copyright issues, but enjoy this lovely song and I'll be back soon. Alright, that was fun. I always loved the looseness and just the freedom of painting with watercolors. And now, like I said, the pastel matte is already prepared for pastels. And just so you know, the surface of pastel matte, it was actually kind of surprising to me the first time I got it. It's not super gritty and yet it holds layers for pastels. It's really a wonderful surface. And none of these pastel papers are really cheap just so you know. But the great thing about pastel matte and many pastel papers is you can wash them off. You can brush your pastels off, so don't feel afraid to start a painting. And I have repurposed multiple paintings that didn't come out right. So pastel matte is obviously water-friendly and easy to make changes if you need to. If you saw me throw my hands up in the air a second ago, it's because I realized the set of Sennelier Pastels here, this pair set, doesn't have a lot of purples. It's got a few little light lavenders, so that's why I grabbed some of those purples from my set in the back. Now you can see I'm grouping the pastels for different sections or areas that I'll be working on. A lot of those rosy colors, pinks, lavenders, a little deeper burgundy for the flowers, and the greens for some of the foliage and some of the darker colors for background and some of those a bit more neutral blues for the background, pushing it back with color temperature. By the way, my patrons will get a copy of this image. I do add a few more pastels as I work, but these are the basics. And once again, you can work with whatever you have. Goodness knows, I didn't have all these supplies when I first got started and we just gradually do what we can and get supplies as we can afford them. I think that's why I'm always trying to give you guys ways to work on a budget, creating your own pastel surfaces. You guys probably know I talk about it a lot. I have a video, Eight Ways to Create Your Own Pastel Surface. And that's because that's how I had to work when I got started. I have, and I'm still very frugal. So I'm always feeling very blessed to have what I have right now. All right, these blues that I'm using right now in the background, notice in the reference image, it was very dark in the background. I decided these roses were so delicate. I didn't want all that contrast or, you know, just a dark feeling. I wanted to keep it light. And as I often do and say in my videos, many times I love multiple stages of the painting process. When you record yourself painting and you can look back, you're able to see the different stages. I recommend that too. I mean, whether or not you're going to show it to anybody or not, it's a very good thing for you to do to learn more about how you're painting. Often we feel like we've just got to keep working and keep working. And you look back at a video or something and you're just like, wow, I really liked the looseness at that stage. So once again, I'm keeping the background kind of cooled off. By the way, this video will come between a part one and a part two of a beginner lesson that I have. I believe it's called Art Principles for Landscape Painting, something like that. The first one that's just uploaded prior to this video is on value. I give some neat examples and a printable graphic you can use for understanding value better in landscape paintings. The next one will be on color temperature. And on that note, that's why I brought this up is cooler colors make things recede into the distance. And I want that background to look further away and the warmer colors are going to be more in the foreground. You'll see later, you can even see in the watercolor painting, how I kept cooler colors in the background and I kept warmer greens, just a hint of them with the watercolor in the foreground. And I'm going to continue to do that with the soft pastels. Now, another thing that happens with soft pastels often is we get frustrated at what's called or many artists call the teenager stage or the adolescent stage. You notice how everything looks a little bit not really smooth or smoothly applied. There's a lot of the background showing through. So I don't blend a lot when I work with pastel, but I do sometimes in the beginning stages just to kind of cover up that surface of the paper. And that leads to another question, which is why do you do an underpainting if you just cover it all up? And as I often say, it you're not covering it all up typically and the underlying color does affect the overall mood of the painting. A lot of my patrons have been asking these questions and doing some neat little experiments of doing multiple small painting studies with different just toned colors for under paintings. And it's really neat how they're seeing how it really does influence the final painting. And like I say, so many people get bogged down with under paintings and what's the right color and how do I do if I have this color in a photograph? What underpainting? I don't think there's any hard and fast rules to under paintings other than using a color that's primarily in the scene. Like you've got a lot of green in the scene. I wouldn't choose a green underpainting, but a lot of it is just experimentation, having fun, getting creative and enjoying it. So play around with it. This one would be what is called a local color underpainting. Local color just means the color that's in the scene, whether you're painting from a photo or from life. I chose to do the watercolor portion in similar colors to what was already there and then enhance it with pastel layering. However, many times I will do what's called a complementary underpainting where you're choosing the colors compliments to your reference photo. I have a lot of videos on that too. But this one is called local color for the underpainting. And now you can see how I am intensifying the darker middle sections of the roses. And I want to be careful because some, and I'm adding some shadowy colors, the cooler tones where some of these petals are actually in shadow. But I want to be careful not to get too heavy-handed with the pastel. I want these to look impressionistic and almost like a dream. And they really have that feeling more now or in a little bit as I work a little bit than they do at the end once again. Sometimes just getting carried away and continuing to work. And it's really a good habit to get up, take a break, go outside, have a cup of coffee, or even overnight come back to your painting in the morning. And often you see it with fresh new eyes. Have you ever done that before? I know I've done it where I've packed some paintings away for a while. Even sometimes a painting I wasn't very happy with and went back, did some reorganization and opened up something and saw a painting I hadn't seen in a while and was like, wow, that's better than I thought it was. Of course that works the opposite way too, seeing a painting after a while and thinking it was good while you were doing it and later realizing, wow, I have really learned a lot and grown from where I was many months or years ago. Now I am going to speed this up a little bit more. This is barely sped up so far while I've been talking, but I'm going to speed it up a little bit more to reduce the file size for uploading. So enjoy the music, but after I finish some of these roses I will be back to talk a bit more about my techniques for the background. I'm continuing to work on the roses here, trying hard to keep that impressionistic feel and also I'm learning more myself over the years. One of my goals has been to create more definite focal points in a painting and one of the strategies to do that is to have your most detail and most contrast in a particular area and then reduce it in other areas and a common way to do this is things in the foreground are typically usually more detailed anyway. So I'm trying to keep it to where these front three roses that are kind of grouped together are the main focal point and then have the rest even more subdued. I think I could have left it even more subdued than I do at the final image, but that's kind of what I'm continuing to work on and once again trying to keep things in the background are going to be a little bit more out of focus anyway. They're usually going to be less contrast, less color, usually they're more neutral, less crisp edges, so I'm going to keep those background roses really soft and without a lot of detail. So that's the goal and I apologize in this section. I got my big head in the way. Once again I am not at my home studio. I prefer to work at an easel but sometimes I will sit, I have a tabletop easel I'll use and by the way this setup literally just my iPad holder with a piece of black foam core that I've taped the pastel mat to, sorry I meant to mention that earlier, and truly you can get creative and travel with your pastels and your artwork. I have had to do it unfortunately multiple times in my life but it is, I tell you what, it has been healing for me while helping to care for my mother-in-law here in our home to have art to keep me at peace. This is the stage prior to working on the background I really did like the looseness and the out of focus quality of the background here and I kind of wish I had not given too much to the background but I was so happy with the overall painting. Adding a few more little teeny buds and roses in the backgrounds again focusing on not a lot of detail so that your eye immediately you hope when you make a focal point the eye goes to the main focal area and then you have interest gradually in other places that are leading the viewer to explore and enjoy your painting. And now I'm beginning to work on the background I will add mostly cooler colors in the background they're going to be greens that are more I guess the best description would be more like an evergreen in color for the ones that are a darker value I don't want to go too warm I don't want to make them like these yellowy greens because once again color temperature gets cooler in the background so I'm just kind of a lot of it's just kind of scumbling and I have another video that talks about the different ways you can apply pastel I can't remember it's like 12 ways to apply pastel I'll try to put clickable links in this video too but it's a really neat way to understand sometimes we get very patterned in the way we apply our pastels and forget that we can twist and turn and use scumbling and linear strokes and use the side of your pastel so it's fun to explore and to try new things and I do believe it will help your artwork to just get better and better over time I'm adding some of the deeper values darker values it's more of a kind of a deep purple and then more of a neutral purple to the areas in the photo that are the darkest once again I didn't want to go as dark as it was in the photo in the background but usually to find those darker values the ones you want to keep dark the best technique is just to squint your eyes or to reduce the lighting where you are and then you can all of a sudden see the darkest areas you can also see shapes I'm often talking about how I paint more by shape and value than by anything I almost zone out and forget sometimes the thing that I'm painting because sometimes when you have in your brain I am painting a rose and you keep thinking about a rose we tend to paint what we think a rose looks like instead of maybe what that particular rose does look like in the picture sometimes they don't look exactly the petals may not be where we think or the shadows may not be where we think so with many many times you actually should follow what the reference image is telling you and not what your brain is telling you I know it always sounds funny to say turn your brain off but sometimes it's a good strategy okay I'm finishing up here I think I've got my I was holding my camera which is my iPhone and painting at the same time and what I wanted to do here I knew I wanted to push the background back even further to feel like it's more in the distance so I grabbed some more brighter and lighter value teals and I'm doing a real painterly approach in the background just adding them here and there and also you see I added some indications of stems I didn't want to get I didn't want to spell everything out too much in this once again the goal was impressionism and not realism and back to one of the main points of this video was the impressionistic beginnings and how watercolor so beautifully can do that for you if you create a very loose watercolor as an under painting it really can help to set the mood for that impressionistic feel and while impressionism may seem like it's a process that you just start painting and it's all loose and free don't think that means you shouldn't plan some things out like I said I purposely thought about my strategy prior I'm showing you where I got some of these turquoisey colors from my other set don't be afraid to plan some things out impressionism and loose doesn't mean sporadic and unplanned so take the time to think about I like the concept of I often get asked how do you know what to make the focal point and I think it's often a good idea to think about what attracted you to that reference image or scene in life to begin with and if it's the thing that drew you to the image that's a good strategy for a focal point for example if it's a field and there's a sweeping tree you may want to exaggerate that tree make that tree the focal point and subdue other elements in the scene or if it's a field of flowers and there's a few in the front that are just dancing and looking like they are lyrical and energetic those may be the things that you make the focal point and these things do get easier the more that you work on them so don't get frustrated with yourself and I say this from experience because I wish that in times past I I lived what I preach so often which is to enjoy the journey you will get better the more you work on these things art is not you know a lot of people say oh well you just have a gift you just you have a gift well some people may have that god-given leaning towards liking art but all these things can be learned and that's why I'm here to help you do that here is the final and it will be available in my Etsy shop soon I have my shop on vacation now but I should open it again in a couple of weeks we're bringing my mother-in-law back home with us to care for her so I hope you learn something and once again patrons you will get the real-time watercolor tutorial portion of this thank you everyone God bless and as always happy painting