 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm sharing this video actually on the Monet Café YouTube channel and with my patrons on my Patreon account. There's the link above if you'd like to become a patron for only $5 a month. It's a great fun place where you get a little bit extra and you help to support this channel. Now let's get to the video. Today's lesson is on painting animal eyes and it really is kind of all about the eyes. When you're doing an animal portrait or a pet portrait, it's really important to get the eyes accurate. Here are a few of my pet portraits. I love painting dogs. I do some dog commission work, which is awesome. Oh, that was little Molly. I love her. And even if you don't get as creative with color as I did in my lion painting, I'll be showing. The positioning and the anatomy, getting the correct anatomy of the eye is very, very important. All right, time to get started. For this animal portrait, I am using Sennelier Pastel Card, LaCarte Pastel Card. I love the surface. It really lends towards creating soft looking animal fur. And I'd like to thank A.R. Mason in my Patreon group for her lovely submissions to our photo reference album. I loved this line. I actually want to do it again. I loved his face so much. Now I am speeding up the sketching portion to this because the main focus of the video isn't the sketching part. I do have other lessons where I focus more on how to get things correct proportionately. And I wanted to not make this video what like three hours long, however long it took me to paint this. So I'm just going to do a little bit of real time to focus on how to paint the eyes. I did end up using a little bit of grid marks just to get those eyes accurate. And then I was ready to get to painting them. Okay, like I said, it's all about the eyes with this. And I've chosen a palette of pastels literally just for the eyes. And I'll take a picture of this so you can see it better. And that may look like a lot of pastels just for the eyes. I mean, if you look at the reference photo, it looks like, okay, we've got gold and black and maybe a little shadowy color and a white highlight. You know, I mean, that's what our brain would just logically look at and see. But when you learn a few rules about art, you can embellish it. That's one of the most common questions I get is how do you change the colors from what you see in the reference photo? And it really is just learning a few simple rules. They're not all that hard. One of the main ones is just get value right and then you get creative with color. So let me break down this eye a little bit while I start to work on it here. I see the eye when I look at his eye almost, well, I would say all, not almost, unless the light is shining from a weird angle, but almost always the eye, whether it's a human or an animal, has a shadow on the top half because our light source is usually coming from above, somehow above us, even if it's at an angle. And our brow and our lid creates a shadow. So it's almost always a little bit darker in that top half. In his case, the bottom part is lighter up to almost around like nine o'clock or so or 10 o'clock or so. And the top part is shadowed there. So, but what I'm going to do first is get in my general values and then get creative with color. So let me start painting here. This is like a dark blue here. I know you probably can't see where I'm making a mark. As long as we have a dark, dark, we're good. And I'm looking, I zoomed in on his eye so I could see it. And this expression of the eye is going to be so important. This is too blue. So I'm going to back up with that. Sometimes you don't know until you just put it down. This is a purple. I know I'm going to use this. This is good. I'm probably going to add something that's even a little blacker, but this will be good to get started. I'm going to be quiet because I kind of need to focus here. And I know this is a big chunky pastel, but you can find corners to work with. A lot of people I know work with pastel pencils for intricate work like this, but I find you can really create more gesture and looseness if you try to learn how to work with the big ones. Now his eye is not perfectly round here. It's got a little bit of a, I'm noticing a little bit of an angle to it. This is really more just to get the general anatomy of the eye before I get too detailed with it. And the grids do help. The larger you paint something, the harder it is to get that accuracy. Now right down there, I'm already seeing where I want to add this blue. The black gets a little bit lighter in value, and I'm just, I don't know how my brain works, but I sometimes see other colors. And I know this value is lighter, but it's in the same color family. So I can kind of add the almost like a shimmery darker value to it. And I'm seeing some interesting purples right down in here, but let me get these blacks a little more. That's just for my note purposes to see a reminder to me. Anyway, what I was saying is the larger something is the harder it is to render it correctly. And so since this was so large, I knew it was probably a good idea. Well, I knew it when I started sketching it in that, man, I'm going to get this right. So it's not like just doing something little, trying to judge kind of how far does that come down. And of course, you know, we've got layering possibilities with this. And we can cover things up. But I'm trying to work more on something that I have called, I don't know if any artist has ever called it this, but it works for me is I call it efficiency of stroke. Because that's going to be thinner when it comes down. Because I want my strokes to count. I don't want to go, well, you know, I'm gonna cover that up later. And so I try to take more time. I hope you guys can see one of the hard things about filming is angling yourself in a way where you can actually paint. And you guys can actually see now this eye, I noticed, it's got almost like a, I'm talking about the round part of the eye, the ball of the eye, it's got almost like a little corner to the circle. And then it goes up back here pretty dark. But these things are worth taking the time. It's not something I want to come back and have to correct, even though pastel sanded papers can be forgiving. Now that I can see it was actually part of my drawing was in too far his eyes a little bit bigger. This is just a kneaded eraser. And if you, if you can get a clean spot, I just got pastel all over it. I just, I don't want to mess this eye up. So just racing out a little bit of it. I can come in and add more to enlarge it, but I'm trying to get it right to begin with. It's almost like this bottom part of the eye is at an angle. And that's another important thing to do when you're painting is think about the direction of the object that you're painting and how you can make a stroke that will give that indication of that direction. A lot of times you do it by how you lay the strokes. And this just comes in his eyes a little bigger and right here and goes up at that little angle right there. Okay, and then we've got a little bit not as much dark on this eye here as on the other one. Again, he's got a little cast shadow from the light source above that is shadowing the inner part of his eye. Now this is interesting to me because it's like his angle of his brow comes out a bit and then it curves back in a little bit like that. And it really gives the indication of that that cat eye feeling, you know how they angle up a lot. Let's see if we got that one in this one. This one doesn't angle as up as much, but it's going to feel more that way when I get this pupil in because it is more set that way when I get the other colors in on that. And I love that I love the way cats have that actually when I was young now I have old eyes that don't look that way. I had kind of that cat eye or whatever especially when I smile, but yeah, things change as you each. All right, so I've got the blacks in there. Now at the underneath part of this of his eye, I'm seeing a little of that blue and believe it or not, I'm seeing kind of a magenta color. So I'm going to get just a hint of some of this blue in there. It's a little light up in there. And even though I'm being very specific with this with the eye, I still want overall the feeling to feel painterly. And that's what I'm going to try to achieve all right now. I can see too I am going to have to make this eye inside a little bit bigger. Now here is that this is like a let's get this color down here. This is kind of like a magenta, but it might be too light. Let's see might not be. I'm just going to put a little bit of that down there because I just see that my little doggy's barking out there Jackson. All right, I got my little Jackson inside. I'm going to move this up a bit and zoom it in even a bit more so you can see hopefully you can see that. Now I'm going to go ahead and get in the general values in the inside of the eye. So I make sure I get these shapes right and also the pupils of the eyes. I may add more colors to it, but this is just to get the general now up above here too. Already I can see right above I might have to actually get in the way here to get in. Unfortunately my eyes have gotten older and I can't see as good, but underneath where that shadow is I'm actually it's darker than this. I'm actually seeing a bit of that dark deep kind of magenta color. So let me see if I can find something like that. This one's probably better. Look at this. That's a little more orangey. That's not even dark enough. It's funny how value changes when you put it up to something. It can be sitting next to something in my box and look relatively dark until I get it up here. Okay, there we go. All right, yeah, I'm seeing a little a little shadowy part. Pardon me if my head is in the way. That's coming kind of up and over his pupil a little bit. Again, I'm just kind of finding a little corner to this. I'm also seeing that this black does come down. I put that blue there, but I want to mingle it in and this comes down a little darker. All right, now let's get in. There's up in this corner here. It's where it's darker and it's kind of an orangey color, but it's also got a little bit of that pink hue. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get this down first. It's lighter than what I just put down before and then this is a, like I said, I'm going to punch this color up a little bit, but I might have to, this might be too punchy. Now I need something a little duller, maybe this one here. And this, I'm squinting my eyes. It's still quite dark next to his pupil, so I think I'm just going to go ahead and get the lights in where I know that they are and this is where I definitely want to get this shape in right. And like I said, I know it came down a little more rounded and a little lower than the black that I had drawn. I'm going to actually add some green to the eyes too. Again, this is my little color notes. I'm still working on efficiency of stroke, but I want to get the shape in and this will help me to do that right now. It's like this eye kind of goes behind where the bridge of the nose is. So all right, there's a little bit of that light. Okay, all right, let's get in. I need even darker than that, almost like a dull. Let's look at this here. It's a dull orangey color, maybe like this. And it is because it's darker next to the pupil. Here it's actually even a little darker than this, but I'll get the idea in and then I'll work on. This is where I want to get some of that green. I'm seeing green along this side and even a little bit of a darker green in there. I had pulled this green, but that's way too light. Let me get a darker green here, maybe even a green that's not so bright. Hey Siri. Oh, you're not Siri. You're Alexa. Hey, Alexa. What happened? Somebody said, hey, let me say something. Hey, Siri. I am playing audio over a Bluetooth connection to MacBook Pro. I heard a man's voice. That's weird. Yes. Who is that? I thought so. Oh, that's my phone. How's my phone talking through that? Let me talk to Alexa. Hey, Alexa. Do you like to paint? I don't have an opinion on that. Well, well. Yeah, that one was definitely too bold. I got to go with the Stuller green. Oh yeah, that's better. I'll get some of that in there. Sorry. I know my head's probably in the way. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The other one's just too bold. Okay. Now I'm going to get some more of a, actually, there's a little bit more of a screen kind of coming around here. This is a really big pastel to do this with. And what I'm doing, I'm kind of scumbling these colors together, meaning I'm not totally covering them up. I'm letting them kind of blend themselves a little bit. That gets really dark up in that corner that I'm going to get a little richer orange, believe it or not. This is a really rich orange. It may be too, it might not be too dark. This is a great American pastel that is really misshapen because it blew over. My easel blew over when I was trying to paint on the back porch. When our house flooded and we were living in, we lived in three temporary places before we finally settled in. This is a nice darker color. Like, I'm having a hard time seeing where it's actually going down because it is so misshapen. Let me get out of here a little bit, see if I can see. You got to find a corner with these and then see where you're actually, where it's actually hitting. All right. I'm going to go a little lighter than that coming back around this eye, maybe this one here. All right. I think I still want to add a little of that green in there. I'll come back and scumble that in. And it may seem like, wow, that's a lot of work for an eye, but I feel like it's worth it. Now I have jumped ahead just a little bit because unfortunately in the filming, my eyeglasses, when I had them on, they kept getting in the way and my camera was focusing on my glasses, kind of like they are right now, rather than what I'm painting. But I do move back and just a minute and I wanted to just kind of do a voice over here to describe things. I've got, you know, again, it might seem like a lot of colors in that eye, but a lot of times art, this used to fascinate me about art is when I was, before I was really painting a lot, is how something close up can look a bit more abstract or perhaps too colorful. But then when you walk away, have you ever seen paintings like that when you're just up close and it's like, whoa, it just looks more like patterns and shapes and colors. And then you back up and that beautiful illusion comes to life or into a more clearer picture of what the image is as you back away. And so that's kind of like it is with this eye. It seems like there's a lot of color and a lot going on if you come up really close to it. But when you back away, all of the values and the colors kind of work together. And hopefully they, I felt like they did. So hopefully other people will feel that way too. But I'm doing the same thing now as I'm working on some of the values and colors around the eye. Again, like I said at the beginning, there are tricks that you can learn. I don't like the word tricks techniques that you can learn that help you to break outside of the traditional or local color mindset, local color, just meaning what you see exactly the color you see in the photograph or whatever your image is. And the technique is to get your value right and your temperature right. Your value is the lightness or the darkness. If you get that right, you can get creative with the color. It doesn't have to be the exact color as long as the lightness or darkness is the same or close to the same. Then also if you get the color temperature right, meaning that if it's an area that's in shadow, say the value is like a middle to dark value, but it's in shadow, you typically wouldn't use a warm color of that value because our brains know and the rules of physics is that things or just nature is that things in shadow are typically cooler in temperature. So you're telling yourself constantly as you're painting, okay, what is this value? Is it dark? Is it medium? Is it light? And then where is this value? Is it in shadow? Is it in sunlight? Is it in, you know, an area where it would be more beneficial to use a warmer color or a cooler color? Now, there are some interesting things I have found that I was fascinated when I first started doing any kind of portrait work. I don't do a lot of portrait work. I love doing animals and I do love doing portraits, but they take a lot of work. As you can see, at the beginning I sped up the sketch part, but the sketch part took not as much as the painting part, but a lot of time, you know, you've got to get these things right. But when I first started doing portraits and studying portraiture artwork of those that I liked, I noticed, wow, some artists actually used green in the face. And I found that it was actually a really neat kind of a shadowy color. So even though green is a little warmer, you would think I was typically using in the shadows of face purples and blues or grays, you know, or whatever. But then when I started seeing how greens could be used to create some interesting color in the face and an interesting, an interesting shadow color, I was tempted to try it myself. And so I even in this lion, after this eye part, I'm going to speed up the rest of the painting. I don't get all of the footage of it, but I get a lot of it. And watch how I use green in a lot of the areas that if you're first starting art, you might have a tendency to just use oranges and browns and deep burgundies, you know, for these lion colors. But you can make your painting a lot more alive, fun, artistic painterly by getting creative with color like that. And green is a great color for a face of an animal or a person. I'm seeing my face super close up here. I'm not really loving that. But again, if I do this again, I will do it without getting my eye and head in the way of this. But I think you can still kind of see kind of what's happening here and how the color is really expressive and outside of the normal colors, you would think. All right, now I've zoomed back a little. I could have kept the lion this crazy with color, but what happens is these tones or these colors kind of get toned down a little bit as I start layering. So you've got a hint of that, but it's not quite so crazy, you know, by the time I'm done, you'll see that happening as you see the painting come together as I add other things to it. So I start out a little bit expressively, and then they kind of get toned down a little bit as I work. That's usually how I roll. But but I have fun with color. You know, why not? We're artists. I mean, unless you're doing photo realism and you really want it to look exactly like the photo, I think that's the beauty of art is that we can choose to express ourselves through our color choices and have a little fun. I think that's what makes it fun. All right, so this I'm gonna, I'm actually now going to speed up the rest of the parts of the eye, and then you can take a look at the rest of the painting. And by the way, please subscribe if you haven't to this channel. I love it when you make comments because I love to see what your thoughts are. And I like to respond. It also does help this YouTube channel if you comment. So on that, let me ask you a question. What do you think about this type of a video? Do you like it when I just take a certain aspect and focus on it rather than a whole painting, or would you rather just me have shorter, you know, full painting tutorials? You know, maybe I can't do it. And I've found statistically, if I do a two hour painting, not many people are gonna watch the two hour process. So it's kind of good for me to clip it up a little bit. But but do you like it when I when I focus on a feature of painting? So I'm constantly asking you guys questions because I like to make this channel better. So anyway, like, comment, subscribe, and hang out till the end of the video. That's also a good thing. So even if you fast forward to see the end, that's pretty cool to see it all come together. All right, guys, enjoy this. And pretty soon I'll be speeding it up. All right, so now I've got some generalities going in that I'm going to move on to the other eye. And I am going to speed this one up since you saw the first one. And then I'm not going to speed it up a whole lot here. But you'll be able to see a little bit about what's going on with this next eye. And then the rest of the video will be a little bit faster. All right, enjoy. Now, again, that seemed like a lot of work just to get started on the eyes. But it really was the focus of or the the main emotion of this painting was to draw you right to that stare in those eyes. And now I'm using that same. It's kind of I think it's like the Terry Ludwig brand and the eggplant color that a lot of people love because it's such a nice dark. I love using darks that are not black. I feel like they just have a lot more life. Even though it appears as black, again, value and color is kind of relative as to what's around it. So it definitely looks like a black on here, even though it does have a little hint of a deep purple tone. So I'm using that same dark to go ahead and get my darks in for the lion in general. I know when I squint and I look, I can see that his mane is dark. And because of the way this photo was taken and I actually liked it, the main was not real detailed. It was kind of obscure in the background. And I wanted to keep it that way. So I don't give a lot of detail into the main and I wanted it to be kind of painterly and loose and fun around the perimeter and the edges anyway. So you can see there where I've added some of the green like I mentioned before in the shadowy sides of his face. And even though when you see the final painting, you don't see that it is kind of still underlying. It's still there working together with the other colors and values that I put down. So this is where I usually don't spend that much time like I did on the eyes when I paint unless it's a portrait. Then I definitely want to get the eyes right and it's worth the extra time to do that. So now from here forward, I tend to do like I normally do, which is work all over the entire painting and working on value, still working on making sure I have his bone structure anatomy and everything right according to a lion and how it would be. And also when I look again at the reference image after completing the painting, I see I think I mentioned at the beginning where I'd actually like to do this again. I feel like you just get better and better the more that you work on a subject matter. And the last, well, I didn't include this part at the beginning, but I had said when I was recording that the last time I painted the lion was actually right before our home flooded in 2017. I didn't know our home was going to flood when I started painting a lion, but I literally finished the painting. I think it was the day before it was Hurricane Irma and we knew the hurricane was coming, but we had to get out of our house when we found out the flood was coming. So I literally finished my painting and packed up my art supplies as much as I could anyway, to get out of there. So and then I, you know, when I know it's starting to take shape now a little bit, you can see where the values and everything starting to finally sort of come together. But when I started painting this lining lion, I happened to think about that and realized how much I love painting lions and I realized I'd like to do more. So I'd like to do it again, even from the same reference photo. So all right patrons, if you guys would like to follow along with this, you know, you can share it in our Patreon group and Monet Cafe YouTube channel. I hope you enjoyed that. And of course, as always, happy painting to everyone.