 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today's tutorial is of some sheep in this lovely snowy landscape. Let's dive right in and start talking about these products. There's only two products in this lesson. One is the Sennelier. I love this brand of pastels. Half-stick set of 40 sticks of pastels. These are half-stick sizes. I actually love the sizes, love the colors. I'll be talking more about this set. Also you can find my product review video for this set of Sennelier pastels in my Amazon shop. This is a wealth of information for you within my shop where you can click on different idealists and also if you click the videos tab it will take you to my product review videos. You can learn so much about different soft pastel products and in this particular video and all of the videos you can watch the video and you can click on the product links right beneath it and it just so happens that this set of soft pastels is on a really good sale on Amazon. I do make a small little commission on this but it doesn't affect your price at all and this set is currently 55% off, only $43 approximately. It's like a dollar a stick. That's pretty good. The other product is a sheet of unsanded pastel paper made by Kanson Métants. It comes in various colors and as of the making of this video it was on sale on Amazon for only around $12. So the whole pad of paper and the pastels were less than $60. Proving you can get started with soft pastels on a limited budget. And I'll be using a beautiful orange color from this pad. I wanted to choose a warm color because the snow had some cooler colors in the scene. The reference image is from unsplash.com a wonderful site to get copyright free reference images. And let's jump right into tip number one the sketch. We want to get our sketch accurate but not tight. Anytime we're painting an animal or a person it is really good to get some accuracy and also I like working from similar proportions. In other words your reference image is the same size as your painting image. Let me show you a quick tip on how to do that. I'm working from an iPhone but most phones have photo editing software so pull up your photo click the edit button and if you're using an iPhone like me you're going to see that little crop icon tool. I've circled it in red right here. Once you click that you'll see another icon that looks like a bunch of different sizes and once you click that it gives you options to choose proportions for that particular photo. You can click around on some of the different proportions you can also move the photo within that frame and see kind of how you want to crop your image. Now I wanted to do an 8 by 10 but you may notice there's not an 8 by 10 option in the list. So a 7 by 5 is equivalent to an 8 by 10 so that's the size that I chose but it's neat that you have all of these options you can even do a free form and crop it however you want and once you're finished and you get the size and the proportion that you want you simply click done and your photo is saved to your phone iPad or whatever device you might be working on and then once you have that crop and proportion measurement saved in your phone then it's time to get your surface ready with equivalent measurements. I love using those mats like mats you put in a picture it's 8 by 10 on the outside and 7 by 5 on the inside. For the sketch I'm using a white charcoal pencil made by Derwent. Since the surface was a little darker in value I thought the white charcoal would work well and charcoal works really well when you combine it with soft pastel. Now here's where I want to reiterate the first part of tip number one which was we want to create our sketch accurate but not tight and I particularly don't like the grid method if you're familiar with that it's where you make a grid on your reference image and you make a grid on your painting surface and you literally are drawing each little square and it that's really great when you're drawing something large but I find drawing in that method or sketching that method creates an image that feels tight and not painterly so what I do you saw me make just little halfway marks on each side of my drawing surface and that allows me to get an idea of where things are in general not getting so tight and the more you do this the better you get but this is also an example of why having your reference image proportions and your painting image proportions the same is going to help you with the sketch immensely and that's because everything is relative your spacing and your proportions were are going to be the same even if your drawing image looks a lot larger than if you're looking at it on your phone the proportions are all still the same I am constantly looking at negative shapes while I'm painting and where things fall in relation to the perimeters of the surface for example you can ignore what I'm sketching right here but if you look back at the reference image you can see there's a little triangular shape at the lower left corner that's the space between the one sheep the main sheep and the other sheep and so that really helps me to look at all those shapes and I try to tune out what I'm painting and rather I just look at the big shapes and their spatial relationships to each other I do find when I'm painting animals or people that the time it takes me to finish a painting is substantially longer than a landscape painting and it is because I want to get accuracy and not tight I want to keep it painterly but it will quickly look amateurish if you have certain things off when it comes to the human face or even animal faces and forms and before we move on to the pastel painting portion I'd love it if you would like this video and subscribe to my channel and also too the footage from here forward on my patreon page will be a majority of real-time content if you would like to become a patron on my patreon page it's real easy patreon.com Susan Jenkins and now it's time to apply the pastels and move on to tip number two tip number two is so important with soft pastel painting a reminder to keep a light touch resist that urge to apply too much pressure it will reduce your ability to layer with soft pastels and when you're working on an unsanded surface as in this case with the Canson-Mittant surface you have limited layers already I find that I can get three to five layers on unsanded surfaces and have them still retain their vibrancy much like painting with oil or acrylic we use the technique of layering when we paint with soft pastels it gives a beautiful not only effect of colors interacting with each other layering on top but it also helps us to create a painting that feels more true to life in other words if we were to paint not using any layers at all it would literally be like how you color in a coloring book you know color this section that section and the result is very artificial and not true to life so try to keep in mind to keep a light touch and it will give you the ability to have more layering potential regardless of what surface you're working on by the way I'm working on the back side of this Canson surface the front side of it if you take it out of the pad has a little bit of a pattern it's like a honeycomb type of pattern it can look very neat and textural but the back side is a little bit more smooth all right now I am moving on to tip number three and tip number three is a reminder to work the hole this is also called blocking in and basically it's a good idea to block in large sections and areas and avoid and resist that urge to get too detailed on any one area so I'm trying to work the hole here even though I will pause at certain times and get a bit more detailed just to get my accuracy of my drawing and my sheep correct for the most part I continue to try and get the large shapes in working the hole for the most part to the end of the painting you do have the ability to do a little blending like you saw me do with my finger just a bit ago and there were some areas in this painting that I did kind of softly blend I felt like his fur under his or her chin there was going to be a dark value and a little more subdued someone to soften it up a bit but you'll see that many of the strokes that I'm making are not blended at all I let the pastels blend themselves as I work and I also use directional strokes which leads us to tip number four back to my coloring book example we're not just filling in color by making directional strokes we are literally giving form and three-dimensional qualities to the elements that we're painting as in the sheep I'm not only looking at the direction of how the fur is laying on top of the sheep I'm also in my mind imagining my hand as if it was literally curving around the form and shape of the sheep that I'm painting now this works also with landscape painting with flowers we're trying to connect our mind with how the element is moving or how things are laying on top of one another and giving your strokes that feeling of movement gesture and direction I have most things blocked in at this stage except for the other sheep that are in the background they're basically going to be darker values but I did want to take pause and start working more on the face of my main focal point sheep I mean really if you don't get this right this is going to be the element that you really want to be the focal point so there are things that I want to slow down I know you're seeing the speed version of it but me personally to slow down and make sure I get these elements right this isn't this is a bonus tip here I'm not including this as one of the tips but keep in mind a couple of things one is you got to get your eyes right when you're working on an animal or a person that's going to be the showstopper for any type of painting that has a person or an animal I mean you don't have to over detail it but you want the accuracy of the eye placement and the eye shape and the shadows in the eye as well another bonus tip is to remember that you don't have to use the exact colors that you see for example I have a lot of the shadowy colors in this sheep that are not really what I'm seeing in the reference photo this is a question I get all the time like how did you know to use that kind of magenta color there or why did you use those teals in the shadows kind of under his sides of his face and it has to do with a couple of things one is you're not bound by the color you see in your reference image as long as you get the value close or similar value just means the degree of lightness or darkness so I knew that because I had take for example some of the teals that you see kind of in between his two eyes and kind of underneath his cheek there I knew the value was close to what I saw in the reference image so I knew I could grab that kind of neat bluish teal color and use it and it's going to create a painting that is more artistic and fun with color and also it is going to allow you to not be stuck to having having to have every single color in the rainbow in other words you can work with a limited little 40 set like this the whole painting was done with this one little set of pastels and another thing I really like about using one set of pastels I mean as long as it has a decent amount of color and values is that you will get exciting color results you're forced to have to choose by value versus color alone another thing to keep in mind when choosing your colors is to use temperature as a priority I know that in shadowy areas colors are going to be cooler and that's going to lean a little more towards blues and purples on the color wheel so you can use your artistic license with those things now I'm getting in these background sheep and I used a black I don't often use black it's I feel like there are more creative ways to create a dark by layering other colors or using a really dark dark purple but because I was limited with this little set I didn't want to use that very dark green in the set that's at the lower left of the set so I decided to use the black and do a little layering on top of it to kind of change the color see with soft pastels we really can blend colors to a degree not quite like oil and acrylic but by layering colors you you create new colors and more exciting colors often so I'm just getting in these cute little shape of the sheep in the background keeping in mind they do not need a lot of detail because they are not the focal point and they're in the distance things lose detail as they move further into the distance and if you started to give detail to anything too far away that's another thing that's going to quickly cause your painting to feel a bit more amateurish so these are just rules of nature and physics and the more that you learn about how our world works the more you will improve as an artist and I always like to think of being an artist is like being a student of nature it's a beautiful thing that happens we learn to really analyze and enjoy and explore the world more and now time for tip number five which is we typically layer dark to light with soft pastel in general in general we apply the darker values first as you can see as I've been working the sheep I put down those darkest kind of black colors underneath and then I'm gradually layering the lighter values on top and also this is because this is how the world works typically things deeper like in the fur or underneath are going to be darker and then the sunlight hits on the outside of objects making the lighter values appear on top so that's a really simple rule with painting that's going to help you immensely and now I want you to sit back relax enjoy the painting process to some music but also keep in mind the tips that I've talked about so far and observe how I'm using those tips in this painting and don't go away because final tip number six is at the end and it is of utmost importance I can't stress it enough so enjoy and I'll be back I must say I really enjoyed creating this painting often painting can be an experience and not just something that's laborious and thinking about your final project or painting I like to create a moment put on some music light a candle get a cup of tea and make an experience out of it and that leads me to the very important tip number six which is don't forget to have fun don't be too hard on yourself if you're a beginner and just getting started or if you've been away from painting for a while and you're in a little bit of an artistic rut it's best just to have some fun do some studies and don't even worry if your painting is going to be something you'll share on social media and everyone will see it and applaud much of art is just enjoying the experience and I pray that is something that you will do and if you recreate from this painting I hope you'll share it and if you do you can tag me on instagram at Susan Jenkins artist and on facebook at the art of Susan Jenkins if you're a patron of mine you will be getting the real-time footage and lots of other goodies thank you so much for joining me in today's lesson I hope it blessed you and it would bless me if you would consider subscribing to my channel liking this video and if you would like extra content or just to support Monet Cafe consider becoming a patron of mine on my patreon page all right artist until next time god bless and happy painting