 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm excited to bring you this lesson on how do pastel surfaces make a difference. In this lesson, I'll be comparing UART pastel paper where I created this painting rather quickly and also Sennelier Le Carte pastel card where I created this painting. And in this video I'll go over both paintings. You'll get two for the price of one and discuss the differences. Now the full extended version is on my Patreon page, but the Monet Café channel will get lots of awesome content too. All right, let's do this lesson. Hello, artists. Welcome into my studio today where I'll be sitting today to paint and I am going to offer you something here that I think will be beneficial to artists who haven't tried a lot of different papers. I'm going to be doing a painting on two different surfaces. The exact same painting on two different surfaces with the same pastels. Let me describe here a little bit about the two different surfaces. The first surface I'll be using is UART sanded paper. It's 400 grit and this particular one is mounted to a board, which is awesome. I got it from dakotapastels.com. What I did is I wanted to also share if you are a patron in my Patreon group, we have now, I have a lot of my reference images in there, but we've now added some reference, I added an album for the patrons to upload their own reference images. And this one patron, I'm not going to say her name because she doesn't want me to, but she uploaded the most beautiful photographs for artists to use. And this is one that I was just drawn to, but I happened to realize that the painting I had just done was one that had a similar color palette that I could use. It just had all those pretty kind of turquoisey blues and some purples and lavenders and maybe some magenta. So I thought, you know what, I've already got the pastels all laid out. They're not right in front of me here, but that I used for this painting, I had laid them out to show my patrons all of the pastels I used. So I thought, you know what, I really like this photo. I already have the pastels laid out. Let's do it. Now because I live in Florida, I often sometimes I'll veer away from the UART paper because a lot of my UART paper curls up just because it's humid. But I happen to have this piece of UART that's on a board. Okay? I bought it this way. But you can mount your own papers on boards. I have a video about that. I'll try to provide a link for that video. I wanted to do a quick little voice over here. My video is actually how to mount the pastel paintings after they've been painted to the board. And I learned this technique from Alan Picard, who has the video on basically just how to mount pastel paper. It's an awesome video. But that's one way to keep you from having that problem with UART paper. So I've got a nice little flat, very flat piece of UART paper. I'm always having to try to press it down while I'm painting. So I feel really good about that. But instead of doing on my other painting, I did an acrylic underpainting. Acrylic ink, I should say. It's that beautiful turquoisey color. On this one, I decided to do something different. And I'm going to do watercolor. I'm actually thinking I'm going to do just a watercolor underpainting, meaning not just one color like I did with this. I really just toned. I should call it a toned underpainting. In this one, I'm just going to have a really loose underpainting. And I think because I did the turquoise over here, I think I'm going to do it with some some pinks and magentas and maybe some purples. So that's that's my plan. Anyway, I'm going to give myself a time limit too, because sometimes I just need to speed it up. And that's going to help me. So I think for the underpainting, I'm not going to worry about that. I always do those fast. But for the pastel part, I'm going to give myself 30 minutes. How about that? That might sound like a lot, but it's not for me. All right, let me get going here. Okay, I've got some my mouth full of some of these goldfish baked Parmesan crackers. Yeah, I should get like some kind of endorsement commission or something. Jackson likes them too. You want a treat? Sit down, sit, sit. Lay down. Roll over. You'll get a view. Good boy. Well, my plans to have a relaxing 30 minutes to paint got interrupted by about four different phone calls. I think I spent about 30 minutes on this. But let me show you real quick. I'm speeding it up just to show you the second painting will not be sped up for my patrons, all right? But this portion will be for both channels, this Monet Cafe, YouTube channel, and my Patreon page. And I'll tell you how to become a patron later. What I'm doing is I put down water. That's the great thing about UART paper. You can, it's water friendly. That is one difference between this one and the other paper I'm using, the Sennelier Pastel card, which you'll see later, is Sennelier, you don't, you can't add water to it. So I was a little heavy-handed with my water. So my whole goal of the UART paper not buckling, the board buckled a little because I had a lot of water on there. So note to self, don't add so much water next time if it's mounted on a board. And all I was really doing was using the watercolor just to kind of get a mood and a little basic composition. So what I did here is I just taped it up and here we go. Now here are the pastels that were from the previous painting. If you didn't see that video, I think, I think that's a really good video should watch it. But these are basically the same pastels. I may have removed a couple of them. I think I had too many darks in it before. And before the painting's done with this one, I don't think I added any more to this one. So there's the general idea for the pastels. Okay, the board has dried and I'm getting in my darks first with that darkest pastel, basically just getting in kind of the gestural feel of the trees. And by the way, with trees, there's a tendency sometimes to just make them all kind of shooting straight up. And there's that's not the way it works in nature. Trees bend and curve and those negative spaces between the trees create such interest rather than them all being like soldiers in a line. So I was working not this quickly, since I've sped it up. I was working rather quickly with this. Again, I got interrupted by about three or four different phone calls. That's one of the challenges of using your iPhone to record your video. And anyway, so I loved again about the reference photo. I loved just the feeling of that light in the upper tree. So I wanted to keep that feeling. And by the way, my patrons will have this reference photo because it's in the new patron member reference album that we have with awesome, awesome photographs. And they're already, we just started that already. While I paint here a little bit, I will tell you, if you're not a patron, don't feel bad if you can't afford the $5 a month to get some of the extra footage. You're really getting plenty here in Monet Café. And it's always my goal in Monet Café to provide free art lessons to people in places and of whatever your means are that you, you might not can afford some of the workshops and buying the online tutorials. So it's always my goal to give those free art lessons, which I will do. I am just giving extra to my patrons. And we're having a lot of fun in there now, too. I'm starting something soon. I'm not going to announce it because it's a surprise. But we have a lot of fun. And it is a great way to just support this channel. I know there's a lot of people on my Patreon page that literally are just, you know, giving the $5 a month to help Monet keep videos coming. So let me talk a little bit about this now, enough about that. So I love you art paper. And I also love Sennelier paper. So I want to try to describe the differences between the two. You art paper, I find the pastels don't go on as impressionistic at first. Sometimes you see the spaces underneath the paper for a while until you either blend it or add more pastel. But this painting is pretty much done here. Again, it was probably good that I didn't have a lot of time because it keeps that, you know, spontaneity and freshness. Now let's move on to the next surface, which is the Sennelier. Oh, I showed my little, my little Monet cafe bracelet. It's the Earth Colors bracelet. I always have these links for the things that I talk about in my description section of my video. So to become a patron, to find the bracelet, I think to find the apron. But now I'll talk about the next surface, which is the Sennelier Le Carte Pastel card. And I think I'm going to talk about the bracelet a little more. It's cool. All right, let's get started. I had to put on my Monet cafe apron because I keep ruining my clothes. Oh, and I'm also wearing the new series. They're called Earth Colors in the Monet cafe bracelet designs. And I love this one. This one is cut. There's two in the series. They have these lava rocks in them that literally, they look like soft pastels. I love them. And what's neat is you add essential oils. Today, I'm wearing Eucalyptus. You just put a drop on your little beads. It soaks them in and you, you smell wonderful all day long. So anyway, there's two designs. This one's the hippie chick. It has alternating beads. And the Gypsy girl has all of the stones together with the wood beads on the outside. So anyway, some of you guys have already bought them. And thank you. It really does support this channel. Oh, and it's got the cute little Monet cafe charm. Okay, time to paint. All right, so what I'm going to do now, though, there are some differences here. You art paper is sanded. This is a 400 grit. The Sennelier Le Cart is a pretty gritty surface. It comes in a pad. I think you can buy your sheets individually. I always buy them in pads. This one size, a smaller size pad, and then they have a larger size pad. And within the pad is all these different colors. And I am running low on some of my color options. So I just grabbed a piece of black and I thought it would be another neat comparison. Not only are we using two different surfaces, but I'm also using two different initial colored surfaces. So right now we're working on black. So this is, it's interesting working on black because your values are kind of opposite. I have a little video. You should check it out on value, understanding value. And I do an example where I show the differences of a dark value on a dark surface versus a light surface. So we're going to be dealing with a little bit of differences because of the darker surface. Like for example, even though this is black, black is relative depending on what it's next to. This color looks dark, doesn't it? So these are going to be like my darks. And anyway, we'll talk about that as we go along. All right. So I'm just going to get a quick little initial sketch in. Quick little station break here. This is the portion where the patrons will get the real time content. But hang on Monet Cafe. I'm going to do a voiceover, speed it up a bit and give you guys some awesome info. Now this little sketch portion is a little bit faster than when I start to apply the pastels. But I wanted to share with you what I'm using here on this piece of Sennelier dark paper. I'm using a lighter colored pastel pencil made by Giaconda. I don't use pastel pencils a lot, but they do come in handy. And often, especially when you have to work on a dark paper like this, I believe this was a gray colored pastel pencil. All right. So now here I am beginning with the pastels. I often like to begin with my darks, or I should say always like to begin with my darks, or basically getting in a value study, whether it's a darker pastel or a medium to dark pastel. And it really helps to establish the overall composition. And like I said before, value is really that important to establish early on. And I am doing a sketch of sorts with the pastels to still try to get that gestural quality of the trees. It's a good idea in art to draw your trees with a little personality. I like to think of trees and flowers and things in nature as having their own individuality kind of like we do as people. I mean, we all have a general form and shape that's the same, but we have our little differences. And it's the same thing even with looking at trees that appear to all be going straight up. I like to establish that some may be leaning one way or another, and I love to see the different negative spaces between trees. I don't know if you've ever seen a painting where they have a lot of tree trunks straight up and down. I see this a lot, and I'm not belittling or teasing the little sketch and sips that they have, or the little painting parties that they have. A lot of times they have paintings of things that are all very uniform, and I know they have to do what they can because a lot of times they're working with people who've never painted before. But good art usually has those differences in shape and direction and a little bit of inconsistency. I have a video that I believe it's on both my Monet cafe channel and my patreon page where I use a term. I can't remember the name of the video, but I use a term that I call forced randomness. We have a tent. Oh, there's my Jackson. Sorry, a storm was coming and he got scared, so I had to put him next to me. But anyway, our brains have a tendency to do that, to put things all in a row or in a pattern, like in a field of flowers. So we sometimes have to force ourselves out of that. And I apologize for little breaks in this and talking, but like I said, on the patreon page it is the real time, and I didn't go in and edit out all those little parts where I stopped. So, but now what I'm doing is I'm getting my next kind of a middle value. It's not my next darkest value, but I'm getting kind of a darkest value, a middle value, and then eventually to a lighter value to get an overall feeling of where the values are in the painting. Now in this video here, you're not seeing the original reference photo. I did show a little bit of it at the beginning of the video. I didn't want to share someone else's photo that was from my patreon group without her permission. So my patrons do have access to that photo, but you guys can see the the painting that I did here that was from that reference photo. And so I'll kind of talk from that. But basically what I'm doing here in the reference photo, I think my values on that first painting there on New York paper is close to the values in the photo. The trees that are further in the distance are going to be a cooler and lighter value. That's just how nature behaves. Warmth, our atmosphere, literally the air gets in the way when things are further away, and it decreases the amount of warmth. That's why we see mountains in the distance that are kind of blue. You notice you don't see, unless you're really close, you can see some green, but when they're real far away, there's so much atmosphere and air in the way that things cool off a bit. So that's a really neat little trick or little way to give that depth or perspective in your artwork. And often, pardon, I am very gestural with my hands. I noticed when I speed these up. Often, I use the expression, photographs lie. But what photographs actually do is they don't capture the image like our eyes do. Often they will make a row of trees in the distance and a field. There may be different levels of trees, but sometimes they'll just make them all look dark. And you lose that depth and that sense of perspective. And so we can use these little tricks once we know them to give our paintings more of that artistic flair and increase that illusion of depth. Now I'm getting in some of my lighter values here. Notice I did go in and get some darker values before I just had the tree trunks. And then I went in with some darks. I think it was a really dark green and added in where some of those tree, the foliage and the leaves and branches were reaching out. I didn't want to get too much detail on the leaves and branches in this. They're more just shapes and generalized. I wanted the painting to be about that kind of the road pulling you in and just leading your eyes up to that gorgeous light that's up in the trees. And really where that light is, by the time the painting is done, that's really the only place where there is some warmth in the foliage in those upper branches and only in the foreground trees. Because light is what creates warmth. If you've got a dim lighting in a room, you really don't see your warmer values as good as warm. You'll see them just kind of as a gradation of gray or on a scale from light to dark. But we kind of lose the warmth. So because that sunlight is up there, sunlight creates warmth. I do end up at the end having a little bit more green in the upper, but not a lot. Not a punchy, really green green. It's more of a cooler green. And now I'm carving in. I like to use the word carving because that's really what you're doing when you do negative painting. I got in more masses of tree foliage and shapes. And then I start carving in the little spaces between. And that is really such a neat strategy and technique to use in art to create a more painterly look. I get that question a lot. How do I get my art more painterly? Well, one is to learn that trick of negative painting. And I also have a painting. Oh, it's probably within 10 videos ago. Not a painting, but a tutorial that's on negative painting and just learning some of those strategies. And what happens with negative painting is it makes your edges more loose and not as defined with trying, for example, trying to draw individual leaves. Say, for example, you paint a blue sky and you paint your tree on top of the blue sky. Those little positive shapes on top of things just look very flat. And when you carve things in, it's really more like how nature works because that is what's happening with those tree branches and foliage up there. Light is filtering through them. And it just creates a more believable and painterly loose style. I don't know if I'll describe that very well, but hopefully. But anyway, you can check out that video if you want to learn more. And I'm going to talk a little bit to my Monet Café people here. You know, I've been talking a lot about my Patreon group and I was very blessed that some artist here in Monet Café asked me to start a Patreon group. I wasn't going to do it. I have enough on my plate already. And I'm the type of person to where if I do something, especially if somebody's going to give five dollars a month, I just feel like I've got to give them more. You know, I don't want to just take that. I've always had Monet Café for free. You know, I've never had any charge for any of these videos. So I knew it was going to take more of my time because that's just me. And it has. But I've really enjoyed it too. But at the same time, I always say this, I don't ever want to stop bringing the free tutorials to Monet Café. I've been getting some beautiful comments from you guys thanking me and telling me. One just recently said I don't have any resources where I live. If you haven't seen the new Monet Café intro video, I just made a new video. The other one was just getting kind of old. And I share in the beginning of the video that we are literally all over the world. I know right now we're at about, at the point of this video, we're at about 25,000 subscribers. But it's from everywhere. I mean, we're talking Israel and Japan and India and Pakistan and, of course, America, Australia. I mean, I can't even begin to mention all the places. But it's just literally all over the world. And it's totally what I had in mind when I came up with the name Monet Café. I had the name Monet Café way before I started the YouTube channel. I just thought it was actually before those sketch and sip things. You know, I thought, how neat would it be if we could just have a little gathering place? This is, and maybe I'll still do this, a little gathering place where people who want to learn about art could just come hang out in this kind of open studio with coffee and just supplies and come hang out and all learn together. And so that was my idea. I thought I would maybe make a little place one day called Monet Café. And so with my life and, you know, just the world the way it is, I didn't see myself doing that as a reality. So I made it a virtual thing. So there's a little history there for you. Anyway, I'm getting in the basic value for this road. And I want to get it in a little darker at first. That's why I'm using that really cool medium value blue. And it's also going to be very shadowy down there on the road. Notice it's below where all that light is. But before the painting's done, I do filter in a little bit of light in the road, like I'm doing a little bit there, because there is going to be some light, dappled light kind of coming through the road. You see now up in the upper branches how I added that negative painting. And it's taking shape a little bit more that those archery branches. But I really was drawn to this photo. I liked that moodiness. Sometimes I look at my work. I feel like I have a tendency to paint dark, but this was a dark scene. And I ended up calling it Enchanted Forest. And in the intro video, no, I'm sorry. In the last video that I just did, I gave credit to one of our Monet Café members or subscribers here on the channel because I don't like titling my paintings. And for the last video, I offered a little picture in the community tab of the painting. And I let you guys come up with title names. And I picked one from one of you guys called In the Moment. So that's what my last painting was called. But this one, the title Enchanted Forest, just came to me. It was kind of easy. That's what it looks like to me. So anyway, so you're seeing it taking shape now. You're seeing a little bit of that negative painting. You're seeing how the cooler values in the back and the decrease in darkness in the back really creates that sense of depth. So I'm going to just play some music for the rest of this. Study it. Give it a try. And if you'd like to become a patron, again, it's only $5 a month. There's some people who are patrons that aren't active in the Patreon group or anything. They just want to keep these free art lessons coming to Monet Café. And it really does help with my being able to afford more time to do this. And because of my patrons, Monet Café, you guys have been blessed because I've been able to buy more equipment. The studio light that I have that really helps you see better. I got a better computer. I got a better iPhone. All because of the, I don't know, seven months or eight months, maybe six to eight months that I've been had a Patreon page. So it really is helping this channel. And you know, the people who can't afford, you know, for extra art instruction. So Monet Café gets blessed because of my patrons. But anyway, I always have a clickable link at the end of the video if anybody wants to sign up to become a patron. So enjoy this video. I'm going to add some nice music. And I hope you guys are painting beautiful things. Feel free to comment, please subscribe. And you can click the bell icon after you subscribe. And what that does is it'll notify you whenever I put a new video up. And if you have any questions, just comment. I try to answer all your questions. All right, guys, hang out till the end. That also helps. It's called click through rate with YouTube, CTR. It helps my videos be suggested more if you watch to the end. I mean, you can probably even fast forward to the end. But hang out to the end. And I hope you guys are safe in this crazy world and being blessed. Here are the two images again of the completed paintings. Keep in mind the first one on you art I didn't give as much time to. But I like both surfaces. But if you haven't tried Sennelier, LeCart, Pastel card, I think you should give it a try. Maybe buy a smaller amount. By the way, they have pastel paper samplers at dakota pastel.com. You might want to check that out. All right, guys, stay safe and happy painting.