 Welcome to Monet cafe. I'm happy to bring you this pastel painting tutorial. I'm calling this one whispers of love in purple As always, we're going to learn lots. I have some fun products I'll share to create a really vibrant and exciting underpainting Also, I will make some new discoveries. I always stumble upon these happy accidents So I'll be sure to share that with you and of course, we will be learning and painting in soft pastels I actually began this painting as something just to paint for me You know how I always talk about Finding the joy in the journey of art. Well, I just needed a moment to break away from the art business and paint Just for the love of painting. So here's a little intro from me and then we'll get started with the learning fun Hello, I'm artist Susan Jenkins and welcome to my home studio that I call Monet cafe I've been painting from home for years sharing lessons on this YouTube channel And I'm going to do something a little different today You know, I love to teach hundreds of videos and lessons here on Monet cafe, but sometimes I need to practice what I preach which is to Just chill out and enjoy the painting process so I want you to just enjoy this and Find the hundreds of lessons here on Monet cafe subscribe if you haven't already and Welcome to the studio. I'm glad you're coming along with me today to paint. Let's talk about these products for the underpainting I'm using Derwent ink tense blocks These are literally compressed ink and they are so vibrant in color and there's two levels to this set They come in smaller sets. So you don't have to get the big one like I have. I'm also using pastel premiere It's a sanded pastel surface that is water friendly But I'll be talking about that as I paint and of course, I'll need some soft pastels Now I did not use all of these purple and lavender colors, but this is a little purple collection that I keep I used a lot of them, but if you're a patron of mine on my patreon page I'm gonna go more into the soft pastels. I actually used now. Why did I need all that purple? Look at this gorgeous reference image. I got this from pmp-art.com. It's an image. I've loved I've actually painted it before and You can find the link to that image in the description of this video and Here you can see actually how I film some people may be interested in that I have a ring light I have all these products I talk about in my Amazon shop just so you know I have a link to my Amazon shop in every video It's a great way for pastel artists to find lots of the products that I Recommend and talk about in my videos a lot. We're about to get started But first I'd like to ask if you would go ahead and like this video and subscribe to this channel If you've been enjoying the free content here, and if you'd like a little more Extra instruction or just to support this channel consider becoming a patron of mine on my patreon page It's only five dollars a month and you can cancel at any time I'll begin my initial underpainting with these three sticks of derwent intense blocks. I'm using these beautiful magenta pink colors I've got one that's really dark. It's a small one then one that's kind of a little bit lighter than that and then finally one that's the lightest and Brightest in color. So I'm just using these three values to lay down an underpainting I get a lot of questions about under paintings I'm going to make a more full-length tutorial on some of the rhyme and reason behind it But for now just know that this is going to lay the foundation for the mood of the painting that I want and I believe it's going to set the stage for a little bit of warmth underneath some of the purple flowers I'm using one of the intense blocks just to sketch in my basic shapes and composition Nothing at this point is to be super detailed I'm really just getting the big shapes and the gesture of the flowers and Kind of just marking in some things to give me a reference For laying down some of these ink tense blocks Now this one is the the middle value one not the darkest and not the lightest And they don't look like anything special when you first lay them down on this sanded pastel paper The trees are the dark. Well, not yet. I haven't even added the darkest yet That's the lightest value. It's a little bit more Light magenta red and now this is the darkest value that I use mostly for the trees and the foreground grasses Now you're gonna watch some exciting color happen This is just a spritzer bottle full of water and I'm using some brushes a larger brush for the foreground and a smaller brush For the background look at that color explode. Oh my goodness now This looks really drippy and messy, but I'm telling you I love it because for me it Gets that General feeling of impressionism and a loose painterly beginning going and the color is just fantastic Look how bright it got after I added the water and by the way because these blocks ink tense blocks are compressed ink They don't take up any tooth of the paper So that's neat now I flipped it over because I often like to use these watery techniques when I paint trees upside down It doesn't make as much of a difference with this one But when you have trees where the tops of the trees show The drips you might as well let gravity work in your favor They drip down and when you turn your painting right side up, it makes really nice loose tree branches Again, this one. It's kind of the trees are cut off So it didn't make that much of a difference, but look at that gorgeous dark color For that mass of trees and that's pretty much done for this stage of the underpainting also to just so you know Now it's dry. It does dry a little less dramatic, but it's still gorgeous now I started to add some of my darks again I want to keep those foreground grasses dark and the trees dark, but wait I realized I kind of lost my flowers There are some larger flowers in this composition. So I just grabbed a it's called a prismacolor new pastel It's a harder stick of pastel and just sketched in some of the flower shapes now again. You guys are seeing the sped-up version the Full version of this tutorial is over on my patreon page It's only five dollars a month if you want to check that out now here is one of my discoveries There's two new discoveries in this video. I bought these little hand wipes They're actually for kids in the dollar store because I was buying some other art supplies And I wanted to have something nearby just to wipe my hands off now before you get on the environmental police I'm sorry if baby wipes aren't good for the environment. I'll try to use them sparingly. Okay, but look what I'm doing with these I literally grabbed one to wipe off my hands and I happen to remember this video By another pastel artist Karen Margulis who did something similar now These are hand wipes not necessarily baby wipes, but hey it worked what I'm doing is I'm using it you know, it's it's wet and I'm using it to wet the pastels that I've laid down now the the ink the ink tents blocks they Dry and set themselves in other words They they're not like watercolor watercolor. It still moves around even after it's dry But ink tents blocks they become set into the paper So I can just use this little hand wipe to to paint that's gonna dry lighter It looks super dark right now, but it was a really neat way to get in my darks and to have them kind of loose and More blended, you know soft pastels sometimes are a little a textural But now I'm using there's still some residue of this color on my hand wipe So I just used it to put some more of that purple in the middle ground. I did want to mention that with this hand wipe I'm not sure if it's what's considered archival acid free And if you're concerned about that don't use it My feeling is I was painting for the joy of it anyway and most of this is gonna get covered up with soft pastel So I don't think it's gonna affect the longevity of the color that much now I want to show you this pastel premiere product it this is where I found it on Dick Blake the sheet I used was 400 grit and I think maybe a 12 by 16 and It comes in different sizes and different colors mine was the white color Also, it's not recommended to use alcohol on this surface. You can use water again I was a little concerned with the hand wipe, but it worked great. It didn't lose any of the Texture of the paper so it the hand wipe did work fine So I'll have a link to this product in the description of the video and now to apply soft pastels Yay, and this is really gonna be fun even though it sped up But keep in mind I have another new discovery that I made towards the end of this video So I hope you'll keep watching. I'm just giving some value to these distant trees They're gonna be lighter in value than the foreground trees And I realized there was a lot of space that was still very light in the middle ground So I grabbed kind of a magenta and a color that's a little bit warmer to lay that down and I started carving these trees out this is called negative painting or painting sky holes and As you can see my trees are they're not blobs anymore. They're starting to become trees By adding some greens and a little bit lighter value, and I just developed these as I go along You'll see me add little branches in there So it really does start with big shapes. Sometimes we doubt ourselves as artists. We're like wait a minute I want to paint more detail. I want to paint leaves But trust me it is so much better if you just get your big shapes in first and real quickly I've been enjoying popping in these little subscriber spotlights. This is from Rick He says thank you so much for this information just getting back into it after 30 years Found your site got some Paul Rubin's pastels, and I'm having a blast. I'm 62 never thought I could do it Thanks again. Well, thank you Rick your comment blessed me And you're just an example of how many people are learning here on Monet cafe So now I've established a majority of The pastel laid down I do end up blending a little bit I still have some little chunky spaces textural spaces in there So here I'm using a piece of pipe foam insulation It's a great little tool for blending on surfaces that are really sanded and all of this to be able to finally add some grasses My grasses are just going to be very loose and painterly at this stage especially I'm getting in some of this pretty purple for some of the shadowy colors in the grasses also in the shadowy parts underneath those trees and Purple just gave that little bit of interest to the deep parts of the grasses now I'm going to be using some really fun purples this one I don't even know what pastel it was, but it was just a really pretty in between purple and magenta Now I'm going to start tackling these flowers I have never painted this type of flower before if you check out the reference image that is in the description of this video from pmp-art.com The flowers are they're like round and they have these little spiky things that come out in a radius like a sphere And then they have these little balls on the ends of the spikes I've never painted a flower like this before so it was sort of an experiment. I found the color was really interesting I didn't quite have the colors that I saw in the image So I ended up using a color that was a little bit too Red to me a little too magenta The little balls that are on the ends kind of have a little green Tint to them So I wasn't super happy with that red kind of color. It was a little too warm for the rest of the painting So towards the end of this video, you'll see my other trick for changing the color of those flowers and it worked really great Using some pretty cool greens For these grasses and I'm just making gestural marks with grasses When I was first beginning painting all of my grasses look the same. They all were skinny They would they might be directional, but they didn't have any real variety I noticed in this image There was a lot of the grasses in the foreground that kind of look like corn stalks So I tried to emulate that so now things are starting to come together Again, it is fast, but hopefully you're getting some good information here So I loved this pretty periwinkle color I set this little clip to real time so you can kind of see the normal speed of me working But in that a beautiful periwinkle blue I thought it was perfect for some of those little purple flowers that kind of were sitting on top and This is starting to come along now I'm beginning to add some lighter greens and I usually reserve My lightest values towards the end of the painting This was another pretty blue that I add to some of the tops of the flowers I'm still at this point not loving the color of the larger Spikey flowers, but you're gonna see my second trick right now after I add some of these white flowers So what I thought I'd do is use a fixative. I don't love fixatives in general, but I like this Dega Fixative it's made by Spectra fix and it is natural no chemicals in it. I love that So what I'm doing. I'm holding a paper towel up. I'm spraying some of it on the lower section It go it looks really dark right now, but it doesn't dry this dark What it's going to do is it's gonna give me a little more layering ability because I specifically wanted to work on these flowers I Used the fixative with a paper towel and I just tore a hole in it And I just moved the paper towel around and sprayed some of the different flowers again It's gonna look super dark right now But you're gonna see me use a blow dryer in a minute and you'll see they they lighten up almost to the same color They were Again, why do this? I want to change these colors and I've kind of gotten a lot of pastel down They the pastels may not layer as bright And vividly as I want them to so now you see how it lightened back up again So now I've got a little bit of a way to add more color I'm just adding a bit more purple to it to tone down that red and It made it for me. It made it feel more harmonious Those flowers didn't stand out so much sometimes you want to create a little color contrast It causes you to notice something but because I wasn't loving that color. I didn't want to notice it that much so this just kind of caused these flowers to Fit the scene a little bit better for me. I don't know you may have liked the flowers a bit more magenta Let me know in the comments. Did you like them before do you like them now? Well, maybe wait till you see the final painting So I added a little bit more of some of the periwinkle colors. Sorry for me getting so close to my painting And my crazy hair, but it's starting to come together and again I did this painting for the joy of it. Now, you know me. I thought why not film myself You know why I do that? I always think if I don't film myself one time I'm gonna end up creating the best painting I've ever created. So I always turn the camera on but I literally Painted this just for the experience. I had some good Christian music on I had my essential oils going That's what I always recommend for you guys to do and it was really something that I needed this art business gets crazy By the way, we're coming into a new month soon April is gonna have a really neat theme in the Monet cafe art group on Facebook and on my patreon page So it's gonna be a lot of fun If you have not yet subscribed to this channel, I hope you will. I noticed there's about 60% of the people who view my videos often haven't yet subscribed So click that subscribe button that'll be awesome It helps these videos get seen to more people who are really looking for some free art instruction So here's a close-up. You can see little hints of some of that magenta, which is okay a little hint is okay and a little bit of the distance and the sky holes behind the trees and This one was overall just a blessing for me like a breath of fresh air and you guys might know if you've watched my channel I love purple is pretty obvious. So I hope you liked this and I hope you'll try it If you do you can tag me if you share on Instagram You can find me at all of the links on this end screen and by the way, I just looked at how many videos I have on Monet cafe It's 840 videos now some of those are unlisted because they're patreon videos But you got plenty content to keep you busy and as always you bless me so God bless you and happy painting