 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and in this pastel painting tutorial, I will guide you through concept sketch and lead you through creating some lovely yellow flowers blowing in the wind. You're going to learn lots of techniques and also this is very basic and on very affordable supplies. So get ready for some painting fun and here we go. First, would you mind liking this video? I think you really will like it. Subscribe to this channel and hit that bell icon to be notified of future videos. Also, if you've been enjoying the hundreds of videos I have for free here on Monet Cafe, would you consider becoming a patron of mine? It supports this channel and you get extra content and extra goodies. Now let's dive right into these materials used and the links to these products will also be in the video description. For the sketch, I used the Paul Rubens sketchbook. This company has been great in sending me supplies to review their products and I loved their sketchbook. So I like to do sketches before painting for multiple reasons and it's also great because you can keep your sketches in this beautiful sketchbook that has a ring binding system. I love this system because you can lay the notebook flat and it's a great way to store your sketches that you can use for future paintings. I often like to sketch in charcoal and I really recommend these Derwent charcoal pencils. They come in a pack with three values plus white. Now this is my favorite pencil sharpener thanks to Enrico, one of my patrons on my Patreon page. He recommended this pencil sharpener and I've absolutely loved it. Also I highly recommend buying the blades as well. A sharp blade is a key to getting sharp pencils. I use kneaded erasers just for corrections and all of these things are very affordable fortunately. The surface I'll be using is made by Canson. It's called Métonce and it's an unsanded pastel paper. If you know much about pastel painting, many artists love the sanded papers but they are very expensive. This Canson pad of earth tones colors is quite affordable. If you've used Canson before, you may be familiar that each side has a different texture. I'm using the backside. You couldn't see me flip it over but the backside is a little bit more smooth. The front side has kind of a honeycomb pattern. The pastels I'll be using, you can see in the sets to my left, are two sets of pastels both made by Paul Rubens. There's a 36 set which has some beautiful vibrant colors. These pastels are surprisingly high quality for their price. Look at that, $39.99 on Amazon currently. That's as of the making of this video. The colors in this set are vibrant. They even have some darks. They have a little guide for pastel painting techniques and also very nice packaging. I also will be using a few of the Paul Rubens 40 set. These colors are a little bit more earthy. Also has some nice darks. I find the two sets work very well together. From my observation, they don't have any duplicates in them. The reference image I'm using, look at these lovely flowers blowing in the wind. They're not quite sunflowers. Are they like a little daisy? This beautiful reference image is from unsplash.com. I will have the link in the description of this video. By the way, if you're a patron of mine, you will have access to my collections that I have gone in and made albums in unsplash.com. That way, you don't have to hunt for a photo that has a good composition. You can use some of mine that I've pre-chosen. But that image is from unsplash.com. I will have the link in the description of this video. You saw me grab a matte, like you would matte a painting. On the inside of this matte was 5x7. Conveniently on the outside of the matte is 8x10. So you get two sizes for one matte. And I like to just kind of mark off a little area to sketch. Definitely speeding the sketch up here. This isn't a sketching video. But the point is I like to do a preliminary sketch. It works out a lot of composition issues. I can correct things. I can really feel the inspiration. And the inspiration for this painting was just these flowers blowing in the wind. Like they're reaching to something unseen and hopeful and joyful. So once I have my sketch done, it's really nice when you have them in the sketchbooks. I put a piece of tracing paper over it with a piece of artist tape. And then my sketch is protected and I can use the sketch for future paintings. So now I'm feeling inspired and I'm ready to paint. By the way, I apologize for my voice. I've had the flu and I did have fortunately a lot of footage I knew I could upload. And even though I'm still feeling about 50%, it's not that strenuous to do a voiceover for this video. Now I'm using just a pastel pencil. You could use a charcoal pencil, anything to just block in the shapes for this painting. But first, I want to do the same thing I did with the sketch. I'm going to take the same mat I used before. Remember, it's 5 by 7 on the inside and it's 8 by 10 on the outside. Sometimes the inner dimensions might be a little smaller or a little different sometimes than an exact 5 by 7. But it's good enough for these purposes. And I like to work in standard sizes because you can or your clients can easily find frames to fit these paintings. So I'm going to talk a little bit. I'm keeping this real time. I'm going to speed up some sections later. But I'm going to talk about creating flowers. Now I have a video that I highly recommend. I'll put it in the description of this video and I'll try to put it as a clickable video at the end of this particular video. On painting flowers easily, breaking it down so they're not so scary. You know, often we feel like we have to paint every petal and get it all just botanically correct. And you really just want to capture the essence of the flower. And there are some simple little tricks that can help you with getting the general shape of most flowers. And now I will speed this part up a bit so as not to bore you to death. But basically you can tell that I am paying attention to where some of the flower heads are. I'm actually focusing the first circle that you saw me draw was the outer perimeter of the flower. You're drawing an ellipse and ellipse is basically a circle that you see at different angles. So you want to kind of make the shape as to how the flower is turning or laying. Sometimes they're facing down. They might be turned away a little bit. And some of these were reaching a little bit more upward. And then later I'm going back in you can see an adding the centers. And that's one of the things I discuss in that video is really taking away the complication of going in there and focusing on petals to begin with. Get these outer shapes in and maybe mark where the centers are. Sometimes the centers aren't in the center. They're in a totally different place. A lot of these you could kind of see the center. But as I develop the petals out from here, it'll kind of change the dynamic of they all look kind of centered right now. But you'll see how they all are kind of turned a bit. And now I'm going to start adding the pastel. This is back to real time. Once again, this is an unsanded surface. When I very first started trying soft pastels, I tried an unsanded surface because that's really what you find. If you go in or if you go to a hobby store especially and you want a pastel paper, they're going to have probably some Canson Métants paper like this. Or I think Strathmore has a pad of unsanded paper that they have pastel paper written on the front. Well, I had no idea that there was even a thing as a sanded pastel surface. And as a beginner artist, I got quite frustrated with papers like this because I didn't know enough about pastels. And I didn't know enough about techniques of how to use pastels on these types of papers. So I had epic fail. Epic failure, I should say. And it was because I didn't know what I was doing. Also, I had very poor quality soft pastels. The pastels I got when I first started was a set from a hobby store. Nothing against hobby stores, but they often don't have quality soft pastels. I say almost never have quality soft pastels. And so I was working blindly, I guess, with poor products. And so what happened was I noticed my work was not looking like some of the other work that I was hunting and trying to find online. And when I would find some pieces that were soft pastel paintings, I was like, why can I get these results like other artists? But firstly, I think it was because of my poor quality pastels. And secondly, because I didn't know how to use unsanded papers. I didn't know a lot about the layering aspect of pastels, which isn't all that different from a lot of other mediums. Acrylic and oil, used layering. And to a degree in watercolors, well. So I had a lot to learn. So that's often what I love to do in my videos now is to encourage beginner artists and to give you a bit of a guide, a plan and instruction on how to get started so that you won't go through the same challenges that I went through. So one great thing about these Paul Ruben's pastels is they are quality and they are affordable. That was part of my problem too as a beginner artist. But still now I have to, you know, I share videos often where I show all of my pastels and everything. And because it's a teaching opportunity for me, I'm not bragging or showing off. But a lot of them I have gotten because of the Monet Cafe channel. I do talk to companies and sometimes they approach me about, hey, would you want to try our set out? So that's been a blessing of having this channel over the years and getting the ability to be able to get some supplies. I've always dreamed of. So back to my point though, I couldn't afford them when I first got started. So that's one thing that's really great about these sets that I've found with Paul Ruben's. They are coming out with a 72 set as well. They're going to send me the set and I'll be reviewing that. So this is a great thing for beginner artists is to be able to afford this habit or hobby or passion. And that's one way to do it. Also, as I stated, the cants and me taunts is so much less expensive than some of the sanded surfaces. So let me talk a little bit more about what I'm doing. You've seen me. This is all real time. You've seen me blocking in just some of the values and colors that are in the painting. Now, I would not have done this when I first got started. I would have gone in and tried to start painting these flowers. That would have been totally first. And I probably would have focused on one flower way too long. And what happens when you overwork things on an unsanded surface, they're going to get very flat in color. When you overlayer and just keep working and working and working, you basically crush the little particles in the soft pastels that have their vibrancy. They're like little crystals in a way, the elements that make up the colors. And the colors become broken and flat, but also become muddied when you start layering too many colors on top of each other. Now you do have a lot more wiggle room when you're working on a sanded surface because it does allow for more layering. But if you try this, well, let's say if you just took a piece of copy paper and you started laying pastels down on it. Very quickly, the pastels are just going to start falling off and you can't put one color on top of another. So you get a little bit more layering, of course, with this type of surface than you do with copy paper. But you have to be a little bit more strategic with your plan. Now, as you can see, I went in with this color here. It's kind of a, I don't know, like a reddish muted reddish pinkish color. And why would I be using this color? The flowers are yellow, right? What on earth would you be using this color for? Well, I've learned to look at elements and see that almost everything has a little bit of a darker value. In little crevices and places and a different color often as well. And so what we do is we get that base down first of a darker value and a color that may be a little deeper or richer than the color that you see in the petals. And then I can start layering on top of it and I generally or typically go darker to lighter. You see now what I have now here is this beautiful orangey color that I'm laying on top of the pretty reddish cool red that I put down. Now you can see how I am using this orange to kind of shape these petals. I'm not drawing petals. I'm laying the pastel on its side. And I've noticed a lot of the petals or the lot of the flowers are turned more to the right. And so I'm not seeing as many petals radiating out to the left. They're more like reaching out towards the viewer. So they're going to look short or almost just like a line on the side of that flower. And so we're really kind of capturing that feeling of the three dimensional aspect of the flower by the mark making that we're doing. And it'll start to take shape more as you see me work. But do you see how these colors are starting to already look fun and impressionistic? And my style, if you're brand new to this channel, is more impressionistic and free. And hence the name Monet Cafe. I love the style of Monet and many other impressionistic artists. And so I like to think of art as being our interpretation of nature and not necessarily a recreation or a photocopy of what we could actually do with a photograph. So I love to be able to have the freedom as an artist to be able to interpret the landscape and the things that I'm creating. Now, because I do sound so nasally and stuffy, and it is a little difficult to talk, I'm going to speed this up so that it's still very easy to follow, but you'll be able to watch it develop and pause it if you want to do a paint along with this. And I would like you though to keep an eye out for a few things as I paint. I want you to notice that I continue to work the whole. I'm not going to get too fastidious or laborious on one particular flower. Also too, I want you to notice how the layering process is gradual, still kind of going darker values, richer colors to my brighter, lighter values. You won't see me add the lightest yellows until close to the very end when I put that final icing on the cake for some of these petals. Also notice that the painting for quite a while looks rather chunky. And I always say paintings go through an adolescent stage. I heard that from another artist. I thought that's so perfect. You know when you're like, I don't know, 12, 13, whenever you started going through puberty and the world is a little just weird for you and you look a little awkward and uncoordinated. And that's often a stage our paintings go through. But just like with teenagers, it's a stage that's very needed to transition from the beginning stages to the final. And also notice that this painting, I would say it's almost more of a study. It's going to stay almost an unfinished look to it at the end. The attempt is not to cover up every single bit of the surface and also not to overblend things. So here I am finally putting down one of the yellows that's a little bit brighter. Again, I'm just using these two Paul Rubin sets. So it makes it very doable for the beginner artist. And I don't have to do every pedal. I'm just getting the essence of the pedals and paying attention to their direction. And if they're coming towards me, they're just going to be little dashes or marks. You kind of see just the edge of some pedals rather than the extension of them. All right, I'm going to add the music. I hope you learn something and enjoy this. I really do love it when you give me your feedback. Maybe let me know if you just like it when I just give a little instruction at the beginning and then just let you guys watch the rest of the process. So I appreciate that. That's how I've learned everything for my teaching techniques on Monet Café. It's because of you. You let me know early on. Don't play music through the whole video while you're talking. You know, tips like that. So I really appreciate your help with that. All right, guys, enjoy the creation of this painting. I hope you follow along and I hope you share in our various sharing platforms. You can find all that at the end of this video or in the description of this video. Don't go anywhere. I'll be back at the end. I was really loving the loose feel of these flowers and didn't want to overwork them one bit. Notice that I had already put down a little bit of a blue at some of the tops of those flower centers. And now I'm putting in a pop of red. The Paul Rubin set, the 40 set has this gorgeous red. Both sets have some nice reds in it. But I lay these reds kind of at the bait between the center of the flower and where the petals reach out just a few areas to lead the viewer's eye up and enhance it to where it comes in at the lower left and pulls the viewer up and out of the painting. This one was lots of fun. This one already did sell in my Etsy shop actually. And thank you to the purchaser. So I hope you enjoyed that. Please share if you recreate from my tutorials. Leave me feedback on this video here on the comment section. I'd love to hear what you have to say and find me in all of those places. Thanks for tolerating my nasally voice and as always, God bless and happy painting.