 Hello my artistic friends and welcome to Monet Cafe. Today I'm going to be teaching on how to sketch with pastels. Yes actually using these hard new pastels by Prismacolor using some Willow Charcoal or Vine Charcoal. A blending stump boy that one's dirty you can actually clean these with sandpaper and kneaded eraser which is I need to buy a new kneaded eraser this one's really dirty and over there you see a soft pastel laying down it's a dark Terry Ludwig pastel I'm going to be using a reference image from an app I love called the sketchy app and I you can get it on your phone in your iPad I don't think you can access it via computer but I use this app to find faces to draw or sketch or paint and it's really fun this is a pastel I did you could see the soft pastels there this is one I did with some soft pastels just on drawing paper and recently I've started actually using these new pastels just to sketch in a sketchbook on a regular sketch paper and I've really been enjoying the results of this so I'm going to share a little bit about how I do that someone asked for me to share this and so I'm going to get started and I'll give some commentary along the way and hopefully we'll all learn something new all right so now you can see that I'm actually just using this vine charcoal and I am basically you're going to see I'm doing a lot of measuring when doing faces and even of animals or people it's crucial to get proportions right otherwise it's going to look amateurish and not professional so as you can see I'm just using this vine charcoal the great thing about it is it rubs off almost with your finger easily so if you make a mistake you're not left with a dark mark there that you can't get rid of and so I just occasionally use a kneaded eraser to kind of adjust and continually measuring and checking and what I do is at the beginning I was just kind of checking the composition where do I want her face to appear on this piece of sketch paper as you can see the sketch paper is of a vertical format like a portrait layout it's taller than it is wide but the photo the reference photo is like a perfect square so you know one of the first things you want to do is kind of get an idea of where is this going to be the best visually the most pleasing visually so again I was making sure I got that right now I am basically getting some points in where I know I'm going to have some reference points to refer back to right now I'm checking the eye and seeing where that should be in relation to the face that that left side of the face and so I'm just kind of getting it in lightly and often these things change I erase and move quite a bit before I get the original or the foundational sketch in there so again just making some measurements later you'll see that I actually I realized that I had the the side of the face into close to her eye that left side the ear is much further back than I have drawn it right here so far and I adjust that and fix it later so again just measuring you see me there using actually the piece of charcoal to kind of make some measurements to see where does her eye fall in relation to the width of her head and measuring is the right eye higher or lower than the left eye so all these little things they seem to be quite tedious but again they're very crucial if you're going to get a good drawing to start with again more measurements and you can see I've sped this up a little bit otherwise it would have taken forever and I noticed too when I'm drawing I always look at the shapes not what the thing is in other words to me that's not an eye I'm drawing it's a shape so I'm looking at what is it shaped like and the reason this helps is because we have a tendency to draw what we think we see instead of what we see that was a lesson I learned in a just a little art class I had in college as an elective class I majored in graphic design so I had a few little art classes and the the lesson is was one of the main things the teacher taught was draw what you see not what you think you see in our mind we say oh these are lips and we think we know what lips look like but don't do that continually look back at your reference image and analyze what is the shape forget that it's a mouth and just start drawing and measuring and making sure you get that shape right I happen to notice um to me the shape of her face you see how it's kind of uh that whole yellowish rng part of her face to me that shape looked kind of like a like a guitar pick if you know what a guitar pick is and so you know my brain just kind of has learned to operate that way the more that I've been sketching and uh I've really been enjoying sketching lately um I think it is a foundation to good art there are some people who say you know you don't have to be able to draw to be able to paint but I disagree with that I actually heard artist Marla Baguetta talk about that uh in one of her YouTube lessons the other day about having good drawing skills it really is crucial um now again I'm doing the ear here and I realize later I move it back even further um because I realize it's not quite right so now just enjoy this sketch process try to make note of how I'm measuring and how I'm just making general marks to get this in nothing overly detailed um just really trying to get in a good drawing before I start adding the pastels all right enjoy now I have my general drawing in and I'm going to start adding the pastels now again these are prismacolor new pastels spelled in you pastels not in e w and uh I am getting the mood in right now with the values I happen to really like how this photograph had that golden um feel to the background some of the background and uh her face and notice the right side of her face from our perspective um it thinks sometimes again just like you analyze drawing and shapes you draw what you see not what you think you see paint what you see and not what you think you see if you were to analyze that right side of her face it is quite dark and it's pretty reddish pinkish reddish brownish and uh so I'm establishing these values um to kind of give that mood and also to to build some depth you know as with any painting it begins starting out uh a little flat looking until you start layering those values and uh getting the the colors in that will accentuate depth and uh and distance and uh contour so uh again I'm just using these um warm tones right now to kind of establish that mood and I it's funny and sometimes I will draw the eyes first or paint them first and here lately I'm drawing them last so she looks a little like a zombie right now but I think it's because you know those are uh kind of fine detail work and um these pastels the good thing about the new pastels is you can get fine detail work better than you can with some of the chunkier soft pastels for one they're harder and uh that makes you able to have a fine line better and another is I break them a lot and you sometimes can get a nice little corner to them so uh I use those corners later to get those eyes in there and um and get them correct so she's going to be a zombie for a while until I finish now what I also do notice I use the blending stump there a little bit to kind of blend in also notice how I like to create color harmony um even though her hair if you look at the reference photo doesn't have a whole lot of red and orange and that um that uh beautiful magenta color in it I want to establish that and work it throughout the painting it gives it harmony and that makes it more interesting now I'm using that dark right there was a dark uh terry Ludwig that's called the eggplant color it looks like it's black it's actually a dark dark purple but that again is to help me establish the values um I don't want to get too tedious on one area until I kind of get an overall value going for the entire painting and that way you don't get your values or your colors incorrect it helps a lot so I don't usually use a white but I did that there just to get that little highlight over her lip because I had lost it a little bit so so again just enjoy oh I want to make a tip here too one little neat thing I learned when I I didn't always do portraiture um I used to love landscapes more and the more I did it I think I didn't like it because I wasn't very good at it and the more I did it the it was challenging and it was hard but the more I started to like it and I learned some neat uh tricks about portraiture um one thing is that with the mouth almost always the top lip is darker than the bottom lip the top lip uh if the light is coming from above almost always it's going to have a shadow on it so you want to make sure you get that lip darker and the bottom lip because it sticks out um is going to have a highlight on it it's going to be lighter so that's just a a little trick about um or a tip I should say about um getting facial um details incorrectly and again more measuring more working so again here we go and just enjoy the rest of this and I'll pop in in a little while now here you can see I'm finally getting rid of the zombie look I'm just using a pencil because I could get a finer point on it to get in the uh like the iris and the pupil part of her eye um I I grabbed a purple there because that just really added some umph to that uh that uh beautiful colors that we have going on there and uh I'm going to start working on the eye in just a bit here and I wanted to point out that even from the reference photo even though you can't really see the color of her eye it looks like her eye is like brown it's actually looks almost to me like it's a deep deep blue um from from what I can see um better than you can see on this video and so I want to get in that that deep blue and um just give it the kind of that mood that really just I don't know it just set a a neat look to her face there and also I wanted to reiterate something you know I said paint what you see not what you think you see I wanted to just um make sure I make a comment on the fact that that has to do more with value than with color because I often if you've watched much of my work or many of my videos you probably have noticed I change the colors a lot from the reference photo I didn't as much in this one I use the general idea of these colors but the wonderful thing is that if you get value right meaning the lightness or the darkness of a color you can get really creative with color as long as you have the value the same you know you could use a purple when it really is more of a a gray of the same value or if the scene is more green and grassy you can change that to pink or orange or whatever as long as those values are correct and of the same lightness or darkness so anyway she's coming along now and I'm I'm really I enjoyed this one I was literally just sitting at my dining room table when I was doing this I had moved all of my art stuff in there and my husband was watching a movie and I wasn't really into it I was more into the sketching so uh so I was having fun so um and now again I'm at things too like uh like that ear uh ears I'm not a fan of doing ears but the great thing is you don't have to put a lot of detail in a ear if you do it almost draws the eye um away from the other elements that you really would rather focus on like the eyes and things so anyway finishing this one up here and this one has really been fun