 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and oh am I happy to bring you this video where I'll be creating six different paintings on six different surfaces. This is a beginner-friendly tutorial with lots of information for budding pastel artists. It's also budget-friendly as I'll be using these very affordable Rembrandt pastels. These are the microsets. I'm gonna share lots more about those. These are just some little scrap pieces of paper I save after I finish a painting. The top row are very affordable unsanded pastel surfaces and I'll also demonstrate on sanded professional pastel papers as well. So not only in this video are you gonna get some education on different surfaces. I also hope to prove that you can get started with pastels with relatively inexpensive products. And as a bonus you'll get six different little pastel painting tutorials. So I'm excited you've joined me for the pastel painting fun and learning. Also go ahead if you don't mind and click the like, subscribe, and the bell icon to get notified of future videos. Those simple things really do help the success of this video on YouTube and help ensure others get to see it as well. Also if you'd like to become a patron of mine you can do so on my Patreon page for only $5 a month. It helps support this channel and my patrons get extra content. So don't throw away those little scrap pieces of paper from previous paintings. Even this teeny little piece of Canson paper can be used. Now the top three are unsanded. This is Strathmore Grey Tones drawing paper and the black sheet is just black drawing paper. I'm going to talk about each one of these surfaces more as I create the paintings. The bottom ones here are more of the professional sanded papers. This is pastel matte. The white it does come in other colors. This is a little piece of Fisher. It's very similar to UART paper. Fisher 400 that I did a little example on on one of my videos and I saved it because I knew I could paint over it. This last one is a piece of Sennelier pastel card. It's La Carte pastel card and it's a really nice surface. And as I create each painting I'll talk a little bit more about the qualities of each particular surface. And as I said I use these Rembrandt micro sets. They're very conveniently organized according to value and color. So I'll be talking about those as well. And here we go with painting number one. I decided to paint Fields of Flowers and I got my reference images from unsplash.com. I will have the links to these images in the description of this video. Now the first little teeny square of paper I'm using is Canson Métonce. It's called and it's an unsanded pastel paper and a lot of pastel artists love the sanded papers but you really can get decent results on unsanded papers as well and they are very affordable. Now you saw I just grabbed my little blue set of the micro sets of the Rembrandt. And basically all I'm doing here is getting in a little tree line shape and you can tell in the reference image if it's really dark. Most of the time trees are going to be one of your darker elements in a painting because they're they're vertical. The sun is not shining down on them like a flat field of grass. Usually things that are flat are a little lighter in value. So I just got in and look how it's even kind of scribbly at this point. So I'm just kind of working in my general shapes. I'm still just using the blue set. I've used three values of blues so far and this is a little bit of a lavender color that's kind of in that blue set as well. And the great thing about these little micro sets is you could totally do a monochromatic painting which means all the same color just different values. You could just use this blue set to create all the values in this painting and it's a really good exercise in learning about color. Now I have gone on to the teal set. You saw me hold it up just a second ago and I thought that teal I was using on the trees was a little bit too green looking or a little too teal green looking. So I just grabbed another one of the darker colors in that set and I'm just sort of developing the tree line a little more. And the great thing about painting small is that you really I have more fun anyway. I don't take it as serious and I just kind of let loose and enjoy the moment. And also too I feel you can see things shapes and spaces better sometimes when they're smaller. All right here's what I'm showing you here. I'm zooming in closely to show you and it didn't focus great. Sometimes Rembrandt's have a little almost film on them prior to using them. Not always but every so often you come up with a stick that has that. So what I'll typically do if I find that is I'll go over to a sanded surface and I'll just kind of rub it off on the area that I need to use to paint with. And once again it's not on every stick but just every so often. Now I'm just as you can see getting in some of my greens because they're arranged according to value these little microsets are perfect for the concept of how things are darker in the foreground and get lighter in the background. Now you saw I early on put down a dark value for that front area of the grasses and what I do typically is lay down a dark area that's almost like a path or trail leading back into the painting and then I gradually layer over that. I felt like it needed to be a little darker at this point. But pastel painting is really all about the layering. I have people ask me all the time why is it considered painting and not drawing? Well drawing is not as much of a layering type of technique and it's more about individual lines and things but painting is more about layering and getting down big areas of color versus linear. Not that we don't use linear strokes sometimes with pastel but it's truly considered painting and this is now just some of those oranges. Now one thing I will say about the Rembrandt microsets at least the ones that I got they have all kinds of different color families. I got eight of the color families and the reds I think they were called even warm reds but they they weren't as punchy as some reds that I like so I do grab another red and I'll tell you what that is towards the end of this little painting. I'm just kind of dotting in some of these little cooler reds they're almost like a pinkish red and I making them to where they're flowers or they're just suggestions really are larger in the foreground and they're cascading into the background getting a little smaller and gathering them in little clumps or areas rather than having them all equally spaced. Now I do apologize that the filming got a little blurry there I think it's when I held up that Rembrandt pastel real close the camera didn't refocus now I'm adding a little lavender to the sky alright that's better now we can see what's going on here now on that now this let me just share here I did grab a Terry Ludwig dark now this will show you real quickly the influence of a good dark it really does add that pop to the painting this is a unison pastel unison has some really nice reds and Rembrandt pastels the microsets I've been using before these last two they're a harder pastel they are more affordable like I mentioned before and I have completed some paintings with just totally Rembrandt's but I find that sometimes if you just need that little punch of color you can really get more color with the softest softies which are typically the Sennelier pastels the unison pastels and the Terry Ludwig pastels now the Rembrandt's are really good for this technique right here I'm just rolling in some grasses and this little painting was lots of fun alright let's move on to the next surface now this is the Strathmore toned gray drawing paper now I'll show you right here how you can definitely do pastel paintings on this drawing paper this is a little portrait that I did of an adorable little girl and I used a combination of pastels I use some new pastels and some softer pastels so you can get a lot accomplished on unsanded surfaces so I really do like the Strathmore gray toned drawing paper this was just one of my simple little tutorials showing how you can paint with pastels using only six colors I believe I like to sketch with charcoal so here we go moving on to the next image once again a reference image from unsplash.com sorry for my studio lights and I like to get interpretive sometimes when I'm doing little paintings like this I don't necessarily have to follow the exact image you saw I held up a bunch of the different little sets that I'm contemplating using I probably will use that unison and that Terry Ludwig pastel again this painting also had some flowers in it they were a little bit more orange than they were red but they still had a little bit of a reds and some nice darks in them now this is the darker green that's in the green set and I noticed in this reference image it had darks on the bottom like where the roots of the flowers were I'm just using a little chamois I think is the the way it's spelled anyway and but this reference image had darks down towards the roots of the flowers and it also had a dark area behind like where the field was you could see the sky peeking through some of them like a tree line in the distance so that's why I had a little bit of dark at the bottom in the top now just gradually layering in some of these other greens it has some nice greens and that little green set and this is once again kind of the teal colors I find often that grasses get cooler when they get buried down in the shadows and you know I have I do have people who've commented a lot that you sure are chatty and I find I think I've figured it out when I speed the videos up like this and often I have to to get all the content in that I want to share with you I think I talk fast trying to catch up with my painting things I want to tell you so I really don't talk this lot of this fast or this much in real life I'm actually kind of quiet believe it or not but I find that's funny when people make those comments okay now I got in some layers of color and now I'm keeping this one a little bit abstract I'm using this chunky Terry Ludwig pastel by the way they're usually longer and rectangular and I break them in half sometimes I find they're more convenient for painting but I'm getting in some little flower shapes with the darks typically I like to put in the dark values first and then layer the lighter values for the flower colors on top now I thought that almost like rusty color dark would look great with some of these oranges from the Rembrandt set on top so I just you see how you can still kind of see the dark and it really gives some nice contrast to the flowers but again I'm keeping this abstract I'm not following the photo exactly I'm letting it inspire me and it's similar to the watercolor video I did not long ago called intuitive watercolor by the way thank you to everybody who liked that video that video got a lot of views in and even though I typically don't share watercolor I got a lot of great comments from you guys and I love watercolor painting so I'll still sprinkle some watercolor painting tutorials in and I might be doing a little bit more of those too by the way I will never stop painting pastels though don't worry I'll keep those videos coming all right so now you saw you some of the red that unison red and I got a little bit of the other reds there's the unison red again that one's kind of like up above the the horizon line sometimes you want a flower that's reaching up even higher so it's like I said it's very interpretive and suggestive I wanted to get some darker darks down in the roots to give a little bit more contrast you see how that gives more interest it was rather flat before when you give some value changes you really create some depth to your painting and now this is that concept of the tree line oh now I am using here this is another Terry Ludwig do you see how much darker this color is then the darkest dark I could find in the rim brand micro sets and that's because of the the difference with pastels when I say some of the soft pastels are harder and some are softer harder pastels like rim brands they have more binder in them they have less pigment in them think of it like pure color and a binder is something that holds it together it's not glued but it's something that holds it sticks it together and when you have a lot of binder and less pigment the pastel is harder and thus you also have less color and when you have a soft pastel like this unison here it has more pigment and less binder so they're pretty crumbly that's why they're super soft but they have more color and that's why they have that punch of color I can't tell you how happy I was when I finally figured that out I really had to figure out how pastels were made before I understood why certain pastels have more color I hope that made sense but I still do like some of the harder pastels they have their own intrinsic qualities that are unique to them as well I like this little teal I thought the teal would make a nice color with some of those oranges as well so looky there just gray drawing paper and you're able to have a little painting fun with your pastel paintings and one of the points of this video was not only to share the different surfaces but also just to help beginners know that you can get started with rather inexpensive supplies to play around and learn this medium before you invest a whole lot of money into sets that are expensive these micro sets are very inexpensive I do have some examples of them on my Amazon shop I like to do product reviews I'm starting to do product reviews it's it's another way I can educate some of my videos are actually going to start showing up on the Amazon products you'll be able to scroll down and see my review videos but I like to give you information and then you decide where you want to buy it on the Amazon site I think these micro sets were about $9 a set I think they varied depending on what color you got if you get the micro sets on Dick Blick.com I think they were more like $8 so always shop around and but it is nice that you can visit my Amazon shop the link is always in the description of my videos here and you can see my ideal lists I'll show you papers I like and other products that I like and you can kind of just real conveniently find a lot of the things that I recommend regardless of where you buy them all right now I'm sneaking in a little bit of that sky in the background adding a few more punches of color and this was a fun little painting for me I I really enjoyed it here's a little better view sometimes you can't see it quite as good of when I have my camera to the side like that but it was really colorful and really fun I just love many painting all right here we go to the next surface which is the black paper once again a reference image from unsplash.com I really liked that field of green and I wanted to do this the other one the previous painting was a long or a wide format what's called a landscape format this one's a tall portrait format but you know really really skinny and now I'm going to use some of these purples now working on black paper is a little bit backwards because we've already got our dark value right I mean even though you could actually get something a little darker than what this paper is but I've already got my dark so now I start working on kind of some of the the other values in the painting and I wanted to get in an idea of the sky the tree line and some of the shapes of the grasses kind of to give me a road map to get started now because I have five little paintings in this video I am speeding this one up a bit more but hopefully you can still follow some of the same principles and you can see here how I did a little lavender and a little blue to the sky once again the beautiful quality of layering with pastels you can use erasers that was a needed eraser spelt K in E A D E D it's almost looks like a little piece of clay but you can erase things I wanted to get more of that tree line now this is the Terry Ludwig dark it's the eggplant color and that's what I mentioned before that you can actually get something a little darker than the paper down I really liked these teal colors I was using for the grasses I kind of wish I had stayed with the teal color palette for the whole final painting but I decided to later add some of those warm greens as well but isn't that pretty you see it's already turning into something with just a little bit of value and some shapes it's amazing what our brains put together with very little information and here's where I'm adding some of the grassy greens it's a pretty easy principle of art that things are larger in the foreground usually and gradually get smaller in the background but they also flatten out I was just praising the Lord there I have praise and worship on music on almost every time I paint but grasses and things they are usually vertical in the foreground and then they graduate that gets shorter and shorter and then they finally turn into like almost like a blanket in the background they become a horizontal shape rather than individual blades of grass sticking up I couldn't quite I was kind of confused about where my path was here I originally had a little path going meandering through there but I redeveloped that as I work and that's always a good idea to have a little path there's sort of one in the reference image but there was kind of a dark area almost bisecting the image in the upper third there you see in the grassy field if you look at the reference image I didn't really like that horizontal line across the field there so I wanted it to meander a little bit more now I'm using that little rolling technique I wanted the grasses to feel like they were blowing this way in that way kind of like the reference image but once again this is just black drawing paper and it was a lot of fun I think the neat thing that I'd like to share in this video is you can learn a lot on these inexpensive surfaces before you commit to buying expensive pastel papers and then even when you are better at art these are great to practice on kind of like I'm doing here I like to have fun on these now let's move on to the sanded surfaces I'm going to talk more about the surfaces but right now I've got those purples and those oranges and that's because I had this really oh and some greens and that's because I had this really neat reference image that had oh my gosh the most gorgeous purple flowers I'd like to try to do this again as a more serious larger painting and I did use some of those blues combined with the purple it makes the flowers like vibrate with color now I'm choosing a color here and I decided with this one I'm doing a lot of different techniques on these two now this surface is pastel matte it's a water friendly surface I like using the white even though I like some of the colored papers as well the white allows me to do an under painting a color of my choice and so I decided with this I wanted to do under painting color I really like for landscape paintings kind of like a gold color so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my brush I put down some orange and some yellow and you see how you can see both those colors with how they're layered and now I'm just using some water sometimes I use rubbing alcohol it does behave a little differently I have a video where I shared that actually that little paint or that little piece of paper with the blue on it it's a video I did about four videos back showing how water versus alcohol behaves when you add it but I just had water handy so I decided to use it now see how neat that is again this pastel matte surface I love it it's you can put all kinds of different water friendly mediums on it and you know obviously wait for it to dry before you add pastels now because this is an orange under painting I know it's going to be a perfect complement with some of these purple flowers complementary colors are opposite on the color wheel so the oranges and the purples really look great together oh and another thing about under paintings I can't tell you how many questions I get about under paintings but as you can see the Rembrandt pastels were great for creating an under painting you can create an under painting like I just did making one color and or you could create a little value study and you don't have to wet them as I did with the brush and the water in this case but when you do the advantage of it is it actually causes the pastel to liquefy pastels literally turn into paint when you wet them with either water or alcohol like drugstore alcohol but when you wet them they liquefy and they don't take up as much of the layer so you almost like you get an extra layer by going ahead and blending it with water it also creates a nice smooth finish before you begin your painting now I had someone recently make a request in one of my videos in the comments section so by the way comment you guys I will try to answer your questions in future videos but their comment was could you show us you talk about how you can make neutrals with with colors in soft pastels and they ask if I would actually do that in a video so basically what you do is you take two complementary colors like I showed you the purple and the orange yellow and you layer them and then you add white and it will lighten them you don't have to add the white it's just if you want to control it now I wanted to make a neutral color so I combined the green and the magenta as you see here and you see how it softened it it kind of neutralized that color it was too punchy before the green was too bright and the magenta was too bright so you see how that softened it I didn't add any white in that case but I wanted something in the distant field that gave the feeling of grasses maybe some layering of flowers far in the distance it's not going to show up that much but there you go there's your example of how to do that you want to just layer compliments on top of each other and then it's you know you can lightly blend them and it will neutralize the color so if you have a palette with a lot of punchy colors and we know color kind of diminishes it gets more subdued in the distance and you want to create that effect just put two compliments together and blend them a little bit and then you'll have you'll have neutralized those colors so I hope that helps so again you guys leave comments and as I say at the beginning of my videos now please like this video subscribe to my channel it's really helping Monet cafe to be shown on youtube to many other people who have no means for painting with soft pastel or other mediums they go worldwide and I can't tell you how many beautiful appreciative people I get now I'm obviously speeding this one up a lot because there's no way I could have this video of a manageable size if I had all of these in real time I may take one or two of these and over on my patreon page I might just give a real-time video for my patrons that's one of the perks for being a patron of mine is not only can you feel great about supporting the channel and helping these videos to keep coming with better equipment man it sure has helped me I tell you what thank you patrons but also you get extra goodies you get my color guides often and sometimes you get more real-time footage now you can see how teeny this is look at that but look at those blues and here you might be able to see what I often talk about is how colors kind of vibrate those purples with the blues on top almost make a new color it's very cool now let's start painting number five now I particularly liked this one I found this reference photo of a lovely field with some pink flowers this is the piece of Fisher 400 it's almost exactly like UART paper if you've heard of those two sanded papers but Fisher doesn't curl UART paper has a tendency to curl I'll talk more about the paper in a minute so this was a little piece that I had used for a demonstration in a previous painting of showing how different products when you apply them water alcohol and I believe Gamsol odorless mineral spirits so that's why you saw the three little swatches so I just put turquoise on top of it and decided to give it an alcohol wash now alcohol does behave a little differently than water that was the purpose of the previous video but both are fine to use if you want to like I said before it kind of liquefies the pastel that you lay down and makes a nice surface that doesn't have a lot of paper showing through now I apologize I didn't get all of the footage I somehow missed a little bit of the beginning footage of this one but this surface is so great it's quite sanded it feels like hardware store sandpaper but it's archival it'll never yellow and it's a professional sanded paper and I used mostly the rimbrant micro sets for this painting with the exception of those distant hills maybe a little bit of dark I might add to the foreground area and at the end I used some pink senelier pastels for the pink flowers but the the rest of it was all these rimbrants so you see you can really get a lot accomplished with some pastels that are rather inexpensive this is that chamois cloth again I like to use it for softening and blending but I typically only do it at initial stages I don't blend a lot when I start adding my final layers what it does is it it mutes the color a bit as you can see which that's intentional at this point all right there's that terry Ludwig egg plane again it looks a little dark right now but I blend it and as I layer pastels on top of it it keeps that impression of deep roots gives that general feel that the grasses are really deep in the foreground so all of these little things are just techniques that you can learn and I like to say that if you want to paint you can it's really just some rules you learn to follow them and you practice and my patrons I love the communication I have with them because I get to experience their comments of all their different phases of how they're learning and really everybody has to learn even if you're just one of those people who's naturally born with a gift especially like things like drawing there's still rules you have to learn but they're learnable now I added a little of that green on the tops of the trees you see how automatically that made it look like a you know trees and distance I love this turquoise for doing distant trees and then for the ones that are a lot further away I added a little lighter see that gave that impression there's trees even further away the reason for that is things cool off in the distance with color temperature and even if you don't see it in the photo you can push these rules and these things so that your painting is even more attractive and interesting with color so as grasses are in the distance like I mentioned before things become more horizontal and flat rather than vertical so gradually the grasses as you move to the foreground do start to become more vertical and this is an example of these rimbrants of how pastels will start to blend themselves I wanted a little light in that sky that was going to kind of be my focal point the eye coming through that little trail and up and around back to those distant trees and that pretty brightness in the sky but now I'm just using like a periwinkle blue and see how it's they're starting to blend themselves I don't need a chamois cloth to do that with so just reinforcing some things I really did kind of like the green and the orange color palette going on here I kind of almost wish I hadn't added the pink flowers but I just went ahead and went with it you know kind of according to the reference photo but as you can see most of these I've done have been rather interpretive once you learn some rules you find yourself a good reference photo that just kind of inspires you it doesn't have to be perfect but find the thing that drew you to that photo and let that become your focal point and it's really so nice to have that artistic license but the best thing I can recommend if you're starting out in pastels is to maybe get some affordable products like this you can see that the microsets are very affordable the papers that I used on the top row were all unsanded papers you can even use drawing paper but get yourself some affordable products and play that's another great thing about these mini paintings as you can just play and have fun don't expect a masterpiece too soon that's a sure recipe for I don't even like to say failure but for you quitting I almost quit pastels when I first got started I love to tell the story it's kind of the birth of Monet cafe is that was back before YouTube if they had it I didn't know about it it wasn't very accessible and I had to learn so much by myself and got very frustrated but I have a pretty determined spirit and I just wanted to learn I kind of needed it at that point in my life I needed it was like art therapy and so I always thought man I I would love to share all these things that I've learned so it's not so hard for others so there's my story and I'm sticking to it the Monet cafe story now those were those three Sennelier pastels so far all the other pinks I think were the Rembrandt's I think I might have added some of the Sennelier's and now I'm just rolling in some grasses like I did before but you see how that trail just pulls you in and it was bright and colorful and all of these were so fun now here's painting number six now I am going to speed this one up quite a bit man was I just just drawn to the the brilliant brightness of the sun in this one and this is on Sennelier La Carte pastel card it is a very sanded textural surface it's not water-friendly though but you could see a little ghost image before I started painting it is repurposeable you can really just get a stiff bristle brush if you're not happy with the painting I have a video on how to do this with multiple paper types and you can just brush off the pastel go outdoors don't let the pat don't breathe the pastels when you brush them off brush off the majority of the pastel and you've got your layering capability back so that's what I did with this little painting it was kind of one I wasn't happy with and look at that you don't have to be afraid when you start painting with pastels on even on expensive surfaces the sanded surfaces you really can reuse them the other two I use the pastel matte and the fissure you can wash them off like in the sink brush off the majority of the pastel with a brush like like I suggested with this one and then wash it off in the sink lay it flat to dry start over again it's very cool so this Sennelier paper I think it lends itself towards impressionism it has results at a very soft feeling I also like using this paper for animal portraits because fur is kind of soft you know so I love this surface as well I may take this one or like I said one of the other ones and maybe do a real time for my my patrons but I I have some that were obviously a lot slower than this one so I apologize I had to speed this one up I try to keep the videos under 40 minutes but man we're just those flower colors I got interpretive again with the color but the flowers we know in our brain if you look at the reference photo we know they're white but really in this lighting the sun is they're kind of backlit the sun's behind them so they have a little cooler temperature to them almost a bluish look so that's how I you know artistically reinterpreted them and it really made it kind of fun I I purposely made a color palette that was both cool and warm with those cool mountains or trees or whatever they are in the distance but I did want to add a little warmth so I added some of these greens so if you have learned a lot from this tutorial I would love it if you'd give me some feedback ask your questions like you always do if you recreate from any of these little paintings or any of my paintings on this channel I love it you guys have been doing what I've been asking you're following me on Instagram and you're sharing your work and tagging me I absolutely love to see what you do now if you're a patron of mine oh by the way you can tag me and follow me on Instagram at Susan Jenkins Artist and if you're a patron of mine I know I get to see what you do because we have a homework album I get to see what you submit when you submit your work to the homework album it gives you chances to win prizes and also I have a private Facebook group for my patrons I get to see what you're working on I get to chit chat with you guys and we have a lot of other little special things we do with my patrons so I hope you guys enjoyed that you learned a lot try some little paintings the theme this month is Loosen Up in the Monet Cafe Art Group and here on this channel so this was kind of going along with that theme and it was indeed a lot of fun so let your hair down get out some pastels and you can do it it's really not that hard just some rules like I said all right guys god bless and as always happy painting