 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today I'm very happy to bring you this lesson where I will be featuring Mount Vision purple pastels to create these beautiful blue and purple flowers. This should be a lot of fun. If you haven't joined the family please subscribe to keep more video lessons coming your way. I chose with this painting to do a warm underpainting and here are some of the color choices I used kind of oranges, magintas, pinks, and you'll see in a minute I add a lavender bluish for the sky. I think it's a lavender for the sky. Yes and I'm working on a piece of watercolor paper. I've done four of these so far. This is the first video I'm uploading. I'm just speeding up this section here where I'm laying down the underpainting. Again this is just on watercolor paper and I have some neat new techniques I'm using that I'd like to share with you guys. So you see how pretty easy that is? We're just laying in some color. If you've seen many of my videos where I make my own homemade surface you know I often use clear gesso made by Liquitex and I will be using that but often I do like I'm doing now. I create an underpainting. Sometimes I'll use watercolor. I mean this is watercolor paper. Sometimes I'll use acrylic ink but this is a new technique. Actually I did use it quite a while ago and forgot about it using a product that I'm not going to go into that in this video but I will in one of these other videos with these long format paintings. I'm going to tell you all about how to do what I just did. Now here's the clear gesso and now I'm ready to make this where pastels can be applied to the surface. And you can of course use an already prepared pastel paper. You don't have to do it homemade like I am. You guys probably know I do this to share with you guys that you can save money by making your own pastel surfaces and this clear liquid gesso works great but you can do this lesson if you want to follow along on a regular piece of pastel paper if you want and use whatever blending method you would like to use whether it's a piece of pipe foam insulation or you know I've been using the chamois cloth lately. Now I did use a few, quite a few of the Terry Ludwig umber shadows and shades or shades and shadows set. You see those nice neutrals there. Aren't they beautiful? I just love these colors. So I liked the grasses that were deep down for some of these purple flowers and I thought those would work well. Now I'm just going to kind of reestablish some of the background colors here and applying this. Now the gesso has dried. I have a nice gritty surface. The pastels will hang on to it but I'm going to share in this video and all of the other three that I'll be doing with the same technique for all of them. Something that I do to perhaps help some of you guys who have expressed your challenges with using the clear gesso. Notice how when I'm laying down these colors it looks really, I don't know, kind of messy and real textural. You're seeing the strokes even though I used a foam brush to apply the gesso. You really see the strokes of the paper and I'm going to show you something in a minute that actually is a technique I'm doing all the time now when I use this clear gesso. I think it works really well. So now I'm just getting a background band of mountains and it's darker than it will be when it's finished but we often put the darks down first because we know we can layer. I'm also getting my darks. This is a, this one, the first one I put down was a dark purple, a Terry Ludwig purple I believe. This is probably the Terry Ludwig eggplant color. It looks black but it's actually not and I like to get the darks in first to establish that value and it's going to create that sense of depth and perspective of things receding into the distance. We know that values are typically darker in the foreground and get lighter in the distance and once again I am going to going to lighten up those mountains. Now here is what I was talking about before. To fix this rather messy, scratchy looking underpainting after the underpainting. This is like a second underpainting. I'm using my chamois cloth technique. You know these are the things that I remember when they first came out. Everybody was so amazed at how they dried your cars so great. It was way better than using a towel. I'm speeding up certain sections just not to make this video so monotonous. But when I use the chamois cloth I do it in sections. I'll use a corner for the dark areas and then so is by the way you can just tap your board. Pastel dust does fall off during this but you see how much stays on to. Now I turned my little chamois cloth to use a different corner of it. You've got eight corners really because you've got four on each side and when I'm going from a light area to a dark area I often don't turn it. I only turn it and get a new area if it's contaminated with dark and I want to keep the light. So now I'm going to go in with this pretty blue. This is going to be actually sort of like another band of mountains. Often I kind of veer away from what the reference photo is and kind of do my own thing. But I think it yeah this one did have a really pale distant band of mountains. I think later I kind of blend it in with the sky but you know all of this is up for your artistic interpretation and what you think would make a you know a more pleasing painting. This is kind of a lavender just pale and notice how it's just kind of blending in on top of that pinkish underpainting of the sky that I did. And now I'm lightening it up a bit. You see how the layers work quite well with this homemade surface on watercolor paper using clear gesso. Once again you can also do this clear gesso technique on watercolor paper and you don't have to use the first initial method I used. You could you know do whatever works for you, whatever you're used to or whatever you have. But again I'll be sharing more about the original technique I used at the beginning for the underpainting in a future video. That will be coming. So you see how this is all I'm using a little bit of a duller blue. That blue it's a neutral kind of a dull medium to dark blue and see how it just toned those mountains down in the distance and I even tone them down more later. But this pastel technique is all about this layering and working the whole painting. I love to work the whole painting. Oh by the way that bracelet of mine is the Monet Café bracelet. I had a lovely jewelry designer create. I saw these lava rocks that were kind of the colors of pastel. They looked like pastels and these lava rocks actually they hold essential oils. If you like essential oils like I do, I put drops of them on the lava rocks and they soak into them. And while you're painting you can smell the essential oil. It's just such a neat experience. So I forget to mention them but they have a little Monet Café charm on them as well. But there's a link in the description of this video I think for the Monet Café bracelets. And it really helps. I've been lately just allowing all the proceeds to go to this jewelry designer. She's had some life challenges and it really I think blesses her to be able to sell these bracelets. So anyway, enough about that. Now I'm reinforcing the dark areas of the painting where I think some of these little clusters of flowers will be. Now I don't always blend a second time. But I kind of wanted to get these dark areas a little softer. They were a little bit segmented I guess and I wanted to blend them together. So you know you can use this a few times. But I don't recommend overblending. Once you kind of get your base in and you feel like you've got a good underpainting with value and color to start with, then I wouldn't use the chamois cloth method anymore. I think we have a tendency especially when we're beginner artists to overblend. And one of the reasons is there I am tapping again. Try not to blow your pastel painting. But one of the reasons I think is because sometimes when we blend, we're trying to correct something that you know we didn't do right. And I'm talking to myself too because I've done this and probably still do it sometimes. But it will muddy your painting. The pastels can take a bit of blending. But when you overblend, they not only get blended together and muddied. You know when we mix a lot of colors that get dull and muddy. But it crushes the little particles. Pastels have like these little crystal color particles in them. And when they get contaminated with a lot of other colors or pressed a lot, you lose that little glistening glorious quality of pastels. Now here's where I was saying I'm going to layer again over these mountains. We know that things cool off in the distance. So I wanted to give it a little bit of a lighter value and a cooler blue. And the reference image had a feeling of fog. It actually had a feeling of fog, I think in the background field. And I sort of give that impression later in the painting. I'm just softening the edges with my fingers very likely here just to get that mountain so it doesn't have a harsh edge or stark edge from the next mountain. Now here is the reference image. It is from unsplash.com. You know I've been loving the site for free reference images. And I just loved these flowers. Now I'm not going to paint all this detail. They're really the little pods or buds that come out are really uniquely shaped. But notice how it's an interesting combination between purple and blue, kind of like my last little tiny painting I uploaded. And I decided I was going to use some of these Mount Vision purple pastels. Now I bought a set that had only the ones on the left, the 920 to the 924. They used to have a little five set of purples. And I bought them. And I'm not sure if they have them, but you could buy just the individual pastels if you wanted. That's what I'll be using for this lesson. But this new set is a set of purples and magentas that's on dakota pastels.com. It's a new set of purples and magentas. Notice those nice neutral purples in the middle, the 600 series there. Oh my goodness, I think I might have to get those two. So you could buy this whole set from Dakota or you could buy just the purples I used or pick and choose whichever ones you want. Now here they are on the Dakota Pastels website. You can see that's like almost a hundred dollars for this set. So if you want to get some of the oh it's called the Violet set 25. But you might want to just pick and choose a few of them. I don't I don't think I used the lighter ones. I think I used 922. Let's see, does it go down or up? Yeah, I used the ones that are lower than that might have used 23. Maybe not. But I think it was 22, 20, 22, 21 and 20. Now of course I'm going to need some pretty blues and see that dark purple there. That's a Terry Ludwig. I'm going to use that dark purple. You know I usually go dark to light with flowers and lots of things. So that will go down first with some of these blues on top, a little lighter colors and also the Mount Vision purples, violets, whatever you want to call them that I used. Now from here forward, I'm going to add some music and speed this up a bit. And as I mentioned before, my patrons on my Patreon page will get the real time footage. As you can see, most of this thus far has been real time with lots of content. So don't feel left out Monet cafe. I just have to give my patrons a little bit more and so they get a lot more real content. So I won't speed it up too much that you can't follow. And I hope you enjoyed this lovely original music by Hannah McFarland. She's a young lady who writes original music and she gave me permission to share this in some of my painting videos. It's beautiful. It's called Simple Devotion. Enjoy and you know I'll be back at the end. Now we're back to some real time footage. I am really enjoying these long format paintings of fields. I have two more on the way and like I said in each one, I'll give you a little bit more on some of the specifics about the techniques and I think you should learn a lot. So if you paint from my video or my tutorial, I don't have many rules. I do ask that you tag me somehow or mention me. I love to see what you do. Thank you so much to those of you who are tagging me on Instagram. If you have not followed me on Instagram, you can find me at Susan Jenkins Artist. So please follow me. I would love it because I really love to see what you do. And if you're on Facebook and you'd like to follow my Facebook page, it is The Art of Susan Jenkins. So you can follow me there and again, you can share your artwork in the Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook. Oh my goodness. We're like, I don't even know how many thousand members we are. We're like maybe twelve thousand members there now all from this YouTube channel where people find the group on Facebook and I tell you what, if you want to learn more about pastel painting and really art in general, join that group. All you have to do is ask to join and answer a few questions. So there's so many resources for you to learn and most of all, I just love the camaraderie that we have and how even in our crazy COVID world, we can experience art together. You guys bless me. This channel blesses me and you know, I love bringing you these lessons so I hope you're enjoying and learning. Alright guys, until the next time, happy painting.