 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. You got 30 minutes? Well come paint with me in this tutorial that actually took less than 30 minutes. In this lesson I'm actually focusing on neutrals. It was this month's theme in Monet Café and I'll show you how you can use some neutral colors to lay the foundation, which will actually cause the brilliant pink floral colors to pop in this floral landscape. So come join the painting fun in this real time, less than 30 minute pastel painting tutorial. It would be awesome if you would go ahead and like this video just so you don't forget. Subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and if you hit that bell icon you'll be notified of all of my future videos and I'd love it if you'd consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. For only $5 a month you can support this channel which keeps the free videos coming to people all over the world who have no other resource for art education and you get extra goodies. The reference image is from unsplash.com and I will have a clickable link to that photo in the description of this video. Now let's talk about these supplies. This is Strathmore pastel paper. It's an unsanded surface. It comes in this pad with various colors all also nice and neutral colors and what I'm doing now is I'm going to tape my pastel paper to a piece of black foam core board. I love my artist tape and my limb tape dispenser. It's so handy. By the way you can find so many of my studio tools and things you see in my videos in my Amazon shop. I have that link in every video but why am I doing this? Well because I'm working flat this is for filming purposes. I sometimes take my board outside to knock off some of the pastel dust. Now this is just a matte like you would matte a painting in a frame and I love these sizes. It's really for a five by seven the inner dimensions but the outer dimensions have to happen to be eight by ten. It's really perfect for just marking off an easy and quick eight by ten format and I like working in standard sizes because it makes it easy for you or your purchaser to find frames. Now here's a tray of neutrals. My palette system in my home studio is actually a set of drawers. This is one of five drawers but I'm also going to be using these neutrals. That was my neutral drawer there. You can see the name on the drawer to the right but that little set is the Jack Richardson hand rolled color wheel neutrals. We just had somebody win that set recently this past month. Now this is a Prismacolor new pastel. The color is 305P for Prismacolor and I love this little hard pastel Prismacolor new pastels they're called. They are really great for sketching and getting in under paintings. You can liquefy them as you can with all kinds of soft pastels but sadly why did new pastel Prismacolor stop carrying spruce blue it's called 305. I don't know why. I love this color and so do many artists. By the way Dakota pastels Dakota pastels.com if you go to Prismacolor new pastels section of their website they have alternatives to this spruce blue. That was so nice of them for artists like me who really like that color. So you can see that's the only part I sped up about this video was just that little sketch but really all I did was use the pastel to block in big shapes using the side and then I blended with my finger. By the way I apologize for not having the reference image in this footage. Often I'll superimpose it over the video. I didn't have room. I zoomed in so much with this. Now these are the nice neutral colors. You're gonna watch me all real time from here on out. You're gonna watch me lay down a neutral base and again I have that other video if you're a little foggy about what neutral colors are. They're basically just kind of lackluster colors. They're a little dull little dead looking. They're not real vibrant and I use all neutral colors a neutral palette to get what's called an underpainting. It's like a painting under a painting. You basically are getting in your general values and colors then you start adding your details and I'm keeping this initial part primarily neutral. I happen to love this neutral color I have in my hand here. It's kind of a purple gray. It works really nice for distant trees. By the way if you're a newbie artist let me just talk a little bit about general values when you're getting in the initial stages of a painting. The darkest value. Value just means the scale from dark to light. The darkest values are almost always in a landscape painting. Gonna be your trees and things in the very immediate foreground. If you've got some really deep grasses things like that. Now what happens with value is as distance increases value gets lighter and the reason is there's air in between you and distant objects. It's called aerial perspective. So and also another thing that happens as distance increases things get further away in other words colors decrease in saturation or intensity. They get more neutral. So that's one wonderful thing about having some neutrals in your palette is they're really great for things that are far away and that's also due to aerial perspective with air being in the way. Colors lose their vibrancy. You just can't see color that far away very well. Notice often that I just turn my pastels on the side when I'm painting and just block in big shapes. The best strategy at the beginning of a painting is not too much detail. I mean or any detail really. This is what's called blocking in. You're getting in your biggest shapes, your general shapes, your values and a general color palette. In this case of course neutrals. And my point with this neutral foundation or underpainting is to prove that neutrals actually have a lot of power. They are going to be what allows your punchy colors or your vibrant colors to really stand out. If I had put down a very vibrant underpainting with like just some really bold bright colors, well then the brilliant pinks I'm going to add would be competing with the other vibrant paintings or colors in the painting. So that is one neat advantage about creating neutrals in your initial stages as an underpainting. See look at all these muted colors. Aren't they pretty? This is a really pretty warm green. It's a little darker, middle dark, and it's just such a nice green color for some of the foreground grasses and just some of the trees. Now it's a little bit too warm for me to put in those background trees. And the reason for that is once again due to aerial perspective. This is the third thing I'm mentioning, the third principle of what happens when things are far away. Remember the first one? Values are going to get lighter in the distance. So if you've got a dark tree in the foreground, your tree is going to be a little lighter in the middle ground and then even a little lighter in the distant background. And the next thing I mentioned is that color kind of loses its punch as distance increases. You might have a really bright, gorgeous red flower in the foreground. And as it recedes, it's going to just dull out a little and even more so as distance increases. They're going to get a little more neutral. And the third thing is again about some of the greens, even though they were very neutral that I was putting on those trees. The reason I didn't take that warm green to the very distant tree, that last level of trees back there, the little one in the back, is because color also gets cooler in the distance once again due to the phenomenon of aerial perspective. Those are three things that you learn those and you really have a great painting foundation already. I was just testing some purples and I decided that's that little Jack Richardson color wheel neutral set. I love Jack Richardson hand rolled pastels. They're just yummy. They apply so nicely. And I decided I'm going to go ahead and start with my pinks first. So I went and gathered a combination of, now would you think, are these neutral? No, these are very punchy and pretty pinks. And I'm keeping my pinks rather cool. Or you could say they're cool reds. They're not real warm. They're not like brick or apple red. Pinks are really a cool red. Now I'm getting in a little bit more of kind of some neutral areas where I know I'm going to lay some of my flowers down. It's kind of a little roadmap as to where I'm putting some of my flowers. Now I typically work dark to light. These flowers, again, I apologize for not having the reference image up here. You can pull it up. Click the link in the description and you can look at it while I'm painting. You can print it out. That's the great thing about unsplash.com. The images are from photographers or regular people that don't have a copyright claim to them. So you can paint and not worry about it. You can share it. You can sell it. It is nice to share it with the photographer, though. I do that not all the time, but they always like it when I say, hey, look, I used your photo in a painting video. And they're always very grateful and happy. So I'm getting in the darker values first. The reason is, things tend to, when we layer values, they tend to have darker undertones or undervalues, and then you gradually lay your lighter and brighter values on top. And also too, it has to do with color contrast. If I just put down, let's say I picked that really bright pink over there to the left of me, the bottom one there, and I just use all of those everywhere for those pink flowers. Without that rich, darker color underneath, they're really not going to vibrate and sing and shout like they can when you have a little bit of color contrast down. Now, I like to add purples. Anything you get in shadowy areas, often you can use purples or blues, and it adds a little color interest. Even if you don't see it in the reference image or in real life, if you're painting from real life, it's always a cool color that you can use to add in the shadows that makes your painting fun. Now, the style of this painting is obviously quite impressionistic. That's how I roll anyway. And, you know, what's neat is this is the second in a row of paintings that I've done on unsanded paper. Now, if you're brand new to pastel painting, you may be like, what the heck is sanded paper? Well, I had no idea what sanded paper was when I first started painting. And I quickly learned because I started working on papers similar to this. And I was not getting the results that a lot of pastel artists I was looking at. This is way before YouTube. I had to work so hard to learn to paint online. I'm self-taught, by the way, all everything I learned online, except for one pastel painting course I had a few years ago. So if I can do it, you can do it. But I was frustrated because I couldn't get the color. I couldn't accomplish what I needed to. And a lot of it was because I was using the wrong techniques. But it's also because unsanded papers like this don't allow you to get many layers. In other words, I'm going to probably be able to get about seven layers on this surface, meaning one color on top of another color. After that, if that, I'm going to do a little trick in a minute. You'll see me do that gives it's kind of a little cheater way to get an extra layer. So I'll show you that in just a second. But after you overlayer and your paper has gotten where it can't handle anymore, what happens is your colors start blending together and getting muddy. You're going to lose your color vibrancy. And that's what happened to me when I was first painting. I was comparing my work and I was like, why is my work not looking like theirs? That was one of the main reasons is that I was over layering and I was on a surface that couldn't handle it. Also another thing I was using student grade pastels. Now, if you're going to scrimp on anything in starting your pastel painting journey, try not to scrimp on the quality of the pastels. And I'm going to I'm going to create a actually I already have a beginner pastel painting section. They're called idealist in my Amazon shop. You can go on there and check out some of the pastels I recommend. All right, now here's the little trick I was telling you. I'm going to use this fixative. It's called Blair low odor fixative. I actually already did. I took it outside and I sprayed it. Now it darkened the painting, right? Can you tell it looks darker? What it did though is it gave me a little coating on I just did it kind on that lower section, a little coating that's going to allow for me to get some extra layers. Now, one of the most common questions, probably the most common question I get is how do you protect your pastel painting at the end? Do you spray it with fixative? A lot of artists have heard that you spray your pastel painting and it protects it from smudging. Well, it might. It really doesn't protect it all that much, but it darkens your final painting. Just like you see what happened here. It's fine if you use it during the working stages as a means to get another layer, but I highly recommend not spraying your painting at the end. I never spray mine at the end. I protect my paintings in these clear bags. I get them from www.clearbags.com. I have a section I go to. It's like artists and photographers and then I get the protective closure bags and you get them in all different sizes. I buy them a little larger than standard sizes because I'll paint something typically in a standard size and I like a little extra room to be able to slide the painting in. But I also cut a piece of foam core board to fit. I will slide the foam core. I have a video on this whole process. Let me make a note. I'm going to try to put that video. Let me write that down. Storage and shipping is the I think it's what it's called. And I put the foam core board in it, then I put the painting in it, then I seal it up and it is ready to be shipped. It can be handled. You can take it to little shows. People can look at it and that's how I protect my pastel paintings. And it's been a great method for me for many years. All right. So as you can see, I've been layering these lovely luscious scrumptious pinks and I am using various pastels I've accumulated over the years. Don't get frustrated if you don't have all these colors. Just do your best. I totally remember just having a few sets of pastels and you just you do what you can with what you have and then you just keep on learning and building upon that knowledge. Now what I'm trying to do right here, I'm I'm layering some of the distant land and hills in the back are going to get a light glazing of green in the for like that distant flat land that's kind of rolling back there. By the way, some of the lighter elements in a painting, when it comes to values, your sky is almost always the lightest element. And then flat grasses, especially in the distance, they're going to be lighter in value. Now my foreground is dark because I have a lot of deep grasses like your the photographer was down on the ground when they took this photo. So you're getting a lot of the shadowy areas in those grasses and I'm gradually getting a little warmer as I'm moving forward. Remember colors get warmer in the foreground. Again, keep in mind what element you're working on grasses is a great example. They're going to just kind of cool off in the distance and be a little warmer green in the foreground. Now I loved the pink flowers and I kind of liked that pretty bluish sky that it was kind of like a blue lavender sky I got in. But the reason I wanted to add some of this pink is I've just learned over the years and kind of gotten a habit of wanting my painting to be very cohesive. And because there are pink flowers in the painting, I wanted to bring in a little warmth into that sky. I didn't want to have a cold sky and warm flowers. So I'm just kind of scumbling in a little bit of a it's what's called a fractured sky. And what that means is you're using different chunks of color in little scumbling markmaking with different colors, but kind of the same value. So you use like two or three values that are similar in different colors. So mine was kind of lavender pinks and blues. And it gave the sky I'll develop it a little more as I go, but it gave the sky a little more interest. By the way, I have another video, one of my most popular videos, one of them, it's up there in the top 10 for sure. It's basically 12 different markmaking techniques. Let me write that one down to include in this video. And what it does is it takes you through 12 different ways to make marks differently. One of them is that fractured technique of layering down different colors of the same value. You'll learn a whole lot in that video. So you're just watching this gradually develop again. It's all real time here. And this painting took around 30 minutes. So you can accomplish something relatively quickly. And one of the advantages about unsanded surfaces for me anyway, is because I know I'm not going to be able to get a lot of layering. I tend to work more impressionistic, painterly and abstract. And I I tend to not overwork my painting because I know I'm not going to be able to get a lot of layers down. So it's really for me a neat way to play. You don't stress out as much either because the paper is a lot less expensive. Now, one of the advantages about some of the sanded papers, a lot of them actually is many of them that are water friendly. You can literally wash them off. You can I usually dust if I have a painting I'm not happy with or one that I've had around for a long time, I can take it outside. I scrub it off with a stiff bristle brush. And so I'm not breathing the pastel dust. That's why I do it outside. Then I bring it back in and literally put it in my kitchen sink and wash it off, hang it up to dry or lay it, let it dry and then lay it flat to keep it flat. And voila, you can paint again. So even though the surfaces are expensive, you can get a lot of use out of them and repurpose them. All right, so see how I've gradually started going dark to light. And I love with fields of flowers like this. Trust me, when I first got started, my flowers, they were so boring. We don't want patterns when we have flowers or everything all in a row or equidistant apart. It's very boring and it's very unlike nature. Nature just has this spontaneous beauty. And often things are in little groupings and they're random and they're varied. But I love to make my groupings in a way to where they have a purpose. And the purpose almost always, I kind of have a theme in my floral paintings, they always seem to be reaching up and trying to see what's maybe somewhere beyond the horizon or just over the grasses. I feel flowers seem very hopeful and rejoicing and praising the day and praising the Lord. So that's almost always how I'm feeling when I'm creating a painting. And you'll see whenever you look at the reference image, my image is not an exact duplicate by any means of the photo. I use it as inspiration and the longer you paint, the more you start to develop your own style and you can interpret the landscape rather than photocopy it or photorealism created as an artist. Now, I am adding a few little pops of dark here and there, not everywhere, because if it's everywhere, it's nowhere. I heard Marla begetta say that an artist that she's fantastic. So in other words, if you put the same thing in a lot of places, it's lost its impact. Your viewer is just going to be looking at that all over the place, rather than strategic places that enhances your focal point. I love to pop flowers over the horizon line just to have a few that say, hey, I am really stretching up high. That's the overachiever flower right there. So just going to continue to develop it. What am I at now? I'm about 21 minutes into this. So I think I'm going to add a little light music for your viewing pleasure. And don't go anywhere. By the way, let me know what you learned in this. I'd love to see your comments and also tell me anything else you would like to see what you enjoyed about this video. This is how I've learned to how to make Monet Cafe. My channel, my videos is from your suggestions. Early on, I got so much constructive feedback that helped me to know how what you wanted and what worked for you. So please let me know what you thought. Let me know recently, the last video, I said something about jabbering a lot. And somebody said, I love it when you talk. That just blessed me so much that it meant that means you're learning. And and I'm not just jabbering. Hopefully there's some useful content. All right, so let me some feedback. I'd appreciate that. Also become a patron. Let me share real quickly a little bit more about what it means to be a patron of mine on my Patreon page. It was a couple of years ago that one of my viewers here on Monet Cafe said you should start a Patreon page. I wasn't even sure what Patreon was, but it's just a platform, a means where people can support creators for creative content or different people that have different talents and you can set whatever level, you know, the subscription is per month. And it was a way that people can support this channel, but not only support this channel to keep free videos coming, which is a blessing. A lot of people just they support the channel. They they don't care about the extra content, but you also get extra content. My Patreon family is a beautiful family. I get to see your work. We have contests. I get to critique your paintings and give you helpful feedback and suggestions. We have various different sharing platforms and groups and just too many other things to mention, but we have a beautiful family. And that's who I communicate most with is my patrons. I see your messages the most and get to know you more. So and it's been a very important thing for me. You know, God just works in the neatest ways. My husband and I both lost our jobs due to COVID. I had a bookkeeping business that was affiliated with the school system and because of that problem with COVID, I lost that he lost his corporate job. And so the fact that I had started a Patreon page became such a crucial part of just me making art my primary income. So just thank you. Thank you so much to the faithful, beautiful people. But it's not just me. It's helping. It's helping artists all over the world. One day I want to accumulate many of the comments I get from artists who say, in my country, I would have no way to learn how to paint. Not only not the financial means to do so, but nowhere to go, nowhere to learn. So these YouTube videos that show up in other countries is such a blessing to so many people. So God bless you. Thank you for that. That was a long tangent on that. But sometimes I just like to tell you what it's all about. All right, I'm going to add some music now and I'll be back at the end. I really enjoyed this painting experience. It's always a blessing for me when I can just have a moment where I can create a painting in one sitting and I put on praise and worship music or instrumental music and usually just grab myself a cup of tea and also light a candle or have my essential oils burning and it just creates such a beautiful mood to paint by. Here is the final again on very affordable, unsanded paper. And I hope you enjoyed this painting experience with me. Please let me know if you did in the comments. Feel free to recreate from this tutorial. I love it when you do that and I'd love it if you'd share it with me. If you share it on social media such as Instagram, you can tag me at Susan Jenkins Artist. And if it's on Facebook, you can tag me at the art of Susan Jenkins. You can find me at all of those links you see on this end screen. Again, you can become a patron, check out more videos, subscribe and be sure to look in the description of this video for all of the products, reference images, etc. All right, my friends, God bless and happy painting.