 Welcome to Monet cafe artistic friends and visitors. I'm artist Susan Jenkins We're gonna have a lot of fun with the snowman and snow tutorial and if you haven't already subscribed to this channel Please do so to keep more artistic lessons coming your way. Here is the sweet snow family I created the final painting and let's get started. I'll show you the supplies first I'm using a piece of pastel matte and Some Daylor Rowney acrylic ink. I love pastel matte for pastel paintings It does allow for some layering and this particular piece is from a pad of just white It does come in multiple colors But I like the flexibility of being able to tone the white surface to suit the painting now Of course with this being a snow painting or snowmen and snow I didn't want to work from a white surface which I rarely do and I thought I would tone it this pretty turquoise Daylor Rowney ink color because I wanted some Coolness to it, but I didn't want it so cold like a blue So the turquoise is kind of a little bit in between blue and green I did add water to the acrylic ink and it ended up drying a bit lighter than I originally intended But it still worked just the same now. I'm using just a piece of vine charcoal or willow charcoal I like using the bigger thicker pieces I feel like it helps for me to keep a real sketchy quality Plus they don't break as easy I try to hold my drawing implement or utensil in a way to keep a sketchy and artistic feel Also rather than working from a reference photo I decided to display the final painting for you guys to follow along with the original reference photo I wasn't positive on the copyright But I altered it a lot in Photoshop and with my imagination I flipped the image I cropped it I changed the background so it's altered enough So there's no issues, but I just didn't want to share the original photo Now if you're a patron of mine, I will share the original reference image within the Patreon post of this particular video and if you're not sure what a patron is of mine I have a patreon page and patreon is a neat way that people can support artists Musicians and more in order to help them keep their content coming improve things in my case improve my Equipment my videos and also to help me just keep these videos coming I love the communication I have with so many of you from all over the world and how often you don't have any other means To get art instruction, especially in these trying times now Let me talk a little bit more about what I'm doing here You can see the snowman the snow papa or daddy has two snowballs So does the baby and the mama has three and so when you sketch things in you can just be very Loose sketchy and not a lot of detail now here are the pastels I'm using now that might look like a lot of pastels But this is kind of my in-between set that I often use where I store my pastels In between different paintings that I'm doing as a temporary storage system before putting them into my studio palette And I find it's really practical for just grabbing because it often has just about every color and value I need for a painting now with this background you can see I already applied kind of a medium value blue And now I am applying a little bit of a darker value blue notice. These are more neutral. They're not super highly saturated colors and I imagined the darker blue background portion of being further away a little bit more in shadow and See how loose and sketchy I'm doing this all I'm doing is giving the suggestion of trees I wanted the background you can see the final painting here. I wanted it to not Grab so much attention that it stole from the main characters of this snow family And so I'm just keeping real loose sketches suggesting trees putting in some branches Hopefully in a way that doesn't detract from the snow people and I often try just like in photography I mean you don't want a tree coming out of somebody's head, you know, so you just Think about these things and gradually you kind of start to do them While not even thinking about it so once again the background should be loose painterly and A bit out of focus and you'll see I develop it more later but I wanted to get something in for contrast first and I used three different values of blues here and all of them were a bit more neutral that last one I used has a little bit more color to it and Really for the most part this is just a value study that I'm doing at the beginning and I'm using some of the same values that I used in the Background to establish the shadow side of the snow family now if you're wondering what is the shadow side? You can look usually at any image and see where is it lighter and where is it more in shadow? And then you can kind of know where the Sun is coming from and at this in this particular case the Sun is coming from the upper right area and therefore the shadows are going to be on the Left side of the snow family and blues are excellent for shadows and this being a snow scene and being cold That definitely works. So see how I'm working in shadowy areas a bit more where it would be further away from the Sun and also Underneath the base a little bit of the the base form of the snow people and also what I'm trying to accomplish Is the roundness or spherical quality of the snow people? And by using shadow I mean if any of you have ever done the little sketching type of Tutorials where you draw a sphere and you add the shadow. It's the same concept When you add the cast shadow and shadows in certain areas you definitely develop the illusion Of roundness now. I've got a little bit of a it's still a blue Um, remember with pastels you can layer so often I will get a darker value in first and then layer On the top so I know I'm going to come back on the right side of those snow people and add my highlights But I'm not super worried about that right now. I'm more interested in just getting an overall value study Overall for the whole painting before I get into any serious detail and I highly recommend that strategy If you want to keep a more painterly feel and have your painting feel more Believable, you know, it's really is a so much about getting the correct values in and that just means The lightness and darkness that scale from light to dark in a scene Now you probably notice I have portions of this sped up and I have it Pretty minimally sped up and just keep in mind that if you decide to follow along Um What I used to do um when I would follow tutorials Is just to pause the video watch a certain section pause it get to that point But my reason for speeding up portions is I think the final Painting was it was over an hour, but um Some of that was due to the fact that I did this as part of a Live stream test. Yes, I'm going to be bringing some live stream videos I'd like to have it be kind of like a paint along a casual experience Almost like a sketch and sip type of thing maybe on Friday evenings. And so I did two parts of this Um with my patrons. I had an unlisted live stream that they could access and see But I didn't make it public. So that's why um some of the video I've I've edited And if you see me talking my jaw moving a lot It's because I was talking during the the live stream and that's that's my goal That's what I'm going to be doing and hopefully you can still follow along even though it's sped up just a bit now I decided to give him a green hat even though in the original reference image. It was a blue hat And uh, we can do that we can break out our artistic license I wanted to make because the scene was so cold so much blue and coolness going on I wanted to have that pop of color in their attire, which is hats and scarves Also too with the little orange noses Now I am going to be adding some music in a bit and letting you guys just enjoy follow along if you like But also I wanted to share a little bit more Before that about painting in pastels in general if you've seen many of my tutorials You probably already know some of the things i'm about to say, but there are always some new people Tuning in falling in love with pastels. I love the fact that my videos Really have inspired and encouraged a lot of artists or want to be artists to try pastels There's such a great to me. I call it a user friendly medium. They don't dry up on you I love being able to hold them in my hands not having to use brushes Now you could see I was just adding I put in the pieces of coal for their eyes and the mouth And um, if you add a little bit of shadow imagine pushing a piece of coal into the snowball And you would create a little divot and there's going to be a little bit of a shadow around it And a highlight on the side where the sun is coming from So those little teeny things that you can do will increase the believability Of uh that illusion of something being three-dimensional rather than very flat now I'm kind of sketching in the scarf and um What we can do I wanted the scarves to be really up high around their chins like you're all bundled up Especially the little guy notice you can't even see his mouth. I just love that And um, so I'm just kind of using a pastel to sketch in the generalities of the scarf I changed the scarf a lot from the original um image that I saw to be Obviously a different color and also I wanted it to feel like the wind was blowing So the little guy in the middle I felt like he was kind of safeguarded between his mama and daddy So his scarf wasn't blowing as much But I gave some gestural marks and strokes to their scarves added some tassels And it gave that feeling of energy and movement Now in these next scenes that are about to come up, you're going to see the screen split into three sections It was part two of the livestream that I did and I didn't really have any way to crop it Any better for you guys to see me actually painting So you're going to see a view of my easel and myself from behind here as I'm working And this will actually be kind of the format of how the livestreams are going to work I'll paint for a while and like I did in this actual livestream sample I'll paint for a while then I'll come up and talk to you guys read your chats Answer any questions I can and then get back to painting I think it'll be a really neat format where I can engage with you guys Live is always fun anyway, you know, so I just really am excited about this So hopefully by the beginning of the year, I'll be able to start offering that and I'd love your comments and suggestions as to What I'm thinking maybe Friday afternoons I don't know maybe Saturdays and I know we have people not only in different time zones here in the united states But people all over the world. So I know it's not going to work for everybody, but I'll do my best All right, so now I wanted you to notice that when I did the scarves I typically put a darker value down first and then I add the lighter color And value on top of it And I've found that you really can get away with less information than you typically think you need It's just suggesting things and that way it keeps that painterly style So in this image, what was the focal point to me? It was kind of their faces and those scarves So I wanted to make sure they got the most contrast brightest color And in this case I am making instead of making the dad's scarf blue like it was in the reference image I decided to make her scarf not quite blue But more of a a teal maybe to go along Harmonize a little bit with that original kind of turquoise teal background color So again, I'm putting down the dark. I'm using this pastel kind of to sketch in her hat It kind of looks like it was a hat with a little brim over her Face if you see in the final painting and then it also looked like she had on like some ear muffs Or either the hat had a little ball on it. So I just suggested I don't have to spell everything out And then I will gradually work and Move from that darker value to that brighter More highly saturated kind of pretty teal blue color And now once again because I want the focal point to be more of Primarily their faces their scarves After I apply this blue. This is kind of a medium dark value I go back in with a prismacolor new pastel. It's I or well not yet I'm actually kind of reestablishing her face. I knew it needed to be a little bit wider sticking out and that second ball was a little bit Too thin So that's the neat thing about pastels with this layering ability. Like I said, this pastel matte paper is perfect for that You have those options. There is the little spruce blue prismacolor new pastel And I'm using that to establish a little bit more shadow underneath the hat And maybe a little bit darker values in some of the folds of the scarf Now that backside where that earmuff is was definitely going to be darker It's more in shadow on that left side Underneath areas of the scarf and you see how just that little bit of contrast You don't want to overdo it or have really solid lines. I try to do broken lines and sketchy quality lines And once again establish some gestural strokes For the scarf blowing in the wind, but you see how that little bit of contrast causes your eye to go right there Now here's that pretty blue. It's such a pretty color. It's kind of just I love colors that are in between I love a periwinkle that is in between purple and blue And uh, this one's just kind of that neat in between a blue and a green Um, which is just really pretty So I'm just with the scarves too Imagine that scarves and these hats that are like toboggan's they're made kind of out of yarn So when you get your darker value down, you can just kind of add little Little kind of zigzaggy marks in places and it really does give that feeling of a What do they call it like weaving like crocheting or whatever? There's just little parts of fabric that are on top and lighter and brighter than others Oh, I'm talking to my patrons there But again, this is kind of going to be the live format that we'll be getting hopefully soon And at this point I was pretty much done with the Part two of the live stream experiment and then I did part three. Actually, I just recorded the footage So you'll see the screen change again in a minute. Actually, you might even be able to see better So enjoy this. Didn't I say I was going to add some music? Let's add some lovely Christmas music Hopefully I've given enough instruction at this point for you to learn something maybe follow along and again If you're a patron of mine You'll get the image the reference image of the final painting The reference image that I used and you'll also be able to share your work if you follow along with this tutorial patrons In our homework album. And if you're patron listening if you're new patron Just so you know, I always have the link to your homework album within the post that you will see Okay, so that was to my patrons. All right. So now here's the point that I'm at when I started part three enjoy this music and Don't go away because I'm going to be sharing with you the technique I used for creating this snow in the scene Which really just set it off All right, enjoy and I'll be back now that I have my snow family Established I'm going to work a little bit more on the background now It's already pretty loose, but I'm adding in just a little bit more interest with some suggestive branches And giving a little bit more value. I decided to make that area behind the mama snow lady Feel like it was going back a little bit further in the distance like the ground. There's maybe a trail back there And so I'm just trying not to make it too busy And then I go in and soften things with a little bit of almost like sky holes behind They're pretty bare in trees anyway But it gives a little bit more interest if I add some different values And I added some purples in there a little bit more of that periwinkle And the goal is to make this not the focal point and thus that's why it's very Suggestive and I know I'm going to be adding snow on top of it. Anyway, I decided to put a little bit of a cooler green Just suggesting maybe a little bit of the green showing through on some evergreen trees back there And now let's add some snow to this scene I've laid my painting flat and I'm using a kitchen grader with some different values of pastels now You might think well snow is white. Let's just use white But I am using different values because snow is different colors based on whether it's in the shadow or in the sunlight And so I'm just kind of working around areas using the larger greater holes to get some bigger chunks of snow And the smaller greater holes to get that More blizzardy feeling of snow where it's um A little bit more compact with smaller particles And so I'm just kind of artistically working it around with some of the different values of the A little bit more of a lavender color Blue periwinkle blue and then I use the lightest one That's kind of my warm white that I I added a little bit of that warm white on the sides of the snow people I didn't comment on that before but that added like the sunlight part Some warmth to it on the on the sunny side of the snow family So I just continue to add it as I think it needs it and then if I get a piece That's a little bit too large. Sorry for my camera shaking I can use my xacto blade to break it up to sign kind of gently move it around in different areas And then when I'm happy with The general snow application I take a piece of tracing paper or glass scene And I lay it over the snow family and I use anything that has a flat round surface a rolling pen in this case A yankee candle. Oh this candle smells so good. And so I'm speeding this up But I roll it in multi directions. What's interesting is it kind of makes a ghost image of the painting on the other side That's kind of neat. So now by rolling the snow in this technique I am able to lift it up and none of it fell off So it is ready to display frame and enjoy I will have this painting available in my etsy shop and also patrons remember to share your creations in the homework album I hope you enjoyed that and Merry Christmas to all and as always happy painting