Hi there.

Today, I thought we'd try something a little bit more interesting.

So let's break away from the beach and the sand and try to paint something a little bit more practical.

Like this field that we are standing on.

Sounds like a challenge.

Well, are you thinking, how can I make grass look interesting for us?

Well, again, as we said, this is a challenge.

Find out with me.

Let's go back to the studio, because it's time to paint with pastels, Hello friends and welcome back to our show, Painting of Pastels.

My name is Frantz Coulanges.

You remember when we went back to that place, the art store, where we picked up our boxes of pastels?

Remember that we mentioned we have the hard pastel in all soft pastels.

Well, we have all of them here.

You could also select the one that is for professionals, even if you're not there yet, because this one would have all of the colors.

But we are sticking to the basics here because we want you to be able to create the most with the least amount of pastels.

As you can see here, we have four basic sets, and from this one, we're going to create a landscape today, something that is so common in the Virgin Islands.

Let us see.

Green.

Tons of greens.

We have greens and we have blues here.

So we're going to start with our sky.

I am picking up this blue, this light blue and the white here.

Let us start with our sky area here.

Now, today we are going to create this landscape, as I mentioned before, and the sky is going to be right here for me.

Now, this is the only amounts that I want to be for the sky.

We're going to have some trees here, and I'd like a nice little winding road right here.

So this should be an interesting one for us today.

So let's see if I have this here.

Going to add another shade of blue here.

Again, the beauty of pastels, We're not drawing we're not doing a drawing here.

We're doing a painting.

So as you can see, we started with the blue.

And I will put some of my clouds right here.

Basically, the idea, what I want to do here today, I'm going to have the mountains set right here like this, and we're going to have some trees like this here.

And I want to I want a winding road to come this way like this here, just to show you where we going, because you don't always need a map.

Sometimes you're going for a stroll and I want the winding road to be like this here.

And then we'll have some trees here.

So not getting ahead of ourselves, we going to put some clouds here again, not too much.

I have the black pastel here.

This is going to serve as my background because I know the mountain range is going to be here.

We have so many beautiful mountains that we get to look at in the Virgin Islands.

So this serves as a background for me because once I'm filling it in, I don't have to do too much.

That's the lazy man's approach to it.

Mountain is going to be here and I'm going to have my tree right here, some grass right here on this side, and then some more trees right here.

So let's see what we can make out of all of this here.

And then, of course, we'll do the blending later, because that's where the fun part is.

So far, Mountain, I'm going to touch up a little on the purple.

Why be conventional?

Let's go crazy with this.

Let's see where it's going to lead us.

Just touch up a little purple here.

So I'm going to have a lot of green, and I want to distinguish one from the other here.

And again, go light because you don't want a messy painting.

The darker you go with, the less amount of pastel that you'll be able to add on top of it afterwards.

Now, if you want to do the on the drawing in hard pastel, you can always add the soft pastel on top of it to complement it later on.

But if you put the soft fast else, the hard pastel is not going to go on top of it.

And of course, the difference is very clear.

If I can show you here, this will be a soft pastel.

This will be the one.

Now, you have this is the hard, smaller and much harder.

And then you have the soft one.

Now, again, we just touched up a mountainous range right here.

Now I am going to select my green, starting with the darker green here.

This is where, again, from the distance, the trees don't have to show that much.

You can just suggest in the highlight and of course, nothing is showing here yet because we haven't started blending yet.

But this will change and my is going to be here and said since it's that close, we can do the leaves and everything else after.

So this is going to be a mostly green painting with everything.

So right now we just suggesting until we start with the colors.

Okay, we mentioned that we have a winding road that we outline right here.

This is going to be hit right here.

Now, let's start giving it some shape first.

Then we'll see where this can take us.

Now, I'm going to start with my clouds because this is the lightest color.

I don't want anything else tainting it.

Again, we're doing puffy clouds later circles around so that they blend nice and easy.

Perfect.

Now I'm just going to blend the sky around it.

Just like that.

You need to be free.

I'll start thinking, Well, if I'm going to go down, how come I don't see the road yet?

It's okay.

It's okay.

Take your time.

Take it easy.

Okay.

We can touch up the sky later.

Now we going to make the mountain that we designed with the purple and the green.

Same principle as the clouds, because we have trees there.

So we just kind of do a little circles around.

And then we're going to touch it up later.

One of the advice that I mentioned in the beginning is to make sure that your studio is a large space.

If you don't have a studio that's large enough.

Make sure that you paint with your pencil outside because the dust for the pastels needs to go someplace.

And if you're in a small room and you're close, then you're going to be breathing.

That does that's not good for you.

Make sure that you're in a large space, large open space and outdoor if you can, too.

That's okay.

Okay, perfect.

Now I have the space where my mountain is going to go.

I know exactly what's going to go here.

I can go back and we touch it with that same green.

Now, remember, we had some purple underneath.

We're not going to destroy all that purple.

Cover it up.

We just kind of complement it a little bit in accents around it, touching it up, small circle around it.

Okay, Now I want to blend the section and so that I could go ahead with my trees because I know that there's going to be lots of green here.

So I'm just blending the green that I have here over the black that I set up in the beginning.

So because I want that to be all green, so is it looking like a big mass of green?

That's okay because it is pastel.

We're going to make it whatever we want to make it.

We've got the time.

Blending with two fingers covers a large area for me.

Now I'm just touching up that area there where I have the little road that's going to be in the middle of this forest here.

Great.

Perfect.

Now, if we're going to give this shape and make it into what we want.

So first we're going to put our tree bark right here.

And again, when you started drawing, when you were little and they asked you to make a tree, you just did a stick going up like this, it doesn't not have to be the case.

Right.

Because trees can take many shapes and they can curve with time.

So you want to give it some interesting shapes and curves.

That is okay, you can do that and not forget.

You can always add your shadows to everything that's you do.

One side just like that.

You're not limited.

You can always add whatever thin tone or texture you want to it.

There we go.

We have this here, so we just going to touch this just so that we have our tree bark right here.

Everything coming together just like that.

Now, same thing I'm going to do on this side here, because we promised some trees on this side.

We just putting them right here all alongside the road.

And remember, this is not only important because they're going to be covered with the leaves, but this principle we talked about for perspective, the further you go, the smaller the object gets.

So you have your tall trees on the front.

And as you move further away, you have this smallest one down there.

So we're just going to give them the shape first before we cover them.

Shadows always.

That helps accentuate your painting.

And we just kind of touch it up briefly thinking that way we can have just a section that we need not too much.

There we go.

Now we can highlight this.

My road here.

So much we can do of this.

And that is what is so exciting because we are not limited.

Okay, now's the fun part.

We are going to add leaves to our trees.

Now the green I'm breaking it again.

That way I could have the texture that I need.

I'm using the side here and I'm just touching the pastel on the board and twisting it like this because again, I want to give the illusion of leaves here.

It's okay to cover your branches, the one that you've worked so hard at making.

Not all of it.

You can leave some to show that there are branches underneath, and then we can add the smaller ones for the smaller part that keep it together.

Don't go all over the place.

You got to give each one of them the individuality and I'll show you how you can add to that in a minute.

Jumping from tree to tree.

Because remember, we have to finish this painting in less than 30 minutes.

So the more time you have, the more time you have for details.

There we go.

Now, taking the lighter green, breaking it again, and we just going to do some accent where the light is coming from here and some yellow.

So from a distance, this could be anything.

This these could be daisies or whatever.

Yellow plants.

Remember, you can do whatever you want to.

And if I want some flamboyant setting for these trees here, I can make them flamboyant trees from a distance.

Sure, why not?

And again, I could have some other flowers growing up from here.

Now for the fronts, since I have some time, can I break the black pastel here?

And I want to make something interesting right here so that it captures your attention from the front, blended in with my fingers.

It's nice background for it.

And of course I'm going in it again over it with my green.

There we go.

So much you can do with pastel because you have layers touching the top with my lighter green.

So it's and then blending it all together.

This is of course, once you're done blending, you can highlight just like that.

Now there we go.

I can add some picket fences here.

Remember, you start small and as you get closer, give them more space and you make them taller.

It's okay.

It's one thing we could do this.

We have this small piece of pastel there.

We could have some shadows going from this tree across the road, and that would be fine.

There we go.

Okay.

All right.

We almost there.

So all that is left for us now is to sign up a name, and then we have a painting made.

I will put it right there.

F - R - A - N - T and Z.

There you have it.

Friends, we have a painting that we made using our soft pastel box of a landscape, something that we see a lot in the Virgin Islands.

Hope that you made it with us of that you were able to rise above this challenge.

So we'll see you next time.

One even bigger challenge next time friends.

Funding for this program is provided in part by the Virgin Islands Council of the Arts.