 What do you do when it's late at night? You need a video ready for the morning and you have been trying to watercolor your favorite photo reference all day long and it just won't work. What do you do? Yeah, I have to get something done. You get out a different medium. This video is dedicated to all of those who think I walk on water because I see your comments. Is there nothing you can't draw or paint? Yes, and this photo is it. I have had this photo in my little photo album where I collect things and paint my photo. I've had it there for years and I try painting it every year and this year was no different. I failed at it again. I was just not able to paint it. I tried all day on Monday. I was painting all morning and could not for the life of me get anything going. I could paint the leaf. I could paint the cones, whatever they are and I could paint the background but I couldn't do all three in one painting. There's always something that completely screwed up. And I started feeling terrible about myself because there's nothing like wanting desperately to get something to work and having it not work. That happens to all of us and sometimes it's that the subject matter is just too hard and I think given that I've tried this for years that's possible. I also need to work on some techniques that I think now I have a better idea what I wanna do. So I'm probably gonna try it again. I'm gonna get back on the horse but by 4.30 in the afternoon I had decided instead of trying to watercolor it again I was going to create this in pastels. And this pastel study has actually taught me some things that I wanna try in watercolor because I worked out some of the color issues that I was having when I was painting and I'm not sure how I'll create them in watercolor but at least I know what I wanna create. So if you're frustrated, if you hit the wall with something that you're trying to paint you're trying to draw in whatever the medium is it's okay to say, you know this one's just tough right now it's kicking my butt and I'm gonna move on. You can either move on to a different subject matter in the same medium if you're a one medium person or it just switched to a different medium like I did. It's no failure to just be able to say, yep, I didn't do that one well and I'm gonna go back and try it again another time but it's not working for today. Now for me, some days just aren't watercolor days because no matter what I do I can't make my brush do what I want it to. And maybe I've just been doing pastel for the last month and my hand forgot how to paint. Now I did a watercolor sketch in my last video so that's probably not completely true but it's always hard to say what it is that makes you have a good day or a bad day with your medium but in any case it doesn't mean you're not an artist if you have a bad one. Now I have to say when I had that many failures with the watercolor I started having my doubts about myself but this drawing in pastel really brought me back to, okay, I can do this, I can handle this because you get that little doubt in your mind and you have to somehow figure out how to deal with it and for me it's just getting back on that horse. I know a lot of people will say if you're having a hard day just go for a walk get out of the studio. For me that doesn't work because what I end up with is carrying that feeling of being a failure as an artist into whatever else it is that I'm doing and I find it really hard to get back into the studio the next time because I'm worried that that's gonna happen again. It's a lot better for me to just switch mediums, sometimes switch the whole subject matter but do something else, make something else so I can prove to my brain that it was just that one thing, I'm still an artist and sometimes we have to play games with our brains so if you're that kind of person don't feel bad if you have to do a little something to try to get your head wrapped around the fact that you're still an artist even after a bad day you're still an artist. Now you might be surprised that I'm using pastels here because I don't really have pastels much on this channel. I think I have one other pastel video, maybe two but I have been working with pastels for the last month or so in anticipation of taking some commissions in December. I've talked about that before and today was gonna be the day that I was going to start accepting applications for commissions. I was very excited. I have a bunch of samples done. I can't wait to show them to you but I had a little tech issue that came up this morning. It was crazy. I woke up and I had like 400 emails from my website. There was like one of those robots, internet robots that found the form. It's on a hidden page but it found it and filled out the form 400 times with gibberish in it. Now there's no way it can hack into my system or anything. It just like pounded that page and kept filling out the form and I changed the captcha to something else. There's all different types of captchas. So I changed it and like six hours later it came back and did it again. So I changed the captcha again to a different kind trying to outwit this thing and so far it seems to be working but I decided I didn't want to launch the form and the application for commissions until I was sure that that was settled because then I'll have 400 emails from it and then like two emails from clients and that would be weird. So I'm gonna try on Saturday instead to talk more about the commissions but if you have questions about commissions you can leave them in the comments on this one. I will tell you a few things because I've had a few places I've posted about the commissions and I've had some questions one of which was why am I doing pastel commissions and not like watercolor or Copic markers or something and there's very good reasons. One, Copic markers are not light fast and I'm not gonna sell you a piece of artwork for a commission price that's gonna fade. And if you ever try to sell something like that you have to let the client know because it's not fair you charge them a lot of money for your drawing and then it disappears on their wall. So there's that. And then I also wanted to do it in pastels because I can work fairly quickly in pastels. This drawing took me maybe five hours or something like that and I've been practicing pet portraits and those are taking five or six hours or whatever I guess depending on what size different ones take different amounts of time but if I were to try pencil drawing, color pencil drawing it would take way longer than that. I can cover more real estate with the pastel more quickly especially when we're talking backgrounds and everything and doing fur and that kind of stuff the blending is faster with pastels plus these are all mom's pastels from the 50s she sent me the ones that you see here on camera a long time ago and I've used them some but they kind of arrived in tiny pieces as you can see they're really small and those tiny pieces are okay to work with but now I have the rest of her pastels as well so if one of these colors runs out I have more selection I can choose from because when I went home in September she gave me the entire case of them because she's decided at her age she's not gonna be taking up pastels anymore so I wanna use hers and I wanna make a lot of art with them sooner rather than later because I wanna share with her what I'm making and I want her to know that her art supplies are getting good use and I don't know how long she'll be with me so I wanna do a whole bunch of stuff in the near future so that's another reason for doing pastels and then there's also the watercolor issue there's some things I can't paint so I'm more trustworthy with something like pastel in knowing that yes I can draw a leaf and I may not be able to have the watercolor techniques that I want to achieve this but I can do this in pastels and I can do animals really well in pastels I can't wait to share those drawings with you I've shared a couple of them over on threads if you're on threads you can scroll through my page and see a few of them but yeah so that'll hopefully be this weekend cause I do wanna get that going and figure out if anybody actually wants any commissions from me I've had a few requests for them and have been telling people just wait till December and hopefully they'll see the video when it comes out and find out that yes it's now available so there's a number of things too that I wanna learn with pastels while I'm doing the commissions and it's not that I'm gonna give you a bad drawing because I'm learning but for instance this drawing I was experimenting with is it better to do the leaf and the cones and the stick and everything and then do the background or do the background first and then add those things on top you know there's different ways to approach stuff and here I decided to do you know just try one doing the background later and I should have done the twig at the end I should have just done the twig on top cause that would have been easy to do on top of everything and yet here I was trying really hard to work around it I eventually gave up on that and instead I just colored right over top of the twig and redrew the twig so that I could get the blending to go correctly from one side of the stick to the other instead of having it look like there was a color break between them but you know just learning different technique things that I just need to practice and if I'm doing a bunch of commissions that will be an excellent time to you know try one with a certain order and another with a certain order I've also had some people asking while I've been posting those things am I ever gonna do classes in pastels and I just want you to look at those boxes and see if I'm gonna ever be able to tell you what color any of those are? No, there's no way like all of mom's pastels have no labels on it there's like three that have a Sennelier label on them and then everything else is little chunks, little pieces so I don't even know what colors I'm using there's sometimes I grab one that it looks like it's a black and no that was a green so I end up with like strange colors on things most colors in pastels look like the color that the stick itself is but some of the dark ones it's a little hard to tell in between dark blues and dark greens so you gotta test those out a bit but I would not be able to tell you any colors that I'm using or like what is a good brand? I have no idea I have no idea what brands any of these are so once I use up mom's and start working on the Richardson set that I bought at least I'll know whether the Richardson are good ones I did buy some black and white Senneliers just so I have some extra black and white around here and they like crumble really quickly so I'm not sure I'm a fan of those I don't know whether a bunch of these are Senneliers but they just are smaller pieces so they don't get as crumbly I have no idea nonetheless, someday I might have more information to be able to share in either tutorials or classes but that's gonna be a while because I'd have to get through using up all these pastels that my mom gave me and I wanna use some because they're wonderful and she bought really good quality stuff which was great but I do hope that this video helps to convince you if you find yourself like having a bad day in the studio and your watercolor isn't working or your alcohol markers or whatever it is that you're using isn't working I highly recommend either moving to a different subject matter and just getting back on that horse or move to a different medium because I was feeling better once I was working on this drawing because I proved to my brain that I am not a failure as an artist because I'm telling you when I keep painting something over and over and over again and they keep ending up in the recycle bin I can start really feeling down on myself and feeling like I've got imposter syndrome and I don't want you to feel that I want you to be excited about the next time you get back in the studio and if you leave the studio with that bad feeling it might be hard to go back in next time I took the tape off and finished the background out to the edges of the paper so I wouldn't have a big black border when matting it and you see mom's lovely drawers of pastels and my finished drawing Yay for getting this done I felt so much better as an artist having completed something so I am a big fan of never leaving the studio feeling like a hot mess even if you just get out a pencil and do a quick sketch now this is a watercolor that I did if you're wondering is Sandy any good at watercolor is that why she's switching to pastels yes I can watercolor so you can watch this one it's a real time video very chill, very relaxed and I will put a link on the screen in just a second so you can go tap to see that one you can also go see playlists on my channel I have like 13, 1400 videos plenty to entertain you and help you to increase your art skills thank you so much for joining me hit that like button and give it a big thumbs up helps the channel out and create something every day I'll see you again soon