 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. Join me in this lesson as we explore beginner products and tips for soft pastel painting. Now, you're going to get a lot, even if you're not a beginner to pastel painting, I'm going to share a lot of products that I think are affordable, great for beginners, but I was amazed at a lot of these products. These are ones I had not used before, so you're going to get the low down. And a lot of practical tips for painting on surfaces that are affordable, DIY, creating your own pastel surfaces, and lots more. So come join the painting fun. And very soon I will have the actual tutorials from some of these paintings. So enjoy, get ready, get your popcorn. Here we go. If you would, go ahead and like this video. Go ahead and subscribe if you haven't already. And if you hit the little bell next to the subscribe button, you'll be notified of any future videos I post. This free video tutorial is brought to you because of the faithful support from my patrons on my Patreon page. For $5 a month, you can support this channel and you get extra content. Hello, artistic friends on YouTube, fans and followers. I'm excited to talk about some new products that I think are going to be so great for the beginner artist. And I love these products, so no matter what your level, I think you're going to be excited about some of my new product discoveries. I'm always looking though for inexpensive ways to paint with soft pastels because it can get really pricey. Well, any painting medium really. But where we spend our most money, where I believe you should spend your most money with soft pastel painting, is in the actual soft pastels themselves. You really can't beat the quality of a good soft pastel and having a lot of pigment versus binder, which is so common with cheap sets. There's a lot of binder, a lot of filler, if you want to think of it that way. So first I'm going to talk about some pastels I've discovered. Then I'm going to talk about some new papers that I've discovered that are all very affordable. And I'm going to be sharing some of my paintings with you and my techniques for protecting them. So you're going to get a whole lot in these next few videos. First, let me talk about these pastels. Now I have yet to do an actual pastel painting with these, but I can already tell that I love them. A lot of my patrons on my Patreon page have said they've tried, well, not a lot, a few, have said they've tried these and they were very impressed. Okay, so I'm going to tell you the price here. This is a 40 set of pastels. I love the size. They're not called half sticks, but they're just kind of nice and nice size. I'll show them to you in just a second. I love the fact that they don't have labels. That's just so awesome. But 40 colors of these pastels is $44 on Amazon. And the company contacted me to see if I wanted to do a review. And I always say yes to a pastel review. And I'm always very honest about them too. If I think it's going to be enough of a negative review on something, I just probably won't share it because I don't want to make the company feel bad. But with these, I can tell I'm already excited. So let's just do kind of a little product reveal here. The packaging is amazing. It's called Paul Rubens, but they do have some Asian lettering here. It's really pretty. I love this gold leaf graphic here. So artist soft pastels. And I love also too they have a nice little brochure in here that has also little instructions for use. I have never seen this in a set of soft pastels. I mean, they may have links or things online. But this has some really neat little pastel instructions for use. Two pages of it actually. And also it has a color chart. Oh my goodness. I have recently been talking to some of my friends and patrons on my Patreon page about how certain sets, they might have their colors listed, but they don't have them in the order. So you can't know where they go. Now this is awesome right here. I love that they have this and also to here's what's even better. I love love love it when a pastel art pastel company will include a color chart meaning a chart that you can fill in yourself a blank one. So what it is is these numbers correspond with exactly where these pastels are. Now why would we need that? Well, it's basically because if you go by the color that's printed on this little printout they don't they never look the same. You know, we're dealing with a printer. We're dealing with, you know, sometimes just lighting things look different when you look at it on paper versus the actual. So if you run out of a pastel and you don't remember which one it was, you may not be able to find it from here. The color may not and you don't have the color anymore. So this is what's so awesome about this chart here is that you literally you don't have to rely on a printout. You take your actual pastels and you go in here and you make a mark on every spot here. It also helps you to rearrange them in the right order if you want to keep them as a set. I've been keeping a lot of my pastels a set. So all right, I've already let's pretend I didn't show it. Voila. It's so awesome. I love the vibrancy of these colors. Now I could pretty much instantly tell just when I opened the box that I was impressed because I could see the color vibrancy and I do something. Whenever I open a box of pastels, I do something I call it the finger test and I literally just take a clean finger and I rub it across one of the pastels to see how much color actually comes off on my finger. So you can already see we've got some gorgeous, luscious colors in here, but this red is literally just singing to me. So let's take a take a look at that. I'm just going to rub my finger across. Are you ready? Oh my goodness. That is such smooth and bright, bold application of color outstanding. Oh my goodness. That means that the manufacturer of this pastel used almost all color with very little binder. It's the ingredient that keeps them holding together as a stick. And the reason soft pastels, the ones that are super, super soft, the ones that are super, super colorful, the reason they fall apart kind of easily sometimes is because they are almost all pure color. Now different products are used for all the different colors. I'd like to research that. Where do they get that red from? Is it from the dirt, the side of a mountain? I mean that's interesting, but all the colors come from different elements I should say. So sometimes they're not as bold or bright as others, but this blue for example is just really good. Oh my goodness gracious. I really like this blue right here. That is such a pretty blue. See that? I already rubbed the red off my finger. So I'm very impressed with their amount of color. Now what I really was curious about was their layout of color here. And I was just kind of examining. I often like to look at the rhyme or the reason behind the layout of a box of pastels. And I can already see they have a lot of nice neutrals. Look at all these beautiful. I love this as a neutral color. I have one that I use very similar to this. It's almost like a dull neutral lavender and gray lavender. And it is great for neutralizing elements in a painting. They have a lot of nice darks. They have a lot of nice earthy colors. Look at all these earthy colors. Orange is another one. Of course I love this red. But look at the reds they have that lean towards a cooler red. Sometimes it's hard to find cooler reds. They lean a little bit towards pink. Look at these reds. Oh my goodness. And almost a little salmony color, especially in this one's kind of peachy color. And this one too. Here's two other cool reds. This one's a really, really nice darker red. And this one, oh my gosh, I just love that color. So those are really nice. They have some nice light values. Love this light blue, like I said. I love this pink that would make a nice sky. I love this light blue that leans a little warm, a little warm blue. And this nice neutral blue here too. Look how gorgeous these are. But again, look at all the neutrals, neutrals, browns. Do you notice something that's kind of missing in this set? Well, it's common for a lot of sets. A lot of sets don't have purples. I don't know why. I love purple. But this set doesn't have any other than this. It does have some nice blues. We've got this nice warm blue. This would be great in a sky. Oh, this pretty bright blue in a sky, upper part of the sky. This gorgeous blue for water, distant mountains. I mean, that's just absolutely beautiful. So again, a lot of interesting colors. Now, I contacted the company. One of my patrons asked me if they have other pastel colors. And they do have a 36 set. Now, I already contacted them. They're sending it to me. I think they were out of stock. And I'm going to hopefully be getting that soon. I did not ask them if it's all different colors than these. I kind of hope it is because I liked some of the colors that I saw on this box top. Look how bright those are. So anyway, that's a little bit about the set. I'm going to be doing a painting demo with just this set. I always find it fun to challenge myself and paint from just one set. Oh, I just spit on my pastel. They are water friendly. So anyway, I am excited. Only $44 on Amazon. Wow. And I'm hoping to really work with this company and see about getting more colors. All right. So that is a very affordable product. You're going to be seeing a painting soon. And as far as papers go, I recently wanted to try out a new paper. Well, it was new to me. I don't know how long this has been out. It's called Canson. Now, Canson makes a paper. They call it a pastel paper. It's called Canson Mettance. And it's a French word. I used to always say it wrong. And it's it's really just a pastel paper. It's not sanded. We often as pastel artists like a grit, like hardware store sandpaper, we can get all these layers. Your colors show up more bold. But the Canson Mettance paper is it's not sanded. It's just textured. And on one side, it's a little more bumpy than the other side. And I've done plenty of videos where I show you can paint with pastels on those surfaces. They also have another paper Canson made that's kind of their version of a sanded surface. It's called Canson Touch. And it's a little bit sanded. And it's nice. It's not as sanded as a lot of the other ones. It's a little more affordable, but Canson Touch. So we've got Canson Mettance, Canson Touch. And now we've got this Canson XL. It's called Sand Grain. There's two colors in it. There's gray and natural. It also comes in two different sizes. I think the other one's more of a wide size. But the price of these, again, yay, the price is awesome. This pad, these two pads, each of them was $21. So 21 for this one, 21 for this one. And it has 40 sheets. Now that is unheard of in the pastel paper world. So I was obviously very curious. Is this a really a sanded surface? Well, I'm going to show you a little bit about what the, I'm going to just show you in this one. And then I'm going to, I'll show you this one. I've actually done more artwork in that one. So this surface is called Sand Grain. I love this nice gray color to this. And it's not grit. Okay. I'm just going to let you know. It's not like a sanded grit like we have with UART, Fisher, what I use a lot, Sennelier, LeCart, Pastel, Card. Gosh, there's so many sanded surfaces. Pastel matte doesn't really have a grit, but it allows for a lot of layers. But it has a sand texture to it. Okay. It's not the actual grit. Many of you know I make my own texture by using a product called Clear Gesso. And I'm going to show you that in the other notebook. So I wanted to experiment first on just the sand grain texture that they have here. So without adding any additional product, other than just a soft pastel painting. So with this, I did this painting actually with just one set of pastels. I'm going to have to go back and look at the video to see which pastels I used for this set. I mean, for this. I can't remember. But anyway, so I completed this painting just directly on the sand grain surface. And as you can see, you can create, you know, a pretty decent pastel painting. One thing I do love about working on surfaces that are not really gritty and sanded is you have to be a bit more strategic and learn to have more efficient strokes, not wasting strokes. I find my work is more fresh when I work on unsanded paper because I'm not relying on the ability to have a lot of layers. And so I actually really like working on surfaces that aren't overly sanded like this one or aren't sanded at all. I should say like this one. Just a sand grain. I do like the sand grain. I would buy this all day long over the Canson-Mittance, the one that's just kind of a textured paper. I like this one much better. So again, the price is right. I also take, I love to just make little pastel journals like this. A lot of people ask me, where do you buy those pads that have the paper protection between them? This is just tracing paper. Well, I don't. I make them myself. So I just get a piece of tracing paper. Let me find it. I just buy whatever's cheap. It is acid free. So your work will be protected. And this I got from Dick Blick and I just taped it down and cut it to size to fit that. So then you can have all of your paintings all protected in your notebook. I think that's really fun. So let me talk about this other pad that is the natural grain and let me also talk about the method that I'm using for this book. That book you just saw, I will probably only paint on the pages. I won't add any additional product. But with this one, I decided what my husband and I were going on a trip and I wanted to get some surface ready real quickly. And I thought having just a notebook to take when you're traveling is really great rather than taking all these different pastel papers. So while he was getting in the shower and getting ready to go, I was in here in the studio frantically prepping some of these pages. I thought what I would do, I've painted on a lot of them, so I'll try to show you some of the pages that I just created. That has a painting. And I did videotape a lot of these. Okay, I'm going to show you this one. I decided to just tone because this one's natural color. It's kind of creamy like you are paper or fissure. I decided to just tone it with pastel. I'm going to show you video on this. Okay, you just take a color of pastel, put it on your paper, and you liquefy it with water or alcohol and a big brush. I used a foam brush. Then I went in and added, did I do it to this one yet? I don't think so, no. I went and added, I did to this one. Yes, I went in and added clear gesso. Let me make sure this way. Yeah, I can tell this one has the gesso. Clear gesso is a product that I have talked about for years and how to make your own pastel surface very affordable. DIY homemade pastel surface. Literally, you can get watercolor paper, you can use this paper, use any paper I say that's a little lighter in its background, and you can tone it. You can actually do a little base pastel painting and then wet it strategically. Then when it dries, like I let this yellow dry after I liquefied it with the foam brush, then I put on my clear gesso. Let me grab it. So clear gesso is just like this amazing product for me anyway, making my own surfaces, because it has a little bit of grit, a little bit of sand to it. I don't know why, but it's got a little texture to it. And it also is clear so that if you do an underpainting of sorts and you go and you put this on it, you coat it, it's going to allow your underpainting to show through. It goes on a little cloudy at first, and then once it dries, you can see through to what you created. So the reason you get, well, there's two reasons you want to get the clear gesso rather than regular gesso. Many artists have heard of regular gesso. It's what a lot of artists use to prep their canvas surfaces, and it's not clear. So if you use, it's white. If you use this to give some texture on this, it's going to cover up all of the yellow. And this doesn't have any grit. Somebody told me that it did recently. We're going to do a little test right here, right here, right now. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So let me see. It's white. I don't feel any grit in that. So I don't know. Now I got to go wash my hands. Well, maybe not. All right. So that is the reason that you want to use the clear gesso versus the regular gesso. And just use a big wide brush or a foam brush. Now it's going to curl a little bit. Okay. Even this one after I finished it is it's got a little curl to it. So what I did is I just created a whole lot of different colors. And then I put my, you can hear that. You can hear that grit. The clear gesso is on that. And I just let that inspire me to create all kinds of different paintings. So I created the first one is just a field of flowers. I made a purple background and I created this field of flowers. So real loose and I let that purple of the background show through. And I just think it just vibrates with color. I love that. Again, I used my little tracing paper to cover up the pages. And that's one I didn't do. That's one I didn't do. And this is one that I did while I was out on that trip with my husband I was talking about. This one had a pink background. And I took a reference image and just gave my own interpretation to it. And I was kind of on a wildflower kick like I am so often. And my daughter-in-law said, why don't you try something? We ran across one of these pages that had, I'm not going to show you the painting yet, it had this green that I toned it. And I've done some videos where I showed, yes, you can do a green underpainting even with a green landscape. But she said that looks like it would be something underwater. So I found this reference image of a coral reef with some fish underwater. Now I didn't get time to finish it. I wanted to give the fish a little bit more detail. But you can see how fun it is to create your own services with all these different colors. And I think it inspires you to get creative and to break out of your comfort zones. So I'm going to be doing a lot more of these. But I just wanted to share with you these surfaces before I share the tutorial. So you'll kind of know what I'm talking about. And I, in the video, when I share the actual paintings, I can say, hey, refer back to this video so you can see what I'm talking about. And now also too, I thought I would go ahead and show you some of my, well, one thing I want to show you is back to the Paul Rubin's Pastels. This was another set of soft pastels. Somebody recommended that I try. I actually just bought this one off of Amazon. And I was skeptical. I was actually skeptical of this set because of the price. When a price is too low, I can almost assure you there's going to be a lot of binder and very little color. So I was like, I don't know. I'll check these out again. So pleasantly surprised. Can't wait to paint with them. But this set is a 36 color set made by Gondola Soft Pastels. And nothing against these pastels. I'm just comparing prices here. I did like the nice little wooden box. Okay, it was very nice. The packaging was great. And when I opened it up, they also have a really nice little brochure. But it is in another language. So that makes it a little difficult. But that's okay. I know God bless them for, you know, shipping things to the United States. That's awesome. It also has a color guide. Okay, a color chart for you to fill out. Love that. Love, love, love that. I like the nice little sizes. Just like with these. These are even smaller. Okay, so they're really small. And there's only 36 of them. They're not in the nice little sponge holders like these. But they were secure. None of them were broken. But this set of 36 is $47. Again, versus this set of 40 that's less money. That's $44 really rich, gorgeous color. Again, nothing against this little set. But I could instantly tell it had less color to binder ratio. Let's just find I'll just do this blue one right here. I'll just take it out because it's little. Okay, so I'm going to do, let me find my pinky. I'm just going to rub across. Do you see that? How there's hardly any color on it? There's a lot of binder. Now, again, nothing against these pastels. These are a little bit more similar to a Rembrandt pastel. They're kind of a medium hardness and they have their purpose. And I actually did do a little quick painting. Oh, I just, I can't say it was a painting. I was just, I got them in the mail and I couldn't wait to try them out. So literally I was cooking dinner and I just laid an apple and a lemon down and I tried to paint with them. So I did a little study and I also like this. I mean, this is just a craft pad. Okay, but if you want some quick, cheap little paper to do studies on, it says recommended for temporary drawings. It's probably not acid free. But if you just want to practice, I was like kind of craft paper anyway. So this was my little practice with these and, you know, look they worked pretty good. But did I do that color there? Yeah, see the color comes off really pretty good. When you work on this kind of paper though, you cannot get a lot of layering. Let me just attempt that right here real quick. We'll put a darker down. You see that color's not bad. Darker down. This is how I usually do like if I'm doing a poppy flower. I get a combination of colors going and let's get a dark center in here. We'll get a little hint of a dark center. I can already tell it's not layering as good. I'll get a little bit of this. It has some nice darks in it too. I like that dark blue. And then I gradually kind of lighten things up or warm them up. Let me lighten it up with a little pink here. Let's say the sun's just catching on some of these areas right here where the petals are kind of reaching out. It's not layering. See how little layering you get with that? So anyway, that's just a quick idea of how these work. And again, very similar to a Rembrandt pastel, which is great. So that's another little set that's affordable and has its own purposes. So anyway, there are so many different ways you can get started with soft pastels and not spend an arm and a leg. I also want to show you real quick how I do the same thing with these black cancel drawing pads. I like working on black surfaces. With this one, I had done some lessons. Let me find one in here. And I adhere my paper differently. I experimented. I like having the tracing paper protection on the opposite side so I don't have to fiddle with lifting it. You see how I taped it back here? Same thing here. Just tape it to the back side. And I use black tape because I just wanted it to have a nice presentation. This is one where I didn't do it that way. I need to tape this side down. So they make nice little sketch journals. I'm not going to take the time to show you too much of these. So it's fun and it's a neat way that you can just have a little pastel journal. And take them on traveling, take them to go and then you can also use them to store, not just to paint on the pages, but to store other pastel paintings. So this is a larger one that I actually take some of my paintings that I just kind of want to store them. I don't want to put them in the plastic bags just yet. And this one was kind of fun. I actually experimented with using a stencil with pastel painting. It was fun. I'm going to make a video on that. So anyway, these pads have a lot of function for you as an artist. I love them. And also too, this was a painting I did where I used a fixative. I still haven't made this video. Everybody ask about fixatives. Watch this. Would you do this with a pastel painting? Let me get the pastel off my hand. Okay, wait. This hand's cleaner. Do you ever do that? Use your shirt. All right, watch this. Okay, you can see my hand other than the pastels I've done here. I'll do my hand part. Nothing. That is, it's called Spectra Fix. Let me see if that's what it's called. It's a product called Spectra Fix. And it's a fixative that I experimented with on this painting and a few other ones. And it did work pretty good, but hold off on experimenting with it. I mean, unless you just want to try until I make the video because I have some suggestions on how to use it. But anyway, so it's a great way to store your artwork and a great way to save money if you want to actually paint on the pages. So I hope you guys learned a lot from this and I am going to be... Oh, this was from a Patreon lesson. I am going to be actually doing, uploading some of the paintings that I've already done and giving you guys my tips and my feedback on some of these products. So anyway, guys, thank you all. Thank you subscribers. If you liked this video give it a thumbs up. Give me a comment. Many of you said you liked this raw footage. I don't have to edit it as much. I leave in my ums and all of my things that don't go right in the videos. So thank you guys for your comments and leave me a comment. I love to hear what you have to say. Become a patron if you'd like to keep this Monet Cafe train going. It's what allows me to keep the free videos coming like this one on Monet Cafe. It's only $5 a month to become a patron and you get extra goodies. You get to submit your work in a homework album. Sometimes we have these critique sessions where I give you suggestions. So it's a lot of fun. Alright guys, and happy painting.