 Welcome, artistic friends to Monet Café. In this tutorial, I'll be sharing a little speed video demonstration. However, I want to show you how pleasantly surprised I was when I tried this fixative by Sennelier for the first time, and I was so pleased with the results I wanted to share it. Now, I'm going to be bringing a full video comparing multiple fixatives very soon, but I wanted to just show you guys this video. If the full video is on my Patreon page, and if you want to see the full lesson where I give commentary and everything, check that out on my Patreon page. Before starting this painting, I did something I've been wanting to do for a while. I've reorganized my studio, so I thought I'd give you a little quick studio tour before I tell you about the products for this painting and share my experience with the Sennelier fixative. Many of you have probably seen this setup from some of my videos. I love open shelving. It's a place where I can easily grab pastels, papers, acrylic inks, a great place for books, and I have a small studio. It's in my home, so I find a lot of people love to see how I arrange things. I love these little drawers. They're not the sturdiest, but I love the fact that I can just pull them out and set them on my desk or wherever I'm working. It's very convenient. Also, consider repurposing an old piece of furniture. This was a piece of furniture that my husband and I, my mother-in-law passed away, and we didn't keep many of her things. Goodness knows we don't need many things in our small house, but this was a great way to store some pastel sets. Also, I moved my French easel. It used to be in the corner. It would shake all the time when making videos, so I thought, why don't I fold the legs in? Yes, you can turn a French easel into a tabletop easel. What I did is I sat it on top of my adjustable desk. Yes, you can even still use the drawer. On this adjustable desk, I can literally just press a button and raise or lower the desk. Therefore, I can sit or stand to paint so easily. I don't know why I didn't think of this before. It really freed up some room in my studio, and now my easel is not going to shake like it used to. Alright, let's head over to my setup to get started with this painting. For today's tutorial, still focusing on our theme of painting green, I'm going to be using unsanded pastel paper made by Kansen. I like these pads. They have, this one is the earth tones, and I'll be using the sheet you saw that was kind of a brown color is the one that I'll be using for this painting, but it has just a variety of earthy type of colors. I also like using the one that is called gray tones, and it, like the name says, it just has a variety of different real neutral colors. The reference image is from unsplash.com. I will have a link in the description of this video, and now it's time to get started. The pastels that I'll be using is a set of pastels I really like. I like keeping them in their set. They are Giro pastels. They're made in France, and this set is called poetic landscape by artist Elizabeth Mallory, one of my favorite artists. She passed away a couple years ago. This set was not cheap. I think it was around $500. Of course, it has this nice wooden box, but I'll have links to all the products I used in this lesson in the description of this video. And like I said, this painting demonstration is a speed video. As I mentioned, my full tutorial with commentary is over on my Patreon page, but I always like to keep free content coming to Monet Cafe and lots of information to help budding pastel artists. So I just want to mention, too, though, if you want to see this slowed down, you can always click the gear icon at the bottom of my YouTube videos. It's on the right side, and you can choose your playback speed. So I would always recommend turn the volume down, though, because you'll hear my voice very weird and slow sounding. So put on some music while you work. So not only was I creating a painting for my patrons on my Patreon page with this painting demonstration, I was also trying to create a painting where I could test this fixative. I had tried it only one time to fix a little problem I had where a bit of the surface of one of my paintings, the surface came up, and I needed a bit more texture, but I had not really tried it, and people have been raving about it. It's made by Sennelier, and it's called La Tour. And one of the challenges of fixative that everybody talks about, or people want to know, do you spray your final painting with fixative to protect it? One of the challenges is it always darkens the final painting. It, like it changes the consistency of it, too. So I never recommend that. However, I was so pleasantly surprised by this fixative, so I'm going to show you right now. Here it is. It's Sennelier La Tour fixative. Because I'm working on an unsanded surface, you're limited in how many layers you can get. I thought I'd use it like I've used other fixatives and spray the bottom of it to be able to layer a bit more. So I took it outside. I didn't want to breathe it. Can you see any difference? I sprayed the bottom of that pretty heavily, and I really didn't notice a difference. And lo and behold, yes, I was able to add more layers. So the first test was, is it really going to darken things? And a lot of times when I have used fixative in the past, it's always during the working stages, like I'm doing here, of a painting. And I expect it to darken it a little bit, and I know I'm going to cover it up and add a few more lighter pastels. But in this case, it didn't seem to darken it at all. I also noticed it didn't curl my paper like some fixatives will do. So here you can see I am able to get a little bit more layering. The reason is because fixative adds just a little bit of texture to your painting, so it's almost like adding just another little layer of a sanded surface to be able to get a little bit more layering. And so I was really pleased with that initial test of this fixative. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, I am going to do a full video. It should be coming soon where I do a fixative showdown. I'm calling it where I have four fixatives that I compare and contrast and give the results. And I take a final painting of mine. I took one that wasn't my favorite painting, just in case it didn't work. And I spray it at the final painting. I spray it with this Latour Fixative. And I'm not going to leave you a cliffhanger. I'm not going to tell you how it ended up, but I think you're going to want to watch that video. So that one will be coming soon. I also wanted to share thank you to all of you brand new pastel artists. Often you come from sometimes no experience at all. And sometimes you have experience in other mediums. And you're so curious about soft pastels. And I just love catering to the beginner pastel artist. By the way, because I'm working on unsanded paper here, sometimes it can be a little challenging to work on because you don't get many layers with it. You've got to know what you're doing a little bit. But the great thing about these unsanded surfaces, this Canson-Mittance, it's called, it's a French word. I used to totally butcher that word with my Southern accent. But it's pretty affordable. So that is a great thing. And I think you'll see here by the final painting. I kind of considered this a study. I just wanted to relax and paint and explore. But I think you'll see it really can produce some some nice results. So I like working on Canson paper. I didn't used to when I first started. I thought I can't paint. What am I doing? So don't worry if you doubt yourself starting out as a pastel artist. Oh my goodness, I just I almost quit. I really did. So that's that's how Monet Cafe was born was me just sharing all of my discoveries. It was very hard for me to learn what I learned as a pastel artist because I don't even think there was YouTube back then. I found a few art forums where I was just hungry to learn about soft pastels. I discovered a few artists that I still love and follow today that were generous with their information. But I started making videos just sharing what I was learning. And I think hopefully I'm encouraging to people because I have no formal art education, other than the fact I majored in graphic design. I love art. I do think, you know, because of graphic design, you learn some artistic principles, an eye for composition and color and all kinds of things like that. But if I can do it, you can do it. That's my point with that. So anyway, you can see this painting developing look how many layers I was able to get on top of the the spray that I did of the Latour Fixative, making some fun little gestural marks. And by the way, like I mentioned, this Canson Métant's paper is fairly affordable. Some pastels, especially the good ones, are rather expensive. As a matter of fact, the ones that perform the best are usually more expensive. I don't recommend if you're beginning pastel artists to go out to an art supply store. Occasionally, they'll have a good brand. But often they have these little artist brands or these art crafty store type of brands. And they're what happens is the cheaper pastels, pastels are made almost of pure pigment, the good ones. I mean, it's the pure color with just very little binder binders what holds them together. So that's why the softest pastels are the most brilliant. They don't have a lot of binder. That's why they're so soft. And the cheaper brands, they have more binder to pigment. So that's why they're not so brilliant. They don't have as much pigment. And I people do this all the time, mistakenly call soft pastels chalk. Well, no, they're not chalk because they're almost pure color chalk is almost pure, not color. That's why they're so pale and non vibrant. So there's a little information about that. But the reason I'm bringing that up is I have on my Amazon shop, I have a link to my Amazon shop in every video. I have idea lists where you can pick these categories, these lists, where I have some of the pastels I recommend. There are some sets that are pretty affordable. One set if you start to get a little more serious about soft pastel painting, I think one of the best buys for some quality pastels is a set by Sennelier the same company that makes the fixative I just mentioned. And it's a 120 half stick set I always recommend half sticks whenever manufacturer makes them because you can get more color for your money. And the set is called the Paris collection. And it's on Amazon, typically for less than $150. The lowest I ever saw it was $113. I mean, that's less than $1 a half stick. And that's a really good buy and Sennelier's are some of my favorite pastels. I really love them. These your row pastels, like I said there, the set that I showed you at the beginning is kind of expensive. It's about almost a $500 set. I will share the link Dakota pastels sells this whole set the Elizabeth Maori set it's called poetic landscape. I loved her she was one of my favorite artists. She passed away a couple of years ago. But this set is pretty pricey the one I got was pricey because the wooden box, but there are smaller sets of Giro pastels. Giro pastels are nice because you know the story of Goldilocks, you know, one bed was too hard, one was too soft, and one was just right. Well, that's how I think of Giro pastels. They're kind of right in the middle. They're just right. So another pastel that's kind of like that are Mount Vision pastels. So you can learn a lot on my Amazon shop and check out some of the pastels and the papers I recommend. I have product review videos. So my goal is to have a wealth of information for artists who are wanting to try soft pastels. I tell you what, beware though, you're probably going to fall in love with them. You're probably going to start an addiction. So I apologize in advance for that. And here is the final painting. I'm just going to pull it in a little closer. Notice it's not overworked. I didn't try to fill in every space. I like it when the under painting shows through. I kind of like that nice warm brown color beneath. And also to keep in mind that I will have that additional video coming very soon where I'm comparing four different fixatives. I think you're going to love that video and be so pleasantly surprised with the results. And I really enjoyed this. Would you do me a favor? If you liked this video, it really helps it to be seen by more people. If you click that thumbs up button, if you haven't subscribed to this channel, please do that. Leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought. YouTube shares this video more when you do those things. And become a patron if you'd like to support this channel to keep more free videos coming to Monet Cafe and to get all the extra content I'm always talking about. And now I would like to leave you with this hopeful message from Galatians 522. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness. Don't we need that in our world today? All right, everyone. God bless and happy painting.