 Hello friends and visitors and welcome to Monet Cafe. I've missed you guys. I've not uploaded a video for a while because I've had some company and some craziness in my life but I thought today I'd give a little short and sweet video and Give you guys some information on pastel storage techniques and tips I know I've had a few people inquire about that on some of my other videos So I thought I'd give a quick little studio Tour of how I store my pastels and I thought what a perfect time to do this because this is the dreaded day That I am deciding to put all of my pastels away that I've used for other projects Now I've already put a lot of them away This is just a couple of little pallets that I have laid out all my miscellaneous pastels to start putting away now I'm going to show you my system of pastel storage, but there's multiple ways that you can store pastels. I Particularly love the storage system of pastel artist Richard McKinley And I learned a lot from a pastel artist friend of mine named Deborah Seacour as to how she Arranges her pastels and so there's various different ways you can do this and a lot of it's just your own personal preference But one thing I would highly recommend because I talk so much about the importance of value You may notice that most pastel artists do store their pastels in a way that Makes it easy to identify the value of a color now for example this happens to be my drawer system and It is my my blues and my purples and I happen to think I probably have a smaller selection of pastel To create the amount of pastel work. I have over the years than any other artist That's a bold claim perhaps not, but I know I don't have the largest selection I see pastel artists that have so many pastels and I'm a little bit envious but but I'm happy for those artists at the same time and So I'm going to show you kind of how my little system works. I have I found this at a little Home craft store type of place and I have things on top of this now But this is a neat little let me move this out of the way This is a neat little drawer system now. I have my blue drawer out already on my drawing table But what I do is I have this drawer system to where the top ones are the blues that I have The next ones ends are my greens. I'm going to sit this down so I can pull my my drawers out and show you and This is my greens and again, I have not put a lot of these away And they've gotten a little out of order I would typically have my my lighter values back here and they've just gotten out of whack So I have my my warmer greens on one side and my cooler greens on the other side And they go from light to dark typically again some things are out of order a little bit but then I have my My next drawer are my yellows and my oranges. I mean oranges and reds and then my next drawer are my pinks and in the pink and earthy brown family in here and The last drawer is for neutrals and I haven't yet got things going there I just have my blacks and whites in there. So as you can see, I don't have a Tremendously large selection of pastels now. I do have some pastel pencils I do have a selection of a harder pastels that's not in that drawer and you may have seen in my videos sometimes for under paintings I'll use these water-soluble wax pastels, but that's pretty much it for my pastels So that should be pretty encouraging For others to know that you can you know over a just a little bit of time I know they're expensive, but you can accumulate enough to actually Create some pretty good works of art and I wanted to show too. This was the first system that I used It's just these boxes it's called Degas Artists pastel box and it's just a box that has Some I think I may have put this in here. I think I did I'm not sure if it comes with the foam in there, but I did the same as my drawer system putting my pastels in there Now I use these boxes Just for moving them around or when I'm working on a painting or something now this next little piece of equipment here or drawer is actually a modification I did out of a little transportable drawing tablet or box that you can take with you when you're traveling and I took the drawer part that fits under here and I just loaded up with pastels that would be Adequate for going on a trip and doing some pastel work And this on here was a little art less than I did in watercolor with their color caterpillars showing how to blend colors That's watercolor not pastel however, um, I also wanted to point out too For um beginners These are an intermediate. These are a couple of really good pastel books that I used When I first got started, this is the pastel book by bill Crevy And this one is pastel painting techniques This one here shows you more techniques and ways to use pastels And there's just a ton of information in here on different techniques. And again, all these things become your own personal little way that you work in pastels and Everybody develops their own little interesting techniques and ways that is unique to you This one here is just lots of information on pastels in general Some some techniques are in here too, but a lot of it is just on education about pastels So those are a couple of really good resources. Again, this little video was just short and sweet Um, hopefully giving you some good information about how to keep your pastels Um, one other little quick tip, uh, I've developed. Um, just kind of recently It's just to keep a newsprint wherever I'm working or up on my easel when I'm working So that you may notice these pastels get kind of dirty sometimes this one's this one's pretty dirty here And so I can just rub it pretty quickly and it's clean There's all kinds of different pastel cleaning techniques as well But that's just one that works pretty good for me. So anyway, I hope you guys learned something from this quick little tutorial or demo or instruction video and, uh, happy painting to all of my friends I'm really enjoying having you guys here with me and hopefully I'll be back to my regular upload schedule And I hope to upload at least a video a week. So thank you subscribers and thank you new visitors and happy painting. Bye