 Welcome artistic friends to Monet Cafe. Your happy place to learn art from the convenience of your own home. Join me today for a fun new pastel technique where I'll be using acrylics and soft pastels. I created these two paintings that I'll be sharing a tutorial on what to do and what not to do using this technique. It definitely was a lot of fun so let's get started. Hello and welcome friends in Monet Cafe. Join me today for more experimenting and this is good for artists of any level. You know if you've been on my channel long I love experimenting and finding new ways to do things, often new ways to economically do things. Not always but it's always good to save money. And so today I have in this experiment some successes and some I wouldn't call them failures but just some ways that I've learned I will do it differently the next time. And I'm going to be using a product. This company, Bless Their Hearts, Arteza keeps sending me products of theirs kind of to experiment with and make a video so I'm like okay why not? But anyway this is an acrylic pad. It's for well acrylic or oil painting and it's this nice thick paper that's got a little texture to it and I thought hmm my pastel brain started thinking could we make this maybe a pastel surface by doing an acrylic painting and applying clear gesso over it and indeed we can. So join me how I show how to do it and how not to do it. All right let's get started. All right so what we will be using for the acrylic portion of the painting is the Arteza artist paint set of 60 colors. That's a lot of colors. As always I like their presentation. This box is really nice along with their their other watercolors and gouache sets they've sent but this is considered the premium quality. It is acid free and archival. It's of good quality. I love the little colors they have on the top there. It makes it convenient. Now I do like these are these tubes by the way are a little bit bigger than the watercolor or the gouache. Nice ample supply. I like how they have them divided by color families and I also like that particular one right there. It's kind of some neutral some different varying values of grays if you just wanted to do a value study. Now this is the acrylic pad. I guess I should say acrylic or oil or pastel now that I've used it for that but it's a great quality paper. Again it's the premium set 16 come in each pad and it has a little texture to it and there's a nice thickness to the paper as well and I really did like this product. I'll definitely use it again. I'll probably experiment more with different ways to use it but it ended up with a really nice kind of sturdy surface to put your artwork on. Here's another product that I wanted to share. It's a product I've used with acrylic painting in the past that I really like. It's called the Gray Matters paper palette. It's a palette actually on paper for you to actually put your paints on and it's disposable so you can just throw it away when you're done and the gray is a nice neutral color for you to put your paints on rather than putting it on white and again this is made by Jack Richardson. I love their pastels but it basically like it says here color mixing guide and I'm going to open it up here so you can see it. So it's basically just these slick pieces of paper. I can't remember how many is in a pad that you can just use as a palette. Squeeze your paints on and then you just it takes water obviously and then you just throw them away when you're done. Very very convenient if you don't want to have to pull out a palette all the time. It also has on the inside of the front cover this very handy guide to color. If you're not familiar with acrylic or oil painting and color mixing I happen to love color mixing although we don't get to do a lot of it with pastel painting but this is a really neat guide that you might find handy and I'm going to show you a little more about that in a minute. Here are the colors that I've chosen and while it may look like a lot because Arteza was nice enough to send me this large set I thought it would be nice to use an overabundance of color with acrylics a little bit more than I would typically use. Now that's different from pastel painting in that with the pastel medium you do need a lot more of your color choices and value choices because they don't mix the same. With acrylic or oil painting and watercolor painting and gouache painting you have the ability to mix colors so often that's one advantage about those mediums is that you can actually have fewer choices to mix different colors. I'm going to show you in the actually on the page of the gray matter paper palette how it has the nice this is by Jack Richardson by the way who makes some beautiful pastels it has on the inside page this wonderful color chart here that if you need a little lesson in color theory or the color wheel this is done nicely it's showing using either colors from acrylic or oil painting the primary colors are the ones with the P on it so you've got a nice just kind of a common yellow a nice ultra well where's the blue primary is the phthalo blue phthalo blue or Prussian blue sometimes I'll use ultramarine as a primary and alizarin crimson okay notice how that makes a triangle so these are your primary colors and the reason their primary is you can't use anything to mix to get a red or the primary blue or the primary yellow you can mix some colors together to get the secondary colors which is what's so neat in between this triangle if you go on the insides you see the mixtures in varying degrees for the secondary colors this would be the exact equal amounts of the yellow and the red would be this secondary orange red orange and vice or same with all the sections of the primary colors you've got the yellow and the blue of course we know is going to make the green with different degrees depending on the ratios same here we know that red and blue make purple so that's kind of a neat way that you can if you're experimenting with mediums such as acrylic or oil or the others that I mentioned how you can have fewer colors to make a lot of colors but again I thought when I love this magenta color I thought it would be nice for me to go ahead since I have these all at my disposal now to go ahead and use a lot of them now here's a little reference photo that I'm using it's a scene that I have painted before and I like it it's from my cousin mark who took a beautiful picture where he lives in Virginia and sometimes doing something that's familiar to you if you like the scene it's good to do it over and over again now I just did little samples of this as I was checking the colors I don't have this arranged so nicely as the color wheel but I do have these in order I've got a violet I was like a nice purple even though I could get a purple from mixing my primaries of red and blue now I did put a P here as to what my primaries are again no rhyme or reason it's just where they fell when I pulled them out of the box but I've got my primary of like an ultramarine blue a primary of a crimson red crimson red usually a pretty good standard red and I can't remember this is just called a mid-yellow one thing I did notice about Arteza is they don't name their colors kind of like some of the standard colors some of them they did like the ultramarine blue and the crimson red but this just called a mid-yellow instead of like a cad yellow or what you might be familiar with but anyway if you've got a good eye for color you can see them and not have to know what the name is so anyway so I've got a varying degrees I've got that this yellow would be a cooler yellow as compared to this one this would be a warmer yellow then I've got a deep green this is kind of a darker blue green then I've got a light sap green I've got a yellow green I've got these out of order a little bit I've got a orange red and then I've got a Ross there's the orange red then I've got a raw Sienna olive green again another green out of order then I've got the crimson red here ultramarine blue cerulean blue sky blue violet and this was a phthalo blue down here all right so with that again I've got a whole lot to work with just to do this experiment but what I'm going to do first this was just to sample I'm going to go ahead and put them on my little gray matters paper palette that's great because you can just tear these off and throw them away and it's a really nice neutral surface to apply your colors to oh and I failed to mention I have me some of values that are dark to light to sometimes I want to decrease the intensity of a color you can either give it a tint or a shade this is the darkest that I have it's a van dyke brown this is a gray this is this gray here this is the van dyke brown and you can't see the titanium white because it's on a piece of white watercolor paper okay so these will be used to either darken or lighten some of the colors that I'm working with now I thought I would go ahead and show you how I actually applied these acrylics to the gray matters paper I go ahead for the purposes of this video and arrange them more like the color wheel I have my three primaries and a triangle and I always think of when you add your secondaries you're just doing the triangle in the spaces it's almost like a like a Jewish star I think of it so now I'm just adding the different colors that would fall between those primaries if you see me pointing putting some on the outside it's either because I ran out of room or I'm adding them out there for a different reason some of my darkest darks I'm putting on the outer edge and some of my kind of a more neutral color so that's basically those are my grays where I'm gonna lighten or darken a color there and here are some of the basic tools I'm using some brushes I've already adhered the acrylic pad the paper to the surface water and a pencil for sketching I've sped up the sketch here just you know because it's not that interesting but as any other art or instruction I give you want to work big shapes to small shapes you don't want to start with little detail you want everything to be very basic and large so that's all I'm doing is just getting in I like I think of it as a foundation to a house or just the good bones okay so you don't need to get too fussy or too detailed with anything at this stage and now I'm gonna begin applying the acrylics I'm holding the palette up a little bit at the beginning so you kind of see how I operate I usually mix my colors in like towards the center of the circle so I have varying degrees of values as I add white or black to it the trick about acrylic and I've had to reacquaint myself while I was painting this is to get a good habit of knowing how much water to add sometimes it's like you can add too much or too little too much and it's just watery and runs all over the place too little it's too thick for it to move anywhere on the palette but this is serving as an underpainting so basically this is just gonna be big shapes and colors that serves as the kind of like the guide or the roadmap to the pastels that I will be applying later now I'm working with some cooler cooler greens there now there's a warmer one value and color if you've watched my videos you know I say this over and over again but it's so important important value decreases in the background you're gonna get lighter colors in the background and you're gonna get less color they're gonna get duller so your greens typically they blue out they get more blue they get cooler that's the other thing okay they get lighter in value duller and they get cooler so that's why that first group of trees I put down there in the back was a little bit of a teal color that's a better color to use for background trees than a bright green things you just don't see bright greens in the very far distance now again I'm just gonna continue to work on this notice I'm using kind of a bigger brush bigger brushes are always better to use when you're first getting started I actually could have used a brush even bigger than that but I'm just again I'm an examining my reference photo I'm paying attention to distance in the photo I'm also paying attention to where the sun is shining that portion I'm doing right there are some trees that are a little bit more in the shadows so you notice the darks down kind of towards the base or the roots so I'm just gonna work a little bit more here again I'm trying to hold it up so you can see me mixing colors and hopefully you get an idea of how to do basically just an acrylic underpainting much it for the underpainting and by the way that unfinished part at the bottom I just didn't bother cutting my paper off I wanted it to fit the dimensions of my reference photo now there's the palette after I finished using it and I could keep using this again I I like it in the color wheel fashion now what I'm doing here is applying clear liquid gesso now here's a product I'm adding to the clear liquid gesso it's by Matisse it's called dry pumice it's basically like sand you just add it to whatever liquid medium and it's gonna give you more grit more of a gritty surface now I'm gonna give you a ahead of time I'm not gonna make you wait till the end to tell you what I did and did not like I thought this acrylic pad would need more grit than typically a piece of watercolor paper but it did not so in the future I will not add the dry pumice you're gonna see me mix it up here together I use basically about a quarter of a cup of clear gesso to about a teaspoon of the pumice what ended up resulting I'll speed this up to get to the final phase but it what ended up resulting was of course believe it or not I mean a surface believe it or not that was too gritty and so what happened was is my pastels were basically getting eaten up too quickly by the coarse grit so you'll see after this painting I'm gonna speed this one up I'm gonna do another painting where I just use the clear liquid gesso which worked much better okay that's it for the gesso and pumice now a quick little blow dry here are my pastel selections by the way I'm using what's considered local color for this painting even for the under painting I did which means it's just the color that's kind of natural to the scene I'm not doing a complimentary under painting or anything like that so now you're about to see what I was describing at this point when I was doing this video I had no idea how much it was going to eat up the pastels right there I'm like oh man this is really coarse I'm rubbing it and so I basically knew right away that I was gonna just not do a totally completed painting it was gonna be very loose if anything's a positive about this it definitely helps keep you loose and painterly because your strokes just come out very coarse and I I kind of did like the resulting painting but I didn't like the fact that you lose so much of your pastel I mean we love our pastels we don't want them to get eaten up so quickly like that so anyway I'm gonna speed this up and you'll see the resulting painting when it's done so I'm finishing this painting up at this point getting close anyway I apologize it's a little more fast motion than I normally do but it's because I'm gonna show you another painting where I don't add the pumice and I'll do it a little bit slower so all in all I love the loose effect of this there was some things I really liked but I definitely would not use the pumice again it was a little bit too coarse and too gritty and wasted up our beautiful pastels so take two here we go with the second painting which if you watch the beginning of this video it's that little wild flower painting and I'm actually using the same palette of acrylics that you saw me using with the previous painting and just as a note if you haven't used acrylics very much there's some wonderful advantages about acrylics but one disadvantage is a disadvantage is that they do dry rather quickly so if you keep a little spritzer of water near you you can actually just spritz a little water on top of your little dollops of acrylics and it helps keep them moist so that you can continue to use them there's all also other kinds of little tricks you can do but I'm basically just getting in values right here I know that the foreground is going to be darker in value the shapes are going to be bigger I know that the depths and the roots of those flowers are cooler I did like in that particular little reference photo there was a coolness to the grass and I kind of wanted to keep that I do add some warmer greens but again just trying to get in big shapes here and keep it very simple I was working quickly even though I wouldn't work in this quickly you're seeing me have sped this up but I was working quickly because I had already done the one painting and I really was anxious to see if just the clear gesso was going to be enough grit for this acrylic pad surface that I'm using and indeed it was and I think it might be the actual texture of the acrylic pad that has enough texture in itself so that it was still eating up some of my pastels even with just the clear gesso not nearly as bad as with the pumice added and one thing I did like about it is I have a tendency to be a little heavy handed with my pastel application and this was helping forcing me to keep a lighter touch which actually is something I need to focus on and I liked how it made me do that here okay now you can see how I'm applying just the clear liquid gesso here with no additional pumice added this is a technique I do a lot in my videos as you probably know if you've watched the channel long in an attempt to help you guys save some money and myself as well pastel papers can get expensive you know pastels need the little bit of grit to hold the pastels so this is a neat little way to add grit to your surface with the clear gesso now here are my pastel selections again and as I said before I focus more on the cooler greens for the grasses rather than the warmer ones now here I'm about to start adding the pastel and yes indeed it definitely went on better it was not eating up the pastels quite as much and that little tool there you guys ask me all the time what that is that's a piece of pipe foam insulation you can buy at any hardware store it's an excellent blending tool I don't always blend but sometimes a sky or some mountains and things in the distance the texturalness of this was causing it to come forward in the painting and I want it to recede and go back so that's why the blending and I don't like to blend a lot but that's what the blending in this particular case push those mountains back you can already see they look more like they're in the distance now because of just blending and add a little bit but don't get carried away with the blending you're gonna when you do that you take away from the freshness of your color and the more you blend and the more colors you add the more muddy your colors get you don't want a muddy and even though colors in the background you want them duller duller or less chromatic in color you still don't want a muddy okay they can be a lighter value and a not as intense in color without making them all muddy looking if you've ever overblended you know exactly what I'm talking about and most of us do get started alright so I basically just added in some of the layers of the colors underneath and I'm getting the flowers down now I love how Karen Margolis teaches how we don't want flowers floating on the top of a painting almost like they're pasted on like you cut them all out just pasted them on the top so this is a technique to where when you put some of your flowers in before you add all your your grassy textural grasses you're gonna layer some of those grasses on top of some of those flowers that way they look like they're buried underneath the grasses rather than floating on the top of the grasses so you can go back and reestablish your flowers after the fact if you've covered up too many you know whatever but it is a good technique to be able to make a more realistic result in your final painting okay at this point relax and enjoy I'm gonna play the music and I've got a big thunderstorm coming right now where I live in my home studio so I'm just going to get away from my computer for a minute and hopefully the power won't shut off while you guys enjoy the rest of this painting I'll I will pop back in and add some more commentary as long as I still have power and I'm not afraid all right at this point I'm wrapping it up and I have to apologize I did not realize I had a setting on my camera while filming that made everything look lighter so I'm about to share more of what the actual painting looked like I put it back on the correct setting for color so this is more accurate this is what it looks like right now so anyway this was a wonderful experiment I hope you guys learned a lot I learned a lot I always I'm learning along with you guys so this was a lot of fun please try it if you have any questions please comment I love your questions also please subscribe if you haven't subscribed to the channel and join our Monet cafe art group on Facebook that you're welcome no matter what level you are everyone is welcome in our group and we have lots of fun all right guys happy painting and I can't wait to bring you another lesson