 Good morning my friends. Welcome to Monet Cafe. I am enjoying my studio this morning and it's just sometimes so nice to get up and make my coffee and enjoy the day. It's a beautiful day here in the Tampa, Florida area. I've got an art student coming today but I've got a little bit of time for myself right now. I love these moments. But I did recently, most of you or some of you may have seen the video that I did on kind of a review of different pastels and papers. These are some of the pastels left from that video and I mentioned this product, Neocolor Water-soluble Wax Pastels. Again, I'll stress like I did in the other video. I don't use these for some of my I would say more professional work or typically work for a commission piece. I wouldn't use them but they're really kind of fun. I had posted something I painted one time. I think it was some pretty bright sunflowers and I had some other artist mention that this product is not, I guess the word archival, latida words but maybe that it doesn't last as long as some of the other pastels. But you know what? When you're doing art and you're just having fun, just get creative. Don't follow the rules so strictly and just enjoy. So that's why I thought I would just give you a little review of these today and also point out a couple of other things that I didn't mention in the other video. One is that I mentioned making our own pastel surfaces and I use the pumice gel with a golden fluid acrylic to tone it like a gold color. But you can use this by itself. If you don't want to tone your paper or you want to tone it a different color, you can use that by itself. Another product that I might even be using maybe today is workable fixative. It's a great way to, once you've filled up the tooth of your pastel paper, you can't get any more layers down, then you can use a fixative to spray and it gives a little bit more texture to it. You can lay down a couple of more layers. I tend to agree with fine artist, pastel artist Karen Margolis, in that I don't use a fixative to spray after my painting is complete because it darkens the whole thing. And I don't like that. It's just not what I painted. And so that's just a little bit about that product. I also thought I would mention, somebody made a great comment about the fact that if you add, this is you art paper, one person also asked, what grit is this paper? This is a 400 grit and it was the one that was in the last video. It's a kind of a fine sanded surface. And the other question was, if you add water to it, or alcohol, which I have here, as an underpainting, sometimes it might can warp. So if you just have it kind of clipped up to the top or whatever, it might be a good idea to do like I've done here. All I did, there's two ways you can do this. You can tape your tape right along a little border of it, like a, you know, just a little eighth of an inch, sixteenth of an inch, whatever around it. Then when you're done with your painting and you peel your tape off, you've got a nice little border that didn't get any pastels on it. However, I like sometimes to work to the edges. So what I do is I flip it over and I put tape on the back sides of it with a little bit sticking out. Then I put tape on, I just put it up here on the easel and I put tape around those edges. So I've got my whole piece of pastel here that is able to be painted on. Again, I've got my water here that I sometimes will use to make a great underpainting. And I've got some alcohol here and I've got some coffee. And I don't want to get those confused. I have had times when I've had a brush working on something and I've dipped it in my coffee. Good idea to put it on the other side. I've got another request after this video to do a water seascape sunset scene, something with water beach like that. So I happen to love those scenes. I can't believe I haven't made a video of it yet. So I will be doing that. That's up and coming. But for now, I'm going to play around with these. I may give a little instruction while I work. And sometimes I may just enjoy the moment and put on some music and let you guys just enjoy the process. All right, here we go. All right, some of this is experimentation for me too because I've used these more for some detail work. But this is one of the Neo pastels. And I'm just kind of sketching in. I broke it and I'm using the flat side of it to block in like we've talked about before. You want to work big too small. So I'm blocking in some of the darker I mean the bigger shapes and then I may just go ahead and do a water apply water to it. So it's almost like a water color underpainting and I might even experiment with alcohol. Basically the difference between water and alcohol is that alcohol just drives faster. If you're doing a water color underpainting, you want to use water. But if you use any other kind of a product, you want to use you can use either. So these are just some trees in the background again, blocking in an idea. By the way, this is just a field of flowers. I thought might be kind of fun and I think I'm going to apply pastel over this as well. This I'm going to use for underpainting and maybe some other things. But for the most part, I'm going to use a little of both. Alright, now I'm just going to play here. Alright, so this is more for just laying down the big shapes for an underpainting. Again, this is a bit of an experiment for me. These colors, the Neo color wax pastels do get darker when you apply water. This blue isn't as much and it behaves a little differently on this UART paper than it does on regular paper. But I'm working from top to bottom because I have my easel up and it things colors drip. But you see how gorgeous that color becomes when you just apply this. Look at that. Isn't that beautiful? And I'm going to let some of these drips just kind of happen naturally because I like that look. Some people might not, but I think it's just quite lovely. So again, this is more just for an underpainting just to get an idea. These are of course going to be some trees in the background. We've got a sky up here that I think I'm going to add regular pastels for that. Now that blue is going to drip into the field, but maybe that will be okay. Now I think that that was water. Okay, and I'm just using a wide brush. Now I don't want to drip dip this in my coffee. Now I'm going to use alcohol. I've just got the alcohol in a little dish and I've had some questions as to what this is. It's regular alcohol. You buy it at a drugstore. Isopropyl. Is that what it's called? Some artists talk about using a type called denatured alcohol. I've never used it and I don't really know what the advantage is. So if any of you guys do, that would be neat. I need to let those blend together a little bit. Oh, yeah. Look, the alcohol is behaving differently with that. It's not. Yeah. Oh, look that. That's weird. Maybe I should stick with the water at the first part just so it doesn't blend kind of weird. Okay, that's kind of neat. I kind of like those colors blending together like that. Okay, back to the water. And again, if with pastels your underpainting appears a little dark at first, that's okay. You can go back over it with light. I'm going to brush a little bit of this this way just to get it flowing. Alright, so we're getting it in here. It's looking nice. And I put down some darker areas in here where some flowers are going to be growing. It's like down. I like what Karen Margolis calls it. Lay down some dirt because down at the ground where these flowers are, there's going to be darker areas. So again, I'm just choosing colors that are kind of complementary to the greens that I'm going to put in here. If I made all of this green, like trees and grasses, when I go to put the grasses down, there's going to be no punch or nothing that really distinguished this them as anything different from the ground. Okay, so we're just getting in a kind of a fun impressionistic underpainting. So so far, I am liking using the wax pastels for an underpainting. They're really easy. They're not as messy as pastels either. Probably should just leave that alone. But I was going to get in here to some of these spots. Okay, this has been fun. I like this. Alright, so I'm going to let this dry and then we're going to play around a little bit more. They work quite well. Nice. I put a blow dryer to it and it's it's pretty dry and I'm feeling it now just to check something. You know, if you use watercolor or even acrylic ink. I'll get a bottle of that and show you can put that down with no danger of losing the grit of your paper. It doesn't seep down into the crevices. So you still have almost like a fresh pastel surface to work on when you apply your pastel. So I was feeling this to see if it behaves the same way and I think it does fill it up slightly, but I've still got a pretty good sanded surface there. So that was just something I was curious about. But I do love all these beautiful drips and things going on. So now I'm just going to start applying some pastel. I may even I'm not sure if I'll do more wax pastels on top of this. I'll just kind of see how it goes as I'm progressing here and I'm just going to go ahead and paint here for a little while and then I'll probably stop and talk. I didn't like that cool green. It was just too much of a contrast back there. So you could take a paintbrush and kind of just knock it off. Apparently then people realize it's also a good technique to kind of soften things. However, you want to be careful about it because you can mute your colors too. See, I'm knocking the color off. The flowers that were in my field, my reference photo were white with yellow tops, but I just really wanted more color in it. So I decided to make them pink and I really like it. But I think I'm going to pull a Karen Margolis trick, which is to spray some workable fixative on here and this is starting the pastels that I put down thus far have started filling up the tooth and I want to add some more like I'm keeping this very, very loose as you can see and I want to keep that going. So I'm going to spray the fixative so that I get a little bit more tooth and I can add some wild and crazy grasses to this and a little bit more of these purple lavendery things that are growing. I want to get those in not in any detail more as just a wide stroke of the pastel. So let me spray the fixative. I have this fixative here. It's a workable fixative by Grumbacher and it's for pastel charcoal and pencil. But I recently watched a video by Karen Margolis where she used a product called Blair, I believe, B-L-A-I-R. I'll check it out. But I asked the question if hers clogged and she responded on her live video that it did not. This one sometimes clogs. When you use a fixative and you spray it, typically what you do just like with spray paint is you turn your can upside down and spray it until it comes clear. That way it gets any of that sticky stuff out of the nozzles. So that's what I do but sometimes I even have to wash the little applicator. So let me go spray this and I'll be right back. Now this is a good example of what I was saying how fixative darkens the painting. It's fine in the in the working process if you're trying to get the layer down, like I said, to get a little bit more texture. But at the end, if I was done with this painting and I sprayed it with a fixative, now actually when I went out I did not spray this part. So it's kind of kept its same shade. You got a little bit of the specs which I kind of like from it. But I focused more on this area and you can see that just totally darkened my painting. And if I was done with this painting that would not be good. So but in this process while I'm working I think it's trying out. It's actually exactly what I wanted. So that's good because now I'm going to be able to, I just want to hint at getting some of these flowers in a little bit better and then getting some of the grasses down. These have a little bits of these kind of yellow tops. Like I said in the reference photo my flowers were white and I may add a little hint of some white type of flowers in the background. But see that pastel is going on really great right now because of the workable fixative. I got behind the little center of the flower. It's light on the top but down kind of the base of it. It's a little darker and actually a little pop of red in there is really kind of neat. I like that. Just gives it a little you know enhancement. And you can even add some of these colors in other places just for suggestions to kind of give it interest. It's kind of neat. Now again where these same thing with that little center part the parts where the petals grow out from the flower. They're also going to be a little dark right underneath the part where it comes out from the center. It's just like a shadow really. So get one on the back side there. And you know you want to get a couple of your flowers more precise and the rest can be looser or more impressionistic because our minds tend to when we see something and we know it's a flower and we see other things that aren't so specific. Our minds just are like oh yeah those are all flowers too which is really kind of neat. I actually want to make this one a little bit more of the star of the show. Let me give it some bigger petals here. That fixative really helped me to get this down better. Give this one a little bit more of that top to it. And I love flowers because they just like I said before they just seem like they're reaching towards the heavens which is awesome. I'm just going to work a little more on these and as you can see these are loose and free. There's my little doggy. I'm going to give a hint of some more down in here. They don't even have to be very specific and I might give a little bit more highlights on some of these other flowers like that color. Let's see here. Probably too light. Let me try that. It's almost more of a bluish lavender. Let's see here. Yeah that makes that lavender makes kind of a nice highlight on some of those petals. The one's coming down further. Sometimes you want to add colors that are the right value but not necessarily what's in the scene because it just creates more interest. Now I'm going to give a hint of some more of this lavender in other spots. I might even want to bring it up a little bit more back in here to subdue this a little bit more even. This is where I will stop and take a break and walk away for a little while. I have an appointment anyway and come back to it and see about the finishing touches. I like the looseness of it. I really hope you guys learned something in watching it and again I am so excited about all the good questions that I'm getting. So if you have any questions about this process feel free to ask and if you're a first time visitor I would love for you to subscribe. I love our little community that we have going on here right now. I already feel like we have a little art family and thank you guys so much and come back soon.