 Welcome my beautifully artistic friends in Monet Café. Today I'm going to be showing you how to organize your pastels in a Hyalman pastel box. These are the boxes that come in various sizes, but I'm going to be talking about way more than just this box and sharing more information. So whether you're just making a studio palette or a to-go travel palette, this is going to help you out. But before you go out and spend a lot of money on one of the choices for a box, whether it be a studio box storage system or a traveling storage system, why not get started like some of our members in our Facebook group, Monet Café art group on Facebook and get creative and find wonderful inexpensive ways to store your pastels with things you might even already have in your home. Check out some of these here. I'm just going to click on a few of these. So this is just a neat way we can look at various things. I have an album in our group where people share their storage system. This one's actually very, oh this one, actually this is mine. I was going to say this is similar to mine. I actually years ago had gotten a really neat little box that had drawers in it and they can be taken out. And so the drawers can be moved, moved around, moved over to wherever I'm working. And so that comes in handy. This, let's see here, this might be something that someone, yeah this is my dear sister and friend Becky, who looks like she might have improvised with this system here. I like it. Look at this. How creative is that? Talk about using drawers like I did. This is Becky's again. These are the drawers that she keeps those trays in that showed in the previous picture. So I'm just going to flip through some of these so you can see that, you know, you don't have to start expensive. You can just get, you know, whatever you have around the house. It could be something like this where you don't have a whole lot of pastels yet, but you can organize them in a simple single tray system like this. And whether you have a whole lot of pastels like this, or just a few, this is something actually I love this system. I don't know if someone ever invented it before I did, but I was trying to find a way to put my pastels in a color wheel form. And this is actually another friend of mine, Linda, who she did the same thing with an appetizer tray. I just used one from Publix. That's a local grocery store that I have, but wherever you could get a little plastic tray, I did like she did here and just put the paper towels in the bottom, but see the color wheel right here on top. Actually, that's an opening underneath there too, where I put my neutral colors. But what a neat and inexpensive pastel palette. I still use that one to this day. So even if you're just getting started with your pastel supplies, I worked for so long with very limited pastels. I think actually I still have a pretty limited supply in spite of the fact that I've been painting for years. So get encouraged, don't get intimidated. Some people have way more than I'll ever have, but just get excited and have fun. And if you want to join our Monet Cafe art group on Facebook, that's a really great way to get ideas. We have all kinds of helpful information. So anyway, oh, I just love looking at these. I can't stop. Anyway, all right, let's get back to how we can organize these, whether it be in a to-go palette, travel palette, or a studio palette. Now here is an image from the Heilman website showing some of their various sizes. I don't think this is all of the sizes, but it's quite a few of them. I actually chose the backpack size. I believe that it's good for me because I want, I don't want it to be too heavy to carry for traveling, but I don't want it so small. They have smaller options than this one that I can't fit enough pastels. So they do make, here's a larger one here, and you see you can use it for various things. This one has some pan pastels in it. This one is jam-packed full of pastels here, but it's kind of the same system with the three on the side. Now I wanted to pause here for a minute and show you some of the prices and the different sizes. You can get on the website and look at this yourself, but this just is going to give you a general idea. And basically, you can see here that from the top row there, the single sketch box, 150 ranging all the way up to the large slim of 345. So they can get expensive. I thought I'd also share here another option is the Dakota pastel boxes. And you can see these prices are less. I happened to really like the Halman box even though it's more expensive, but this one would definitely suffice. I'm actually surprised I never bought one over the years. Now here's just a quick look at my boxes that I showed before in the drawers that I have on a shelf in my studio. But now I'm going to be not only taking those boxes, but also I have bought three new sets of pastels since, gosh, in the past like four months or so. And I haven't even gotten to organize them yet. Now this is a Jack Richardson assorted set of 60. Boy, that's like a tongue twister assorted set of 60. And it's the it's the half sticks, which I really like because you get a lot more bang for your buck when you get the half sticks versus the full sticks. They go a long way anyway. So why not go ahead? And if you're going to spend the money, get more colors versus larger pastels. Now this is the first time I've tried this technique. I really don't like when pastels come with labels on them because that's a pain. You got to take all these labels off. And I thought it might be easier just to get a little Xacto blade and be very delicate. And it actually worked really good with the Jack Richardson's. The labels are very thin and the pastels are soft, but not so soft that they fall apart. But you're going to see me doing the same technique to another set of pastels, which are the great Americans. They are very soft. So I had to be even more careful with them getting the labels off. Now I did go ahead and take a picture of these pastels before taking the labels off. I like to have with all of the numbers showing. So because I like to have a reference as to which colors there are. Now that technique worked really great on the Jack Richardson's, but these great Americans again are very, very soft. So if you choose to do this with any great Americans, see some of those are crumbling. You've got to be really careful. Of course, they're so soft they crumble even when you're to a degree, even when you're just trying to peel the labels off. So all in all my Xacto blade system did work. It was a lot faster, but you've got to be so careful. Make sure you have a very sharp Xacto blade. Now this set again is the great American plein air assortment, I believe, and it's by artist Richard McDaniel. I always want to say Richard McKinley because I love his pastel work as well. And I've been playing around with this set a little bit, not a lot. Obviously you can see I haven't even taken the labels off of many of them. But I think I'm going to really love this brand of pastels, although I have, you'll see in the video, I did integrate them into the travel box, the helmet box. And I know that sometimes the softer pastels get a little more crumbly, you know, so be careful carrying your box around. And if you're just starting, of course, we love the softies. The advantage to soft pastels is they go on even when you've got a lot of layers down. Soft pastels are great at the end. But sometimes a medium to soft pastel is a good choice as a beginner, such as Mount Vision. Now I've got all of the papers off the pastels. That one set, the Sennelier, I was excited. They don't have labels on them. That is really awesome. And it's there and also a very soft pastel, which I love. It's one of my favorite brands. There's so many that are my favorites. It's hard to choose. But I wanted to show you real quick the sheet that I mentioned. This has to do with those great Americans right behind the sheet there. I took the picture and I actually also made a little mark, because pictures don't always portray the color exactly. So I made a little mark as a reference if I need to order that color again. Alright, so here we go. It's time to get started. Now I'm just going to open up the box basically and kind of give you an idea of how it functions. That right there is a little screw-in port there where if you have a tripod and your little tripod adapter like that you put on the bottom of your camera to put it in, that will fit in there. And you can basically just put this on a tripod. It does come with a strap, which is nice to carry it. And also a key to lock up your precious babies. Not that many people would want to get in there and get pastels, but I don't know. If you're around some of our Monet Cafe people, watch out Teeson. You guys are great. Y'all would never steal someone's pastels. Anyway, so you see this system is basically these pieces of board that have this wonderful foam on the insides of the board and on the bottoms. Now you do have the little dividers in there to divide it up, which is handy to keep your pastels separate, but you can take them out too. They are removable. Now the importance of that foam is that it keeps your pastels very compact because the main thing you don't want to happen when carrying this box around is for them to shuffle around and bump up against each other. Now this is the easel that or that comes that I'm sorry does not come with it. You have to buy it separately. I believe I got the 12 inch. I can't even remember the sizes. I got the medium size one. There is a smaller one. Sometimes I do work that's like a 11 by 14 painting, so I thought this one was good for me. I also got the little accessory that is the pastel box that you put on the side. So basically with this box you are all set and good to go for any plein air painting or just you know you don't even have to be going far. Sometimes I like to paint in my backyard and you're definitely ready to go with these items. I thought I would show you my strategy. It's actually a system I've been using for years. I happen to like this picture that I found of artist Karen Margolis in her pastel box. It's kind of the same system that I use. I base mine just on the color wheel really and like you saw in the one picture early on with like the appetizer tray in a circle. This is not a circle but it follows the color wheel. Watch as I I'm going to zoom in on this so you can see it better. Now here I've flipped the color wheel over. It actually works better for this demonstration. Notice the warm greens on that little box there. The warm greens then it goes to cool then it goes to finally to your purpley blues and then eventually past your purples to your pinks, past your pinks to your reds and your oranges, and finally the yellow. And if you were to fold that around you'd go right back to the yellowy greens again. And now I'm pointing out here how they are in order of value. Notice if you squint your eyes you see that goes from light to dark and that's just the best way to work. So now it's time to get started and filling this up and I'm going to of course start with the warm greens on the far right side there. So what I'm going to be doing is grabbing my studio little studio drawers that I have and also integrating in like I said the other pastels that I have purchased, the other sets. So I love to work with smaller pastels, not teeny, but I often break my pastels. So it kind of works out of my favor because I get to leave some in my studio palette and put some in a travel set like this. So I'm basically just going to be, if I have any duplicates in my studio set I will put them in here or break them if they're larger. So it's time to get started. Now again we're going to go light to dark, going with the warmer greens and then gradually working to cooler. On the far right is where the warmer, the more yellow, like I said before, if you were to wrap that around in a circle, if you kept going to the right you'd end up back at the yellows again. So these are going to be my more yellowy greens on the right and then going up in value, light to dark as you go up, but then as you go left they're going to get cooler. Moving more towards cool greens and then eventually towards warm blues and I know this, if that doesn't make sense, warm blues. I have another video that actually describes the color temperature of colors. Sometimes people have had a hard time with this and I really like the fact that I've had some people comment that, wow, I never got it until this one particular video I did. I think I've switched, yeah, I'm going to actually be doing the lighter ones up towards the top there, working my way down towards the dark ones if you see me moving things around a little bit there. But color temperature is just something that once it clicks you're like, aha! And it's really the color wheel that helped me to truly understand color temperature. Oh and I wanted to mention I have made some playlists finally here in our YouTube channel which should make it much easier for you guys to find things. I have a lot of videos that talk about color and value and color temperature and composition sometimes with composition and I've grouped them all into a playlist. So if you go to our YouTube channel and you go to the section that's, I think it's in the tab right next to videos it says playlists. The one with color and value it has gosh maybe between 10 and 16 videos something like that. Then I have some with under paintings so it's going to be much more helpful to you guys to be able to quickly find them rather than scrolling through all of the videos individually trying to find just a particular topic or subject. So I've got a little bit more organization to do with the playlist but from here on out I'll just simply add the video every time I upload one to the appropriate playlist. This one of course is going to be put into two categories two playlists one will be color value composition and one will be pastel organization and maybe even a third one pastel products. Okay this one kind of covers a lot of ground. Alright so you can see if I get my shoulder out of the way there if you look on the upper top right you see the warmer greens. If you look where my hand is now you'll see the cooler. They are getting closer to blue as they as they cool off. If they're warmer they're getting closer to yellow. So you start to get it after you've been painting a while but I'm going to speed this up and this should be fun watching myself do this quickly because man this took a lot of time and I'm going to enjoy speeding this up. Now you'll sometimes see me grab a tray or palette there those are new pastels in you pastels and they're harder and what I'm doing my strategy here is I'm not only just going according to color and value I'm going according to softness and hardness too. I'm trying to basically make this a pastel box that has a little bit of everything so I'm trying it's it's quite tedious too because I want to make sure first and foremost is color and value but I don't want to have to have boxes of harder pastels and super soft pastels and super darks and super lights so I'm trying to make this an all-in-one box so I'm really thinking about it and you'll see the different shapes of pastels there's the the new pastels again and again I like to break my pastels I use them on their sides in a little shorter way so I'm just kind of breaking a few of each color and and kind of just integrating it within the whole set. Alright so here's the point where it's going to get fun for me to actually speed this up and watch myself do this very quickly rather than so laboriously and slow but again take note as to how these colors are moving in conjunction with the color wheel and I really think this is going to be helpful if you've especially if you've never done this before but even if you've only attempted this before so here we go. I'm going to make a point here about neutrals. I actually have a box in my studio or a little tray here like I have that has more of my neutral colors in it and again I'm trying to make my Hellman pastel box all in one so I want to integrate neutrals in there as well. Oh it felt so good to get to this point where I knew I was just about to finish up. I wanted to point out too that you notice where the in the center section there where the little holes are that's where the easel goes. I typically arrange it light you know towards the front to dark but it doesn't really matter that much to me. I grab pastels from wherever anyway but if you like it light to dark you want to flip flop how I've done it there and now here is the aftermath of all of the remaining now these pastels the the ones that I broke off from the sets are going to have to now be integrated into my regular studio palette so I'll have plenty of more pastels to fill that up so that was a neat way you could take these sets even the half sticks and make them work for your studio and your travel box so I'm very excited about using this for the first time I also want to show you I made a little video footage of how I'm actually going to close it up so here is the the board that you have on for each side that it's going to be a little snug you kind of have to press it down but that foam is so spongy and soft I'm not in any danger of breaking any of those pastels and it needs to be tight so that it keeps them firmly in place oh I'm so happy I can't wait to use my hyalmin box and I hope that was helpful so if you haven't subscribed yet please do so to keep more educational and fun videos coming your way happy painting