 Right, it is now finally time to open up my box from Dick Blick Art Supplies on DickBlick.com and open up the new pastels that I got yesterday. Some of you may have seen my video in our Facebook group how I wanted to do an unveiling and it was literally right before I had to meet my husband out to dinner and I thought I'm just going to wait to open the box. It was hard but now I'm opening it and I have to admit I did already open it so it would be easier for the filming. So let's take a look at what we have here. Okay what are they? I have had so many different types of pastels over the years and there's a few brands that I have only gotten a sample of or a stick or two. One of them is the Girot. I used to say Giralt but it's French Girot and I do I like those so much but this is a brand that I have never even tried to stick up it before. So let's take a look. They did a good job of packing. I like these little air bubble thingies. I'm going to save these. I don't know how long the air lasts but this might be good to wrap if I ship a painting. I have a nice little way to ship artwork. I think I've made a video on that before but oh I ship my camera. But these might help for something in the future. Alright so can you see this here? Yes here we go. I'm going to take them out and I'm going to move this box so you can actually see the set that I got. These are some extra colors. I'll show you what I got but here they are. They are the Great American Pastels Great American Artworks and this set has 78 handmade soft pastels. It's not the Richard McKinley. A lot of you may be familiar with Richard McKinley's work. I love his work. I almost got his set but this is artist Richard McDaniel and it's his plein air gallery assortment and I liked it for the following reasons. Let me take it out and move this box and I'll tell you why. Alright they also sent it with this nice little brochure of all kinds of different pasta all their colors and some of the different sets. So this is a nice reference guide for all of your colors. They didn't send like Terry Ludwig does the little sheet where you color in your pastels to know which is which in the set but you can emulate that yourself. Alright so here we go. Let's open it up. His work is beautiful. You can see some of it here and I think that's the reason I liked this set because it is very colorful which is a way I like to work. Let's set this set back here. There we go and it has a lot of the colors that I love. Some of my favorites which are if you've followed my channel much and if you've watched or you're in our Facebook group Monet Cafe Art Group you know I love love love purple and some sets don't have enough purples for me. I already have a whole lot of oranges and yellows and reds because I don't use those as much as greens and purples and and teals but this set has not only a lot of sets will come with the warmer purples but they don't necessarily come with cooler purples and this right here this is like a primrose so I'm gonna say that's a blue well it is it's a blue but it also is a little bit more of a a primrose-y color okay so we've got a cooler purple here these are a little warmer but they're nice neutral purples and and then we've got just a look at that incredible variety of purples in there. I just love it and I also love how they have these arranged all right some sets you may be familiar with sets if you've ordered them you're kind of trying to find the rhyme or reason they're not according to value they're kind of according to color family but sometimes there'll be a crazy one stuck in somewhere else I'm not sure why and I'd love to research that and find out why pastel companies order them in a set the way they do but this Richard McDaniel set notice how if you squint your eyes they're they're in color families obviously you can easily see that but they're also within the color families they're kind of according to value if you look down at the bottom here most of these are the darkest value in that color family okay but let's just talk about this for a minute we've got our lightest values up here we're going similar to the color wheel okay we're going from the blues okay let's let's start here notice the reds in the middle okay if you add the blues and the reds together you get the purples here okay and notice the reds and the yellows here if you add red and yellow you get the oranges okay and now these greens are here because they're next to the yellows these are going to be your warmer greens they start to get a little cooler down here but these right here are your warmer greens so there's just a a nice arrangement to these pastels and I really like it I like the names of some of the colors too um one of them was well this one's called periwinkle this purple I love I really love this purple um and let's see here maroon of course vivian I thought this these two are very beautiful pinks this one's going to give you a little punch like if you're doing some poppies that have pink or comb flowers or something like that um so they got a few punch colors in there I also want to mention they have some really great neutrals in here we've got some kind of nice neutrals going on in here over in here and um let's see some more like in here these are a little neutral in here they're kind of paler not as bold in color but a lot of sets don't give you very many darks and this has got such a rich assortment of darks got a dark green dark brown a plum which is going to be usually a plum is more like a dark purple but this looks almost like a black to me but it's dark dark I don't usually use black black but if you need a dark dark there it is at abergeen I don't know that's kind of a purpley um muted dark here iris a real rich purple here and bismarck I don't have my glasses on so I'm guessing it's some of these names but anyway look at that lovely set now they're also they're in squares okay so these pastels are not round they're in squares and there's advantages to both square and round round you can actually roll them around and make like grasses um squares you can make really wide um swatches of color um for your painting so there's advantages to all kinds of different pastels I did want to mention that there's a couple you know pastels there's a very delicate thing to send you can already see it's a couple that got a few chips on them but that's only because these are very soft okay I'm thinking I'm going to do a painting to demonstrate these I'm going to use just this set I'm not going to use any other pastels just to give an example of what this set can do but I'm thinking they're probably not as soft as terry Ludwig's and maybe more in the mountain vision I'm kind of hoping they're not super super soft because I I would like to have another one that's a little bit more um in between and um I also got this set with some birthday money my mother gave me a birthday present she got me a gift card um to Dick Blick and so that was the perfect gift for me I'd had my eye on great American pastels for a while and I got this set in particular like I said I loved the colors that it had I loved the values I love that it had neutrals and darks but I also felt like this is a great set in and of itself to keep as a plein air set to take out on location and I really got tired of sometimes setting up my box and and pulling it out of my main color palette and this way I'm going to try and see if these are a good type of pastels to just take on location just the settle on maybe throw some others in okay so now you've heard my reasoning why this is heavy too why I chose this color palette now these were oh I'll uh in the video I'll try to put up the actual price I believe there were like 230 or 240 dollars for the set on Dick Blick of course they always have your retail is 400 and something but on Dick Blick it's 200 let's say round 250 you know by the time you do shipping and all that if you sign up for Dick Blick I get an account sometimes you get little uh credits like you can get free shipping with so much of an order so that's good these are some nice greens I noticed I didn't have like a a super vibrant green these are closer to this family this one is a little close to this one here um right here but it's I don't know I it looks different it's hard to order online but it's called neon this one's called chlorophyll um this one is a little close to this one but a little darker too it's kind of in between these two okay so that's just a little bit more I like the cooler greens for grasses at the end of a painting especially if you're doing a field of flowers or anything like that so I got me a few more cooler greens I think this one only has one other color in it again sometimes you don't know these things until you just get them it's hard to accurately portray the color of something now this was just a I wanted another bright bold high chroma uh teal blue aqua teal whatever you want to call it this one's called lagoon it's close to this one let's get this out of here but do you notice it's a little bolder this one's more dull and I just sometimes I like those bold colors for punch so these are a little uh warped and if you saw my other video on when we toured the mount vision pastel company you get a neat idea of how pastels are made it's very very interesting so what I'm going to try to be doing over these um when my life settles down a little bit it's still very crazy um what I'm trying to do though is to order sets from different companies like this give a critique and do a painting because a lot of you have asked and requested giving some ideas of what are the best pastels to use for a beginner and I thought that might be so neat if I can have some videos talking about the pluses and minuses of different sets and um actually showing you the set and doing a painting that might be so much better for you guys than just trying to order online and looking at all the colors it's hard it's hard for me to do so I know it's hard for you guys so anyway here are the beautiful great American artwork Richard McDaniel plenary gallery assortment so next will be me doing a painting with these and um hopefully you know I'll be able to upload this soon because uh I've got another painting in the process right now so anyway guys I hope you enjoyed that little box opening product reveal and I'll be back soon with a piece of artwork happy painting