 Hello, artist, friends, and visitors to Monet Café. Today I have a quick little lesson for you on how we can actually apply pastel, soft pastels, to not only watercolor paper, but watercolor painting. These are just a few little watercolor studies really that I had done a while ago, and I wanted to apply some pastel because I just love how pastels are so brilliant and they really make the colors sing and make the painting so vibrant. This is one that I have already done that to, and if I hold it up close, you can kind of see where I've added the pastel. You don't want to overdo it with this technique, but we're going to talk about that more right now. So let's get started. It's a pretty simple technique, and I think you're going to like it. Let's do it. Okay, so here are the two little watercolor studies that I've chosen just to describe and demonstrate this technique. I'm using two different products here. I'm going to show you two different techniques that you can do this. One is using clear gesso. It's basically, it's by Liquitex. It's basically just a liquid, kind of the consistency of syrup, that you can apply with a brush or a foam brush to a surface and give it more grit. If you've watched my channel much, you know that pastels typically need some grit to hold on to, and we use pastel papers which are sanded, almost like sandpaper. So watercolor paper is not sanded like that. It's got a little bumpy surface to it, which you could put some pastels down here, but they're not going to stay. They're not going to fix to it very easy or hold to it very easy. And so what we're going to do is create a surface that we can allow the pastels to not fall off and to get a little more vibrant color. So this is one of the ways, this product here, and this is another product. I use this one quite a bit in some of my videos. It's a spray fixative by Blair. I like this one recommended by Karen Margulis, and she uses a lot with her beautiful paintings. But I use it never at the end of a painting because it will darken your pastel painting, but just to add a few more layers or get a little more color to allow me to get more grit to that painting. And so this product can actually be used right on watercolor paper. So on one of these I'm going to use the Clear Gesso, and on one I'm going to use the Fixative. Both of them will give me a little bit more of an ability to put some pastels down. So let's get started with these techniques. It's so fun. All right, so the first one I'm going to do is with the Blair Fixative, and I'm going to do this one. And because I don't want to take this one down, I'm going to cover this one up while I spray it so I don't get the spray on here. I've also moved my camera back a bit because I don't want this Fixative to drift onto my camera lens. Also, with that in mind, you don't want to breathe this stuff, okay? I will spray little bits in my studio and kind of walk out and fan it around or use my blow dryer. But if I'm doing a decent amount of this, I will take my artwork outside to do that, okay? So just keep that in mind. Some people ask about whether or not pastel dust is bad for you. Also, some people wear masks. They have a little reaction to it, but that's very rare. I have been doing this for years and I've never had a problem with it. But anyway, so back to the Fixative. We're going to just spray a light coat on this just a few inches back. I want to get enough on there to where it'll actually hold to it. Okay, that's good. Now I'm going to blow this dry and step out of the room for a second. Okay, now the Fixative is dry. Okay, and you notice it didn't darken the painting very much with watercolor, okay? So it's not really going to darken watercolor, but Fixative will darken pastels. Might be a hair darker, but not much. Now what we're doing with this is I'm not creating a pastel painting. I'm enhancing this with pastels, okay? So I don't want to just totally cover this up. I just want to use the brilliance of these pastels that I've chosen to just really create some intensity and some beauty to this little watercolor painting. So let's get started. So I'm just looking for areas of enhancement. I really like a little bit of this. That's a little too dark. Primrose blue. That's one of my favorite colors. It's like, is it a blue or is it a purple? And it's just really a nice little color. And I, you know, sometimes you guys may wonder, you can't see my marks. I just, you get to where you can find where corners are on the pastel. And it really helps to be able to feel your way with pastels. All right. I really love what's going on in these grasses down here. I've got some worms and coals, okay? So I'm going to represent that with, this is a little bit of a cooler green. A little bit of a cooler green. And so I'm just going to scumble. That's a word that just means to kind of, almost seems like it's just being messy. But there is a little reason to it. It's not all haphazard. So just getting in a little bit of these cool greens. My paper's moving around a little bit. I apologize for that. And maybe a few of them just kind of coming up and around. And I also like some of these warmer greens. Now this one might be a little dark. Let's see here. Oh no, I like that. Got a little warmer greens going on in here. So just scumble it all around. Maybe some back in here. We got some back in here too in these trees. So again, I'm just finding a spot, also a spot that's not dirty. I use a piece of newsprint down here to just wipe my pastel across to clean it if it looks like it has too much of other colors on it. All right. So a little bit of this back here. Not too much. We don't want too much intensity of color in the background. All right. I think I need a little bit darker value of those cooler colors. Now this is more of a, just a, I love this color. Look at this brilliant cool blue somewhat teal green. And I'm gonna get a little bit more of these darks down in here. I'm gonna have to hold this paper as it keeps moving on me. Get some of these down in here. Okay. And I like some of this kind of brilliant purplish blues down in here. That's a little bit of that. Oh yeah, that's really pretty. And these, if I recall the reference flower, it just had all these pretty flowers just growing up along this fence row. And I wanted to keep this one so loose and not fixed or tight because the flowers just look so free. Now this is just a brilliant beautiful magenta pink. And see, it's just really some of those darks on there. Oh yeah, like that. And you want to be careful not to do patterns, okay? I don't want to do dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, because life is random like that. I mean, there is order to life, but there's a lot of spontaneity, which is what creates beauty, I think. Now I'm just doing a little bit of these lighters. Now I might throw some of the lighters over in here off these flowers. I have a little ink drawing on this too, which sometimes I'll do. There's just a little bit of the ink pen I've used to indicate leaves, but keep them very subdued. I'm going to get a couple other little colors and we'll finish. All right, believe it or not, I don't want to do too much more. Again, I am just enhancing this, not doing a full pastel painting. I like some of these lighter pinks in here. I want to pop a few of those in here. One thing you'll notice real quickly you can accidentally do with watercolor paper is, with watercolor, you want to preserve the luminosity of the paper. Your lightest light should still be very bright because the paper is showing through. You have to be careful not to darken up your watercolor too quickly. All right, so now I'm just going to add in. I like this purple here. I don't want to do too much back here because I want to keep these looking far away and the less detail the more that's going to happen. Sometimes I have a problem with my left hand in this camera because it's awkward sometimes. All right, so I'm adding a little bit more to that shadow and a little bit more to the shadow under this window and going down into these grasses. All right, so now this one is the one where I'm going to apply the liquid gesso and more pastas. All right, with the liquid gesso I'm just going to shake it up. I'm not even sure if you need to shake it but I do and I'm just going to use a little foam brush here. This one I don't have to worry about breathing or moving my camera back because it's not getting in the air like the fixative was. All right, so I just put a little on my brush and we're just going to paint it on here. Some of it dripped. I'm going to make sure I get enough of it on there and this stuff doesn't dry super quickly so you've got enough time to just work it. Now this will, as you can see, it looks, it dulls out the painting a little bit but that's actually okay in this case and it's going to brighten up a little bit more when it dries but that's okay in this case because the pastels are going to be the the brilliance factor in this. So let me blow this dry and we'll get started. I wanted to point out because I've had this question asked a few times about what to do when your paper warps. Water color paper, when you apply water, it's going to warp or most likely it will and what you can do, see how this is curved, is lift it up, turn it over, however you have it, you know, it might be flatter here to something. You're basically just going to apply water to the back so just get your foam brush cleaned out of course and apply just a thin coat of water, not much, and it's going to curve that back in the opposite direction. So let me do that real quickly and then I'll get started. Alright, so that application of water did flatten it out a bit. There's still a little warping but it's not too bad. Now I've blow dried the the gesso so now you can actually hear it, the sanded surface. More so, well you can kind of hear that one too, but I can feel it with my finger that this one is is more gritty than the fixative. Okay, so the the gesso is going to give you a little bit more grit so all I'm going to do now is just enhance some of these colors and values that I think really make the painting work. We often want to leave the background more subdued and blurry to push it back in the distance and foreground things will get more of the brilliant color and typically more of the darker values so I'm gonna get started on this one.