 Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm really bringing you guys behind the scenes now into my kitchen actually. Monet Cafe is just my home art studio and sometimes I have so much going on in my studio that I need a little more space. So I've brought some of my soft pastel paintings that I need to prep to get ready to put in my Etsy shop, to package up, get ready for shipping and just to protect the paintings. So one of my most common questions I get is how do you protect your pastel paintings? Do you spray fixative? So I hope to tackle that today and I've got a lot of paintings to get ready. I'm gonna share with you my techniques, my products and I've got this really great big island. Well, it's not that big in my kitchen. It's from Ikea and a nice healing mat. I'll share with you all of the information on how to get these products. So if you wanna start protecting your pastel paintings in this way, you'll have everything you need to know. All right, let's get started. Before sharing my method of how I store my pastel paintings and protect them, I wanna tell you why I use this method. This is a quick little walkthrough in my studio, just a 10 by 13 room in my home. I want to address real quickly why I do not use spray fixative for my pastel paintings. That's the most common question I get on my YouTube channel. So this is a little sheet, I call it my color notes. It's all the colors I use for a particular painting. My patrons get access to this so they can see all the colors I used. And I didn't wanna ruin a painting. So I decided to use this. This is a popular fixative. I know some pastel artists who use this. The reason I don't use fixative is because it always seems to darken the final painting and flatten the color. Now I didn't wanna ruin an already completed painting. So that's why I just used my color notes here. I think you'll be able to see a definite darkening and change in color intensity. Therefore, let me show you my solution and how I protect, store and ship my pastel paintings. Here's an example of some of the paintings that I'll be getting ready to prep and package up today. And I wanted to show you one of the reasons I like to get my paintings more substantial and put them actually on a board. This is just a piece of black foam core board. Sometimes, depending on the surface that you use with soft pastel painting, sometimes your paper can slightly warp. Now, one thing you can do is go ahead and adhere whatever your pastel surface is before you paint to a more substantial surface like foam core board, matte board, gator board. Often I just get busy and I'm painting and I don't do that ahead of time. So I do have a technique to do it afterwards. You'll be seeing me do that today. So a lot of these paintings are nice and flat already. And they would be fine to just put into what I'm gonna show you, my little clear bags, with a piece of foam core board by themselves because this one is not warped at all. This is on a piece of Sennelier LaCarte pastel card. That always stays nice and flat. This one I believe is on a piece of pastel premiere. And because I used a water type of underpainting to it, it did work just not bad. I mean, this would be fine for framing as is, but I'm probably going to adhere that to a foam backing board as well, a piece of foam core board. So I'm gonna show you my process. I'm gonna show you some of my tools and techniques and hopefully it'll be very educational for you. I wanted to point out that the black matte you see me working on is called a healing matte. I got this large one from Dick Blick and you can actually get smaller ones. I got this cute little healing matte at the Dollar Tree and it's perfect for small paintings or small areas. The first painting I will be getting ready to protect and store is of a red poppy field and it is on a surface that did do a little bit of curling. Usually this is because I do an underpainting that has some water involved. And what I'm doing here, I'm gently, I've learned to hold my pastel paintings very delicately with my fingers and I'm using a white charcoal pencil because the surface is black, a piece of black foam core board to make an outline that I will cut to match the size of my painting. Now this is a handy dandy little tool. It is a Logan foam core board cutter. I use this thing all the time and what I'm doing is I'm lining up a little groove. You see that little groove there? That acts as a guide that I will pull along the line. I place the foam core board off of the edge of the table and I line the groove up with the white mark and then I put the little blade at the end and just make a quick motion and it makes such a nice clean cut. Now how am I going to put my painting on this board? This is another magical product. It is 568 positionable, I think they should say repositionable, mounting adhesive layer. It has glue on the inside of this roll. So what I will do is adhere this glue to my little piece of foam board and the way I do that is I don't try to line it up exactly. I let there be a little bit of an edge of the positionable glue product sticking out. Then I take either a utility knife or an X-Acto blade and I just again leave a little bit of room and cut the exterior perimeter of the Scotch 568 positionable mounting adhesive. That's a long product name, isn't it? And once I do that, I can then get a more precise cut trimming off the excess and once I have that done, I will flip the board back over and I've got to give this some pressure to be able to make that glue release from the mounting tape and onto my foam core board. Now what is this? This was a little tool that was provided with the Scotch product. My little Boston Terrier Jackson got ahold of it. He thought it was a toy or something. So I still use it. I just find the straightest edge of it I can. You could use anything, a credit card, but I do suggest to add a decent amount of pressure and I do it multiple times and I also make sure to get the edges and the corners. Once I, that's called burnishing by the way. Once I've done that, you can see I'm peeling off the outer part and it's leaving the glue on my foam core board. Pretty neat, huh? And now it is time to place my painting onto the foam core board as closely as I can to lining it up. But if it's not perfect, you can reposition it before we move on to the next step. And here is that next step. I like to use tracing paper or you could use a product called Glassine and I place a piece of tracing paper on top of the painting and now you may be surprised at my next step, which is to use the same burnishing tool, the really chewed up burnishing tool and do basically the same process. I am just pressing with this just as before, but this time adhering the painting to the glued surface. Now I know a question I'm gonna get is, what does this mess up the painting? Well, a little bit of the residue you can see on the tracing paper will come off, but I think you can see that the painting remains intact. I've never noticed any real color loss or change to the original painting, even though there is a little shadow image left. I would like to share though that prior to doing this technique, I take my paintings outside and give them a good tap on the back of the painting to release any pastel dust that may be still sitting on the surface. Before the next step, I like to put a little bit of personal identification on the back of my painting. I had these little stickers made. I have circles and rectangles for larger paintings. The little circles are great for small paintings and I do this because my signature is so vague, just my initials SJ, so I like to have a little bit more identification. And now, how am I gonna protect these? I use these clear bags that I get from clearbags.com. I've been using this company for years. I buy bags in various sizes and the company has so many different sizes available. Now, I like to use a bag that's a little bit larger than you would think for the painting and that's because I have a piece of foam core board in the bag with it. Sometimes it's adhered to the painting like this. Sometimes it's just a loose piece of foam cord with the painting inserted as well. Now, I just do a little technique where I blow into the bag and the painting slides right in. The bags do have a little adhesive strip on the back and this one was a little larger than my painting so rather than using the adhesive strip, I just folded it down and I used some black artist tape because my foam core is black and I love my limb tape dispenser. It's awesome. I'm gonna have all these products in the video description, by the way. So I just fold it over and put a little piece of artist tape to secure it. A couple of little pieces here. Sorry for the glow of my light on this. And then my little painting is protected and ready for me to store or to ship. Before moving on to the next step, I would love it if you would go ahead and like this video. Comment, I love to hear from you and go ahead and click that subscribe button. Become a subscriber to Monet Cafe. And if you would like a little bit more, consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. It's only $5 a month. We have a lot of fun. My patrons get to share their work so come join the family. And now I want to show you how I would ship one of these paintings if they're purchased from my Etsy shop. I'm going to do the same process I did before in cutting the foam core board. This time I've already got my painting in the bag but I'm doing this because I want to add another little additional foam core board for protection. I used the same cutting tool as I did before to cut it. So now I have my painting sandwiched in between two foam core boards. One's on the inside of the clear bag and one's on the outside. And I just secure it with my artist tape. And I can fortunately say that I've never had a painting damaged using this process. Now I want to show you how I actually ship my paintings when someone buys them from my Etsy shop. With every painting I sell, I include one of my pastel painting and framing tips sheets. By the way, I have this sheet available on my website. I think it's under the tab called about pastels. If you want access to it, you can use it and change it to suit your purposes. It's right there where you see download file. I also like to include a business card and by far my favorite business card company of all is called Moo.com. I love these little squares and the neat thing about them is you can have one order and multiple designs of your paintings on the back of each card. I think you can have up to 50 different images per order. And I'll be sure to include a link to Moo.com in the description of this video as well. And now that I have my little painting all secure and ready to go to its new home, I like to make it pretty. I use some decorative tissue paper or wrapping paper to wrap the painting. And I also like to give it another little special touch. I really just feel so blessed when someone buys some of my original art. So I also send them a little thank you note. I just use some brown craft paper. I typically have a pre-printed note on the opposite side but I also include a handwritten note as well. And I include one of my business cards and of course the pastel framing and care tip sheet and another little sticker on the outside of the envelope. I will of course personalize the envelope and then I will package up my sweet little painting to get ready to go to its new home. And here's one more behind the scenes tour of Monet Cafe, which is my house. Like I said, I have this little area in my house. It's not quite a hallway. I call it a roundabout. And in this area is where I keep my paintings that I have available in my Etsy shop. I have them loosely arranged by size but I'm going to switch to a different system and kind of file them, organize them by date. I'm getting to where I'm getting so many paintings that I need a better way to find them once someone purchases them. I love using these little shelves. I have a video actually where I show with my husband's help how to put these shelves up and links to find them on Amazon and they work great for small spaces because you can utilize space on walls up high. Often we forget about storage spaces up high. So I love coming up with practical ways to store because I've been living in a pretty tiny house for years now. I hope this video was helpful for you and that you learned a lot. I also hope that you will click that like button in this video, leave me a comment. It really helps when you comment on the videos and also subscribe to my channel and buy one of these paintings in my Etsy shop if you would like. All right, everyone. God bless and happy painting.