 Welcome to Monet Café. Oh, I'm so excited to bring you this video. If you've ever been interested in pastel painting You're gonna love this. I have taken in this one video every method I've ever used for creating my own pastel surface. You know those papers can get expensive. So making your own papers Can save you a lot of money. So not only have I made eight different methods of creating them I've painted seven different paintings in this video So you're gonna get a wealth of information not only for all the different products I don't want you guys to spend a lot of money waste a lot of money on things you might not want to use So this video will give you that information and you'll also get a lot of pastel instruction as I create the paintings So let's get started Welcome friends and visitors in Monet Café. I'm bringing you a lesson today That is kind of like a you asked for it I get so many questions about Creating your own pastel papers and surfaces and what products to use that I thought I would take Many of the products that I've used in the past and put them all together in one video to compare so that you can see What might work for you and what you might want to try. All right. I hope this is a practical video Since creating the intro to this video I actually decided to add a total of eight different surfaces that you can make homemade and Just so you know, these don't have to be done on watercolor paper They could be done on any type of board that takes water such as matte board gator board, you know Whatever works for your purposes, but watercolor paper is pretty inexpensive So these are the eight different techniques and products that I'll be using throughout the duration of this video And I will be creating seven Paintings as a final one of these I just would not use again. So there's a little I don't know mystery to this So you're gonna have to wait to the end of the video and see which one of these Is not a good choice to use but anyway So join me now as I show all of these different techniques and create paintings from them and give you feedback On what my favorites are so hopefully this will help everyone to be able to save some money in creating pastel surfaces All right, here we go. I've got my paper divided With the blue painters tape as I mentioned and I love these little dishes I think they're they're from walmart, but I think it's a pioneer woman. I think that's the name brand But they're very practical for me when I'm doing my artistic experimentation But for this first one This example is going to be using watercolor and clear gesso. I'm going to use this foam brush To basically just wet the surface of the watercolor paper it basically just creates a A wet surface to apply it to which makes like a wet-on-wet type of effect and It goes on more fluid Then if I just Did the watercolor before adding water see how that looks so Translucent and pretty so I'm just putting on The watercolor you could pick whatever color you want. I pick different colors just to Be spontaneous and have some variety in my resulting paintings But you could pick whatever color you want now I am what am I doing now? I'm going to let that watercolor Dry right there because I can't apply the clear gesso on top of that So now the next product I'll be using is the regular gesso like I mentioned some of you guys have questions Can you just use regular gesso like clear gesso? No, you can't because it doesn't have any grit to it. Okay But what I'm going to do here is I'm going to apply Or add to the clear gesso. I mean the regular gesso. Look it's so confusing Just some gouache. I get all these nice little samples from Arteza. This is some metallic gouache And then I'm going to add this dry pumice. Okay dry pumice Is basically like sand and so I'm just going to add a little bit of this Little I'm still experimenting here too. I mean that's like a quarter teaspoon there With the gouache the metallic gouache the metallic gouache has a little bit of a sheen to it But it really doesn't um Really show that much of a sheen when I finish it. I add a little more because it's a little dull Um, so it ends up being kind of like a little lavender Um, I don't want to over complicate things, but you can tent your paper before you add these surfaces I just didn't in this particular video. So everything I'm doing is kind of on the surface Um now here it is and it's got the gesso Not the clear gesso the regular gesso which has no grit to it With the tint you could use whatever product you want to tint it acrylic watercolor gouache And the dry medium pumice. Okay like the sand we added our sand to it because I was testing it there because the regular gesso doesn't have any grit to it. Okay Next is the color fix primer This product is made by art spectrum. It has the sand in it already and you can get it multiple ways I have this color here. It's called australian gray. Um, but it comes in various colors And it also comes in clear, you know, like you don't have to have a color to it So, um, I love this product and uh, you'll see this is one I end up really liking too Okay, so it's already got the sand in this one So you're just basically painting it on and it is a little bit less expensive than buying Some of the sanded papers to make it yourself. Again, I want to reinforce that It doesn't have to be on watercolor paper. These can be done on other surfaces Now this is the fine pumice gel and I have my little instructions on the top of that You want to do one to one whatever color you're using to the pumice gel now? This is the Kind of the go-to technique for artist Rita Kirkman. She to me, she's like the inventor of this I I really think she is but she basically uses the golden gel medium fine pumice gel Combined with this beautiful golden Fluid acrylic. It's called a quinacridone gold Now you'll see why it's called quinacridone gold when I put it on the paper. It looks kind of brown there Oh my goodness. It's the most luminous beautiful color and Rita Kirkman uses this for her beautiful animal paintings and landscape paintings too But I just particularly love her paintings of like cows and animals and things Oh, see how that goes on she recommends using a foam brush And I've tried this technique before and is a little finesse to it Because it dries kind of quickly. I work. This is a small area. I'm using so it was pretty Achievable, but I basically just spread it on with the foam brush trying to get an even coat It is kind of thin. You don't want to put this on too too thick and it makes the most beautiful golden almost like Underpainting surface for whatever whatever painting you're doing. I love golden under paintings All right, so there are the first four that I'm doing and oh I didn't I didn't finish because remember that watercolor I put down That's just watercolor. It doesn't have any grit to it. You can't do pastel paintings on that or if you did you wouldn't get any layers So now this is why the clear liquid gesso You can use on top of watercolor To add that grit now if you did this test yourself Put a little of the clear gesso in your fingers You can feel the sand in it and so that's why you're able to do a pastel painting on these I don't know who discovered that about clear gesso, but i'm so glad they did. It's very cool Now here i'm just doing a sound test and it's more by feel for me But you can kind of hear how gritty these surfaces are and uh as I do the paintings I will also share which ones um suit themselves best for pastel painting Now for this one, I thought I'd actually lay the products in the squares. Um, this is a golden pastel ground This is golden wait for it to focus acrylic ground for pastels. This is golden coarse molding paste And golden mycasious iron oxide. Are you getting the idea that golden makes a lot of products we can use for creating pastel papers? That's awesome. All right. So the first one is the golden Pastel ground. It's basically just like a little liquid kind of similar to the golden Fine pumice gel and I've got a choice here. I could use various products to tint this with but I think I decided To use the acrylic ink. I love acrylic ink. There's it's so beautiful and again I could put this acrylic ink on the paper. It actually would come out much more bright More bright than it did in adding it to the Um the medium but uh when I mix it up, that's what I was saying there You could actually add the acrylic ink first But I choose to add it to the pastel ground the golden pastel ground Um, and I actually I almost didn't make enough here. I barely have enough to cover the paper But again, you just mix it up. Whatever you choose again, you could choose the acrylic ink You could choose watercolor. You could choose regular acrylic The options are endless with all of this and that's why with this video I wanted to kind of take the mystery out of it because it could get confusing with all the different ways you can do things But you just play around and find the ways that suits you best, you know So um it is experimenting, but hopefully this will help you guys and know what products you might want to try And you might want to buy. Um, all right. So that's the pastel ground made by golden. This is the acrylic ground for pastels I didn't well, I'll I'll share my results when I do the painting, but um, this there's some differences to them Uh, so anyway, I'm going to use just regular watercolor to tint this one with and again I'm showing there. I could have put it on the paper. Um, but I decide to mix it into The acrylic ground for pastels Uh, and it does if you choose to do it on the paper it comes out brighter um And also I might want to mention that you guys if you've been on my channel on you've probably seen I do a lot of Watercolor under paintings if I'm using watercolor paper I'll go ahead and start the preliminary painting in watercolor and then just paint clear gesso over it So, uh, some of these you could do the same thing, but they're not as clear as clear gesso So whatever work you did on the watercolor paper is not going to show through if you use one of these products That's not clear But you can always do it this way if you want just tint it with whatever Whatever color and whatever product you want to tint it with All right about to get finished up. What would that one be number? Six because we did four before so um, yeah, that's number six All right now getting ready for number seven I'm choosing to take some of my new pastels In you pastels not any w. They're harder pastel and this coarse molding paste I'm going to show how you can actually tint your watercolor paper with pastels And just do a little wash over that to blend it in You can you have choices as to how to wash it you can use water or that alcohol like I just showed you there Basically the alcohol I like it better. It dries faster and I don't know it seems to make things flow And blend better. Maybe that's just me But anyway, doesn't that uh, that pastel turn into a beautiful golden color kind of like the golden acrylic I used before the Quinacridone gold So, you know, just so many different ways you can do this So I need to let that dry and then I will apply the golden coarse molding paste Now another golden product. We're going to use this Mycaceous iron oxide I had learned about this from looking at one of the facebook groups for pastel artists And another artist had shared a painting and she mentioned this product and I was like wow Because it's nothing I would have ever thought to use first. It looks kind of a dark brown and um I had no idea it had grit to it But the neat thing about this golden Mycaceous iron oxide is that it sparkles It's got little bits of I guess the oxide or something in it I don't know, but it's it's got a little shimmer and a glitter to it. You kind of see it in that photo there All right. Now the new pastel with the alcohol has dried and I'm going to apply the golden coarse molding paste And it is exactly what the name implies. It is very coarse So I Actually had a hard time getting it to dry. It was like so thick and pasty But anyway, so As I finish this last one up here, it will be time to get to the painting And I actually I'm just going to talk while I'm putting this on Actually in taking the blue painters tape off If whatever tape you decide to use If if you do it this way, I mean you don't even have to do it this way You can just do it on a regular piece of paper. But if you want to experiment like I did Take it off slowly. I I pulled a little bit of my watercolor paper off by Being a little too anxious to paint I guess Okay, so let me get this one finished up and then it is time to paint. Let's do it I also thought I would just quickly show you my little basket system. I keep all of my Products for creating pastel surfaces in one basket And it's just really handy for me to have them all in one place So I don't have to go hunt them down when I get in a mode To make some pastel surfaces and I also recommend if you're going to do it Do them in big batches. I mean go ahead and make a Take a dedicated time period of a few hours or day or whatever And make you a whole bunch of surfaces because one of the Best things to do when you're painting is just when you get in the mood to paint Just to be able to paint and not to have to slow down and or go Oh, let me make a surface and so the more you can have things accessible and ready. It's just going to make things better Oh, I like these little uh containers I buy at the grocery store just little tupperware containers If you have an extra of something mixed up You can just save them for for a pretty good period of time anyway And this is just the place in my studio where I keep a lot of things I like the basket system because I can pull things out in groups if I need them And uh, I like things open like this where I can see what they are. So just thought I'd share that I also thought I would show you a bit of these surfaces a little more close up Especially this my case is iron oxide now you can see that sparkle, right? And it actually does have a very nice gritty surface to it And here they all are and I'll just I'll speed this up and show you how not to take the tape off So as a recap here, they are again I'm not going to read them all but if you wanted to pause this and check them out you could Yay painting time. These are the seven resulting paintings from the different surfaces that I used They're not in order here and you notice there's only seven. I mentioned one of them I chose not to even do a painting on so um We will wait to find that out Now I wanted to share my resource that I used for these images for the reference images There's a great site called it used to be called paint my photo dot com now. It's p m p dash art dot com And you know, it's really great like now. I didn't want to hunt and find the perfect reference image So I just went to this site. I typed in poppies. I found all these different paintings or photographs of poppies And what happens is artist? photographers And artists use the site but photographers upload their images allowing you to use them copyright free So this was just a really neat way to find images rather quickly Here are the first four surfaces that I created and you may have already noticed that I've turned this upside down I'm going to start working on the first one I did which is the blue watercolor one there that I used clear gesso on top of the watercolor The reason I turned it upside down is I didn't want to cut these up right away And I if I had that this one at the top and I start painting with pastels The pastel dust would fall and would fall on whatever was beneath it So I turned it upside down so that won't happen. Now. I'm just using a piece of willow charcoal Um, I just keep this little stick of charcoal handy Because you know, you don't really need to do a whole lot of sketching mostly with landscape Paintings or especially simple ones like these so I just kind of sketch things out a little bit and um And then just get to work and I don't I don't even do a lot of sketching on any of these And after using the willow charcoal All I'm basically going to do is get my darker values in and for that I'm going to be using a just a little I break my pastels often but a little broken piece of a new pastel again in new pastel and They are great. They're harder and they're really great for kind of sketching things in in the beginning or Getting down like your your darker values. So and this should this is all very sketchy and A lot of times we don't loosen up enough when we paint and I think that's what's really great about Doing quick little studies like this and giving yourself a time limit on finishing them it really kind of breaks you out of your your um I don't know tightness, you know that we often have as artists I'm using a combination of pastels here And I'm not going to do a whole lot of commentary on creating the paintings Because this is more about the surfaces And so I won't go in necessarily into all the different brands of pastels But I'm using a combination of soft and hard pastels But mostly I want to share here that this is again to recap The clear gesso that I applied on top of just some watercolor painted on watercolor paper And the clear gesso indeed Does have enough grit to work quite well for Pastels to have something to hold on to So now again, I'm getting in more of my values I'm making kind of a trail that will lead your eye through it And I'm not sharing the reference images on here because Paint my photo. I think they have something to where I'm not supposed to really share that I just shared that little video at the beginning there just to show you guys how Awesome it is to use this site And there's all kinds of different Places you can find free reference images. I find the best thing is to get your own photos I know we always can't do that Again, I don't even live where there are mini poppies. So, you know, sometimes these things come in handy And especially for an example like this It just made a quick and easy resource for me to find some some photos to work from quickly But I actually would suggest Um Whether it's paint my photo or something else a lot of times working from thumbnails That thumbnails are just the small image that you see like when I pulled up a search for poppies There were all these little like one by one or one by two squares actually even smaller than that And if you just focus on doing a lot of little paintings like that Again, give yourself a time limit and just work from the little thumbnails I think you'll find that It frees you up as an artist and you'll you'll definitely improve None of us practice enough. I shouldn't say none of us I know I know a few artists who happen to be great because they did practice a lot I need to get more quick practicing in and I will say this was a lot of fun for me I mean, even though it was a lot of work After getting all of these done and doing the paintings. I mean, I was in the zone. I put me on some Good music. I like music with no words when I paint either praise and worship music or just some good instrumental music. I like classical and Anything that's kind of ethereal So it's man. I tell you what painting is just Like heaven sometimes in our crazy chaotic world And I know you guys relate because I see your work. I see your comments I'm so thankful for all of you on our youtube channel and in our facebook group We truly are like a family. It's amazing. Isn't it? We've got people from all over the world And we all relate to each other and it's such a beautiful experience where nobody's getting all Fussy and caught up on silly things. We shouldn't even you know argue about Anyway, I love our group. I really do now. That's just a piece of pipe foam insulation I wanted to kind of blend those trees in the background to make them appear More in the distance things do tend to get blurrier in the distance Not that you always have to blend them, but I wanted to in this particular case But as you can see I am adding quite a bit of layers on this One coat of clear gesso on top of the watercolor paper and And just so you know, I mean some people are like well is is all of this archival meaning Is it going to last a long time or these products that don't have any? They're acid-free or whatever and everything I've used on all of these products I believe all of them are totally acid-free and I've had people ask me. Well, can you sell these paintings if they're on watercolor paper instead of pastel paper? Absolutely, you know, I prepare all of mine before I ship them I put them I put a backing of a foam board on it and put it in a little clear bag That's a good site to get the little clear bags. That was too light to darken it up There's a great site. I think it's clearbags.com where you can get the different sizes if you work in standard sizes you can get like um, five by seven four by six eight by ten um 11 by 14 all these different sizes of bags that you can just slip your little pastel paintings down into with a foam board in the back cut to fit and um Then it's just ready to go either ready to store ready to ship to a customer Ready to take to a little art fair where you might people might want to actually handle them and it's very safe to do So I do have a video where I Show you how to do this process But anyway, as you can see looky there, it's all coming together and it's again just using clear gesso I didn't put the prices of everything on here, but you can so easily check that Great places to find uh pastel related products Of course a lot of you use dick blick.com. There's one called jerry's art arama.com And I always like to highly recommend dakota art Um dakota art has been so awesome to be generous enough to donate our prizes in our mone cafe art group And dakota art, uh, just so you know, it's really everything pastel you could ever want I mean you can get such an education of just going on to their site. They've got some awesome products Um, I think maybe all these products that I've shared in this video. I'd have to check that out Um, but uh, they the people they're great too. Um, the girl I've been working with is just awesome So, all right, so let me finish this one up and we'll move to the next one All right, that was so much fun now I've moved my paper again to where this one's on the bottom I decided for a vertical format and this is the surface where I have Mixed regular gesso that doesn't have any grit with what did I use? uh gouache I I mixed the um kind of like the gouache that has a little sparkle in it that didn't really sparkle in this and then I added the dry pumice to add The grit to it. So we've got regular gesso whatever tint however you want to tint it and Dry pumice added and I really liked the surface So this is the first two that I did is like the questions I get a lot the difference between clear gesso and regular gesso and once again Um, the regular gesso has no grit. You have to add your own grit which I did here and it worked great okay, so if you want to get regular gesso and um get you some dry pumice That would work great. The only disadvantage I would find to the This method versus the clear gesso is if you want to do a watercolor underpainting To begin with your regular gesso this example here, it's not clear So you're going to kind of make your watercolor underpainting more It won't show up as much. It's going to be more Opaque and not show through or be translucent through the clear gesso So, you know, whatever method you want to use But I really liked the surface. It worked great. Um, I I'm still a fan of the clear gesso for one It's it's one less step to do too. You can and you've got the like again I said the the fact that it's clear Helps for different applications. So anyway, um, once again, here we go more painting and more music Okay, another fast and fun painting and by the way, I'm towards the end of these I'm speeding them Up more than I normally do Just because this is more about the the surfaces than it is the paintings But this is the one that I love And when I make these I usually make them in big batches. It's the one that I used The example of Rita Kirkman She uses the golden pumice gel One to one ratio With another golden product the golden fluid This is a long color name quenacridone nickel azo gold refer back to the beginning when I give all the information on these But you one to one you can mix the fine pumice gel. Really, you could mix it with anything. You don't have to use that particular Uh, golden fluid, uh acrylic paint, but I love that color. That's a gorgeous color So, um, so this is just those two products mixed together one to one ratio applied to a board watercolor paper whatever surface you want and This works great It is not quite as gritty as even the like the clear gesso. It feels a little finer to the touch But I I find that it still takes a decent amount of layering and It has sufficed for many of my paintings. I've used this technique quite a bit and again I like to make them in big quantities. I like to Just take a day and I actually this method is not so easy to do on big surfaces so Sometimes you can take a big piece of something and and create your surface and then cut it but for this process I typically cut my sizes before I apply the product it begin again because like I said in the beginning of this That it dries kind of quickly. So it's better not to work on a big old huge um piece of watercolor paper or board or whatever But I love this one. This one worked great. Here we go again with more painting and music Yay time to move on to number four. I wish I could paint this fast in real life. Actually, no, I like the process and this one is the Fourth one I created it is the art art spectrum color fix Primer this color that I'm using is called australian gray but they make all kinds of different colors of this and I really love this. I forget sometimes to use this product It has enough grit if you're you're probably familiar with color fix The the paper art spectrum cells the it already made on the paper, but this is a way you can do it yourself I haven't done the cost comparison on these versus the actual paper, but I'm fairly certain it's quite a bit cheaper to just buy the product and make it yourself Plus sometimes I love playing around with this. I've done this with this particular product where I've gotten like a stiff bristle brush with a second time twister and Kind of make a real textured surface Instead of the smooth even strokes and often I really like a textured surface like that It it lends towards a more Impressionistic feel so enjoy this painting number four Yay, so that was all four paintings done on the first piece of watercolor paper and now I'm moving on to the second batch This is the surface that was the acrylic ink combined with golden pastel ground And this golden product has grit in it and I just used the acrylic ink to tint it the one right next to it That's the green that is the I think I used watercolor mixed with golden acrylic ground for pastels now that was confusing to me golden sent me these products as samples And it was confusing. I wasn't sure what the difference was and there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference I put them in my fingers and um felt them and I I think this one the golden pastel ground was a bit grittier A bit more gritty Than the other one, but they both worked great. Okay, so you might want to get a small Containers and when you try this if you've never tried it before you may want to get one of the smaller Containers of these just to sample and play around with and uh, see which ones you like the best too Now this is an instance where I let the color Of the original surface kind of dictate my mood and my choices Rather than the reference photo alone. I used the reference photo for the composition. It was a nice composition But it was primarily um if I recall More of just like green field red poppies blue sky, you know kind of more of your typical scene But I had that beautiful pink uh surface underneath and when I added that yellow for the sky I thought let me just add this golden yellow for the sky and and by not applying it um All over the surface I allow a little bit of that pink to show through and so I I just made that you know Kind of a glowing nice sky from that so I let that dictate my choices for the rest of the painting And uh, I just wanted to keep that pink glow underneath so I I let those distance fields be a little bit pink kind of reflecting What's in the sky and then I decided because I've got Kind of like some purples in the shadows beneath the grasses and in that Those trees to the right there. I decided a compliment to purple is that beautiful Orange so instead of the poppies being red. I thought the orange would just be more A more beautiful choice for this color composition that I have going on here and see that Oh, I had that really bright orange pastel. I'm not sure what brand that is that Might be a unison But anyway, and then see that teal that I'm adding there See how that just made those orange colors pop and I was literally just having fun playing with color at this point and that's the neat thing about doing a lot of smaller paintings like this is You loosen up and you really start to have fun You know kind of like when you were a kid You got a big old box of crayons with all the colors and you didn't sit around and and say Oh, I got to make the perfect picture. I don't know. Well, maybe some of us did But for the most part we just had fun and we enjoyed the freedom of creating and Of course, we do have to learn the rules. We do have to get better We have to learn our tools, which is what i'm trying to help you guys do here But when all of that starts to come together the process starts to become like magic So I encourage you to keep practicing try doing a lot of small non serious pieces like this And you'll find yourself playing again and actually having fun This one will be painting number six and it is the one where I used golden acrylic ground for pastels I'm pausing because I'm having to remember it and I combined it with watercolors straight from the tube And obviously this pretty green color another instance here of where I let the color of the surface dictate The mood and my color choices. I loved this green So much that I wanted to make the sky green like a greenish yellow and yes, you can do that because As many of you know, if you've watched a lot of my videos Value meaning the lightness or the darkness of a color is more important than color So if you get the value right you can get a little crazy and fun with color And so that's what I did here. The original Reference image was not In any way the these colors it was did not have a green sky And it did not have the color of the flowers that I end up using here And I also wanted to Comment that I didn't find a lot of difference between this surface And the previous one that you can kind of see a little bit of it there to the left Being that well, they were both the golden Um pastel ground to the left and the golden acrylic four pastels Um when I started working on them, there wasn't that much of a difference So, um, I'm not sure if any of you guys want to comment if you've used any of these products and you found a difference But um, I think for me, I would order one of the other. I don't think it would really matter now for the Uh composition or the color palette I'm choosing here is because that lime green is kind of dominant still. I'm letting it show through I thought the flowers would be pretty now kind of a compliment to the lime green is more like a magenta purple And so I put down the deep purple as a base for the flower and then um, Kind of layered it with some of those magenta colors. I also liked that. Uh periwinkle blue Um kind of mixed in there and by the way This was my most, um extreme departure from the original reference photo and What was interesting to me is that when I shared the paintings on in our facebook group monnaie cafe art group This painting got more likes than any of the other ones And I think maybe it is because it was getting very creative with color All right time to begin painting number seven now you may have noticed that I skipped one. Um, this should be eight. This was the eighth one the surface that I created So now if you heard me at the beginning of the video, there was one I chose not to even paint on That was the number seven and just so you know that one that I did not paint on Was the golden coarse molding paste it was just too darn gritty and um, it actually just was so thick and pasty Um, I think it's a product that you use to mix with acrylics to somehow get maybe that really thick textured look I'm not sure. Um, but I didn't paint on it. So this one is actually the seventh painting But it's on the eighth surface and that surface and you if you remember It's the one that has a little shimmer to it is the another product by golden my caseus iron oxide And uh, I love this. It's really needed. It causes you to get a little creative I was um actually kind of getting in a rush by the time I had to do this last one Some other chores I had to get to oh my goodness. I would rather just stay in my studio and paint all day I know you guys can relate. Um, but anyway, I chose this uh little image It was of a single I couldn't tell if it was a rose or a poppy But I decided to kind of make it like a rose and it had the stormy sky But what I liked about the composition is that everything seemed to be reaching up towards Something you couldn't see. I mean the clouds were moving in that direction The flower was reaching in that direction and it was just really a neat composition. So um, it's it's very textured The surface, but I like that and I also happened to like working on darker surfaces. Um, it causes you to Um make different color choices. I think I mean all the rules are still the same with regard to value Um, but you've already got a medium value on your surface So um your darks and light choices are going to be a little bit different But anyway, so enjoy this last little one. I do if I had to rate Let me think at the very end of this. I'll give a rating as to what my favorites were. I do like this one though All right, enjoy the music I've skipped a little bit of some of the stages of this one Basically because my video is getting too long if I get anywhere kind of close to an hour video Um out here in the country where I live I have really limited wi-fi and uh, it just takes too long to upload. So But anyway, I wanted to go ahead and finish this little one up and then share you my Share with you my opinion on all of them But to recap I wanted to show you again the one where it was using the course Molding paste and uh, I just didn't even didn't even decide to use it Now once again, these are all of the different products that I used on the watercolor paper Let's take a look at the paintings. This one would be these aren't in order, but this would be the number one Which was the clear gesso painted on top of Uh watercolor paper where I had already painted some kind of like a teal blue This next one is where I use the art spectrum color fix primer, which works great I love this product again. You can buy it in different colors. It's awesome By the way, this one was number three on the watercolor paper That I used now. This next one is the number four, which is I call it the reed a kirkman technique It's the golden fine pumice gel Mixed with a tent and the tent is the golden fluid acrylic the um quenacridone nickel azo azo gold Such a long name. All right So now this one would be number Five is the golden pastel ground and I added the acrylic ink that pretty uh bright paint to it It paled it out when I mixed it together, of course, but I love that one I'm definitely going to use more of that product. All right, this one would be number six Which is the golden acrylic ground and I added watercolor again, uh the pastel ground and the acrylic ground for pastel Seemed very similar to me. I really liked both of these products. All right Now this one was actually number two, which was the regular gesso and I added dry pumice and a tent of gouache You recall I skipped number seven the course the golden coarse molding paste and I went on to the golden mycautious Iron oxide. I love this surface. It's really cool. So in all in all, let me give you kind of my rating So out of all of these first if I had to pick those that performed most like a Already pre-made pastel paper such as uart or color fix or so many other brands I would say that number three the art spectrum with the color fix primer It really does come out more like a pastel paper Then I would all also add to that number five and six the golden pastel ground Where I mixed the acrylic ink again, you can mix whatever you want and the golden acrylic ground with watercolor Those felt most like a pastel surface My next personal favorite with regards to final results is I just really love number four the reed akirkman method With the golden fine pumice gel and where I add the quinoa crudone nickel azo gold. I just love that color But the gold fine pumice gel works well, but keep in mind It doesn't allow for as much layering as the previous ones. I just mentioned Okay, so the next on my list If you go up to the first two number one and two I prefer number one the watercolor and clear gesso. It's just easy. It's quick And it really does give you a lot of layering for that choice I think I would say the golden my casious iron oxide Would be my next choice and then I would Conclude with the regular gesso and the dry pumice added those two also work great They're just not my more of my go-to methods and last on the list Of course is the one I didn't even do which was the golden course molding paste Just not in my opinion not great for making your own pastel surface. So there you have it. I hope this Um video tutorial demonstration was very beneficial and helpful for you guys Try some of these Please subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and you'd like to learn more about pastels and art in general I share a lot on this channel Also, feel free to comment add your suggestions and also join our monnaie cafe art group on facebook such a great warm happy place encouraging and instructional Educational so much to learn there. So keep creating beautiful things and as always happy happy painting