 Welcome, artists and friends to Monet Café. Step into the studio with me today as I show you how to mount pastel paintings on board after they've been painted. So I'm gonna explain in this video how to do this process, what products you need, and it's really not all that difficult, fortunately. All right, let's get started. Hello, artists. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I wanted to let you step inside my studio today because I tried something I've never tried before and it was a success. So I'm gonna show you how I did it and explain what I did. But have you ever had a painting that you did and, you know, you wanted to have it a little bit more professional or a little more sturdy, maybe for shipping or showing or selling to a client. And, you know, sometimes the pastel papers are kind of fragile. I believe you could probably even do this with watercolor as well. But and often as you art paper curls like this. So, you know, I don't really want to sell this or market it like this. I do put it in the clear bags and straighten them out. But I wanted a way to make these look a little more professional by mounting them on a piece of foam core board. You can use matte board or Gator board if you wanted to. But I used this black foam core board to get this little painting securely mounted so that it can be shipped very safely. And it's just a little bit more professional looking for your client. So I'm going to show you how I do this with a product that works great. And I want to share with you too that I learned about this technique from artist Alan Picard. He has a video on YouTube. Just type in Alan Picard, A-L-A-I-N, I think. P-I-C-A-R-D and mounting. If you go into YouTube and type his name with the word mounting, because he shows how to do the mounting on the board, he has an excellent video, way more professional in my videos. So I learned about it, but he in the video does it with just an unpainted piece of U-Art paper. So I'm going to show you how to do it after you've painted a painting. And yes, it can be done. So I'm going to be doing that now with this little painting here. And like I said, it works great. I'm very excited to be able to do this. I'm going to do this with a lot more of my paintings now. So join me while we learn how to mount a painting after it's been painted. Now, before we get started, I thought I'd share with you that I did do a little in the studio Wednesday. I'm doing on my Patreon page where I showed how I trim my pastel paintings. If I've done them on a larger piece of U-Art paper and I have a little system that I use with my cutter and some glassing, a product that's great for protecting the paintings. So that's a special thing that I do for my patrons. So if you want some extra content, it's only $5 a month to join my Patreon page. And there's a clickable link at the end of this video. All right, now let's get started with mounting these cut paintings. Here's a quick list of the supplies that you will need. You will need some foam core board or Gator board, a utility knife and the 3M 568 positionable adhesive and some glassing for protecting your painting. All right, now I have already pre cut my foam core board. I really wanted to use black like I did with the other one, but I didn't have any more black foam core board. And I actually had a mark on the back of this one. So this is the side I don't want shown. In other words, I'm going to put the painting on this side so that I have a nice clean back in the back. Another thing too I like to mention is clean hands. I've got some tackiness on my hands right here. So I really need to get my hands nice and clean. You can keep some little wet wipes near where you are. Okay, so I should be good, but try to keep your hands really clean. Now what I'm going to do here is again, this this 3M repositionable adhesive is tacky on one side. It's tacky, obviously not on the outside. It's tacky on the inside. So again, I want this part with the mark to be on the tacky side. What we're doing is we're taking the glue off of this and putting it on here. You'll see how that works in just a second. And what I'm going to do is this isn't really a straight edge here. So I'm not going to line it up exactly with the edge there. I'm going to line up my board right here. This is the nice side I want out. I've got my little utility knife here. Let me get my hair out of the way. And now I'm just going to cut I'm going to press down a little bit. Now that's because it's tacky, it's going to stick to the board a little bit. I'm going to take my utility knife, give it a pretty firm cut, firm cut here. One more cut here. Let's see if we got it a little bit more right here. And that should do it. Yes. Alright, so what we've done, I can roll this back up now tear that little bit off. What we've done is made a board that has the adhesive on this side. Now the glue is on the back side of this paper here. So what we've got to do is use this little burnishing tool. Okay. And what it's going to do, it comes with the three and product. And I've got a little glue on my hands. So kind of wipe that off. What we're going to do is we're just pushing. I like to get the the edges and the corners good too. And I've only done this one time. And we're just trying to get a nice this one was dirty from the previous painting, but that's okay because this is going to come off. I do want to make sure my surface here is good. Let me wipe that off. Again, clean clean clean surfaces. Yeah, we were good. And I will keep the burnishing going. And the reason that we want to do this is what it's doing is it's pressing the glue from this paper onto the board. I might be overdoing it, but we want to make sure it works. Okay, that should be good. Now what I like to do is I like to work from the corner. And when you pull it back, you can see you can really see when you use blackboard if the glue is coming down. But I can see. Yes, it did. It worked. And pull slowly with this. I can tell it is all of the glue is down. There's a little spot here, but that I don't think is going to affect the painting adhering to it. Alright, so now we've got a piece of foam core board cut to the size of the painting. Watch your fingers because this stuff is really sticky. And we've got the glue on it so that we can adhere the painting. Now sometimes when I cut my paintings, there's one side that's the right side and one side that's not. So I'm just kind of making sure before I commit. Now it is repositionable. So that's a good thing. I think we're good here. Alright, so because it was so curled, it's a little harder to get to stay. Sometimes I use my pinkies. Alright, so we've got it kind of down. Now, this is where the glassing comes in handy and I want to do this fairly quickly because I don't want it to pop back up. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set the glassing very gently onto the painting. And again, glassing, it really looks like wax paper. Now I'm just burnishing again. And you can do this. A little bit of the pastel will come up on the glassing but it should not damage the painting. I'm pressing at a medium pressure. But again, glassing is very much like wax paper but the reason you don't want to use wax paper if you're going to long term um keep it on your painting. A lot of times people will protect their paintings by putting glassing on it. I do it when shipping is that glassing is not I mean wax paper is not acid free whereas glassing is acid free, a safe product for you to use with your pastel artwork. Alright, so again, we're just protecting the painting while we're just burnishing it, making sure it stays put and it is securely mounted. And by the way, I announced in my last video that you guys probably know I'm not a big jewelry person but I do like bracelets especially because sometimes that's all you see of me as my hand in my videos. But I do have a jewelry designer working on a special Monet cafe bracelet series that will uh that are inspired by famous artists like a Van Gogh, a Monet, a Degas, Renoir. Alright, so here we go. Lifting it up. You see how a little bit of it came off but the painting still looks fine. Uh it is sticking a little bit to a side there right there but we're good and you can reuse this um if you just wipe that off really good. Uh it should be fine. Alright, so now we've got this little painting securely mounted looks a lot more professional. Let me get my light over here because it really does make a difference when you can see these in the light. And uh it looks so much more professional uh with it mounted like this. Now it's not curling up anymore. So now I have two paintings. I've actually got to do a third one here today. Um that are ready to go. They just look so much better this way. They can be shipped. They can be put into the what I'll do is I'll put these into the clear bags and I put my business card in with it and then they are ready to either be shipped to be displayed shown somewhere uh or just kept in your studio for a while until you decide what you're going to do with them. So anyway, I hope that was helpful. You can mount pastel paintings after they've already been painted. Alright guys, happy painting.