 Would you like to learn about a common household product that works like magic with pastel paintings? Come on in the studio with me today where I will show you how to rework a painting or remove pastel from an old or failed painting and start fresh using this common and magical product. So don't throw away those old paintings. Stay tuned to watch the magic happen. Hello artists and welcome into Monet Cafe Studio, which is just a small room in my house, by the way. But if you've followed my channel for very long, you know that I love to experiment. I love playing with new products and experimenting, trying new techniques. And that's what I'm going to do today. And if you're seeing this video, it means it worked. So I saw another artist share a product that she used with pastel painting that fascinated me. What she used was a magic eraser. So who has heard of these? You've probably just used it for cleaning your house though. And I'm going to share in this video a technique where you can use a magic eraser, yes, with pastel painting. All right, come on in the studio and let's do this. Over many years of pastel painting, I have a lot of older works, pieces that were done when I was kind of first learning and getting started. And also, if you've been painting a while, you'll notice that your style changes. And so sometimes works that you thought were really great at the time. You look back on them and you go, hmm, that's not really where I'm at today. And I have shared lessons where I teach you how to rework an older painting. But I really think this magic eraser technique works quite well, either wet or dry. I'll show you both. Now this painting, oh, this is way back from 2019. And you know, I liked this painting when I created it and I sort of like it now. But it's not my style anymore. So here's my little technique for putting a painting on a board. Whenever you want to work all the way to the edges of a painting or restore it like I'm doing now, you put a little piece of tape halfway up on the back of the surface or painting in this case, you'll see me do it right here. So you just put it on the back with the sticky side to the surface halfway up. So it holds onto the painting. And then you just put another piece of tape on top of that one. And then voila, you can adhere it to your board and paint all the way to the edges. And dust can be a little bit of a factor with this technique. So you can either do this outside, but I have a pretty powerful fan next to me where I work with a HEPA filter that works great. Now this is something that I have used and still use to get a majority of the pastel off of the surface. It's a stiff bristle brush, and this happens to be one that's like for stenciling. And I've found that it works great. And I'm speeding this up, obviously. But I'm just working all over the painting. You can see the dust falling off. And this actually produces what's called a ghost image. But using this Mr. Clean Eraser can give you a bit more pastel removal than just the brush technique alone. Now I'm going to cut mine in half because I'm just thrifty like that. I'm going to first show you the wet technique. Now this was my first time doing this, so I did not even know what to expect. You're going to see some of my failures in action. So I first tried wetting the Magic Eraser. I mean that's how you use it normally, right? And I'll tell you ahead of time, I really like using it dry better. You're going to see that example as well. So I squeezed out a majority of the water and I began just wiping my painting. And I started with the darker trees first. You see how much that's pulling off? And I think that was a portion of my painting. I even rinsed it out. You can see me rinsing it out here. That was a portion of my painting that had more pastel on it than other areas. You can see how thin the pastel is in the foreground. Now watch when I get to the foreground how much it's pulling off. You see that? But with the darker trees, it didn't pull as much off. So I decided to use it like a paintbrush. I grabbed some of the darker from the trees rather than just continuing to wipe it. And I thought, let me just make me a little ghost image underneath that I might could just start over on the painting. And so that was the first technique and method that I tried. It does kind of look like a mess here, right? But believe it or not, when you get most of these layers off like this, even with something kind of crazy looking like this, you can definitely add plenty more layers of soft pastel on top. So I thought, okay, let me make this a scene not like it was before. I'm going to make some larger trees and then another band of trees a little further and create some light in the distance. Because this is UART paper, many of you know that I have a challenge with UART paper because it curls. Well, it definitely curls when you wet it like a lot of surfaces would. But this is, of course, an older painting of mine when I was using UART. I now use a surface that's almost just like UART. It's called Fisher 400. I get it from a site called proartpanels.com. But I am flattening it out using this blow dryer technique. And eventually I get it nice and flat again. I did use my tape technique, though, just to get those sides flat to the board. And now, believe it or not, I have created another type of underpainting, very different from the original painting, that I can just start a new painting. And this was, again, the experimentation process for me. So I was just kind of working from imagination here. And now I decided, let's try using the Magic Eraser during the painting process. Can you see how I'm using it here to soften some of that magenta color I already put down? And often we really want to start our paintings a bit more subdued and soft. And I do most of my blending, if any, at the beginning of a painting. So now you're going to see me playing around with this concept again, blending it with the Magic Eraser. And I haven't tried it yet, but I'm thinking you could use the dry method even on surfaces that are not water friendly like this. I mean, you're using it dry, you could probably just brush off the pastels from any surface. So I'll experiment more with that and share. But it definitely works on this UART paper, and I'm sure a lot of other surfaces. And so now I'm still playing around with this painting here. And now let me speed things up a little bit, because I'm going to show you the non wet technique. If you just want to use the Magic Eraser dry, say you've already got a painting that's complete, just pretend like this is a complete painting. And I'm just going to use the Magic Eraser and wipe off the majority, leaving a ghost image. So here we go again. Let's speed this up once more. And I'm making marks in a way. I'm also kind of wiping it off a little bit on a paper towel in between strokes. And I'm wiping it directionally to kind of enhance or make a composition that will leave me with an image that is just moody and soft. And then I could actually just create another painting on top of that. So how many times could you do this process? I don't know. But it is nice to know you have a few times to rework your painting. And now I want to see how the Magic Eraser works. If I want to use it dry and just remove almost all of the painting. So I'm real quickly just creating some kind of quick painting that has lots of layers. And now I'm brushing it off once again with the stencil brush and getting most of it off. And then I'm going to use the Magic Eraser dry. Now watch this process. Again you don't need to see this in real time. I'm working vertically and horizontally. Look at how it's removing everything. And it just keeps taking layer after layer off. And I'll let you know if your surface is really sanded like this UART. It did leave little bits of the Magic Eraser kind of on the surface. But I just brush it right off and I'm good to go. I decided to turn it vertically instead of horizontally. And now I'm creating a painting that will be for my patrons on my Patreon page. Here's some footage of different stages of the painting process. But isn't it so neat to know that I took a painting that I had created so many years ago and I removed almost all of the pastel and used the surface to create a brand new piece. So I think that should be exciting for a lot of you. And if you'd like to see this full tutorial with my commentary from start to finish then you might want to consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. It's super affordable. $5 a month, not a day or a week. And you unlock hundreds of videos. You get to be part of my Patreon family. I get to see your work. It's just a beautiful community. And if you've hung in there this long I hope you will smash that like button, comment. I'd love to hear from you. And please subscribe to keep the free lessons coming. All right, everyone. God bless and happy painting.