 Hello artists and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I am so excited to bring you this lesson. I know many of you have been anxiously awaiting this reveal for a new way to make a pastel surface that's not only easy, but it's affordable and awesome. And I would really appreciate it if you would go ahead and like this video. I think you really will like it and subscribe to my channel. And if you hit that bell icon, you'll be notified of future videos. Also, if you've been enjoying my channel and all of the free lessons, literally hundreds of free lessons, I'd love it if you'd consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. It's only $5 a month. You can cancel at any time and my patrons get extra content and extra goodies. Before diving into this easy and amazing discovery, I have to give credit to artist Bruce Gomez. I learned about this technique from him at the recent Pastel Live 2022 event. He shared his technique for creating his lovely pastel paintings using only watercolor paper. Yes, just watercolor paper. But he did something to the watercolor paper that I've never seen before and had no idea it would work. So get ready, you're going to love this technique and it will save you lots of money. Great for beginner artists. Now, many of you may know that on my channel, I have created pastel paintings on watercolor paper before. This example shows you how really the texture of the watercolor paper makes your painting course. You have to do a lot of blending. This is me just using watercolor paper alone. And very quickly, you start to add your layers. But very quickly, you lose the ability to get any final layers. You can maybe get three or four layers of color that's still rather bright. But gradually as you work, you lose that ability to layer colors and your colors become muddy. And you can't get things like laying flowers on top of a field. So you're very limited when you try to use watercolor paper alone. And you're always wrestling with that bumpy texture of the paper. Now I've had another technique of using watercolor paper. You can see in this tutorial, it's watercolor paper. I'm applying pastel. And then I'm literally going to liquify the pastel. This is this creates an underpainting. And once you create an underpainting, you can go in after it's dry and add pastel. But without doing anything else to the watercolor paper, you're back to the same scenario I just showed. There's the texture of the paper. You can't get much layering. So you get your underpainting in. And then what are you going to do? You know, you can't really get many layers of soft pastel down. So I've used a product in the past that adds a little bit of texture to the surface. And that product is called Clear Gesso. I get mine from a company called Liquitex. Now don't use regular Gesso because it will cover up all of your underpainting. The Clear Gesso lets your underpainting show through and it has that little bit of texture, almost like sand in it. So once it's dry, you can apply pastel. It literally makes almost a sanded surface like many professional sanded surfaces that you can buy that are much more expensive. So this is a neat, easy way to use watercolor paper, a way to save money in pastel painting. And so many artists, lots of my patrons use this technique and have used it very successfully. You can see in this little demo how I was able to get multiple layers and the color is still fresh. I'll include a link to this demo in the description of this video if you'd like to see the process. So what do we do to the watercolor paper so that we don't have to use Clear Gesso and we also don't have that bumpy texture that we're wrestling with? What I learned from artist Bruce Gomez is that watercolor paper has something called sizing applied to it. And that sizing has to be removed for you to be able to apply layers of pastel. I actually never knew this. So what is sizing watercolor paper is traditionally sized with gelatin so that the watercolor paint does not sink straight into the paper. The gelatin provides a little resistance and forces the paint to sit on the surface and only partially sink into the paper. So that's the general idea of sizing. So we're going to remove this sizing. That's what makes it really challenging for adding pastel to. So I'm going to recommend the same thing that Bruce recommended which is a 140 pound cold pressed watercolor paper. I like arches because it's 100% cotton and it's a really nice quality watercolor paper. Bruce recommended using 80 grit sandpaper. So I went out to our garage and I found some but I did find some on Amazon that should be very equivalent to what I used and it worked great. So here I am doing it in regular speed. What I did is I'm basically just going to use part of this paper because I want to be able to compare applying pastel to just the watercolor paper and then the watercolor paper where I'm removing the sizing with the sandpaper. And now I'm just looking for a little reference image to inspire me. I believe these were some from unsplash.com. I picked some field of flowers with pink flowers but I used my artistic license and I made them a different color. First I'm going to demonstrate just making some pastel marks on the portion, the top portion here, that I removed the sizing with the sandpaper. Now the bottom portion does not have any sandpaper application to it. It's just the plain watercolor paper. Now let's add another color. I think you'll be able to see the difference quite clearly. Look at this blue added over the green. See how it just applied so smoothly? And now look at it applied right on top of where the regular watercolor paper is. You see the texture and the bumps. Now let's apply another color on the next little swatch. Again, look at the softness and you see down at the bottom it's just terrible. It doesn't even have that type of even application. That's what impressed me about this technique is how soft the pastel application was and I am going to be using this technique a lot. I'm speeding up my painting demonstration because this isn't necessarily a pastel painting tutorial of a landscape with some flowers. But I wanted to just talk about my assessment and my discovery in using this technique. Again, the softness is what I was immediately impressed with and excited about because we have lots of beginner artists and just people in general, myself included, where these pastel products get expensive and it's so nice to be able to find discoveries of products that are not only affordable but they work so well and this was just amazing. Thank you, Bruce Gomez. So you can see if you could kind of compare it to what I had posted before of me just painting on watercolor paper alone, I had all of the grit and I had to blend and you'll notice that I do do a little blending in this but what was so exciting to me was how I could add new layers to previous layers and they did not get muddied. I'd say in this painting I added, oh, by the time I finished the field, probably about eight layers to things. I don't know, I haven't counted. Here's my little blender. It's literally just a packing peanut. By the way, that works great on this watercolor paper technique. It just softens things a bit so that you can add more layers. I used it again on the sky. So now look, we've already got this pretty soft looking landscape painting. I'm able to get in more layers in the sky. I really just used my artistic license with this. I used the field in the photo just as a little bit of inspiration and I kind of intuitively created my own landscape. Now you can see some of the pastels that I actually used and I decided to make the flowers kind of orange, look a little bit more like fall than the pink flowers in the image and if you recall, now you'll start to see how I am adding these colors and notice how bright they are. I'm purposely making these subdued, but in a minute you're going to see me add kind of my focal point flowers that are literally going to layer on top of the previous layers I've already put down. If you remember from my previous example in this video here, I was showing working on watercolor paper alone without using the sandpaper to take the sizing off and by the time I got to my flowers, you could not get another layer down. All it did was just kind of mix and blend with the color to make it muddy. You could not get the actual color of the pastel to show up. So that's the advantage of this technique is for some reason, I don't know the scientific reason behind it, but for some reason you're able to get more layering. The texture is softer and the application is just so nice and in just a second you'll see me add some even brighter orange flowers and you'll notice they just pop. They apply very easily as like a fifth or a sixth, maybe even a seventh layer to things and I could have kept layering. I was just amazed at this and I know there have been many of you when I mentioned this a few weeks back that have been anxiously awaiting this video and my thoughts about this technique and I will give it a two thumbs up. If I had more thumbs, I'd give it more thumbs up. Totally going to be doing this technique. I love it. So once again, 140 pound cold press watercolor paper, 100% cotton, an 80 grit piece of sandpaper and just sand off until you'll actually start to see the sizing or the little extra layer come off. It just makes little residue that then you just brush it off and voila. You have a paper that takes pastel so beautifully, allows for layering, has a soft feel. See, look how many I'm adding pink flowers now. That's got to be at least eight layers. So I hope this was a great revelation for some of you. I know it was for me. Again, a huge thank you to artist Bruce Gomez. His work is fantastic. That's exactly what he used was watercolor paper alone for his demo that he did in pastel live and his painting was fantastic. Here you can see it a little more closely. You can see the color better here. Sometimes I don't know why lighting might be a little different, but this is more true to the color. So if that blew you away like it did for me, I'd love to get your feedback in the comments. So let me know what you thought about this and I hope you'll give it a try. I think this will be a blessing for many pastel artists and as always friends, God bless and happy painting.