 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins with some great news for pastel artists. Some of you, if you've been exploring pastel art may have realized pastel papers can get quite expensive. But many artists don't realize just how durable they are and that yes, there are techniques where we can reuse or repurpose a failed painting. So in this video, I'll share three different services where I'll do just that. And if you haven't subscribed to this channel yet, please do so. I would love that and we have a lot of fun. Also, stay tuned to the end of the video where I will share one of the paintings that I recreate on this surface that I repurposed. I will be sharing this video in a full tutorial soon along with two others of repurposed paintings. Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I'm here to bring you some good news. If you're a pastel artist or you're just starting in pastel art, you know, some of these pastel papers can get kind of expensive and often we might even be a little timid about starting a painting or get so frustrated if we mess one up and think, oh, I've wasted so much money. Well, the good news is that we can repurpose and reuse many different pastel papers with a few simple techniques. So I'm going to share with you today three different pastel surfaces and my method for restoring them to be able to paint on them again. So it's going to be really educational and hopefully very helpful for you. So let's get started. Okay, so I'm basically going to be erasing to a degree the paintings that you see here. The first is on UART paper. I love UART paper and this is a much older painting of mine and I've been staring at it. It was on a shelf for quite a while. I realized it's just not my level of work now and the color is a little flat. It's a little overworked. So I knew I didn't want to throw away this UART paper. This stuff gets expensive. So I knew that I could do something to repurpose it. So I'll be sharing that with you. This is a water-friendly paper, by the way, pastel matte, also a water-friendly paper and this was from a tutorial. It's not that long ago, but I wasn't real happy with the arrangement of the roses. Something was off and it was bothering me and when that's the case, it's not usually a piece I want to sell. So I thought also too, why throw away this painting or throw away this pastel paper? Pastel matte also gets expensive. So I'll show you how we can reuse this paper and scrub out and get rid of this painting. This painting is one I liked, but I felt like I got it too dark. I really liked the beginning stages of it better. This is on a piece of Sennelier La Carte pastel card. I love the surface. This is not water-friendly, but there's a technique that I can do to remove most of the image here. Now with all of these techniques, I won't be removing the entire painting back to the original surface, but it really does create a nice little underpainting beginning to be able to start a new painting. Often I like the after effects when I remove a painting. So let's get started and hopefully this will be really helpful for you to not waste pastel papers and not be afraid to get started. All right, here we go. Okay, here we are literally at my kitchen sink. You know, I could say my videos have everything but the kitchen sink. Well, now it has my kitchen sink. So this once again is on UART paper. It's UART 400. Once again, I love the surface and it is pretty darn durable. So here at my kitchen sink, what am I going to do? Okay, here is something that I recommend doing outside. All right, I'll show it to you right here, and then I'll probably finish it outside. I've got a stiff bristle brush here. Actually, this comes off. It kind of broke. So I'm just going to take the handle off and use this right here as a little scrubby. And you can use anything that works for you. That's a little bit stiff or can scrub a little bit. Obviously, you don't want anything too awfully abrasive, but because this is a water-friendly surface, I can lay it right in my sink. So let's take a look and see what happens here. Let's get rid of... I'll zoom in here. Let me zoom in. All right, so let's take a look at what happens here. I wish I could keep it still. Yeah, here we go. Look at that. Can you see all that pastel coming off? I'm going to get in even closer. You see that coming off? That's a lot of pastel coming off, and it's getting a lot of layers back in. Now, most likely I will recreate a similar painting. I'll already have a nice underpainting here, and it will be ready to go. I mean, I'll have things laid out, and I think I'm going to create this painting, but much more loose and vibrant in color. So I'm going to knock this off in my kitchen sink and go outside and finish the rest. All right, now I have the wind at my back here, and it's great because the wind can just carry the pastel as I scrub it. All right, and now I have the majority of the pastel off of the paper, and it will receive pastels right now just fine. You could literally do any painting on this. It seems like you'd have to do the same subject matter, but you really wouldn't because it can receive a nice underpainting layer, and you could start again. But this paper being water-friendly, I can wash it off as well and get even more pastel off of this paper. Look at this. Yes, I am wetting this paper. That looks kind of neat, right? That's kind of pretty. I think I like the wet version better than my pastel version before, you know? It's just a little bit impressionistic-looking, right? So that will be a nice beginning for my new painting. I do think I'm going to keep it kind of like the field of flowers. So what I'm going to do is, I think I'll just start on this side here, is I'm just going to scrub, scrub, scrub. Look what's happening here. You see how much of this is coming off? Let me zoom in again. I'm going to dry my hand. You see how much of that's coming off? I mean, you can almost erase this paper. Now, UART paper does curl and warp sometimes, but we have techniques where we can get the warping out, too. So maybe I should call this video. How tough is UART paper? It's pretty darn tough. I've been using Fisher paper lately because it's almost just like UART paper. Fisher 400, and it doesn't curl like UART, and it might curl if I wet the heck out of it like this, but isn't that neat? Almost done. Alright. Now, it is going to curl, alright? But there are things we can do to uncurl this paper as well. After gently blotting the majority of the water off the paper, I lay it flat, first face down, and I take a blow dryer, and I get the blow dryer very close to the paper, then I flip it over to the front, and voila, it's nice and flat. How flat it is already. So with a little more work, I can get this right back to the flatness it was prior to wetting it. So, and that's really not much of an image left on here. If I wanted to recreate the same painting, I've got a nice little ghost image, or otherwise, I could just start from scratch. I could paint something totally different because this takes so many layers. Listen to this here. Wait, let me put this down here. Me and my craziness, huh? Still has a nice sanded surface. And now I'll be doing the same strategy to this pastel matte surface. I love pastel matte, and I often, because it's a water-friendly paper, I often will do a watercolor underpainting on this surface, which is exactly what I did in this roses painting. So when I wash this one off, you're still going to see the water color. It doesn't wash off like the pastel. So you have a little bit more of an image left if you've done any type of an underpainting, such as a water color underpainting, or something with acrylic inks. But as I'll demonstrate when I do a painting on this, it's still okay, and you can most definitely create a new painting on this surface. This is the Sennelier La Carte pastel card. Once again, not water-friendly, but I will use my stiff bristle brush to scrub off the majority of the pastel. Once again, it's great to do this outside if you can. The wind was at my back. I wasn't breathing a lot of pastel dust, and I won't be able to wash this one. But even with the ghost image that will be left on this surface, I can still create an entirely new painting. Once again, you'll see a little footage of the new painting I create on this surface that I'll have later as a full tutorial. So let's take a look at the three surfaces that I have repurposed to be ready to paint again. All right, here they are. All three surfaces washed and scrubbed and ready to create a new painting. And as you can see, the UART paper it's still so sandy, almost like, I mean it feels just like when I first painted on it from fresh. And almost all of the image came off. Really, the pastel matte would have done the same thing if I hadn't created a watercolor under painting on this surface. So I have washed pastel matte before and had it been almost the same as the UART with not much image showing. And of course, the Sennelier that we cannot wash, it's not water friendly. But look at this nice ghost image. You wouldn't even have to do the same painting. I think I will because I really like this composition. But you could actually turn this out. It's amazing how many layers you can get on pastel papers. So you could really create whatever you wanted with this nice, it's got a nice neutral muted tone to it anyway. And here's some quick sped up footage of an upcoming tutorial where I will actually be doing exactly what I said. I'm turning it horizontally just to prove that you don't have to recreate a painting exactly like the ghost image that will remain after you brush off the pastel. I created a painting that was totally different. And so because these sanded papers allowed layering, we really have so much flexibility. And here's the final painting. Once again, I'll have the three painting lessons coming soon where I will show you new paintings on these papers. Isn't that nice to know that we can reuse pastel papers and repurpose them and we don't have to throw them away. And we don't have to worry about starting a painting because they're more durable than you think. All right, I hope that was helpful. Now I gotta get to painting. I got three paintings I gotta finish. All right, happy painting. If I mess up, I won't be able to, you know, restore this or anything. You might have been a little timid about, and my technique for repurposing them to be... No, it doesn't always go as smoothly as you may think, or I may share in my videos. So I hope you enjoyed that. Stay tuned again. I will have the three paintings for these surfaces coming soon and happy painting.