 This video is brought to you by Squarespace. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build your beautiful online presence and run your business. Hello everybody and welcome back to The Average. Today we are testing out some thing that I really hate. I always have hated but now I'm starting to think maybe I've hated it because the way I was taught to use it wasn't fun or useful to me at the time. So I'm thinking I'm going to try out some soft pastels again that give them another whirl because I've seen some pretty decent paintings out there with these and I was thinking I met that stage with my art where I really want to try to do different stuff with different media. I'm totally a mixed media artist so it makes sense for me to try out stuff. This is how it looks and they are absolutely gorgeous. I do love the colour range of them. They are beautiful. Look at this pink that is exquisite and these blues everything. So many nice colours so I don't know why I was limiting myself. As you can see they probably look a little bit used already because yeah I've used them and let me explain. I did this a little paint over with them just to try them out and also I want to do a bigger piece and I'm starting to think that I need to do smaller studies of bigger stuff that I want to do first. So today we're going to recreate this painting or this image that I did using a bigger sheet of paper and maybe more detail and a little bit more complexity. I'm hoping I'm hoping I don't just recreate the same thing again but this is kind of like the layout of what I want to do. As you can see I used a little bit of water colour because I want to use the pastels in a way that I would use them not just to like make something completely out pastels because I just don't think that would suit me and yeah I'm getting more experimental. I want to be more experimental and I want my style to evolve a little bit and that is why I'm using these and I think they're really pretty and I think they give a real vibrancy to stuff and also I'm really starting to think of how I can use this in my horror comic and use this kind of misty imagery or glow or huter stuff or fade them off in the background. There was this YouTuber called James Gurney and you can find him. He is an incredible artist and I feel like I learn a lot from him. So he uses pastels in the background to kind of mute down the distance. That's called artistic perspective I think where you know in the background things are a little bit faded because they're in the distance they're harder to see and I really need to start thinking about stuff like that a little bit more thinking more whilst I paint and yeah so we're going to recreate that today that painting that I did which is here and I really liked it just ignore this this is just a little bit of a study using watercolours I think and yeah anyway I'm going to do this and I think I want to modify the overall composition I'm not sure about the sea because I think in my horror comic there might not be any sea nearby but I want to think about maybe using a street here or something I don't know so I'm going to do some thumbnails for this and figure it out you may be wondering what the heck this is for so if you saw my Ikea video uh months and months ago I found this little roller at Ikea not this one I found another little roller at I found it at Ikea roller and it was for like children and then I realised that I really enjoyed it so Pesto she's charring at birds so loud I saw this roller at Ikea and I bought another one because that one broke because it was for children it wasn't very sturdy so I think this is probably for like lino printing because it's a hard rubber rather than like a roller that you would paint but anyway I've been using it to lay it down a little bit of an area first and I quite enjoy it so I'm probably going to use this as well okay uh I'm going to start out by getting my watercolour paper I think this is going to be quite a chatty long video so bear with me this is my watercolour paper this is a arches cold pressed cold press basically means that it's two feet I found this out recently I've been learning a lot guys and um hot press means that it's less two feet but I really really like this arches paper I think this is the best watercolour paper that I've come across and I I've used a lot of different watercolour paper so maybe for other people it's not as good but for me personally I really like this paper I'm going to be using watercolour with my uh pastels and you're probably wondering why aren't I using wash I found that it was a little bit difficult to use wash with these because if I wanted to go over something water it was kind of reactivating the grosh so yeah it just it made sense to just use watercolour here because it will be a lot easier to manipulate when I'm come to using the the pastels so like I said before this video is sponsored by Squarespace and it offers such a great range of website building tools for you I use Squarespace to host my portfolio site and I I really felt like it was useful to have something for people to go to to search for your name and to see your artwork in the future I'm thinking about selling my comics using my own commerce website on Squarespace and I think that would be really handy I just took a template that I liked and I went with it and then I just uploaded a lot of images that I thought were interesting and then I went to the about me page and a real little bit of a description about myself and it was super straightforward and easy to use please head to the link in the description if you would like 10% off your first purchase of your website or domain okay so there's my layer of yellow I'm looking at my thumbnails now and what I decided to do is create a little bit of a graveyard motif so there's going to be some graves here in the foreground and then we're going to have the motel from my horror comic in the background I think I'm going to get started as this is still wet because it makes sense for me to just go for it with this paper it kind of it takes a while to dry and you do get a lot of nice bleeding of the watercolor if you use wet or wet which can be nice quite a nice effect when we come to use the pastels I think it might look really cool so I'm trying to mimic kind of the clouds that I had in my original piece I'm just going to layer it out using like a fine wash of watercolor and then try and figure out where on my page everything else will go I'm going to put pop the motel here I quite like using pastels with watercolors so far I think I think that's what I enjoy I still haven't used the pastels enough to figure that out yet obviously using this paper is quite different to using the paper in my sketchbook because it can handle a lot of water in my sketchbook I have a lot of textures that I really enjoy that won't show up here so I need to try and mimic that somehow because I really do like the way that it kind of looks rough and it's not quite soaking into the paper I really think that's pretty so I want to try and emulate that and I think I'll probably get that look with pastels a little bit when I go over pastels I'm hoping that this will lighten up the color I am being really experimental with this piece because I really am trying to get looser with new art supplies and stuff like I said I'm a mixed me to artist so I really want to try and delve into like using as much different techniques and things that I can because I think like it's really helping me evolve and it's really excites me as well to try out new supplies yeah I really wanted to be super dark where like the moon is there so the light would be coming this way so over here we're gonna have a gravestone let me know if you like these kind of longer chatty videos where I'm trying to show you how I'm doing my process so in my painting I do have like a really light area where the the sky meets the land and it's kind of like a purple hue and I do have a little bit of white wash I'm gonna use for that because I feel like it needs to stick out a little bit I'm kind of making up the motel as I go along but I will be looking at reference pictures so what I'm doing now is just trying to give a little bit of an underpainting to this image before I go in with the pastels so using it in my sketchbook roughly I realise that that is kind of the best approach for me I think they work really nicely with watercolours they kind of complement each other the way that they're a little bit random you know a little bit organic in the way that they can spread or move or push so I think it's interesting to use them together so yeah like I said I'm trying to block out some shapes here with the watercolour and I really like the way that this moon kind of it's not so nice in the way that it spreads out in the original image it kind of has like this shape to it where the rays stop which obviously is not realistic but I like the way that it looks I have this attitude of kind of going for stuff and then regretting it later so we're just going to see how this turns out so at this point I'm starting to think that maybe I can start using my pastels within the image I'm a little bit anxious to do that because I know once I start adding it it will be harder to add the watercolour to it because it won't react well with the pastel so I'm just thinking like if I need to specify anything else here like I said this is a very experimental piece for me I'm starting to really just get a feel for this medium and see how it works with other stuff that I use but yeah so far so good so let's just go for it I guess yeah so I'm going to use this kind of white okay so I'm going in quite roughly and please pastel users if you use pastels and I'm using it completely wrong please please be nice to me because I don't know what I'm doing basically I I think I used these a little bit when I was in school but no one really taught me how to use them or about them really so I'm just kind of going for it and seeing what happens now I'm going to go back in with water and you can see that it pulls the water it doesn't really work and it kind of lifts up some of the powder that I have here but I'm going to just use it like that anyway because I think it softens the edges and it makes some interesting textures where the water isn't allowed to be pushed that's how I like to use it anyway it's probably completely wrong see look I'm getting like pools of paint color and pigment here which is pretty fun for me I'm enjoying it a lot people might be screaming you're using it wrong but I don't care I think with using these pastels I really get to work into the painting like with my hands and I've always been quite a textile person when it comes to art so I think like it kind of is a really nice thing for me to just kind of like work in the paint and do different stuff like that I think it works really nicely for me and I was quite surprised at how much I really like using pastels now I never ever ever liked them and I swore that I would never use them I just never really thought about it to be honest and then I saw these paint these ones on um I think it was amazon and I just I was like those colors look really nice and it looks quite fun to maybe use that and I don't know what came over me but I was like yeah I'm gonna try those out and I'm really glad that I'm I'm using them to be fair let's add a little bit of orange hue to this moony area I know that's a bit weird because it's a moon and people will genuinely associate like white light with the moon but really the light that you're seeing from the moon is the reflection from the sun so it makes sense to have it a little bit yellow and especially in this little imaginary world that I'm building so I'm going in with these polychromos uh faber castel pencils they're my absolute favorite so I'm just detailing the stuff that's going on in the foreground a little bit more because that will be more detailed because things that are closest to us would have more detail so I need to make sure that that is clear I really like these pencils a lot and I think they really work with what I'm doing here I would say I haven't really got a style for the comic yet and I am working on the script I've written about maybe a few pages because this is still going on and yeah I think I'm a little bit intimidated by this project to be honest so that's why I've been kind of putting it off but now that I'm sort of finding a style for it drawing more imagery to help me with the story I think it's coming along a little bit more and I found sort of a theme for the story so it's all going to be about kind of belonging somewhere like that's going to be the general theme like belonging and I think that is going to work and I think before I didn't really hit those notes of the story so it was I was putting off doing it if that makes sense and now that it is coming along I'm gonna I'm gonna be trying out to get it done quicker still bear with me please folks so so basically this is sort of the image I need to work on some more details I do want to define the shape of this building a little bit more I wanted this to be like the sign of the middle above it and I know it wouldn't really make sense lighting wise for this to be so prominent but I think maybe it would just be like a bright colored sign so that's my reasoning for using this bright I'm kind of liking the way that it's looking now a little bit more hence so that where this is kind of a hill going down and then that is in the distance so I need to make that a little bit clearer so let's try it I'll probably go over this again with some pastel just to see if I can knock it back a little bit because right now it's a little bit in your face so I'm hoping it's clear that this is kind of like a hill in front of this stuff going back maybe I need to add like a little bit of like land here so it's not just like this is sticking out of nowhere so I think what I'll do is I'll mark that out maybe this composition is a little bit odd and I wish I had maybe spent some more time on the thumbnail but hey lessons learned right I think it would be dark here as well even though the moon is like there I think it just grounds the motor a little bit more and I do like the way that that purple looks with the hill so it kind of looks like the hill is beyond going past and the light is shining onto the hill so I'm going to use this purple to kind of define that hill a little bit more in the background I think I want to yeah I want to like get rid of this line here so when the moon is like hitting her arm it's definite that there's a form there I think that will look cool I'm just going to like blend it in with my paintbrush a little bit okay so right that's the process so far I think I'm going to work on this a little bit more and I will meet you guys at the end I guess so that's the final piece I probably could do a lot more to this and like knock this back a bit more and play around with it more but I feel like as well I'm getting to that stage where I'm overworking something I'm pretty okay with how it is now I really enjoy using pastels with watercolors I think it just it really is a nice cohesion of materials and yeah I'm going to use those a little bit more and I love these colors these by the way if I didn't mention are Jack Richardson Richardson I don't know how to say that Richardson soft hand rolled pastels they're pretty expensive they're about 50 quid which was really crazy for me considering I don't even like pastels but I saw these and I thought these looked so nice that maybe they would be really cool to try and use and yeah that's it that's the end of the video I hope that you guys enjoyed this kind of chatty more talky video and also thanks again to Squarespace for this sponsorship and I will see you guys next time bye oh one more thing if you don't have fixative for these pastels hairspray is a pretty good cheap alternative and it works it holds it down I've always used hairspray for fixative so there's a little tip you guys if you didn't know