 Welcome friends to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins bringing you something that I think will really help a lot of artists who want to paint in soft pastel. I recently discovered a really neat way to use a block of watercolor paper to create my own homemade pastel surface. Now there's a couple of neat things about this watercolor paper that made this painting lay flat and just come out like many professional sanded pastel papers. So get ready to have some fun saving money. And if you're a patron of mine on my Patreon page, no, you're not seeing double. This video is of the same subject matter. I did a full live stream of the same flower painting for my patrons on my Patreon page. They got the full live stream content, all of my pastels that I used. But what you'll be seeing in this video today is the little study that I did before the live stream. So patrons, if you're watching, keep watching because you're gonna learn something new. And on that note, if you would like to become a patron of mine on my Patreon page and support this channel, it's really easy and real affordable. It's five dollars a month and you can cancel at any time and you get lots of extra content. So come join the family. We would love to have you. Also, if you would go ahead and like this video, I'd really appreciate it. Subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and click that bell icon to be notified. Of future videos. The product you'll see me using in this lesson is fluid 100 300 pound watercolor paper and it is on what's called a block. Some of you may know that I've used watercolor paper in the past to make my own soft pastel painting surfaces. But there's something special about this paper that makes it my favorite. So stay tuned. I'm gonna be talking about that. It comes in multiple sizes and it's quite affordable. The reference image is from a flower farm. This is their Facebook page called Juniper Canyon Flower Farm. They're in Helix, Oregon. And one of my patrons had shared some of their photos and I contacted them. I loved their photos and asked if I could use some of their photos for references and someone got back in touch with me and said yes. So yippee. I'm gonna be sure to share the final painting with them. And the reference image I'm using is Delphiniums. I think that's what these are called. And I am very grateful to this farm that allowed me to use it. For this homemade pastel surface technique, you'll need the watercolor block. You'll need some water and a paintbrush. There's another product you'll also need. I'll talk about later. It's called Clear Gesso. Now I did a little sketch and I'm gonna speed this up a bit because it's super basic. All I did was get in the horizon line, just a general kind of curving horizon line. I got in the basic flower shapes and I wanted to keep them very gestural and lively. And I only got in the ones that were very evident, the large flowers. And as I paint with pastels, I can add the smaller ones later. And what I'm going to be doing is creating an underpainting. It's called. It's like a painting under a painting. It's a nice road map to get started. Because this is watercolor paper, I can wet it. Now, sometimes I actually do a watercolor painting as an underpainting. Again, because it's watercolor paper, I can. But I also sometimes will use soft pastel. This whole painting will be only soft pastel. A lot of people don't realize that soft pastel is paint. It's just in a dry form. So when you add water to it, you liquefy it. Now, in my full live stream tutorial for my patrons on the larger version of this painting, I go over the whole process in real time, of course, live. And I had my patrons chatting with me and it was a lot of fun. It was my first, I guess, official live stream. And I'm going to be doing that more often for my patrons. It was really great. So I describe, you know, the technique that I'm doing here. But I'm basically just getting in a warm background for just some earthy colors in the background. And now I'm going to liquefy or turn the pastels into paint. Again, it's watercolor paper. So it works great. Now, here's what's neat about this 300 pound paper. I had never bought 300 pound paper. I had only used 140 pound watercolor paper. And I had heard that 300 pound paper, that's like a tongue twister, doesn't buckle as much. It's thicker and it takes more water so you don't get the buckling. Now, because this is on a block, I'll be talking about that more if you don't know what a block is. I'll tell you all about it. But because it's on a block, it doesn't curl. You know how a lot of people you tape your watercolor paper down or you wet it to stretch it because of this block and that it's 300 pound paper, it stays so nice and flat. And I'm pretty heavy-handed with my water, typically. So you're going to really love the fact that your final pastel painting won't be all warped like past times I've tried to use watercolor paper. Now, I left the flowers blank because I could have done the whole under painting with just all of that warm color. It's kind of a gradation from top to bottom, from lightest values to darkest values in a real peachy earthy color. The reason I left some of the flowers blank is because I wanted them to be very bright and luminescent. So I kind of wanted a little bit of that white of the paper showing through. And I decided to do it in sections like I'm doing because I didn't want the peach color to blend too much with the blue. So I decided just to do the flowers to liquefy them with water after the fact. So that's why I did two phases of the water application to the pastels. And I'm keeping these very nice and loose. Some of them leaned a little more blue, some leaned purple, and some were a combination of both. Again, I'm just getting the largest shapes, not worrying about the little details. I can layer those with pastels later. And then I'm going to add the water to this. And I'm going to try and keep the, it's going to blend a little bit with the pastels. I have already liquefied the peachy color, but I'm going to rinse my brush out and kind of keep those flowers, the blue and purple flowers, not contaminated with the other background I already laid down. And now with a clean brush, I'm going to liquefy the pastels here. And again, it doesn't matter if they blend a little bit with some of that peach color, but I'm trying to keep them brighter with the white of the paper. Now, why would I do this? Why would I even do an underpainting or liquefy them? And the reason I wet the pastels, you could also use alcohol, like drugstore alcohol, is because you see how it really filled up the tooth of the watercolor paper or the texture. And I don't have as much of that bumpy white surface showing through. Again, the pastels literally turn into paint. And so you get to paint with them, and you get a nice smooth application rather than that bumpy, textural application. And once this is dry, we can't really just apply soft pastels to this paper because they won't stick. Pastels need a little bit of texture. And this product, Clear Gesso is excellent for that. And I don't use regular Gesso. First of all, it's white. It would totally paint over white over your underpainting. And also regular Gesso that's often used for prepping canvases. It doesn't have the little texture in it for some reason. I don't know why, but the Clear Gesso has little bits of sand or grit to it, and it's clear. So it will dry and you'll be able to see through to your underpainting. So it's just a marvelous product for being able to make your own homemade pastel surfaces. Now some of you watching may be thinking, Susan, I've seen you do this technique so many times before. What's different about this? Again, I'm going to talk to you about that very soon. And if you have tried the water paper Clear Gesso technique of making your own surface, give me a shout out in the comments and let me know if you've tried it before. And I bet you you will like this product even more for the reasons I will share in just a minute. Now this is back to real time. Now the Clear Gesso is dry. I have my underpainting. It doesn't look like much, does it? But believe it or not, there are some benefits to this underpainting that will really make your painting easier to paint. Actually, it's like a little roadmap to get started. It will also create a more painterly style to your work. And because the underpainting is nice and warm, it'll really make some of those greens pop. There are so many beautiful benefits to underpaintings. And actually, it's better if they're very loose like this. We're not trying to get detailed. We want it loose, gestural and free. And what I'm doing now is getting more of the warm tones that's a dark. I know those are deep grasses. And if I just start putting green down right now, it's going to look a little flat and a little dead. So I'd like to get some darks in that are going to contrast with the greens and give them also a nice value to rest some of the lighter greens upon. Now I love this color here. It's kind of like a magenta. And it also leans a little warm, not as warm as like the orange or peachy colors I put down, but I thought it would be a neat little pop of color behind some of the grasses and some of the other distant flowers and stems reaching up. So I'm creating this environment, if you want to think of it that way, for my flowers and my grasses to be able to just say, Hey, look at me. And if I did all of the colors, just the same as what I see in the reference photo, that wouldn't happen. So now this is kind of an orangey. Oh, I switched it. Did I know this is kind of an orangey reddish color. And I'm putting this notice my values. Let me pause on that for a minute. Notice my values from the lower part going up are going darker to lighter. Value just means the degree of lightness to darkness. So typically things in the foreground are darker in value, especially things that are deep in grasses like these. So I put down my darkest value first in the foreground, then I'm gradually getting lighter as things are reaching up. Then the lightest thing, of course, is the sky. So I'm just gradually getting my values lighter. I'm also getting them cooler. And notice that that pink pinkish color that is a cooler color than the orange, meaning it doesn't have as much yellow in it. And I'm just kind of scumbling. That means just kind of little short random strokes, scumbling in between the flowers purposely trying to keep this loose and energetic and free. I'm not trying to create a photograph here. I'm trying to create a painting. I realized I wanted a few more darks in just some strategic areas. If you squint your eyes and look at this photograph or any photograph, you can more accurately determine lights and darks. And what you're basically doing when you squint your eyes, you're making a little filter. You're blocking out the light. And that really allows you to see, it kind of takes the middle values away. You're able to see what's really light and what's really dark. And I noticed the areas that I'm doing here were where there were some obviously deeper grasses and things. And this is going to give you the impression that these flowers are closer to you. Again, things get darker in the foreground, lighter in the background. An obvious example of this, it's like mountains. You notice in the distant mountains, they look pale and they also look cooler. Like I said, things get cooler in the distance. But things in the foreground are typically darker and warmer depending on your subject matter. And now what I'm going to do is I have the clear gesso applied and it's working great. But I'm actually going to get a paint brush and I'm just going to kind of knock down some of the texture off of a little bit of this pastel that I've applied. So now I'm painting with the pastels dry before I was painting with them. I was turning them into paint by using water. And by the way, I'm working flat. I actually prefer just artistically to work at an easel. There's one benefit to this multiple, but one of them is that your pastels fall down because of gravity. But I also like standing because I can back up and look at things. But I work flat for the benefit of filming. When I'm creating a tutorial, it allows my camera to be right overhead with a nice overall lighting that helps you guys to see a little bit better. So this paint brush technique actually works quite well when it's flat because I can blend and move the pastel around that's still laying onto the surface. Now this might look a little dark right now, but I'm getting in some colors for the sky. Now, skies typically are darker up high way up in the heavens. You know, it gets dark up in space, right? So think of that as you get higher, things get darker. As you get down closer to the horizon line, things get lighter. I happen to think that a sky in this case would be pretty if it had more of a cyan, a little warmer blues, a cyan is a warmer blue. And the reason was because the flowers tended to be a bit cooler. So I thought if I had a cool blue sky and cool blue flowers, that's not going to be as interesting. So I do pop a little bit of that teal cyan blue into the the flowers as well, not much a little bit so that it is harmonious with the sky. But again, I wanted some color interest. So that's why the colors that I'm using for the sky lean a little bit warmer. And you'll probably notice, like I said, I'm gradually getting my colors lighter as they get closer to the horizon line. Be become a student of nature too. Next time you're out and about looking at your surroundings, take a look at the sky, become a sky watcher. And I think you'll see this really does happen in nature. Now I'm just using a pastel to actually blend some of my sky. Now the more layers that you add with soft pastels, the more they will start to blend themselves. And they get smoother and less bumpy and textural. But there are some tools that you can use to blend them out to soften them up a bit. And I typically only use those things at the beginning stages of a painting. I feel that if you over blend, you're going to muddy your colors and lose that fresh vibrancy that's inherent to soft pastels. They really are the most brilliant in color of any medium. Now what I've been doing now is sneaking in more of that pretty warm color between and around the flowers. It's called negative painting. I wanted to kind of get that background just a little bit muted or neutral. This is more of a neutral pastel here. And it was just a little bit too bright. That's another thing that happens with color in the distance. Things get more neutral. If you notice a flower that's really, say it's a bright beautiful blue flower really close to you, you'll see it's brilliant color. But the further those flowers are in the distance, they start to pale out. They start to, first of all, get lighter in value, cooler in color in general. And they get duller in color or more neutral. Now I am back to talking about blending. I am using a little packing peanut. You know those little things that you get in packages to protect your packages? I have found these work great on certain pastel surfaces. This one of course, this homemade pastel surface with clear gesso. The packing peanuts just blend beautifully. But they don't work great with any professional pastel paper that has a lot of tooth. They're literally like sandpaper like UART, Fisher, Sennelier, of course. And they're almost just two texturals. So they just eat the little packing peanut right up. You can't even really blend with it. But it works great on this. It works great on pastel matte, color fix, and lots of other surfaces. But my purpose for this is I want that sky to appear far away. And I didn't want it to steal the show from the flowers. Now sometimes I do like a textural sky with with some clouds. But in this case, I felt like the flowers didn't need any competition. I wanted them to be the star of the show. And now I'm going to start developing some of the darker values in the flowers. If you squint your eyes again, you can see which flowers have darker values. You can also determine where the sun is. Even though you can't see the sun in this photo, you can tell that what's a very important thing to do when you begin a painting as it will make your painting more believable. And in this case, I could tell that the sun was coming definitely more from the right. I could see on some of those flowers that the darker values were more on the left side. And then of course, darker values are as they get deeper into the grasses as well. And I love the fact in this photo that some of them were purple, some of them were blue. And often many blue flowers, whatever those flower varieties are, they actually typically have a little bit of blue and purple in them. But I really just thought this image was so lovely. And then in the distance, there were some that were further away, that were a little bit of a lavender. Again, they're getting lighter because they're getting further away from the viewer. And now I'm going to start scumbling in some of the other flower shapes that I see. I say flower shapes because I'm not trying to recreate a botanically accurate flower that I could put in a flower encyclopedia. I'm creating a painting and that means suggesting things. And also too, by suggesting certain things, you allow other elements that have a bit more detail to remain the star of the show. The bigger flowers are most obviously going to be the focal point. And that is one focal point strategy, which is size. And the smaller flowers that are buried deeper, and I want some of them to be buried too. I'm going to put grasses on top of them. I don't want all of the flowers just sitting on top of the grasses. That won't look very believable. Now, here's where I was saying, isn't this a pretty blue? It's like a teal blue. And here's where I was saying, I'm connecting the sky a little bit because I am adding a little bit of that warmer blue to the flowers. So we've got a combination of cool blues, warm blues, and cool and warm purples as well. And what I'm doing, again, back to suggesting, I can see, I talked about this a lot in my live stream, I can see the way that these flowers grow from the reference image. They're not, well, first of all, they, they're almost like these long stems with lots of little bouquets on them, flowers that are circling around the stem. And so they're, what's the word? Spiraling. That's the word I'm looking for. They're spiraling, like from the base, larger, getting smaller as they're going up. So try to avoid putting each one, just like a little pattern on each side, like flower on right, flower on left, flower on right, flower on left, because some of them are turning, you're not going to see them all forward facing. And you, you don't necessarily have to get out your ruler or measure and try to get them all exactly where they are, but just determined kind of how they grow and just give that little brief suggestion. And before you know it, you've really given the impression of that particular flower variety. You will also notice that these flowers have darker centers. It's almost like they have a little black center. So I am going to get a darker pastel. They won't all stay this dark, but that's, that's really kind of one of the ways we work with soft pastel. We typically put down our darker values first, and then we can layer and lighten them up. It's opposite of watercolor. Watercolor, you want to preserve the light. So I'm still scumbling in some other colors, and I'm trying to keep the edges nice and loose and to have a feeling of motion and gesture. But now I'm going to start adding the dark centers. And again, I want to take those centers and spiral them. I've already kind of given the indication of where the flower shapes are, but I can kind of see where the centers will be as well. And I'm, I'm not making an exact circle. I'm not making all of them the same size. And I'm certainly not trying to make an exact pattern. Sometimes you, you create a little random space somewhere. Again, it's going to make your painting look very amateurish. If you have everything samey samey or patterned everywhere, we were going for the way nature really works. And that's not how nature works. Even though so many elements in nature have patterns, and I'm fascinated by something called the Fibonacci sequence, there's literally a mathematical formula for many of the patterns in nature. But even though much of nature has a pattern, there's also this beautiful sense of spontaneity. And I always think of elements in nature like music. And if, if you're a musician out there, shout out if you know what the term dissonance means. Dissonance in music is where there's a little note that's almost a little off or a little minor or something. And it actually adds such beauty to songs when everything, again, it's not samey samey. Can you imagine if there was a song where all the notes were just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot? It'd be so boring. So I equate music and art together a lot. I think there's a lot of similarities. So now I'm going to some of my lighter values. What I'm doing is I'm building the flower from the depths of the flower out to where the petals are catching the light. And keep in mind that things that are in to the stem are darker. So we get our darker values down first, again, to be able to have something to contrast the light on. And then we gradually get to our medium values, and then finally to our lightest values. Once again, keeping in mind the location of the sun, because in this case, the lighter values on the flowers will be on the right sides of the flowers. And that's really going to give that feeling. You can kind of see it in the field, too. The light is coming from the right side. It was interesting that I chose a blue based on the color and the value. This one that's in my hand right now. I knew I needed some of these petals on these flowers to pop with value because the sun was catching them. And I just grabbed this color. I thought, Oh, this is good. This is a nice periwinkle lighter blue. And I didn't notice until later, I think this is the one, but there's one that I grabbed that's actually an iridescent pastel, iridescent meaning it shimmers and shines. I think this is the one. But I was like, You know what? And I like iridescent pastels. I don't use them a lot. They're kind of fun. But in this case, I thought it was so fun. And the painting, the final painting actually does shimmer. By the way, if you're curious of where I get my iridescent pastels, there's numerous companies that make them. But I'm very blessed. I live in the Tampa, Florida area. And the pastel company Mount Vision Soft Pastels is manufactured. Their plant is here in Tampa area. I actually did a tour of their facility. It's a video here on Monet Cafe of how pastels are made. The owner, Carl Kelly, gave me the tour and actually showed me how they're made. It was so cool. But while I was there, back to my story, he showed me his iridescent pastels. And they have, I think two sets, a regular set and a dark set. And I went ahead and got both sets. I think maybe it's 12 in total, something like that. And they're really a lot of fun. And again, this little final painting was shimmery and sparkly. And you are going to see at the end, I know the part of the topic of this video is that it's kind of a new discovery of mine. It's the same technique with watercolor paper, underpainting, then clear gesso to get your pastels to stick. But it's a better result because of this watercolor block and because of it being 300 pound. You're going to see at the end of this video where I take it off of the watercolor block. It's really super easy. And you can't believe how flat I couldn't believe how flat the surface was. Once again, if you guys have ever tried this, I'm able to get pretty good results. But almost always there's a little bit of warping. After it dries, it usually flattens out pretty good. But while you're painting is what's challenging is the watercolor paper can warp and curl and you're kind of working around some of the bumps. And this stayed totally flat the entire time. So that's really the new discovery of this particular video topic. And I love it. I'm going to do this again. I'm going to buy more of this watercolor paper. It comes in many sizes and totally do this technique again. I actually, I must admit, I liked the, I'll talk about what I'm doing in just a second. I liked the final painting on this watercolor surface, this homemade DIY watercolor surface with clear gesso better than my live stream video. I liked my live stream video painting. It was on Luxe Archival, by the way, a pastel paper, a professional paper that's sanded and a lot more expensive than watercolor paper. But I liked my little painting on the watercolor paper better. So, you know, you really can get good results with this. Now I'm using a harder pastel here. This is a Prismacolor new pastel spelled in you pastel. And I'm using it to scumble in some of the stems. You see some of the stems on the flowers, even though they're mostly covered with flowers. And you can, and I used it for some of the grasses. Now I'm using the same strategy that I mentioned before, darker values to lighter values. I got in my darkest greens, some of that cool dark green I was using for the stems. And now I'm just suggesting, that's my favorite word for painting, I'm just suggesting some of the lighter, I would say medium green values, warmer values for some of these leaves. I don't have to have them all perfect. All I'm doing is looking for shapes and sizes and values. I got my medium value now, I've already gotten my darks in. And I'm just kind of zoning out and looking at the general shape of the leaf and scumbling them in. A little gestural mark, a little, and by the way, your painting will be more lively and painterly and impressionistic. If you keep your marks rather quick and gestural, rather than slow and mechanical and pressing down very hard. If you make a quick little gestural mark with a light touch, you can press if you need it darker in some areas and then lighten up your pressure. You're going to have a much painterly final painting, if that's your goal, if that's your style. I know a lot of people love realism, so I do too. I'm fascinated by that, but totally my favorite is impressionistic painting. Now I'm giving little suggestions of some of those little stems that are growing up that aren't quite fully formed. They've just got the little buds, they're little oval shaped buds. Again, I don't want them so patterned. I'm keeping them random. Do you see those pinks peeking through now? Those vibrant pinks, some of them are warmer, like orangy, and some of them are pink. Look at the life that brings the painting. To me, that's fun. We're artists. We can have color fun. We don't have to paint exactly what we see, as long as we follow the rules in general. I like the expression, once you know the rules, you can break them. So in general, you don't want to get too crazy. And you'll notice that I will still gradually get lighter. If you examine the reference image, by the way, if you're a patron of mine, you will get a copy of this reference image. And also, once again, credit to the Juniper Flower Farm in Oregon for their lovely photo. But I have the reference image. If you're not a patron of mine, I've got it in the top corner here. I know it's a little small, but you can probably squint your eyes and see that there are some areas on these leaves that the sun was just catching them, where they were pretty bright green. I don't want that everywhere. Or it becomes just monotonous and nothing stands out. But I'm again, just getting the general shape of the leaf with a light touch. I can't stress that enough. Oh my goodness. It took me years to develop a light touch. I was so heavy-handed and a light touch is really going to help your painting stay painterly and allow you to get more layering. If you're finding that your painting is getting muddy looking or you can't get many layers and you're like, why is this happening? It's probably because you're pressing too hard. Now, you can have some hard strokes with heavy pressure, but only your final marks. Because you know, these are going to be the sprinkles. They're the icing on the cake. And you know, you're not going to be putting more layers on them. And often too, those final marks, you're going to find they're brighter. They apply better if they're some of the better, very soft pastels. The way the layering process works with pastels is harder pastels work great when there's not a lot of layers. You can get harder pastels once you've got, you know, two, three layers. But as soon as you start getting more and more layers, you go to put one of those harder pastels down and you're just not going to see them very great. And they don't have the color vibrancy as the softies. So while I say you don't have to have this regiment, oh, I've got to use a hard pastel right now. I'm on a first layer. I've got to use a soft pastel now. You don't have to do that. But you'll just notice it'll become an instinct that you know the softer ones are really going to give you that pop of color towards the final layers. So this one in my hand, for example, is a Terry Ludwig, very soft, very wonderful. I love their company. It's a U.S. company. The people there are awesome. And it's just a great product. But the ones that are kind of rectangular and large, those are Terry Ludwigs. And I break my pastels a lot just for them to be more manageable. Some other softies that I love are Sennelier. Oh my goodness. Sennelier still, I think to this day, still has one of the best buys on Amazon for 120 half sticks. It's like $130. Don't quote me on that because the price may have changed. But that's amazing. You're just spending a little bit more than a dollar or pastel stick and you get 120 colors. So if you're getting started or have gotten started and you know you kind of like this pastel painting journey, that's a really good set. Another good set. Look at all this information I'm giving you in this one video. I can't be quiet. Another good set is the Paul Rubens. I've been pleasantly surprised by this company. They sell their sets on Amazon. They have a 36 set and a 40 set. And those pastels are very similar to Sennelier that are very professional. So Paul Rubens on Amazon, soft pastels, not their oil pastels. And they're going to be coming out with a 72 set. I'm going to be getting that one soon. So I'll be sharing that as well. So those are some good buys if you're just getting started in pastels. My very first set of soft pastels was Rembrandt's. I would say they are a medium softness to hardness ratio. And they're great. I had to get it because of budget. I could not afford the soft pastels that were more expensive. And at first I didn't know any better. Well, let me go back. The first pastels I got were from a craft store. And oh my gosh, don't do that. Most craft stores don't have quality pastels. They have student grade pastels. And I got so frustrated I almost stopped painting with pastels. I was looking at the results I was seeing. And no matter how I tried, I couldn't get those results. And I didn't know it was because I was using products that you literally couldn't get those results. No, I had a lot to learn too. It wasn't all that great. But I am so passionate about what I do because I have learned everything the wrong way and the hard way. But I am not a quitter. And when I started learning things, I thought I got to tell other people about this. So I hope you've enjoyed my journey. And again, I hope you subscribe to this channel and consider becoming a patron. I've got over, oh my gosh, hundreds. I know I've got over 400 free videos here on Monet Café over the years. And the beautiful thing is that there are people all over the world sending me messages saying, I could have never learned what I'm learning if it hadn't been for this YouTube channel. Because not only did they not have the money for lessons or the time, a lot of people have kids, you don't have time to go find real life, you know, workshops and things. But also there are some people in countries where literally there are no other resources. So I just love the fact that people all over the world are learning and it just feels like this wonderful family. That's why I named it Monet Café, because I love impressionism Monet. And Café just feels like you're hanging out with people with a cup of coffee. And so man, I'm just really rambling on. I've been painting a lot today and real quiet and just painting. I painted for a few hours over the past few days. And so maybe I'm just a jabberbox because I've been quiet for so long. Anyway, I'm glad you guys tolerate me. All right. So look at all that color. I'm sorry, I moved my painting a little bit out of the scene here. I'll pull it back down in just a minute, but I'm using this Prismacolor New Pastel again to get in some of these wispy gestural grasses. I love things that are reaching up into the sky. And I haven't applied so many layers that I can't get these strokes of hard pastel on here. Remember how I said sometimes if you have so many layers, you can't even see the harder pastels? Well, that shows you how good this clear gesso works. It really does allow you to get quite a few layers. Okay. In just a second, I'm going to move the painting down so you can see it better. I'm also going to go ahead and zoom in to the painting so you can get a little bit more of a clear view of some of the colors and values and also these iridescent pastels. Now, I know you can't tell how iridescent they are from this angle, but really when I take them into, I have this little part of my home studio. I call it the roundabout. It's this little area between my bedrooms and my bathroom. And I have my shelves and everything on the wall where I have all of my paintings where I can store them. I have all the paintings for my Etsy shop in there. And the lighting in that little area is, I don't know what it is about that lighting, but when I move my paintings that have iridescent pastels in there, oh my gosh, they just shimmer and sparkle is so cool. So that's the one, I don't know if it was the one I was talking about before, but that is the iridescent pastel. Now I'm just going to sign it with this pretty magenta fuchsia type of color. And now for what I've been saying the whole time about this video, what's so cool about this new technique is because it's on this block, a block is literally watercolor paper glued together. And the reason it's awesome for watercolor painting is because it keeps it from buckling. Well, that's why it's good for this homemade pastel surface as well. Because now the neat thing about this one is it's open, some watercolor blocks only have this little sliver that's open. This one is open at the top and the bottom. So what I have here is a palette knife. You could use a butter knife, but now I'm going to turn it upside down because the bottom section is also open. There's a space. So in other words, it's only glued on two sides. Because of that, because of it being glued, it stayed nice and flat the whole time. So you do have to give kind of firm pressure here. And you just press and remove that top sheet from the block. Once again, it's 300 pound paper, so it doesn't warp at all really because of that. And I'll definitely be using this product a lot for pastel painting. Now I did take it in my little roundabout area, I call it. And here you can kind of see the shimmer. If I move it in the light, isn't that cool? The lighting's not great in here. By the way, that coffee cup painting is the next tutorial. You guys get a sneak peek. This was from my Patreon live video. You can see it's larger. It was on Luxe Archival paper. It also has the shimmers. But you can see compared to professional soft pastel paper, the little watercolor block works just great. I hope you guys learned a lot. Please like this video, leave me a comment, join my Patreon family. If you like, we'd love to have you. And as always, God bless and happy painting.