 Well, good morning artists and friends at least it's morning where I am now here in Tampa, Florida. Welcome to Monet cafe today I'm in my home studio, and I thought it was a great opportunity for me to go over Some of the questions that you guys have about different surfaces for painting on pastels I do have another video where I talked about surfaces and different pastels But I'm gonna give a little more time to this one and focus just on the papers and the surfaces And I've got my Monet cafe coffee cup here having a nice cup of coffee this morning and hang on while I take a sip Mmm, I love days like this. All right, so we're gonna get into first of all Why can't we just use regular paper or watercolor paper or whatever with when using pastels? This happens to be my Set of iridescent pastels I got from the Mount vision pastel company that actually is located here in Tampa, Florida It was great that I got to tour the company and get these beautiful iridescent pastels. They're real sparkly And they have one of the largest selections of iridescence as most companies they even have a set of darks Which I got but anyway, I'm using these as an example pastels are dusty Okay, and if you were to use these just on a regular piece of drawing paper or even if you go to craft stores They sell a paper that's called pastel. I can't do was both my fingers and quotes pastel paper It's actually not really good for pastels I mean you might can get a little bit of layering done on there But the point is that with a flat paper that does not have a sanded surface Your pastels are just going to you can get one layer down maybe but then as you start adding pastels They start getting muddy colored. They're not as brilliant and they kind of fall off So it's hard to work on a smoother type of surface. So we literally use products For papers that have a sanded surface kind of like sandpaper in a hardware store. I wish I had a sample of that I've actually bought some cheap Hardware store sandpaper and done pastels on them just as an example I would go with a finer grit not a real coarse grit though. It'll eat up all your pastels So let's talk about some of these papers here and hopefully you'll learn something When I get ready to do a painting I have choices to make as to what kind of surface them am I going to use now if you're just starting out as a beginner This might be overwhelming. Oh my goodness. I can't afford to get all of that stuff So just start with something simple try one and then go from there Okay, a good good paper to use is you art paper. Okay, this is they come in different grits This is for grades. This is 400. It's pretty fine. I think it actually goes up to a 600 800. I can't remember but it's great because it's got a fine grit But it allows for a lot of layering and I like the nice neutral color. It's not white. It's just kind of a creamy Off-white color. Okay, so that's you art paper I get them in big sheets and cut them down, but you can get them in smaller sections in a little Packet of papers that they will send you. Okay, so you art paper is great I'll see if I can give some examples of paintings on each of these all right, so there's a nice piece of you art paper and Let me go to the ones that I didn't make first. Okay, these are the ones These are homemade surfaces here, and I'll show you how you do that But now this is another one that I love it is Lecartte pastel paper and it's made by Sennelier me with my southern accent I usually get all these names wrong, but I think I finally got this one Sennelier Lecartte pastel paper. I think I used to say Sennelier Anyway, you don't have to be able to say it to be able to paint on it. Praise the Lord So here is a pad of paper that I get that has various colors in it. Okay? It's got the browns. I've used a lot of them out of here. So you can't see all the colors They don't show it on here show it on the back No, but anyway, I like they have kind of like a a tealish gray one that I've used all of them Anyway, so these are really nice. I actually like working on dark surfaces, too But the Lecartte paper is really coarse the grit on this one is 360. It feels more coarse than that to me But I like it. I think it lends more towards an impressionistic feel It keeps me very focused on my strokes and making sure I'm having efficiency of stroke and not overdoing things And I love the loose feel that I achieve with the Lecartte pastel card Some people like it. Some people don't so that's kind of a personal preference now we also have the Canson a lot of people Canson is kind of like the one I was saying in the Craft stores you can get you can get a Canson paper. It's not really a pastel paper I see some people do great work on it, but this Canson paper is a little bit more for pastel. Okay? It's called the me taunts. Is that right? So people are correcting me I was saying it like Spanish like meaty and taste, but it's French. Okay me me taunts or something like that Touch, okay? So this one is not as Doesn't allow as much layering. It's kind of fine, but it doesn't have the same grit that the other two do So I like this paper, but I don't feel you can get quite the layering as the other papers But I do think this one is less expensive. Okay, I'm not going to go over all the cost of these But they can get kind of pricey, which is why sometimes I make my own But you can get these and you can the pad and you can cut them up That's a good way if you're just beginning don't take a whole piece like this and do a big painting cut them up into some smaller sections And just have some studies that you do, you know to practice with and get better. Okay? So this is another nice Canson product. Okay? Here is another one of the Already prepared surfaces you can buy I like this product a lot and I find myself forgetting to use it It's actually a board now the advantage of this is you don't have to mount it or anything when you're done And sometimes these other papers you are paper can actually kind of curl and warp in humid climates I do have a video on how to fix that problem if you ever have that problem. So um, but this one you don't have to worry about That it's a hard pastel board. It's really nice. It's ready to frame. This is an 11 by 14 gray I like working on a surface that has a color versus white. It has different colors that you can work on Let me see if it has the I don't see the grit of this one, but it it also Will receive quite a few layers of this and I just like the way it feels I have it in the plastic now, so this is good and you can buy different sizes in this as well okay, so now for your homemade surfaces lay that down and We have a few different options here. This is a technique that I learned I got this one a little splotchy, but from artist Rita Kirkman. She does beautiful work If you want to check out a good artist, I love her work But she did this technique and I emulated what she did because I love the glow behind this What she does is she uses this product Golden gel mediums fine pumice gel. Okay, it's this is probably stuck on. No, it's not okay So I have my ratio taped right to the top so I don't forget it Okay, so it's just a gel and it's sanded. It's got a grit to it Okay, so you can take matte board gator board You could even do this with watercolor paper, but it might warp but you take another type of surface That's not that expensive and I like doing it This one happens to be on matte board here You can go a lot of times to framers and ask for their scraps of matte board like the matte in a frame that you have in Your frames for your paintings and sometimes you can get it free or inexpensive So this one's just matte board. I have a way that I cut it But we can talk about that in another video But we're just gonna apply the sanded surface to the matte board and what I do is I mix up this ratio one-to-one ratio of fluid acrylic to The pumice gel this is the fluid acrylic now the reason you can use any color you want any Acrylic color you want which is one that I did here. Okay. I like sometimes just I like these bright bold colors And ones that should still show they're kind of transparent. They show the white still through it. It's not really opaque and dark Okay, so this was a really pretty Surly in blue or something that I I used for that board So you can pick any color you want, but I happen to really love this one read a Kirkman does Quinacridone. I think I got that word right nickel azo gold and This little and with the golden fluid acrylics. I love how they they always have these three little black bars on it They make a little stripe across it so you can see how transparent it is You see how you can see through to see those black bars? That's why the white of the paper shows through so well with this and keeps it bright with that nice glow Okay, and this color is also a great complementary color to a lot of landscape paintings So if you like landscapes the greens and the blues This is going to be a great background color for you to use for those. Okay, so when I mix this up one-to-one. Okay, so if you do The four tablespoons of this four tablespoons of that if it's real easy and then you I keep it in a little container If I have extra left over so that I can use it again when I do this I like to kind of just make a day of it not a whole day But take a period of time and go ahead and make quite a few of these boards I cut them up in different sizes because I happen to love this color again. This is another one You can do I've done it in green I had a painting that I did recently if you want to see another color it was a painting I have on my YouTube channel called joy in the morning. It was a field of flowers and I did it on this Pinkish magenta red background color again kind of a transparent parent color But if I do this with my fingers you can kind of hear that sanded surface and on this one too I play guitar so I have an advantage of having rough fingertips, but this one's even more sanded I must have put more pumice gel in that one. Okay, so you get the idea make your own pastel surfaces Okay, so now there's a couple of other ways you can do this too These I don't have physical examples of them, but I happen to love this product and I forget about this one too It's a color fix primer. You can get in different colors made by art spectrum fine tooth Again, it's similar to the pumice gel in that it already has the the grit in it You're making your own sandpaper So the same thing with this one you can get you matte board gator board whatever kind of surface you want And I always use a foam brush With this one these and with this I use a foam brush to apply it. Okay, you could use a paintbrush too You could swirl it around if you like that impressionistic Feel on your board which kind of again makes more of an impressionistic style so this is just a great product that you can use to make your own papers and Again different colors. I happen to like this color too. Okay, so I've got a few of those This is another one. It's called a dry medium pumice. I'll have to get the the recipe for this one But it's like literally dry like sands to make your own gritty surface So this is another product that you can use to mix with acrylics So again lots of different Techniques and things that we can use to make our own surfaces Here's one that I talk about a lot in my on my YouTube channel And I I like this technique because kind of quick and easy when I'm traveling too. I Happened to like watercolor as well as pastel so often I will do a watercolor painting on watercolor paper. Okay, watercolor paper is kind of cheap You know unless you buy, you know, if you're really good watercolor artist and you buy the expensive ones But this is just I mean you get these at Walmart, you know, and they're not that much So I basically just will do a watercolor under painting. Keep it really loose. It doesn't even have to be anything Detailed it's more just to get the mood and get some colors down and Then if you want to apply pastel to your watercolor all you do is get this product it's called clear gesso and It's a gesso product that has and clear is a good one because if you want your watercolor painting to show through So that you can do the pastel on top the clear allows you to do that So this has some grit to it again I would take my foam brush and apply this I wait for the watercolor painting to dry and then you just apply the Liquid I mean the clear gesso on top of it wait for it to dry one of my last videos I show how I attach the watercolor paper To my board when doing it so it doesn't warp watercolor paper will bend and warp when you apply the water So there's a neat little way you can tape it down to keep it from doing that so that's another very inexpensive way to Do watercolor and create your own pastel surface now I want to recommend something here that is a wealth of information beyond what I just described, okay? Dakota art pastels WWW dot Dakota pastels comm has an amazing catalog. Okay, this catalog is going to give you More information overload than you probably need right now. Okay, but it is just so detailed in all of its information It has all of the different pastels that you can buy it gives their names and it tells Whether they're soft medium or hard they have them range from soft to medium to hard down here I talk about a lot of these different ones in my videos I don't have all of them, but you know you will come to find which ones are your favorite again I just went to the mountain vision Manufacturing company and they have a great starter set Okay, if you want to go back and look at my video on when I toured the mountain vision company Okay, so Basically in here. I'm not going to go through all of the again Look at all they have all the pastels that you can get you can get this catalog for free if you just contact them They will mail it to you for free. Isn't that nice because they want you to buy their products, right? Oh my gosh, I just get dreamy eyed when I look at all these beautiful colors going through here But on page I think it's 31 and marked it Yes, they have a great great chart here to compare all of these different pastel surfaces, okay? We talked about pastel board ampersand. I just showed you that one. I had that color. I believe and Then color fix I didn't show you this. I like color fix paper a lot, too You can get in a pad with all these different colors. It's a great product. I actually haven't done Let's see. What do they call it pastel matte? I know a lot of people on our Facebook Monet cafe art group on Facebook use pastel matte very beautifully and Again art. There's a you art paper right here. It only comes well It actually now comes in another color comes in a you art dark, okay? So wow like I said it can get overwhelming if you're just starting but trust me This will all you'll start to get it and figure out which ones you like but just try something or even making your own surface and just have fun with it it's more about just learning the medium and getting used to it and There's definitely time to grow and get better. Don't get frustrated at first. Just have fun I always say that sometimes we feel like we're supposed to create a masterpiece and it's like no You're gonna make a lot of bad paintings before you get good It's like gosh, maybe a thousand paintings before you're really really a good artist So I don't want to scare somebody like what I gotta paint a thousand paintings. It may not take you that long Anyway, so this is just a great great resource for more pastel products and things I wanted to just give that to you guys and as always I focus on beginner intermediate and advanced artists But my heart is really tender towards beginner artists So this is a good way to maybe learn a little bit more at one time about what you might use and try So now I have the wonderful opportunity to pick one of these surfaces and start a painting Oh, I'm so excited. Oh, and if you guys want a Monet cafe coffee cup or a Monet cafe apron on my website It's Susan Jenkins fine art calm It's in the about section and usually a little link at the end of the videos You can actually go to that page and pick as seen on Monet cafe and in there You'll have the links to find these so as always guys happy painting and I'll see you real soon