 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I know I say I'm always excited to bring you videos But I'm really excited to bring you this one I have discovered for me the best blending agent to use with soft pastels I'm gonna show you many of the different products I've used to blend soft pastels and I'm gonna share with you why this new discovery is one that is awesome And I'll also demonstrate this product in a little painting tutorial at the end I would so appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like Subscribe and click that bell icon to get notified of future videos And I'm able to keep these free lessons coming because of the support from my patrons on my patreon page If you would like to consider becoming a patron It's only five dollars a month and you get extra goodies and extra content Okay Now let's put on our mad scientist lab coat and have a little experimenting fun The first four products here are ones well the first three are ones I use often water alcohol matte medium And I recently discovered Gamsol odorless mineral spirits is great for blending pastels for wetting them and creating an underpainting But I recently discovered this last one airbrush medium. I can't remember who mentioned it to me I saw it either on a post or maybe from one of my patrons I apologize. I can't remember where I heard it from But I thought I'm gonna buy some of this stuff and give it a try and if you've followed my channel for very long You know, I'd like to bring you guys along with me for my new Discoveries and while I'm filling up the containers, I'd like to share that why would we even wet soft pastels? Well, a lot of people don't know that when you wet pastels with different products, they become like paint It gives you a lot more options when it comes to using soft pastels different techniques and Painterly effects. So let me share with you the results of these five products and why I think I have found my favorite I'm using watercolor paper because of course it receives wet mediums quite well And I often use it to create pastel paintings. I'm going to show you a painting at the end using my new discovery So I had some pastels laying around. I just chose a couple of colors to demonstrate this I thought that teal color was a nice one. So I'm going to make five Little swatches of this particular color and use all five products to show you how they blend What happens to the actual pastel color? Not just the color vibrancy, but also how it Behaves and applies on the surface with a brush I've zoomed in here more closely so that you can actually see The results a little bit better and I want to let you know that in between each product When I would switch one to the other I cleaned the brush a lot with water and dried it quite well So I didn't get intermingling of different products The first is just plain old clean water and this is most definitely the cheapest alternative And I use water very often to create an underpainting To get painterly results see how it just turned to paint, but I want you to notice right now how Dull the color is and it's very thin But it works great If you're just wanting to do an underpainting and the underpainting gives you kind of a loose painterly roadmap You can cover the surface of a white Paper I don't like working on white paper. So sometimes I'll just tone a paper one color You can most definitely use water now. This is alcohol Can you see immediately that it's a little darker in color? I had a question a while ago about the differences between using water and alcohol For under paintings and I did a little video on it, but here you can actually see very clearly here I'm cleaning it again. And by the way, that was 70 percent Isopropyl is that how you say it alcohol from a drugstore the next product is one that I have used quite a bit It's matte medium. It's something you can use with acrylic paint Now I noticed that see how it the dust kind of came off of it It was kind of moving the dry pastel around, but it does have a different stroke that the product Makes the pastel behave maybe a little more painterly I noticed my brush had more painterly strokes kind of like if you were using an acrylic paint The next product is one that I used in a few videos. Oh back when it was uh christmas time I did a couple of winter paintings using this odorless mineral spirits And uh, I did like this too. Uh, it has um, kind of a drier stroke The matte medium looked a little more fluid and liquid and this one just really had a flat That's probably a better way to put it. You know like flat paint versus maybe satin paint or glossy paint the odorless mineral spirits was definitely more Flat or a matte finish now cleaning my brush off really good because I want to make sure I just get this new product Which is the airbrush medium Made by golden. This is the one that I bought and I'm going to have product Link information in the description of this video. It's very thin. You see it's almost like White water maybe a little thicker than water And I and I'm sorry. I'm left-handed. You can't see right here, but you will soon It is noticeably more vibrant in color. Can you see how it held on more to the actual color of the pastel? I hope this transfers well with the video I was just this was the first time I had used it myself here and it continues to blend Literally like paint the the way that it flows is just so nice So I was very excited, but then I decided, you know what? Let me try something else I wanted to see how two colors would interact with each of the medium selections or the product selections And so I just got a pretty dark purple pastel And this is just a duplicate of what I did before using different products for each of the color swatches Now let me pause here and show you real time Of the airbrush medium now the swatches of the teal color have pretty much dried I think the last one with the airbrush medium medium was still a little bit damp But now I'm going to apply the airbrush medium to the purple swatch of pastel color And once again, it is going to really Blend so beautifully softening the colors and I'm zooming in even more here So you can see this beautiful layering capability Can you see how I layered over the teal color and how it created a new color? So let's go back and see how the other mediums behave when I try to layer them over their original first color Oh, but I did do a little more here. Do you see that almost new color of purple? It created by layering the dark purple over the teal and the strokes are just so lovely And the color is more vibrant. I hope you can see that I didn't film myself mixing the other or blending the other Purple colors with their respective products, but here you can see where I did it first the water Then the alcohol then the matte medium then the gamsol odorless mineral spirits and wow Look at that color from the airbrush medium. I mean it is so to me noticeably different So now I decided you know what I'm going to do a painting using this new product And I'm just going to speed this up a bit but share with you my thoughts as I paint I'm once again just using plain old watercolor paper pretty affordable And I and some brushes and I literally just used a little palette of pastels that were from a previous painting And painted from my imagination. I did a little bit more experimenting with color So I'm really going to speed this up and show you this is all just using the airbrush medium And see how these colors interact with each other the colors blend so beautifully and smoothly And again, I love the ability to be able to layer one color on top of another color now here I'm putting it back to real time. I wanted to give a real close example of just water Versus the airbrush medium and it'll probably really make a difference when you try it yourself Just the way that it flows on your paintbrush. So I did a little more airbrush medium on my purples I decided to see what it would do when I blend them together. Can you tell I like experimenting? And I am going to share more with you about where you can get this and The the cost of it. I'd say it's it's pretty affordable because a little bit goes a long way Okay, I'm really going to paint now. So I decided to just work from my imagination once again with the pastels I just had sitting there I filmed myself when I do everything not knowing if I'm going to even create a video out of it But I am glad I filmed this process now I did have a little bit of wetness on the paper somehow my fingers must have been wet right there You see how it looks a little darker back there, but this is just a dark I believe it's a terry Ludwig eggplant color and I'm going to use the airbrush medium right now just to blend in My darks, you know, and I'm going to have some really tall foreground grasses and something kind of meandering grasses in the distance And then my trees are going to be darker because they're vertical elements, especially that foreground tree But notice the richness of color and the depth of color and it really brings out the purple You know a lot of times I say the eggplant terry Ludwig pastel looks like it's black, but here you can see it is really purple So I did I think I waited on that to dry added a little bit of blue to the sky teal I had a little bit of yellow. I'm doing this in stages. So I put the purple down did the airbrush medium I'm getting the sky in and now I'm applying the airbrush medium to the sky portion And it really blended the colors that I had laid down quite nicely And this is all still experimentation for me. I'm just I'm playing to see how things behave and work out and I really recommend doing that As an artist now I wanted to give those distant band of trees an illusion Art is painting is really just an illusion. We're trying to make something Look three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface So there's lots of little simple rules you can learn to do this and once you learn them You can do like I'm doing you can paint from your imagination. All right now. I'm laying down It's kind of a brown color. I wanted to just get in another dark And I'm going to use the airbrush medium to blend this on top of the purple now the purple has dried now So let's see what happens. All right. It actually got very dark, which is fine with me. I actually prefer To work dark to light with soft pastels you can layer with soft pastels And once again, this is just watercolor paper I've done nothing to this paper other than apply pastels and this airbrush medium Now I'm getting to some of the greens that are in the field I'm trying to work in sections not over what is still wet and I'm applying the airbrush medium to that And notice how it just really all blends so well together. Now, there's my trick That is clear liquid gesso and a foam brush Now I have lots of videos on why I'm doing this right now Basically, if you want to get the beautiful layering capability of soft pastels You're only able to get so many layers before they start getting muddy with color On a plain paper or watercolor paper, you can get a couple But they just don't blend well together or layer well together Now the clear gesso is dry and I'm slowing down this footage and turning up the volume. Can you hear As I'm rubbing my hand there's like a texture to it And the reason is because clear gesso has little bits of sand in it I don't know why actually Regular gesso does not now. There's another reason I use the clear gesso If I do an underpainting like I did in this particular case if I used white gesso I would cover up everything I'd already done. So that's where the clear part comes in But also the clear gesso has that little bit of grit to it And when it dries you've got a really nice sanded surface to lay your pastels on top of If you're brand new to pastel painting, you may not realize like I didn't when I first started using pastels that pastels Actually layer better with a little bit of a sanded surface That's why some of the professional sanded surfaces are sanded like hardware store sandpaper But they're professionally done and they're archival But I have um shared many times how you can save a lot of money by making your own DIY homemade pastel surface using clear gesso I use this technique all the time Watercolor paper is inexpensive. The clear gesso actually goes a long way Kind of like I said this our airbrush medium does So I buy a big bottle of it and by the way if you're interested in a lot of the products that I talk about I have an amazon shop and I have the link in every video And it's really just for your convenience to find the products. You don't have to buy them from my amazon shop Um, it doesn't cost you any extra to buy from my shop It cost you the same price and I get a little teeny commission But it's most important for you to get the best price So but you can find the clear like liquid gesso under I think it's diy Pastel surfaces. I have all these item lists. Okay. I'm gonna go right now after I make this video and add that airbrush medium To it as well. I noticed that the golden that's the name of the manufacturer golden They make a lot of products airbrush medium on I think on amazon for an eight ounce bottle. It was I don't know maybe 15 dollars But I think it's less expensive on dick blick and dick blick.com and I believe it was about 12 So about a three dollar difference. So um, check that out. I'll I'll put a link Directly to the airbrush medium in the description of this video So let me talk now about A little bit about what i'm doing here. I actually added a little bit too light to that tree there but I know pretty much the rules of The illusion of a landscape painting. So that's all i'm doing and trust me i've been doing this so long I was terrible when I first started. I think that's why I love to share so much because I can relate to so many beginners I did so much wrong And um, but once like I mentioned before once you know some of these rules You can take a reference image. You may love the composition, but you don't like the color um, and you can use these rules to Break out your artistic license and create a painting that's dynamic and um, beautiful and artistic and use these basic rules to embellish enhance and make a painting that really sparkles And as I mentioned, this was really just a little afternoon of experimenting for me just to kind of see how the airbrush medium would behave. I loved it And uh, just played around with this little painting and had some fun So I do recommend you doing that studies just creating little studies Is a great way to learn and you don't stress out so much You just have some fun and you don't feel bad. You can throw them away and do them on some inexpensive surfaces like this I decided to add some flowers that just seemed like they were reaching to the heavens And uh, I I love that theme. I feel like all of creation is just raising its hands and praise to the lord And painting for me is really like an act of worship I love to put on some either classical music or some praise and worship music And uh, just enjoy the moment. That's really a lot about uh, what Monet cafe is about Is enjoying the the act of painting and the blessing of being able to paint And when we can do it together, it's way more fun, right? All right, so here's my results and here you again You can see that airbrush medium. The color is gorgeous. It layers so smoothly and beautifully I lightened up my painting a little bit after I walked away And so yeah two thumbs up if I had more thumbs, I'd give it more thumbs up to airbrush medium and for the beautiful painterly effects that you can get with it I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you learned something and check out the product links in this video Please like this video. Leave me a comment. I love to hear from you and maybe consider becoming a patron. All right, everyone Happy painting