 Welcome Artistic Explorers to Monet Café. You've come to the right place if you want to learn more about art, specifically pastels. Today it was a very exciting time for me combining pastels and oil paint. Yes it can be done and I'm going to be sharing that with you guys in this video. A couple of quick announcements before we begin. Many of you ask about my music that I use in my videos and where I get it from. I actually just use the YouTube Audio Library. There's a lot of great little selections there you can use and I don't have to worry about a copyright issue. Also I sometimes forget to ask you guys to subscribe if you're a first-time visitor to Monet Café. This YouTube channel is a great resource for you if you're interested in art, learning how to paint, and specifically pastel painting. And all of the videos in Monet Café YouTube are free. Currently I'm focusing on bringing more beginner content to this YouTube channel. However, I also have a Patreon account. This is a place where you can support me in continuing to bring the free videos for $5 a month and also get some extra content. With that said, the full extended version of this video will be provided on my Patreon page and also my Patreon Facebook group. This video that you will see here if you're seeing it on YouTube will have some limited content but still a lot of great information. All right, time to get started. Okay, here we go. Like I said, we're going to be combining oil paint and pastel. How are we going to do that? I got this set from Arteza for free. They send me some free art supplies to demo and they are archival in quality. These oil paints there's a nice variety of colors. I think if you're an oil painter there are higher caliber or quality oil paints but these are great for purposes for experimenting and also for doing an underpainting. Now what I'm going to be using to put the oil paint on instead of a palette is a Jack Richardson. It's called a Gray Matters paper palette. I find these are incredibly helpful for using with oil and acrylic. They have a nice gray neutral tone and they're slick. They can take the water and you're going to see also inside here I want to show you real quick. They have a chart that's a real nice information with a color wheel, some color theory information, a little value scale. So it's really beneficial in that respect as well. Now what I've done I took a half a piece of that Gray Matters paper and I taped it on my board and also a piece of a surface I'm going to show you in a minute what the white paper is there but this is just the sample. Now anything about oil paint or acrylic and even watercolor is you don't have to use all of those colors they provide. You can mix colors and get a huge variety of colors and values by using just some a few selected colors and these are the colors that I chose. I chose let me see if I can read them here. Cobalt violet, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, light green, mid-yellow, yellow ochre and crimson red. And I don't even use all of these colors while I'm doing the underpainting with oil paint but I thought I'd go ahead and sample them and demonstrate how these work. Now what I'm going to do is I'm taking isn't this neat how you can just put it up instead of a palette in your hand. I saw another artist doing this I think it was with oil paint. You can do this with acrylic as well. Keep in mind though oil paint dries very slowly. There's positives and negatives with that and acrylic paint dries very quickly. Again the positive and the negatives are if it dries here's the the the positive with oil paint drying slowly is that you don't have to worry about them drying up while you're painting. I live in Florida in the Tampa area and paints can dry up very quickly. Acrylic paints if you're outside working and oil paints you don't really have that problem with. Now the disadvantage is oil paints dry very slowly meaning that your artwork is going to take a little bit longer to dry. Now how do you get around this with the oil underpainting and not having to wait forever before you apply the pastel? I'm going to talk about that in a minute. Now with acrylic paint of course it's just the opposite. They dry quickly which is a negative. Again you have to kind of spritz it with water keep it moist or use this like a stay wet palette you can use but the fact that they dry very quickly also is a plus that you can get a second layer on pretty quickly. You don't have to wait so long like with oil paint. Okay here's all the colors. Now what I'm showing you here is not something I really used while I was working. It's just like a solvent. I usually don't like to use any chemicals but the solvent was to clean the brush afterwards. This is walnut oil and another artist shared with me that when you're oil painting you can use this natural product walnut oil to blend and mix your colors and and and work using oil paint straight from the tube they're too thick so you have to kind of dilute it with something to get different consistencies whether you want it thinner or thicker. So the walnut oil works great for that. All I'm doing you can't see me here is I'm dipping the little brush in the walnut oil and I'm grabbing just a little bit of the paint and you can see how it blends quite nicely. I have sped this up because it would get real boring if I had it real time. So same thing and all I'm doing is wiping my brush off with the paper towel in between applications. Also keep in mind I showed you that little solvent at the beginning that's what I used at the end to clean my brush or if my brush had some really dark color on it and I needed to clean it before putting it in the yellow I would use the solvent for that. Alright so here we're get I'm showing you here how you can an example of mixing colors in between the the green and yellow the main one I made like a yellow green in between the orange and the yellow I made like a more of a orange yellow. Now what I'm going to show you here is how you can make some additional colors and values. I think first what I do here is I just make a nice kind of a sepia by using a little bit of red orange and ultramarine blue. Make like a burnt umber. It's a nice like kind of a dark brown. Now if you want to get a good dark I don't like using black it's very flat and not very it's not a lively dark color. So often what I do is I will combine green, red and ultramarine blue. There's various ways you can do this to get a nice dark. But you see how dark that came out. I'm adding a little cerulean blue in there. Oh into that one. So you just play around with color and make you a little color chart if you're ever getting more into these types of paints. Now what I am doing here I'm adding a little white to show you how I can take the darks that I just created and make a nice gray. You actually can get nice gray tones once again versus using black out of a tube and white out of a tube. Your gray is much more beautiful if you combine some complementary colors and then add some white. Once again I'm not using all of these colors for the under painting I'm going to be doing but I'm using it as an example to show you the technique. This is what's called clear liquid gesso. It's a product that's used for various artistic purposes but it works really great for pastel painting because it has a little bit of a grit to it. Almost like when it dries it feels a little like sandpaper and that's really a great surface to use for pastels. So I'm showing you how I'm painting it onto these oil paints and how it's clear so the the color shows through but it's gritty so we can apply pastel. Now the gesso is dry here and I'm going to demonstrate how I am applying pastel over the clear gesso and how it actually does work and real quickly too I forgot to mention how did I get these oil paints to dry so quickly? Well I just took it in my bathroom and and shot it with a blow dryer. I'm pretty hot heat and hot heat and basically because I use the walnut oil and the oil paint I kind of it's a little bit more diluted perhaps than some thick thickly applied oil paint so I found that it did dry more quickly than normal oil paint because I applied it thinly. You will notice this more when I actually go to do the under painting you'll see my technique of how I make it much more thin and not real globs of oil paint. Now notice here that really this is a neat example for multiple reasons. First it's showing how yes I can apply pastel on top of this oil paint because of the clear gesso I put on top but another thing is I like to talk a lot and try to teach on not muddying up your colors and how really pastel can take on a life of its own. If you apply look at how I applied that teal color over that red if you see the teal off to the side it looks very light but on top of the red it's almost like it creates its own new vibrancy and color. I'm sorry that one kind of ran out of the video screen there but here's a close-up where you can see a little bit more of how the interplay of colors is so interesting and so painterly. We talk a lot on my channel about how to get a painterly effect and that's one of the ways. Now here is the surface that I just used on that little white piece that I was working on. It's another Arteza product and it's made for acrylic painting but I found it works great for oil painting too. It has a little bit of a texture to the surface and I've used this in the past successfully in applying watercolor acrylic and now oil paint. I think I may have tried acrylic inks on it. I can't recall that but anyway real quickly I wanted to give photo credit to Dana Brockert. She provided some lovely fall photos. Oh gosh maybe close to 20 photos in our Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook. That's another group you'll want to join on Facebook totally free. It's a private group but you just ask to join and just say that you heard about the group from the YouTube channel and it is I think you guys comment below if you're a member in our Facebook group. I think it's the most helpful encouraging pastel group maybe art group all together on Facebook. I mean it's just there's something very special about this group of people so no matter what level you are you will feel welcome in this group and you'll learn a lot. But anyway so Dana provided all these pictures and I decided to use her photos in our monthly painting challenge. Every month we have a painting challenge. We have categories. We have prizes and currently we have a beginner and an advanced category but I believe in 2020 I'm going to introduce an intermediate category as well. But anyway thank you Dana for these lovely photos and also too let me know I'm not doing a lot of talking here about drawing techniques. I do have my own little tips and advice on getting an accurate drawing so if you guys on the YouTube channel here would like again I'm focusing more on a beginner series. If you'd like maybe a video or so focusing on better drawing skills let me know. That's how I know what to bring you guys so I'm very attentive to what your wants and needs are. Okay now it's time for the oil paint. Remember how I said I wasn't going to use every color. Now how am I going to choose my color palette or my underpainting? Notice that I'm pointing at all of those warm colors which there's a lot of in that photo it's autumn colors. What is the complement to that? Well you just look on the opposite side and it's a lot of blues purples and magentas so that's what's called a complementary color palette. Now what I'm doing now if you're brand new to this I'm providing or making creating an underpainting. I'm using the oil paint to create a complementary colors to go underneath the pastels. I'll try to talk a little bit more about that after I explain my techniques with these oil paints. Now what I did you saw me you'll see me do it again. For some of it I literally apply the walnut oil to the paper so I'm making the oil paint very diluted. It's almost a wash more than painting. That's why when I said at the beginning I'll tell you why it dries a little faster than the regular oil paint is because I'm applying it very thinly. All right so I've taken my ultramarine blue. I wish I had had my palette or my filming a little wider so you could see the colors I'm mixing. That's just crimson red and ultramarine blue. It makes a nice magenta purple color and I'm just literally staying on the cooler side of the color palette to create this underpainting because the photo my reference image has so many warm fall colors. If I was to a lot of times I'll do you may have seen many underpainting techniques I've done. I love doing warm colored under paintings typically because usually we're painting a lot of green in a landscape. While this did have a lot some green obviously in it it had so many warm colors I thought it would be neat to have a cooler underpainting. It would make the colors a little more vibrant. You remember how when you saw me applying the pastel just a little bit earlier on top of the the oil paints and how there's a neat interaction between colors. So that's one of the things that happens or one of the benefits of an underpainting is you lay down a foundation that your color your final color palette is going to interact with for more dynamic color. Now of course I'm using what would be called local color for the sky meaning local color just means it is what it is. The sky is blue so I just kept that blue because I'm keeping colors mostly cool. Now I say mostly cool but the magenta that I'm the red that I'm mixing in with the blue is a little is warmer. So I've got the cool blues and cerulean blue like a sky blue and a little bit of the crimson red to get more of a magenta color. Now I'm just getting kind of a general gray blue gray kind of in for the road. I add a little bit of some shadows later but for the most part with this underpainting and with the drawing that you saw I haven't drawn a single leaf I'm just getting shapes in. You're not focusing on a drawing you're focusing on big shapes and values and that's going to help you keep a painterly look and when you do these under paintings I don't know I just think they're magical. I love doing complementary under paintings just because I think the final color comes out much more vibrant and beautiful. All right I'm just going to keep painting here but again keep in mind this is a very thin application of these oil paints. I'm using a lot of the the walnut oil on my brush as I'm blending and mixing colors. Now I'm getting, now's where I'm getting in a dark. That's the neat thing about this too is sometimes when I do a watercolor underpainting you can't get really good darks unless you just worked at it for a long time because watercolor by nature are very translucent and not very opaque so it's a little bit hard to get your darks in but that's really a neat aspect about these oil paints is that you can fairly quickly get a nice value study and color study underpainting beginning to your painting and again this is one of the very basics of art in general is that darker colors or I'm sorry darker values are typically in the foreground and they dull out or get more pale in the distance. That's why you typically see me when I'm painting apply my darkest darks are going to be to the foreground and they just kind of get more dull as they move back. Often too that's how I'll work with my brush if I'm using a brush. I'll mix my darkest color and I'll start working in the foreground and as it gets out of my brush and gets thinner I kind of move to the background it creates that illusion of distance or depth. Again you see how some of my marks here or my brush strokes are thinner for the shadows and some were darker. So anyway as you probably can see here I was actually very happy with just playing around with these oil paints. So now I'm adding a little bit more of the warmth to the foreground just like I talked about value is darker in the foreground and paler duller in the background. Another art technique of that distance or perception is warmer colors are typically in the foreground and get cooler in the background that's why you see me adding on top of the darks in the foreground a little bit more of the warm tones. Now I just like I showed you before in our little oil paint example I just mixed up a good color to get a good dark. The tree trunks are pretty obviously the darkest thing in this image. There are some darks over on the right hand side obviously in those bushes and things. But again back to the oil paint I had so much fun with this that I really think I want to do another one and have even more of the oil painting showing through. Don't cover it up so much with pastel. I was in a little bit of an experimentation mode with this and I I really applied a lot of pastel. Now if you're watching this now and you're on the YouTube channel you're going to see this in its entirety but the part that's going to be on my Patreon page will be the pastel application. I'll give you a little snippet here on the YouTube channel but that's that's going to be the benefit. I'm just so grateful to my patrons there. The $5 a month I've said this before it may not seem like a lot to people but it's a lot to me because I really you know I'm not sure at this phase of my life if I could keep up the time that it takes to do these videos if I wasn't able to get a little bit of financial return for it and it also helps the channel get better. I'm able to buy more equipment and things that make my videos better so I'm very appreciative to you patrons but my point is that I want to give them something special. You know they're just doing it for support you know and really don't expect anything. That's the comments that I'm getting but I really love to to give back to my my sweet dedicated patrons as well so that's why the full video with the final steps of the painting the pastel part will be on my Patreon page and in our Patreon Facebook group. So anyway I think you can see that this was actually kind of neat. I really liked just this cooler with the warm tree magenta color underpainting by itself so maybe my next painting demo will be doing another one of these with less pastel application just a little bit on top of it. I don't know it's fun. So I'm about to wrap up this oil painting portion of the underpainting and it's really important to keep in mind that when you're using oil paint you need to clean your brushes out. I'm not even using an expensive brush here but a good product for that it's called the master's brush cleaner and preserver. Now I'd already taken my brush and cleaned it with the solvent that I used. You can use paint thinner or whatever outside because I didn't want to smell it but once I got the brush fairly clean I simply just kind of move it around in the brush cleaner and get all the bristles coated and then I just kind of clean it off really good with a paper towel and that just ensures that the next time you go to use your brush it's nice and clean and ready to go. Okay now just as I did in the little example or the sample at the beginning what do we do to get the pastels to stick to this. Again I did a quick blow dry to this to get it dry. It's dry. It dried fairly quickly actually. I was surprised. So again back to using the clear liquid gesso to apply to the top of the oil painting and I was really happy. Sometimes when I apply gesso it causes colors to bleed. It really didn't bleed at all and I know it looks a little cloudy here but it dried fairly translucent so you could see the underpainting quite well after. And again this is a quick little side note here on the clear gesso. I've had people ask why can't you use regular gesso instead of clear gesso? Well for one reason your underpainting wouldn't show through because it's not clear. For another reason there's something I don't know why but the clear gesso has the little sand to it the grit and that's what makes the pastel stick. And now that it's dry it's time to apply the pastels and this is the section where the full extended version will be only on my Patreon page and my Patreon group on Facebook. But I'm providing some little video snippets here so you can get an idea of the content that I'm going to be including for my patrons. Once again I'm going to continue to bring free video tutorials here on YouTube and I am going to focus a little more in these next upcoming videos on a beginner series. I've gotten a lot of great feedback from you guys. And just because I have a Patreon page now doesn't mean I don't truly respect all of my YouTube subscribers. It's just been an amazing journey for me over these years of creating videos and how you guys bless me with your comments. The fact that you have got over 21 close to 22,000 subscribers at the making of this video and that's I'm just amazed at that and I'm just so thankful for each and every one of you. So thank you guys for all of your support being subscribers, members on Facebook, or members and patrons in my Patreon group. I am so thankful for each and every one of you. So happy painting!