 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're going to have some creative fun today where I'm going to show you how you can make your own boards so you can paint with pastels and not have to buy the expensive papers and also be sure to stay tuned to the end of the video where I will give a speed demo of creating this painting on one of the homemade surfaces. My patrons from my Patreon page will be getting a full tutorial of this particular painting. If you don't know what it is to be a patron of mine for only five dollars a month, you can support this channel, keep the free videos coming and you get extra content. And if you're brand new to Monet Cafe here on YouTube, I hope you will subscribe and join the artistic family. Hello artistic friends and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I'm happy to bring you a tutorial that's going to kind of lighten things up a little bit. I've been doing some paintings that were a little bit more time-consuming for my last few tutorials and sometimes I just need an artistic break. How about you? So I recently created some of my own boards for pastel painting. I did just do a painting of these flowers. Somebody help me with whatever the names of these flowers are. I miss my mama. She was the flower expert and I don't have her to call now and ask her. So I love it when you guys help me out with that. But anyway, this was done on a homemade board. It's on mat board and I'll tell you a little bit how to make them. But you could use any surface that you like and we're just going to have a good old time. How about that? But as you can see, it comes out pretty nicely. You don't have to spend a whole lot on the expensive pastel papers and I really like the results of these. Let's get started. I'm going to show you some of those smaller boards and we're going to have some flower painting fun. Here we go. And by the way, stay tuned to the end of the video. I'll have a link for another lesson that I had on eight ways to make your own pastel paper or surfaces. I use watercolor paper with these. So I'm going to show you some of these boards that I've created. And what I like to do is when I start a project like this, I like to do quite a few of them. I mean, if you're going to get everything out anyway, you might as well make a few and then you're ready to go when you get the urge to paint. And I like to have fun with these, give them some creative underpainting colors, tone them different colors. One question I get all the time is how you know what color to paint an underpainting or how to tone the board or the paper. And sometimes just have some fun like we're going to do today. So these are some different sizes. I've got four by six, five by sevens, eight by 10s. I did a couple. I have some 11 by 14s also, but I did a couple of 16 by 20s. I like working large. I just have a tiny house. I don't have the room to put all the large pieces. So so anyway, I'm probably just going to do a few of these for this. We're going to lighten up and have some fun. So here we go. The type of board that I cut to make multiple sizes was a piece of 32 by 40 mat board made by Crescent Company. And I like the size because I can cut it up into some standard sizes. And I'm also using mat board because I had a lot of these big sheets left over after a framing project from years ago. So it's really practical for me to use this. Now, some people prefer to use Gator board. Gator board is awesome too. I actually just bought some. I've never made my own boards with Gator board, but it's a little more expensive than the mat board. Now you could of course use watercolor paper for this pastel surface application. So get creative and use what you have. I'll be providing clickable links to both of those products in the description of this video, along with this helpful chart or guide that I created in Photoshop to show you how you may want to cut your boards as well. It's neat that I can get 13 boards out of one 32 by 40 inch sheet. I didn't film myself cutting these, but I found a little video clip that I can show you how to do it. Basically you're going to measure and you're going to use some sort of straight edge that's metal and a box cutter. And you simply just about three times make a pass pretty firmly. And then it has a nice clean cut. And now it's time to be like a mad art scientist and create our own colorful boards with this product called Golden Pumice Gel Medium. It's fine pumice gel. It's got a fine texture. This is the 16 ounce jar that I have. You could see it is around $21. There's a smaller size and eight ounce size. That's about $11. So I've got my little recipe on the top there. I'll talk you through it. Basically you're going to use 75% fine pumice gel to 25% color. And you can do the color of your choice. I will be showing you one of my favorite colors very soon. But you can also use acrylic paint. Now this is I just love this golden color Golden Fluid Acrylics Quinacridone Nikolazo Gold. I love this color because it makes such a nice warm underpainting color. Also it's very transparent. You can see those little bands where there's like a little swatch of paint. And you can see through it. And that's going to keep it really bright and luminous. So this is a great way to make your own board. I also call this the Rita Kirkman method. Rita Kirkland is an amazing pastel artist. And the first time I even learned about this mixture was from one of her videos. She's so wonderful to share these things. But I do a few of my own variations on this as this video progresses. So here we go. I don't measure very specifically. What did I do like? Maybe three teaspoons full of that. Oh maybe more. And so then and you can also play around. It depends on how much color you want. But pretty much a 75 to 25% ratio will work fine. This golden fine pumice gel has a little bit of grit in it. That's what we need to make pastels stick to surfaces. Have you ever tried using pastels on plain drawing paper? I'm getting to where I really do like it better. But there are certain papers that have a little bit more texture to them. Where the pastels work quite well. But there's some drawing papers. The pastel just literally falls right off. So this is why they have professional sanded papers. And they are so awesome for pastel painting. You can get so many layers. So this method is a way to do it yourself and to save some money. And to get creative. I have so much fun making my own boards. It's really neat. And I really love some of the color combinations that you're going to see me creating soon. All right. So now you can see what I've done here. I'm going to speed this up and mix it up really great before I apply it on a board. You see what I mean? I wish I could mix this quickly. Also I don't worry about getting it on my fingers and everything. It's I'm kind of like a big kid when it comes to that. And what I'm doing here is using a foam brush. You can use a paint brush if you like. Sometimes I like to get a more textural feel and I'll use a coarse paint brush. Sometimes I'll do the strokes diagonally. In this case though I'm using a foam brush and I'm keeping it a little bit more consistent. What I'm doing is applying in one direction and then I will let it dry. And then I'll turn it and apply it in the opposite direction. While I was mixing up this particular recipe I decided to try this on wood. I have these nice wooden boards from Arteza. They sent them to me. I've actually done some pastel painting on them with another method but I thought I'd go ahead and use this pumice to golden fluid acrylic ratio on these boards. I did the same thing. You don't have to do two coats with these. I feel like I get a little more texture when I do two coats. And I even did the edges of these boards. So I'll have to let you know how that comes out in a future video but I had extra of the mixture so I thought I'd go ahead and apply it while I had all my stuff out. So I did a few boards with this particular recipe. I wanted to mention too that if you find that the boards warp they're going to warp a little bit because of the wetness of the application. But they flatten out after you let it dry especially if you put some things on top of it. They flatten out very nicely. And now let's move on to recipe number two. This is my own creation. You're going to need some color. Like I said you could use the color I did before. Quinacridone, Nicolaiso gold because it's a great underpainting color especially for landscapes. But I like to get creative. I have some acrylics that I haven't used in a long time so I decided to play around. Now here's the recipe. It's kind of like uh let me see what would the measurements to this be. I do about a teaspoon full of color to two teaspoons full of the fine pumice gel. Okay and two teaspoons of this product. If you've watched my videos much you know I often use clear gesso alone. I could just mix the clear gesso with the color and it works good. But I really like to this combination of the clear liquid gesso with the fine pumice gel and the color. Again you can use whatever color you want. Acrylic paint. You'll see me later use acrylic ink. And I find this has a nice texture to it for pastel painting. And this is one of the 16 by 20 inch boards. And I am really looking forward to painting something on this board with this beautiful purple color. Once again using a foam brush. I believe I give it two coats vertically horizontally. And also too I like to stress and I'll be stressing this more as I share some of the actual painting demonstrations on these boards. That a common question I get is how do you know what color to paint in under painting. Well I'm finding that if you just get creative and do some of these under paintings you will often find a reference photo that you're like oh that would look great on that purple. So sometimes you can work it backwards instead of finding the reference photo and then toning the board. Let the board inspire you and then find the reference photo that you think will work nicely. I have one that worked out perfectly on this aqua board that I used. All right here we go again. You see I from that board cutting guide I gave you before I had 13 boards that I had to tone. So this is the same as before and instead of the purple I'm using my favorite color here. Once again this gold just works so great for so many different types of landscape paintings. It's a beautiful beautiful beautiful under painting color. So here we go again. I won't bore you with this one so I think I did another 16 by 20 I think on on this board with this particular recipe. I created a few more boards of different sizes using this recipe and some acrylic paint and I once again did two coats but then I came up with an idea. I noticed that the acrylic paint and the acrylic ink when I used it as the color did not go on as vibrantly as I would have liked. So let me show you another way that you can do this. In this example I'll be using acrylic ink. I use acrylic inks lot to tone boards and do under paintings. Once again whatever color you choose you could use regular acrylic paint but did you notice what I did in this case? I just applied the color to the board alone first. It seems that of course when you mix it with the other ingredients it's going to dull the color a little bit. So in this case I just let the acrylic ink dry alone on the board and I thought instead of putting this in a dish I just applied the pumice gel directly to my little roller. I thought let me try a roller versus a foam brush. This is just a foam roller and so what I did is I rolled it around. It takes a little while to get enough of the pumice gel on the roller but so this is back to just using pumice gel alone without the clear liquid gesso. And all of these techniques have worked great. I have painted on quite a few of these boards already. Another good idea is to make a little note on the back of each board what the recipe was and that way you'll know when you paint on it. If it works really great you can turn the board over and go aha that worked awesome. I will do that again. Here's an example of a painting that I did on a a board that I created in another video. I have multiple videos on how to make your own pastel surfaces and so with this beautiful aqua color I created this painting of koi fish. So you can see it works quite well. And for your convenience I created a recipe sheet with all four of these recipes for making your own boards along with the supplies and extra supplies. So hopefully that will be helpful for you. Once again I've got to thank my patrons for my ability to even do this. It's because of their support that you guys get the benefit of all of these freebies. And as I promised at the beginning of this video it's time to paint on one of these boards. I used a beautiful photo from Robin Harris. She's part of our Monet Cafe art group on Facebook. This was flower month and so many of our artists submitted their own flower reference images for everybody to use to paint from. Thank you Robin for such a beautiful photograph. While the majority of this painting will be sped up I'm slowing it down at the beginning to show you another little trick that I used and learned from Rita Kirkman. This is Art Spectrum Color Fix Primer. Also has a little bit of a grit or a tooth to it. This is a technique that I've discovered myself. I use three little dishes and I'm basically going to do a value study of my reference image on this board using this terracotta colored product. Now I have some water, I have some paper towels, and I have some brushes. Use whatever you like. I'm not sure, yeah I think in one of my videos I shared this technique before but maybe not this new technique, how I dilute some of the product. Basically one of the dishes will have full strength Art Spectrum Primer. One jar will have a little bit of liquid and the last jar or dish will have more diluted formula to it or mixture to it. So this works great for me to go ahead and be ready to have a darker middle and lighter values to paint in. So I've already got my underpainting on my beautiful board that I've prepared and now I'm going to create a value study with this reddish darker value that really works great. I really love this technique. So here we go. Now as I said earlier you're going to get the speed version here on Monet Cafe. I try to give you guys lots of great content so you can learn a lot but I also try to give my patrons from my Patreon page a little bit extra because they're paying five dollars a month which is really helping me to be able to afford to keep bringing these free lessons to Monet Cafe. So I am so grateful for you. If you're one of my patrons seeing this lesson know that I'm going to be doing a slowed down version of this particular lesson that I will have on my Patreon page. Now all I'm doing now is looking at the darker values and making some marks of where things will be. The flowers I'm going ahead and getting them in just so I have a roadmap of where things are going to be. It really helps me to know where to start painting with pastels and this board is going to be so ready to receive pastels because it not only has the coating on the board, the underpainting on the board, with the fine pumice gel and the gesso. This is the board I used with that recipe combination and of course the golden fluid acrylics. It also has this value study that I'm doing. These darker colors here that you see are also going to have some grit to them since I used the Art Spectrum product. Now you probably noticed I cropped the reference image quite a bit. I really wanted to make it a vertical. I wanted to hone in on some of the energy of the flowers and I did you'll see the to the left over there. It's a little gouache study that I did and while it won't have the same colors as what I'm creating here it gave me kind of an idea of the gesture and the location of some of the the flowers. I really love this technique. It just comes out to where that little bit of golden peeks through. Now here is a station break. Another important part of painting is to give yourself a few little treats. Remember to slow down and enjoy this. This is some Earl Grey tea on some beautiful little tea cups with a piece of banana nut bread. Yummy. Now I'm hungry. Please enjoy the speed version to some lovely music and stay tuned to the end. Also I love it when you leave comments. Let me know what you thought about this video and also give me a thumbs up on the video. Find me on Instagram and follow me at Susan Jenkins Artist. If you create from any of my tutorials please tag me on Instagram. I'm loving seeing your work there. You can also become a member of our Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook. And it's gosh I think over 13,000 members in that group. You can learn a lot. There's artists of every level and I just love the generosity of our group and my subscribers here. Thank you subscribers to Monet Cafe. If you haven't subscribed I hope you do that too. Alright that's enough. Enjoy the music and I'll be back at the end. I hope you've enjoyed this lesson on how to make your own pastel boards. It really does work quite nicely. I really enjoy making my own boards. I also wanted to share with you why would you do this? It seems like a lot of effort right? Well there's a few reasons. One it's fun. Two you save money. You know like I said I got 13 boards out of this one large sheet of mat board and if you use watercolor paper it's even less expensive. I also love the third aspect is I like the creative control. I like to be able to tone my board whatever color I want and give it some texture if I use a stiff bristle brush. So it's really kind of part of the creative process. So here's a little bit of the close-up and I enjoyed this painting. Once again my patrons will get the full tutorial and I also have oh gosh I think three or four other paintings I've already done on some of these boards. So hopefully I can get those uploaded and shared before flower month is over. I better get busy right? I pray you are blessed. You get some opportunities to have some creative fun and of course enjoy the master artist who has given us all this beauty as reference material. Thank you for being part of Monet Cafe because art truly is better with friends and as always happy painting.