 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. This video is going to excite you if you have wanted to find more practical and safe ways to take your soft pastels on the go. So in this video I'm going to review a wonderful pastel storage system and also give you tips and strategies on how to fill it with a color palette system that works well for multiple paintings, whether you're using it for plein air painting outdoors or in your home studio. Alright, let's get started. Oh and if you haven't yet subscribed to this channel I hope you will. There's lots of learning and lots of fun. Also if you'd like to support this channel on Patreon, my Patreon page is patreon.com slash susanjinkins. You can keep these free videos coming plus get extra content for only $5 a month and I really appreciate it. Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I am very happy to bring you a video that I am excited about. Talk about the Lord's timing. I've done a video in the past on some storage solutions for pastel painting and one of my favorite products by far if you want to take your pastels on the go or want to do a little plein air painting or your life just takes you in many directions like me is and are the Heilman boxes. They are really bar none. I think the best out there. I've been on many trips with them some planned and some not so planned but I have taken them on airplanes on cruise ships through flood and wind and weather as our home flooded in 2017 trying to escape things so they are secure. Your pastels are in the best possible place when they are traveling in a Heilman box. I was so blessed that Marge and John Heilman contacted me about doing another video. I have one on this backpack sized Heilman box that I'll put a link to that video in the description but I am so happy and so blessed how wonderful that John and Marge sent me another Heilman box. It's one I've been wanting. This one is a great size. It's pretty large. I'll do a little review of it again but the other one that they sent me is called the Mini. I am so needing a smaller version of this so thank you Marge and John. I'm so grateful. I'm gonna do an unboxing. I haven't even opened it up yet so here we go. Alright so you can get an idea of the size difference here between the backpack size and the mini size and they do have a size even smaller than this. I'll go over their sheet of their products. Their website is great very informative. It's Heilmandesigns.com. You can go to a section called compare all boxes and this will give you information on the sizes of each box and the weights whether it's empty or full. Now let's take a look at the backpack size. It's the one that I already had prior to this video. There's a great description on the website and also various pictures but if you expand this one picture you can see that the inner dimensions are about 21 inches when opened and even though there are less expensive storage and travel set options out there this price of the Heilman backpack is so well worth it. And now let's take a look at the Mini. As you can see it's about 19 inches when opened and that may not seem like much of a size difference but when they're full there's about a pound and a half difference between the two and if you're doing a lot of traipsing across the countryside that pound and a half makes a difference. And now let's take a look at my new mini Heilman box. The craftsmanship and attention to detail is second to none. Now I always wondered how do the pastels not fall out. Well it's this little system that's used with these panels and these movable metal clips that hold it securely in place. The underside of each panel is a nice cushy foam and that's what cushions your pastels to keep them from moving, shifting or breaking. And you'll see the inside of this box in a minute that also has the foam. This box comes with two information sheets. One is a spec sheet for your actual box and another one is a product sheet to give you more information on other Heilman products and designs. Both the Mini and the backpack size come with a strap that's longer than the little handle on the end of it and this can simply be attached to the brackets that are on the outside of the top of the box. Another great feature is the fact that this box locks. Yes you have a key to lock your pastel box. This is important if you have little ones at home and sometimes you just want to secure your pastels against creative little hands. Here is a better view of the inside once again with the soft cushy foam on the top of the box and on the inside of the box you can see there is foam as well and also divisions in this box of the three sections on each side. And not all of the boxes have these. I think it's the smaller sketch box size that does not have the wooden inserts as divisions. And now let's talk about some accessories you can get for your Heilman box that I personally think are important. This is the easel that inserts into your box to hold your working surface. Also the Heilman palette tray is so nice to be able to just attach to the side of your Heilman box to be able to keep your pastels that you're using while painting. Now let me show you how this easel works and it really works quite well. Basically it fits into two small holes within the box and towards the back and it is a nice snug and secure fit so you don't have to worry about it falling off. So basically the bottom of the easel has these two metal poles or prongs and they will fit down into the holes. And if you have a little challenge with getting them in you can just sort of give a little bit of pressure and then when you take it out you can gently rock them to get them to come out. The easel is adjustable. You can adjust the bottom section to your comfortable height and the top section to hold whatever surface you're working on. I suggest a backing board or some sort of board. These are basically just different standard sizes of some boards I made for pastel painting but I would probably adhere them to another board. This is just to show you the different sizes. That was an 8 by 10 that I turned two ways. Obviously it will fit things much smaller. This is a 16 by 20 that I tried and it's out of the visible area but this was kind of the max size that it could hold. All right now this little pastel palette tray just snaps right onto the side at whatever location is comfortable for your painting style. Another feature already included in the Hellman box is on the back side or the underneath side when you open it. There is an opening that will allow you to attach a tripod to this. Now I happen to have a tripod that has a little adapter that screws right into this and then I can just put it right onto the top of my tripod. It's a great way to paint outdoors and of course you would not need this if you were using this box just to paint from your tabletop. Now if you are painting on location using a tripod this is another little feature on the front of this box. There's a little hook that you flip over on both sides and it keeps your box secure for painting on location. And you don't have to use a tripod when working on location. I sometimes take my Hellman box and put it on my French easel. I just open up the drawer and it stays nice and secure. So there are multiple options for using a Hellman box even just sitting on a table and working. And now for the fun part filling our box with our beautiful pastels. This is my backpack version again the larger box and you can see here how I have arranged my palette. This is kind of my typical arrangement which is according to color and value. You can see here the six divisions of color where it is lighter at the bottom and gradually the values get darker at the top. For this mini Hellman box I decided to use a different color palette strategy. I hope you'll like it. I actually have already used it. I did a painting and I loved it. The three divisions on the left are brights, darks and neutrals. The brights are going to be my highest chroma. My darks are going to be my rich darks that I'll use for the darkest values. My neutrals will be one's more pale of color and a little lighter in value. Before talking about the divisions on the right side I wanted to point out the color wheel. Basically with the right side I'm arranging the palette totally according to the color wheel. Let me show you those divisions again and then I'll come back to the color wheel to describe more about how they're laid out. Always beginning at the bottom with this strategy. Yellow is your starting point. The first column will have yellow, orange, reds and cool reds. With yellow as the starting guide on the color wheel and moving to the right this is the general idea. Yellows, oranges, basically reds and going a little bit into cool reds just before pinks. The next column continues to work from the bottom going around the color wheel. Pinks, purples and blues. Picking up where we left off at the color wheel, pinks and purples and blues. And the blues in this column are mostly cool blues really just before they start to get a little warmer in color. And now continuing to the next column once again from the bottom warm blues cool greens and greens. Now if this confuses you I have other videos on color temperature that might help. Here we are again at the color wheel. We're going to be moving a little bit more right there to the warm blues the greens and the very warm greens. So basically I took the circular layout of the color wheel and I applied it to the palette going from each column bottom to top. And now I'll be adding pastels according to this color theory or layout and I'm going to talk a lot while I do this. I think the whole process should be an education in itself. Now here are my brights. I am of course speeding this up just so you know. It can be I don't like the word tedious. It can be time consuming so be sure to allot yourself adequate time for this. And when you do you can actually find this to be relaxing. I know many people have said they love cleaning their pastels another time consuming process. But basically with these brights I am still working with the color wheel. Notice the yellows at the bottom. I haven't quite made it up to the top where it will end in the warm greens going from yellow to the right of the color wheel all the way back around. And all I'm doing right now is looking for my brightest high chroma color. I'd also like to add that I typically break my pastels and in a case like this with a small hylman box it's a good idea to have some smaller pastels. Don't have full sticks. How do I do that? Well with rounded pastels I use a cigar cutter. This happens to be a Mount Vision purple that's a pretty bright purple. It's a little darker but it's still considered to me a bright. And so I use my little cigar cutter and it makes such a nice clean cut. So there's a little tip. And I find these smaller sizes are great because you get more pastels in your little box. Here's a set of the Mount Vision thunderstorm gray set. I love this set. And I have used my cigar cutter to cut each Mount Vision pastel. They're pretty big. There's full sticks are pretty big so I cut them twice and I get three little sticks. That's a neat way too that you can actually use one set and keep it as a set but also use some of it for a travel box. I get that question all the time about do you keep your pastel sets that you order as a set or do you incorporate it into your workshop palette is what I call it in my studio. And this is a neat way to where you can do both. You know if you break your pastels or cut them the way I do. I'm going to talk about breaking some other pastels in a minute. All right now this is real time here and I wanted to point out that before arranging them within the actual box notice that I have a little piece of paper there on to the left there of the box. And the reason I did that is I didn't want to keep fiddling with them in the box and getting all that foam dirty you know or covered with pastels. No it's going to get that way anyway. Maybe I'm being a little bit fastidious about that but it's a neat way for me to just play around and arrange without the obstruction of the sides of the box and I did this with each of the columns. I just have a little piece of paper cut to the interior column size of each of the columns and of course they're all the same size so you can just cut six of these to go ahead and be ready. And here you can see that the arrangement is once again according to the color wheel from bottom to top from the yellows all the way around to the warm greens. And keep in mind this is the second Hyalmin box that I have done and I just kind of wanted to experiment with this particular layout for a palette. I did like it. I have already done a painting from this box and it was a practical way to lay it out. But if you don't have many pastels I have to say two. I like the other method too that's in the other video. And if you don't have a lot of pastels that's probably the better method to try. If you've already done one according to just color basic color and value you might want to give this one a try. And now I'm moving on to the second column which will be the darks. Dark values I have found are pretty crucial. You don't want to use them everywhere obviously but having some good darks is really going to develop that contrast that you need for a dynamic and beautiful painting. So I am rather than using the cigar cutter it did not work on these square or rectangular Terry Ludwig pastels. I just broke them. And again I like working from these sizes anyway. These are a little shorter notice they're shorter than the Mount Vision one that I cut with the cigar cutter. And it's because the Terry Ludwigs are a little bit shorter. So but I still thought it would work well and it did. And also it allows for me to fit more of them in my Hyalmin box. So I have more colors even though this box is a little smaller. So what I'm doing here with my darks I didn't really arrange them according to the color wheel like I did with the first column with the brights going from yellow at the bottom to the warm greens at the top. I really just looked at the darkest values and you know and what happens to the more you paint I don't know maybe some people are better at this than others but I'm able to real quickly see a color. It's just like if I know I'm looking for something that has a hint of cool green I can just look at the whole column and go bam there it is. And I think some of it comes from just painting a lot or maybe your color perception. In my Patreon group we've done some tests on color perception. And there are a lot of people who did quite well with that had 100% color perception with this test we did that was really pretty pretty tough. So I think some people do have more of a gift towards color and also too you know some people are color blind. But that too can or that should not be a deterrent. It can be a benefit actually. When you're color blind you have to lean more heavily on value and getting your values correct in a painting is really more important than getting color correct. I did incorporate some darks from other sets. That first set of darks was the Terry Ludwig set one and two. This set right here is the Mount Vision Thunderstorm Gray set that I showed before. It has some nice darks as well. So I pulled out some of the darks I liked from that set. And I was still kind of playing around with all these darks and I realized I had way too many darks for a small palette like this. I really needed only I think I reduced it to about a little more than half of that column and then I used that space at the top to add some harder pastels. Some of my Prismacolor new pastels that I often use for grasses and things. So that was a nice little section for those. Here's one of the Prismacolor new pastels I use often. It's called Spruce Blue and I had a brand new one so I just broke it in half. But you'll see towards the end of this video where I greatly reduced the darks and add some other pastels at the top there. And now I'll move on to the neutral column. I have one of my sets. This is actually a drawer. All of these that you see all my pastels are in these drawers that fit into this little cabinet. And so now the neutrals I'm going to pull some sets that I know have some nice neutrals. This Terry Ludwig set is called Umber, Shadows, and Shades. And there's another one that I have called Shades of Nature. Both of these sets have some beautiful neutrals. And if you're not quite sure what a neutral pastel is or a neutral color, check out my video on how to make your own neutrals. It's a real good education on what neutrals are, why they're important in your painting, and how you can actually make your own. So that's a cool video. But basically I like to think of it as a color that's a little bit blah or it's so it seems. They're actually quite wonderful especially when used correctly with a painting strategy. But they are not like the brights like the first column. They're a little dull in color and they're actually made by combining two complementary colors, okay, across from each other on the color wheel. And then you can add white to make them a little lighter in value. So I'm purposely going to have my neutrals be a little bit lighter in value. You can have a neutral that's darker, but I already have my darks in a column. So I'm going to have my column of darks and my column of neutrals that are more middle to lighter values. Also, I once again pulled neutrals from various sets, not just the Terry Ludwig set I showed at the beginning. I went back to my Mount Vision Thunderstorm Gray, which I said had a couple of really good darks in it, but it also had a lot of great neutrals. And again, because I broke them, I'm keeping these sets intact. You may not like working from pastels that are this small though, so keep that in mind when you go to create your palette. And I am using the color strategy while I did not do it in the darks per se exactly like the color wheel. I am pretty much for these neutrals. You see at the bottom I've got my warmer tones working up to some of my pinks and purples and blues and greens. And so it's kind of loosely following the color wheel with a more neutral palette. And now so as not to bore you with watching this process three more times, I have basically decided just to put up the color wheel for you so I could hopefully make it even more clear as to this strategy. Once again, the top, what I consider the warmest color is yellow. This is just for arrangement purposes. It's how my brain works with the color wheel. And so with yellow as a starting point, I am working this first column from my yellows to my oranges, kind of to my yellowy oranges, then my oranges, then my oranges that have a little more red and my red and my little bit of cooler reds. You see how the reds at the top have a little bit more pink to it. That's what a cool red is. And now with this first column complete, I am moving on once again to the middle column that will go from pinks to purples to cooler blues. Here's my little mini palette here. And even though you're seeing the sped up version and very edited, so you don't have to watch the whole process, it took me hours to do this. And the reason is you really want to analyze and compare things. I knew I wanted a combination of some pastels that were a little harder, some pastels that were a little softer, but mostly I went with just color as my guide. I wanted to also mention that because I have already a column of darks, a column of brights, a column of neutrals, this section on the right side of the Highland box is going to be more mid values, lighter to mid values. Remember I have my darks already, so I don't need really a lot of darks in this. So it leaves me room to get more of the middle to lighter values of these colors. I'm working now on the last column, which is going to be the blues that are just a hint warmer. That just means they're leaning a little more towards green and yellow. And so the the warmer blues to the cooler greens to the warmer greens. And again, if that doesn't make sense to you, I'm not going to put a little clip up here of the video, but I believe it's just called color temperature. You can find any video on Monet Cafe, usually by going to YouTube, type in Monet Cafe color temperature in the search bar, and you should be able to find it. Now I did go back and tweak this, like right now I'm looking in my pink purple and blue column, and I can see one that's a little too dark to be in there. I don't need that dark in there because I have a dark very similar to it in the dark column. I also see a neutral just above that purple dark that I probably don't need that neutral in there. So I tweaked this and it really helps to stand back, walk away from it for a while, and then stand back and take a look with a fresh perspective. Often you can see things more clearly after you walk away for a bit. And here is my final, well not my total final color palette layout. I did do some tweaking to this afterwards, but you basically get the idea the brights, the darks, the neutrals, and also some of my Prismacolor new pastels. They are the ones that are slender, and now my middle to lighter values of the color wheel. And as I stated at the beginning of this video, it was perfect timing. Thank you, Lord. I had to go on a trip again, and this little mini Hylman box was just perfect. I did create a painting while I was traveling. I was very happy with the arrangement, with the brights, darks, neutrals, and color wheel layout, and it worked quite well. I like both methods of the color palette, so I'm still playing around with this though. But by the way, this video tutorial will be coming soon. It has something special about it, so I'll be sure to share that. But whatever you do, enjoy the journey and have fun. I'm so grateful to each and every one of you who are subscribers here in Monet Cafe. If you haven't yet subscribed, I hope you will. Become a patron if you'd like to support this channel. And as always, happy painting!