 my artistic friends I'm in my studio today my home studio and I wanted to bring you a video it's gonna be short and sweet but I know we love to order pastels and sometimes especially if you're beginning we don't really know what they're like just from looking online or seeing pictures on the art sites like Dick Blick or Jerry's Arterama so when I get sets like this I want to share kind of like my little review of what I think of them some of these I've had before but some some I haven't so I'm gonna go into my beautiful colorful goodies I got I know I don't need to encourage you guys to buy more pastels and I am so sorry if I have created a habit but you know what it's Christmas time so you might be able to get a gift of one of these so anyway let me share with you some of these beauties that I've just gotten and a couple other products all right let's do it all right I've tried to set up my lighting so you can see these accurately with color and that's sometimes hard to do a lot of times things don't look the same when you see them on your computer or on a website but I think from what I looked at in my video I did a little sample I think these colors look pretty good this set here I like this little half stick set I often break my pastels anyway and so sometimes if you're trying to be a little more economical just go ahead and get a half set especially or half stick set especially if you've you don't know that brand very well and you know you don't want to go ahead and commit to the full sticks but let me show you what these are here these are the Richardson soft pastels Jack Richardson and I have never had these before and I haven't even done a painting with them but I'm gonna show you what I think about their hardness to softness ratio okay so this is the assorted set of 60 okay so there's a lot of colors in this set and I can't recall the price I'll try to you know prices change sometimes but I'll try to pull it up online and share it in the video so you can see what I paid for these and so let me let me just show you this I have a little um this is just a little piece of sanded paper that I was working with this is a piece of Sennelier Lecart card you see I've done some scratching on it already I was actually sharpening a pastel pencil there but I'm finding that these let me do a color that's not really on here this is kind of like a pretty grassy green I'm finding these aren't super super soft they're not hard by any means but they're they're kind of nice that you can get kind of an edge on them okay they're not as soft as the next ones that I'm going to show you I want to kind of show you in order of softness but man I love doing it on this dark so you can see it so these are a nice soft but not too soft pastel okay and I really think I'm gonna love them I like having a variety of round versus square pastels the Jack Richardson pastels around the next ones I'm showing you around but then I have a square or rectangular one I'm gonna show you and if you guys a lot of you are familiar with the Terry Ludwigs I always said Ludwig I'm not sure if it's Ludwig or Ludwig but those are square they're big chunky squared pastels and there's advantages to the round versus the square the round ones you can make it a different color some other green you can roll them to kind of make grasses and things they're nice for for rolling okay with the square ones the flat edges are good for covering a lot of area okay so that's a advantage to round versus square another one's brand that's round is the Mount Visions if you haven't seen the video go back and see the one where I toured their facility it's right here in Tampa and it was fascinating to see how pastels are made it was awesome and at the very end of that video I share some of the good sets I would recommend Mount Vision as a good starter set of pastels because they're I would say like Goldilocks she wanted a bed that wasn't too hard or wasn't too soft that's how those pastels are they're great in between pastel so check out I'll try to put a link to the Mount Vision video here so if you're a beginner and you want a good set to start with those are good but these look like they'd be a great beginner set too because again they're not too awfully soft and they're good for multiple purposes so I love these colors too I'm my goodness I opened it up and I literally just stood there and stared at them for a while they're just absolutely beautiful and I like that they have some nice bold you guys know I love punchy colors but at the same time you need some good neutrals to balance a painting out and it does have these nice neutrals here so thumbs up to the Jack Richardson soft pastels half stick assorted set of 60 loving it they look awesome I can't wait to paint with these oh my goodness okay and now I had actually forgotten how much I love Sennelier pastels okay these are these are soft and beautiful let me get out my little card again here this is the plein air landscape set okay and the colors are gorgeous now this is also a this one is that no this one is not a half stick yeah it is half pastels gosh I didn't I don't think I've ever bought their full pastels because that's a pretty big half pastel isn't it so this is the 80 landscape half pastel set okay shown actual size and it's Sennelier it's a French word I used to butcher that word oh it's funny I see I see right here this painting on this set the last name is McDaniel I just happened to notice that and that's gonna be the next set that I showed you is Richard McDaniel let me see if his signature is the same on here he doesn't have a signature on any of these but I'm sure that's probably the same artist one of his paintings on this landscape set so let's take a look at some of these again I love the round pastels I think they're awesome and these they just go on so great and I think one of the reasons I love them is because I happen to love Sennelier paper okay and that's what I got another pack of this paper actually this is my large one let me show you my small one this is the Sennelier La Carte pastel card the reason it's called card instead of paper is because it's pretty thick okay this size is the 30 by 40 centimeters okay and it's pretty large I usually take these and cut them up but they have another pad right here that I just got that I like this size okay it's 24 by 32 centimeters okay so it's really got the same selection as the large pad and it's got some black some kind of sand colored I love that gray green bluish color and some various other warm colors but back to my point these pastels by the same company works so great on the Sennelier La Carte pastel card again let me grab something that's really gonna show up great on here I've done some greens let me get like this orangey color here a reddish just kind of a reddish orange color here okay and oh my gosh the color is so vibrant they're soft they're very soft but they're still controllable okay they just make these nice marks on here oh I love it love it love it love it and again that was a pastel pencil I was sharpening on here okay but you can already see how those Jack Richardson's were harder for making grasses like that let's see how this one does with rolling it around I'll just roll it kind of right here yeah they they make good good line mark making lines and everything too so so these these roundy guys are awesome too so and the thing I love about this is it also has some nice neutrals look they have the neutrals on the side just like the Jack Richardson did they got some other neutrals you know kind of throughout here but most of the neutrals are gonna be here your grays and your tans and stuff but it's an awesome set I absolutely love Sennelier pastels okay so let me show you this other set I actually did a box opening for this next set that I've used some now I actually used these what they are to do the last painting I did of the dog portrait you may have seen the the portrait that I did of our group moderator for our Facebook group Monet cafe art group her name's Katrina and her sweet dog karma passed away and I wanted to do something just special for her so I did a portrait of her dog karma and I did use some of these for that painting and I love them okay oh I did notice this this signature McDaniel here it is the same painting as as this McDaniel painting okay and I do that maybe that's why I like both of these assortments because I'd like the color choices that he uses so this is the great American artworks Richard McDaniel plein air gallery assortment okay and again these are square the other two you saw were round and these are square like Terry Ludwig's Ludwig's and they're not as thick as as they are but um but I like them a lot and that they are pretty darn soft they are very good for your final work this in LA as R2 but let me use a like a totally different color here do something lighter okay and they still have the labels on them oh and I want to show you real quick that's a cute name I love some of these names Cindy Winkle that's really cool um but I want to show you something that I did I think I showed it pardon me for walking in front of the camera in the other video it's really helpful to have a reference sheet for your pastels if you run out you get online you try to find the color you ran out of and you can't remember the the number of it and it doesn't look the same online and you're like but I need this color and I've already taken the label off well you know because I'm going to take all these labels off as I use them it's great Terry Ludwig pastels has a sheet that comes with it with all the numbers on it and you just make a mark by it with your pastel so you can always go back and know the number of that color these did not come with that so I took a picture of this box I printed the picture out and because sometimes printers and colors look different I didn't just rely on the picture although it was pretty close I took each pastel and made a little mark on the left hand side of all these so some of them are kind of different but um so that if I need to reorder a color there it is right there okay so if you get a box of pastels and they don't have that nice reference sheet for you to mark on just take a picture of the open box and then you can make it yourself so then I just I save these you know so I can refer to them later okay so and I got a few extras of of these of different colors but again so this one was the great American artworks 78 handmade soft pastels Richard McDaniels plenary gallery assortment oh and I didn't make a mark on this paper with this one did I I can't even remember well let me do it again I do it yellow because I haven't done one of those yet and again these are these are soft and nice yeah I like that beautiful beautiful pastels and I also liked with this set sometimes you you know don't know why they're arranged the way they are it's just how the artist wants them arranged if it's a set that's from a particular artist and this one I happen to like that it was arranged according to color and value you know it's really easy to go find very quickly I want a dark orange boom you got all of your orangey yellows and yellows over here you got your warm greens next to your yellows and then they gradually go to cooler greens down here so it's really nicely arranged so I just love that so anyway that's just a little bit about some of the new pastels that I got I hope that helps again check out Mount Vision I'd like to recommend those as a starter set any of these would work but these are these are so soft that it's really good to have some other medium pastels Rembrandt's are another that's one of the first pastel sets that I got was Rembrandt's and they're they're harder they're not as hard as new pastels but they're there I'd say they fall look if the scale was hard to soft here Rembrandt's are going to be more like writing here okay Mount Visions are a little softer and then you just keep getting softer like some of these that we've done here okay so Rembrandt's is another good just a medium to medium softer to hard pastel you get it anyway I hope you enjoyed this and learn something from it and I know I'm probably gonna make you guys buy more pastels but hey it's Christmas time right now when I'm making this video so it's your honey get you some of these pastels and happy happy painting paint something beautiful bye guys