 Welcome to Monet Café, I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I love bringing you guys practical information to help your pastel painting career along with tutorials. But in this video I'm going to share with you a recent discovery that I'm so excited about. I'm just doing a voice over here. This was a video I shared with my patrons on my Patreon page where I was so excited about a new invention I made for a backing board to support my pastel artwork and also for teaching. So in this video I'll be sharing with you why I made this board, how you can make your own board and why I think it is a wonderful backing board or support for pastel painting. My typical backing board has been a piece of black foam core board. I like it because it's lightweight. I can move it around whether I'm working upright, lay it flat. But one of the challenges with it is it gets dirty. You can see some of my pastels and my underpainting mediums, how they've gradually made the board very dirty. And since I like a nice presentation, especially for my videos, I find myself having to replace them often. I get these at the dollar store for a dollar. But if you want some really good foam core board, it can be about four or five dollars. And here you see I often like as a teaching tool to put things on my board while I'm creating a video. You can see my helpful teaching tools taped to my foam core board here. And once again, this board is also getting dirty. So after a period of time, I have to replace them. Now I've had a new method of filming lately where I'm actually filming with my camera overhead and I had been using the same method of putting down a clean piece of black foam core board just for a nice presentation. And I have to have my little buddy Jackson with me, of course. And you can see the same thing happens. I have just pastel dust, little residue of the pastel sticks. I sometimes lay on the foam core board so it gets dirty. And the main point here is it gets expensive to keep replacing my black foam core board. So I thought, what can I do to make something that I can reuse? And so I had the idea of using a black surface that I could literally wash off. So I happened to think about a chalkboard type of surface. And I knew that they made this peel and stick type of chalkboard. And I realized I needed to put it on something that was lightweight. And thus I used the Gator board, which is lightweight. And it's a bit more water friendly than foam core board and a little more sturdy. So this system is going to work great for me. I can use it flat. I can pick it up and put it on my easel. And another great feature was I happened to find magnetic chalkboard. So this is amazing for me because when I have it up on my easel and I need to put some teaching tools or elements on my board, voila, it's going to stick to the board. Just great. I'm pretty sure I got my Gator board from DickBlick.com. If you go in there and type in Gator board, you'll see all these different sizes. Now it is not inexpensive, okay? But remember, this is a surface you're going to be reusing over and over again. So check it out and you might want to check around for other pricing. Now as far as the magnetic chalkboard material, I was able to find one that was much larger. I really wanted to go larger than the board that I had made. This one is not magnetic though. I found this on Amazon for basically around $21. It's 35 by 78 inches. The one that I purchased was smaller. It was 18 inches by around 39 inches and it is magnetic and washable and it's just great. But I might do another board and lose the magnetic feature just to be able to have a larger board to put on my easel. Now let me show you how awesome this is for cleanup. As a test, I decided to add soft pastels to this board. Now it is a chalkboard. We know chalk will erase, but I wasn't sure about soft pastels. So I thought I'd just add a few different pastels and I ended up creating a little painting from imagination. My main curiosity and hope was that these pastels would wash off similar to chalk. So I just kept playing around, adding some color, and then I decided to just get a spritzer bottle of water, spray it and see if it could be washed off. So let's check it out and see if it will actually come off and I'll be able to use this board again, thus saving me a whole lot of money so I don't have to replace the black foam core boards all the time. All right? Ready? Here we go. Let's check it out. So now I'm just spraying on some water. I mean I could have just gotten a paper towel and wet it and done the same thing, but I happened to have this little spritzer bottle near me. And I was so happy that after spraying it a few times and wiping it down with a paper towel, the board came perfectly clean. And so now what's the great news about this? You can use this board over and over again. And if you get pastels on it, you can just wipe it off. Now I do still have to experiment to see how some of my other underpainting mediums, I mean I use like acrylic ink and other things. So I'll probably have to be a little more careful when I use mediums that might not come off this board. But hey, at least I know that with soft pastels I can clean this board and reuse it over and over and over again. And it's very portable. You can take this with you. You can make a few different sizes. By the way, if you want a good little demonstration on how to cut a piece of gator board, this is a clip from a video from artist Rita Kirkman. She uses gator board for her fantastic paintings. And here she's cutting a board that she's already prepped and she's using a metal ruler. I use a T-square basically. And you use a utility knife. You mark your board, of course, the line that you want to cut. And you first just score it. You don't try to cut through it on the first pass. See how she's doing three passes? And then once you get a deep enough groove there, you can literally just pick up the board and it'll snap right into. I'll include a link to her video in the description of this video. So this was me kind of blowing dry my board. I was so excited. So I hope you guys enjoyed this. I hope it'll help you out. And I love saving you guys money. And I'd really appreciate it if you would support me on Patreon. It's $5 a month. You keep these free videos coming to hungry artists all over the world. And you get extra content. Also, like this video. Let me know what you thought in the comments. And as always, happy painting, and God bless.