 Welcome to Monet Café. Artist, subscribers, visitors. I'm so excited to bring you this video on how we can paint with pastels on wood. Now, this is part two. I did try it before and now I have a new improved recipe which I will be sharing with you in this video and a lot more. So, you're also going to get, of course, the recipe for the homemade surface for painting on wood, the technique for sealing these, how to package them, and a lot more. Look at these cute little packages I made. Now, these are available in my Etsy shop and I know I only have the four right now, but I'm going to be making more because these are so darn fun and cute as they can be. All right, so let's talk about part one. In part one, I painted my recipe on a wood panel and the recipe that I used came out very textured. You can see it as I zoom in here. So, I will be sharing my new recipe that worked great and I used them on these little wood slices. I thought, why not try it on something small? And Arteza was nice enough to send these to me. So, you know, I hate to sound jealous as a pastel artist, but so many other artists that work in acrylic and oil and even watercolor, they're a little bit more user-friendly and they don't have to be put under glass. So, I wanted to come up with a way. I mean, look at some of these cute paintings. These are not mine, but they're just really so beautiful. So, I wanted to come up with a way to do the same thing with pastels and now I've tried multiple recipes. This is a little fast-forwarding of some of the other recipes that I tried that didn't work quite so well. So, I did find out that I wanted to use the marble dust though. That's in that bag right there that I just held up. So, let's get to the new and improved recipe. Now, in part one, I used a product called Fine Pumice. It's literally like sand, little finely ground bits of sand and it's very similar to the sand that I feel in clear gesso. It also has a little sandiness. That's why we use that product a lot, just alone to make a pastel surface, but I found that the pumice was a little bit too gritty for the application on wood. So, I used this product right here in front of me, marble dust. Now, fortunately, marble dust is not all that expensive. I found a four-pound bag of it on DickBlick.com for $9. It feels like baby powder. And now, right here is where I filmed myself finally coming up with the winning recipe using marble dust and unlike one of the first recipes I tried that used just marble dust, water and regular gesso, I found that didn't have enough grit. The marble dust, like I said, is like baby powder. So, I decided to use marble dust with the clear gesso because clear gesso also has a little bit of that sand or pumice in it, but not as much as just the pumice alone. So, here is the final do-it-yourself pastel surface recipe. It's really easy. Two parts of clear gesso. Make sure you get the clear and one part of marble dust. I thought I'd share why I think this combination works well. I could have used just clear gesso, right? I talk about that all the time to create pastel paintings. I found, though, that the marble dust added more consistency to the mixture so that things applied a little bit more smoothly and it made a nice covering for the wood surface. Now, as you watch me combining this, I will explain to you why I think this worked well. And, by the way, not just on a wood surface. On any surface, I've tried this recipe on watercolor paper since this experiment. I've tried it on matte board and it worked great. I actually have an upcoming video where I used this exact same recipe and I was very happy with the results. Even though the wood slices were fairly smooth, I decided to go ahead and just sand them down just to get it as smooth as possible before I put the recipe on top. All I did was get a brush and brush. You can see how wide this is clear gesso. Even when you add the marble dust, it's still pretty clear. So, if you want to do an underpainting underneath it, you could. I decided to do two coats of the new recipe and then I wanted to tone it. This is a product that I use a lot for underpainting if I'm gonna tone something, you know, all over because I love this color. Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold, made by Golden. It's golden fluid acrylics. Do you see how translucent it is? And this color is just a beautiful underpainting because it's a complementary color to a lot of landscapes. I am speeding through the painting process of these because I've got other things I want to get to and explain to you guys. But I found that the new recipe worked great. I did use a little my chamois cloth blending tool to kind of blend in a little bit at the beginning stages and I just recreated a painting that I had done from my imagination that was actually on a similar background that Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold. And I found this recipe worked great. I could see a little bit of the ringlets from the wood, but I actually really like that. I feel like this looked so organic, especially because pastels to me just are so earthy anyway. And pastels combined with the wood, it's just a really neat effect. I did love the Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold background to these paintings too. I think I'm gonna keep using that. So here's a close-up of the final painting. You see how rich the color is on it. And I'm also going to be sharing with you what I do to cover the back and also how to seal this. So lots more coming. Alright, so here's this painting and I thought I'd also show you one that I did with the incorrect recipe. You see how you see the ringlets a lot more and I found the pastels just didn't apply as nicely. I thought I'd also share that I didn't do this one with the Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold. I just sketched something out from imagination and started painting. So I wanted to share that so you don't think you've got to go out and buy that product. I do happen to like it, but you certainly don't have to have it. You could tone these with anything if you didn't want to work on just the clear wood surface like I'm doing here. Alright, let me speed up through this and let's get to seeing all of them done. I had a total of four, three of them with the new recipe. And let's see how I protect these. Alright, aren't those cute? I just love them. I'm gonna do a lot more of these. Here's the four that I finished. Like I said, one of them, that last one there, was the one that I did with the recipe that I wasn't so happy with. And then I was like, I have got to get these to where people can just put them on these little easels without having to worry about smudging them. Once again, I don't want to sound jealous of other artists who have mediums that are a little bit more touch-friendly, but I knew it would be much more marketable and fun if I could protect them in some way. So, join me now as I explain what I did to protect these little wooden treasures. Before I share the process, I thought I'd show you the final result. Do you see how it has a little slight sheen to it? Well, I'm gonna tell you what that is and how I did it. I even made a nice little custom back to this. I'm sure many of you are aware, if you've been painting with pastels for a while, that spraying a final coat of fixative on your final painting typically darkens it. I am experimenting with some products right now that I hope to share some good news, but I did not want to do that for this. So, I came up with my own strategy. I knew that I had used these clear bags before. I get mine at clearbags.com. I use them all the time, actually, to protect my paintings when shipping them, really just when showing them, and I knew I could put these little wood slices into the bag, but I wanted to make my own frame of sorts with these to protect them. So, I used some 4x6 bags that I already had and I kind of played around with the best way to do this. So basically, all I'm doing is making a custom cut plastic frame for my wood slices. I take the 4x6 bag and I just cut it open, basically, and I set this to the side to get my little pastel painting ready to adhere it. The product I'll be using to adhere the plastic to the painting is called Diamond Glaze. Yes, it is acid-free. It will not yellow over time. I use this product, actually, to adhere the little Monet Café charms on the Monet Café bracelets that we have, and it's a great product. It dries very clear and quickly. Now, probably the most difficult part of this process is to apply an ever-so-thin layer to the edges of the wood slice. What I did is I have a little piece of watercolor paper here that I just put a teeny little drop of the Diamond Glaze. Now, the cap, make sure you clean it off. I actually opened it up because the nozzle will glue shut as well. So, just make sure you wipe it off really good before you put the top back on. Another thing you'll need will be a teeny, weeny, tiny brush. And I have lots of these little brushes. I have, actually, some of them I've just gotten from Walmart just for more, you know, durable things that you do. So, I've zoomed in here so you can see it really up close. Do you see how thin that is? I did find that I have to kind of be careful not to, if you have a light area of pastel, like a sky, make sure you clean your brush good and get a clean application of the Diamond Glaze. And once again, this is an archival product. It won't yellow. The plastic bags from ClearBags are also archival acid free. So, with a proper application, this should last a long time. And, you know, I know this might not be for some of you. I sometimes wonder if I'm like the black sheep of the pastel art world. I don't know. But I'm having fun and I hope you guys are too. And, you know, what's the expression? Necessity is the mother of invention. And I needed to cover these so I figured out a way to do it. And I wanted to share it, you know? That's what, to me, art is more fun. That's what Monet Café is all about when it's shared with friends. That's our new logo. By the way, I have new Monet Café logo products underneath every video. All right. So what am I going to do now? I've got my little thin coat of glue around the edge. Very, very, very thin. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my pastel painting and I'm going to carefully, just at one time, you don't want to wiggle this around, sit it down on top of the plastic. And I press, press, you know, just a little gently, not too hard. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my X-Acto blade. Now, I, I got pretty good with an X-Acto blade in graphic design. I'm back from the old days before we were right at the cusp of going from cut and paste to computer. So by the time I graduated, I was kind of at the cutting edge because I was just, I had one of the first Macintosh computers, you know, the first Macintosh computer that was out in those days. So, but before that, I had to use my handy-dandy X-Acto blade a lot. So I moved this to the side because I couldn't quite do it underneath the camera. And if you even want to attempt trying this crazy idea that I have that actually works, you might want to practice a little bit before you actually put this to a, a pastel painting you've spent any time on, because I find that you kind of have to turn your blade a little bit out so that you're not cutting off the wood slices. And, and once again, this might not be for everybody, but I wanted to show how I did it. And it really does work quite well. Oh, and another thing is important to make sure your X-Acto blade is sharp. Now, you'll see, I just basically just pull the plastic from around. I've made a nice clean cut. So there you go. There's my little painting protected nicely. And it could be put on the little easel that I showed at the beginning. You could use them as magnets to stick on your fridge. You give them as gifts. They could be used as Christmas ornaments. Oh, and also make sure you clean your brush. I use old brushes just so it doesn't matter. But go ahead and get the glue out of your brush. And just in case you want to know how I finalize these, I have some decorative papers that I use to package my original art in when I ship it. And I decided to make a custom back to these. So I really just did the same strategy. But this time, of course, I use the diamond glaze on the entire back. And I cut it out. I have my nice little custom back. I also have these little Susan Jenkins fine art stickers and this little round hole punch cutter that I use. And I just think that when you make something look special, it feels more special for the buyer. And I always like to think my art is going to live in a new home and it's it's really kind of emotional actually. So try to make it special when you do things like this. And I know people appreciate it because they tell me they do. Here are the final paintings that are not only protected on the painting itself, but also in another clear bag with a little thank you card I like to include with my art. I also include a business card in with the package and these little earthy organic pastel paintings on wood are ready to take a trip to their new home. That was a lot of information, but I know a lot of you had inquired about what my final recipe was for this and how I went about protecting them. So I hope you enjoyed this. I always enjoy sharing with you guys. That's what art's all about. Again, these are in my Etsy shop. I will have a clickable link in the video. Become a patron if you like. Please subscribe, come back, like, comment. Let me know what you think about these. Have I lost my mind or is this a good idea? All right guys, happy painting.