 Hello my friends and welcome to another Experimental session in Monet cafe. Like I say, this is more like science to me sometimes than art because I just love playing around with these mediums and materials and just seeing what blends well and Creates a good surface for pastel painting today. What I'm going to be doing is I've done this one before and actually shared a video where I I mix up the Golden fluid acrylics and again, this is a color that just works really well as an underpainting Quinacridone nickel azo gold it is a mouthful But if you notice these bars here with the paint swatch across it that shows how transparent it is meaning that the Luminosity of the paper is going to show through it makes for a really great Product for an underpainting, but I mix this one-to-one ratio. I have it on the top here to Remind me with this Golden gel medium fine pumice gel the pumice in it is what gives it the grit that's going to allow Pastels to adhere to and if you're very much a beginner in pastels You'll learn very quickly that you can't just do pastels on a smooth surface It will just fall off you won't get any layers and you'll get frustrated and wonder Why do I see all these other pastel pieces that look so beautiful with color and yours? Just won't even layer or look very bright Well, that's because you have to have almost like sandpaper some grit to the paper now This is just plain old matte board I had a lot of extra matte board from a framing project that I had and it is what's called archival It's acid-free so it is good for long-term Paintings and longevity and so I cut it up the big pieces I have I just cut it into standard sizes with a big paper cutter and I use it to make my own pastel surfaces and It's cheaper to make your own and also you can get different Families of the families of color that you might not get with regular Pastel papers that you buy so what I'm going to be doing if you notice here I've picked out some acrylics now this here that I've used before is fluid acrylic you see right under the golden Name which means it's going to be more liquidy you can hear it Okay, so it's going to apply more smoothly to the surface these are not fluid acrylics this is golden open acrylic and But if you notice the same thing here I've chosen colors that have that luminous Transparent look it's this is very see-through transparent now on the back of the golden acrylics It'll give you a little scale as to how transparent or opaque Transparent means see-through opaque means not see-through this one's very transparent It'll also give you a little Grading on how thin or thick it is and I want to get one that's not too Thick let me see this one. I've got to put my glasses on to read it and I believe this one is Probably a little thicker than some of the others Yeah, it's a little bit more on the thick side. Okay, so this one might not apply as good as this green gold I don't normally like greens for an underpainting, but I thought because of the transparency and the thinness of it and this one's still not as thick as the other one that it might work and Then here is indian yellow. This is in gram acrylics and it doesn't have a thing on the back it does say transparent which I could tell it was and It may not it's a little bit thin too But because these are not as thin as the fluid acrylics I thought I would try if you've seen some of my other videos using clear gesso clear gesso It was another product that can be used to apply to watercolor paper and some of my videos and these boards here and it has a grit to it as well So and it is Liquidity like the fluid golden fluid acrylic So if I need to make these thinner when I mix it with this I'm going to use the clear gesso So that's my thinking. I hope it works and I'm gonna give it a try Okay, what I'm going to do is use the indian yellow one first because I Like that as an underpainting, you know, I like the Complimentary colors as an underpainting better than the greens. I do a lot of landscapes So there's a lot of green already and yellow or gold or red or orange makes a very good underpainting so I'm gonna mix up equal portions of these two and Then I'm going to add some clear gesso if it's not thick enough. So hey, why not just do it right here with me I do have a palette knife around here somewhere That I'm going to use to mix with but for now. I'm just going to kind of guess it I'm going to put in this is a little teeny board that I'm doing here This is just a little six by four. So I don't need much at all. It's good to do an experiment here So I think I'm just going to try maybe just about that little there and Let me grab my palette knife so I can mix it Okay, here's my palette knife. I'm going to open up the fluid acrylic I'm sorry not the fluid acrylic the fine pumice gel and if you notice I've got a little piece of saran wrap in here this stuff dries really hard and If you don't get it off the edges really well, it'll seal itself cement itself shut to the side So I just keep a little piece of saran wrap there. This one's falling apart It does look like the product actually kind of deteriorates the Saran wrap it might have to come up with another method. Alright, so I do it doesn't look like this is clean But it is I'm just going to get a little dollop of the pumice gel Kind of equal to the little dollop of paint. Maybe a little more Get off there. Alright, that's probably good. It's a little more than the paint, but get the right idea here I think it'll be close Alright, so we're mixing this up and what that's doing is it's adding that pumice which makes the the grit to the paint now that is Pretty pretty liquidy, but I believe when I mixed it up with the other quinacridone fluid acrylic It was more liquidy than that So I am going to add a little bit of the clear gesso again, which does have the grit Little bit of this just to loosen it up a little bit. Okay, so you can see I almost did equal amounts of everything And I don't know what I'm going to get here So I may not be sharing this video All right, so Need to come up with a better way to mix this Definitely want to get any if the I think the reason for the fluid acrylic is that you don't get clumps in it And I don't want any clumps in this yellow All right, that's probably pretty good. Whoops. I actually have a little bit more of this Pumice gel in there. Let me get that mixed into all right. Well as soon as I get this mixed up I'm going to apply it to the board right so now time to apply it to the matte board and you could use Some artists have used gator board. I just like applying it to something that is a sturdy surface It's kind of neat to have a pastel painting that is not so flimsy like some of the pastel papers So this is more durable for shipping and things like that. So but keep in mind if you do use matte board it has a side that is rough and A side that is smooth. I actually have accidentally applied it to the rough side a couple of times and you may like that texture to your painting But I just prefer to have My pastel underpainting on the smooth side. So I've got it on the smooth side now All I'm going to do is take one of these little foam brushes. I'm going to get this up here and a little bit on the brush All right, and I'm going to really press sometimes I have to press it with my fingers Oh, look at that. Okay. So we're getting a little bit of that Quality that's kind of like the quinacridone gold. We're still getting that glow Pretty glow behind there. All right. I'm liking that now. I'm going to flip it around here maybe get just a little bit more and This is always a little bit of a tricky part because the stuff does dry pretty quickly But I think we're going to result end up having Yeah, see it's already drying is having a Textured surface that's still got that luminosity to it. So that's pretty neat. I like that one I think since I have it already mixed up. I'm going to go ahead. I've got a little scrap piece here That's not really a standard size or anything but sometimes I like having these little odd pieces to just get creative and Also, I like giving little paintings as gifts, you know, that's just the neatest little gift to give talk about something homemade Oh, yeah, that's already drying already. Awesome Nice. Okay, this one's a little more yellow than when I use this product, but I like it too Okay, now I think I'm going to do one in the blue and the green All right again I don't normally like to use green as an under painting but this one was just so vibrant and This might be neat if I was doing a painting a landscape that had a different Mood to it like a night scene that had a lot of blues in it This might make a a nice under painting. So anyway, I'm sure I can come up with something So same thing. This is now an 8 by 10 Piece of matte board. I do have the smooth side and I'm going to start Again, the problem is that it dries very quickly when you're doing a large size. You're kind of limited Because you have to try to work so quickly and not have any lines. It will create Lines if you don't Get it blended right and fast enough So I'm trying to work fast and get it all across here. It's kind of hard And a little bit of the the texture the lines is good, but I try not to have it Too awfully consistent. See that's already drying over over in here And I if I put another stroke on it, it's going to create a value difference there So I've kind of got that covered and I'm thinking that It's got a little dent in it I'm thinking that if it doesn't have quite enough grit or pumice gel in it that I could still apply more of this liquid gesso after it's dry just a coat of that or even Perhaps after I apply some pastels, of course, we can use our sprayable fixative sometimes to get another layer in okay So we've got our nice little bright bright green one interesting. Okay. Now I'm going to move on Well, I've got a little bit more of this green left. Let me see if I have a smaller thing to do Okay now on to this beautiful blue that's called Magnes blue hue and The same deal by the way, I am Washing this out and drying it pretty good in between because of course we don't want to blend these colors All right, so you probably noticed my last time I did this I actually just used the spoon to measure with now the next ones that I'm doing are 11 by 14s I think I'm just going to do one of them So I'm probably going to mix up about the same amount that I did for the green That seemed to be enough for a few of them. So this if I do the same amount should be enough for 111 by 14. So again, I put about a half of the spoon With the paint and I have to work fast with this one again because this is a big one This is bigger the biggest one. I've done so far. Oh, isn't that gorgeous. Look at that Wow, so pretty. Oh wow Well, I am quite pleased with how these came out. I have Of course the colors that I already did in the video But I also wanted to show how close how similar these are This is the one that I've originally done and have on Some of my videos I think I have two of them on how to make this surface with that Quinacridone Nicolazo gold and the pumice gel and you see it's really close to that Indian yellow that I used actually it's a little more orange and I think I'm gonna love that Indian yellow as an underpainting Also, too, you saw as I did the the greens love that green The blue has a little more stripes in it because it is bigger and it is hard to get it applied but it still has that nice prepared surface and Also, too, I thought I'd show you my failure. I did this one prior to making the video and with this beautiful I think it's called permanent rose. It's just a gorgeous bright pink and It had some clumps in the paint So I think that's what's showing through here But you know my work is so impressionistic that I don't think that's gonna matter. I'll paint on top of that So anyway, that was just a really great experiment I think I'm definitely gonna share a video of me using these but from what I can see they work You know just as good as when I made this surface with the fluid acrylics So anyway, I hope you enjoyed this and look at that bottle. Isn't that just gorgeous? Wow Most of you guys are color freaks like me. So I just had to buy that Anyway, hope you guys had fun and learn something new and I'm just having a blast sharing these videos with you All right. Bye. Happy painting