 Hello there, I'm Sandy Allnach. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'm gonna be showing you more with my mom's vintage pencils. In my previous video, I showed you how I sharpened them. Got them all nice, they were really dull and that's one of the reasons she hadn't used them in years, but she bought these back in, we believe the 80s was kind of her best guess and I wanted to sharpen them up and get started with them. So in my last video, I talked a lot about sharpening and these are pastel pencils but the same applies to colored pencils. And in today's video, I'm gonna be comparing colored pencils and pastel pencils with a full piece of art. Well, mostly full piece of art in pastel but these lovely delicious pencils with a couple of different brands are going to be used today. So let's get started. Now I have enough experience with pastel to have an idea of the difference between these but when I had so many people asking what the difference was, I thought it's about time to show you a little bit of a head to head test and I'm gonna start with colored pencils and these are Prismacolors, I believe both of them are Prismacolors, I'm just gonna layer them and just make a little swatch of blue that turns into a green that goes to yellow and with colored pencils, you can layer them on top of each other with just really soft layers building them up. This Stonehenge paper that I'm using has a lovely texture for colored pencil. I love the texture and I would in general just keep working with those colors to get them to blend but since a lot of people like to use blending solutions I'm gonna use some Windsor and Newton sans odor. You can also use Gamsol or any number of solutions with a blending stump and wetting it in that little cup. I put a cotton ball in there so I won't spill things everywhere but I can just dab that onto the cotton ball and then get a little bit of moisture so I can start blending the colors even more and it intensifies them a bit. It also pushes them into the paper so that there's not gonna be a whole lot of pigment like flying up in the air. It's not real dusty in that sense. And even if you have just regular colored pencil that you've colored onto a piece of paper with you can move your finger over it and you get a little bit of little color moving but not a whole lot. Quite the opposite with pastels. Now pastels are very, very, very soft. Think of them as like almost dust in a pencil because they're gonna make a lot of dust. You can layer them over top of each other like this, get some blending going, you can use your finger or here I'm gonna use a soft tool to do some blending. And I didn't test out what colors these were gonna make when they blended. This was not the best comparison apples to apples but you can see that you can get a really smooth blend pretty quickly with pastels. Pastels are built for speed even if they are very messy. When you blow off the excess, all that excess dust you do end up getting some on your table. I usually keep a little dust buster around on my desk. Yes, a dust buster. Every once in a while, getting all that dust off but you can blend it with your finger. You can blend it with a cotton ball. You can blend it with a lot of things but when you do blend it, it lifts up pigment. So you may need to add more to it, that kind of a thing. And if you have just plain old color on the paper it's going to make a bit of a mess. So if you are trying to use these for say greeting cards or something this is not a good medium pastel pencils because anybody that touches them is gonna have a mess. You could build like a little frame around it and make it as though it's a shaker card but just have the pastel included on the inside. So if you wanna try pastels, you could do that. You can buy pastel pencils in singles on some websites. I will find some links and put them in the doobly-doo if you just wanna buy a couple colors and try them out and see what you think. Now in making just a blend in a circle, I thought I'd try that. You can see above my circle where I blew off the excess with my breath. There's a little spray of color. So that is just something that you need to get used to if you're going to blow it off your page. That's generally not the safest way to go because you're gonna end up with dust all over your studio and in your lungs. So generally I don't do that except on this really quick little test here. So that's why I use my little vacuum, my little hand vacuum. With color pencil, you can do the same thing and create a blended circle just using the same colors. And in both of these, I'm just gonna use some greens in between to make the blending go faster but you can layer colors in the same kind of a way as you do in a strip and just make something that looks more rounded with the sunshine on one side and the dark on the other kind of an ode, I guess in some way to the full eclipse that we just had. Did anybody see the eclipse? I was on the West Coast and we didn't see much of an eclipse at all. So I had a lot of FOMO but I saw lots of beautiful pictures of it and it was quite amazing. We won't have another one. I know in our newspaper it said we won't be able to see one until maybe 2044? Like that's a long time away but whatever. You can travel the world. Apparently there's an eclipse every 18 months somewhere. Now with color pencil, you can't really go over those colors and try to brighten them but you can with pastels. You can go over top of it with a white, make a white highlight. You can add more yellow to it, brighten those things up. You can't necessarily with colored pencil. So there's some things that one medium or the other does better or worse and it's all a matter of what you want for your artwork. So let's take a look at a drawing that I did. My mom had given me of course these pastels and I wanted to use some pastel matte to make an animal drawing. Pastel matte is kind of like a super fine, I hesitate to call it a sandpaper because it doesn't feel like sandpaper but it does have a surface to it that's great for pastels. The pads come in different collections of colors and this one I selected this kind of blue grayish color because I wanted to draw a seal and the seal is sitting on a big rock and I began by just simply drawing it in a white pencil. Now I was trying to use only my mom's pastel pencils. I have a couple other sets but I really wanted to play with these and say, mom, this is from your pastels because she gave them to me and I wanted to honor her in that. So I'm kind of making do. There is one white pencil and it's a general charcoal pencil so it's technically not a pastel pencil and there is gonna be a spot or two. I'm gonna use some actual soft pastel sticks because I just got tired of trying to do larger areas with a pencil because a pencil is just gonna take longer. But I'm gonna show you a technique that I learned and I'm just really excited about. I wanted to try it on the main element of the drawing. I've done it in a background before but I watched a video in which, and I can't even remember because I watched a whole bunch of them at once and I don't remember who the first one was that I saw but the person had used isopropyl alcohol to melt out all of the pastel in a particular layer. Now you can do that strategically in one of my commissions that I did. I did the blanket. There was a blanket in the background of it and I ended up putting the red down across the blanket and doing this technique and then doing the pattern on top of it and you'll see why that makes a difference when you see how this goes. But I'm just kind of throwing colors in here. Notice I'm not being real careful with it. I'm just being kind of a mess and in that little jar is some isopropyl alcohol and mine is 99%. I saw the video that I remember seeing, they said you could use 70% but 99% is what I had, so that's what I used. And I'm just using a regular old brush and I'm just painting the pastel. You can see it just kind of turns into almost watercolor. You can get a watercolor effect and just leave it as that or you can use it as the base color underneath everything else. And one of the reasons that this matters and that I discovered it and like my mom was sitting in her hospital bed and we were having art chats while she was there and we were talking about pastels and I said, oh mom, have you ever used isopropyl with your pastels? And she's like, why would I do that? And I said because and then I explained to her how this works and her eyes just lit up and I was thinking she would love to go into her studio and go try it because she would just fascinated with the idea of it. But I explained to her that the part that you paint with the alcohol and it has to be done on a paper that's strong enough to handle it becomes like just dry. Like it doesn't lift up anymore. So this first layer, messy as it is, doesn't go anywhere. So now I can draw on top of that. I've got all that color underneath so that's why I put blues and purples and things into the black so I can have some color coming through. Most of it I end up covering when I'm doing the rest of the drawing but I can lean on this and not make a mess of all over it. Like I'm not, you know, laying my hand on the drawing and ending up with like just a giant mess on my sleeve. So when I discovered that I was like, oh wow. And additionally, like with that blanket that I told you about, the red of the blanket stayed in place and I wasn't fighting it every time I was trying to put part of the pattern of the design of the blanket on top of it. So there's a lot of different uses for this. You can also just do a particular portion if you just want to, you know, do this for the background section or if you just wanna do it for an element in the piece of artwork. Cause you can just, you know, you can move it wherever you want with a brush. Just let it dry completely cause you don't wanna use the pastel on top of the wet paper, but it dries super fast. And what I have seen in a number of videos that I've watched since I found that one is that a lot of people who go out and do plein air and I haven't tried plein air pastel cause I don't know, I have no idea how I would pack for that. I think I'd have to pick out colors first cause I can't take all the pastel I have. So maybe I'll figure that out at some point but they take isopropyl alcohol and then they can get at least a base layer that's gonna stay put. When you're outside and there's wind and everything, I would think that would be super helpful to be able to use this technique. So I'm just adding color on top of the color that's already there as the base. And with pastels, as I said, you can layer lights and darks, interchange them. Most people, I think, do with pastel, they do the darker first and the lighter on top but I think it depends on the element because sometimes I find the opposite will work better, really depends. Like here on this one, I could have put a dark color in for all the white areas of the fur seal and I decided to do some light colors in there. So I would have a light base underneath of it. Now also with the sharpening, probably looking at my pencils going, man, those are dull pencils. The tips are very sharp when I want a really sharp line but there's a lot of this I wanna soften. So I haven't really stressed out too much about getting every single pencil sharp for every mark I'm making on the paper. Pastel pencils are going to dull quickly because they are so soft. And I guess I shouldn't say they're all so soft. There are some brands that are made as heavier, more hard line types of pastel, the same with sticks. You can have ones that are really soft or ones that are harder and they're good for different techniques. But what I ended up doing as I worked my way through the drawing is just going back and forth as I was putting the detail in and I would sharpen the pencil for just the section that I was working on. And lots of them could do with just the very, very tip of it being sharp. I would use the soft tool to do a little bit of blending. Most of the time I wasn't trying to get rid of every line. I just didn't want the seal to look like I was drawing every piece of fur because that to me just ends up looking very busy. So I would soften some of it and end up kind of trying to create some subtle differences in texture. And in this particular one, I wanted to have the sun really hitting one side and creating just a nice halo of cast light around the seal. And I also wanted to have some kind of a blue halo on the backside, just so that there was almost something surrounding him, but it didn't look, I don't know, didn't look like it, it was a glow necessarily. In the pencil collection that my mom still had, this group of colors, there was no gray. So a lot of it I ended up doing with a light blue and you'll see when we skip to right here, all the shadow on the left side of the seal was made with the light blue pencil and white. I just layered the two of them together and kind of kept blending in layers underneath and then drew on top of them. But that's a lot of blue in there to create that kind of really soft color. And yes, I know I didn't film every step of it. Apologies, but we would have been here all day because I didn't want to speed through this. I wanted you to be able to see kind of how I make my strokes on the paper. I am relatively new to pastels. My mom had given me her pastels a number of years ago. I had done some drawings with pastel but I hadn't really focused on it very much. I didn't do much research about learning new techniques or anything. I just tried some things for fun. There's one drawing that's supposed to be any day now arriving at my house. It was a drawing that I did for my mom. It was my first finished, like I'm proud of this, drawing that I did of two penguins, a mom penguin and a baby penguin. And my mom said she wanted me to take it because we were packing up her old apartment and moving everything into the new for her hospice location. And we were cleaning out the old stuff and she wasn't really gonna be putting stuff on the walls. So she was encouraging her daughters to just start claiming stuff and I wanted to get the stuff that I didn't want her to feel like she had to ship. So I packed it up in a box and shipped it to myself so it should be here any day. I will share that on socials when I get around to getting that in the mail. So for the rock that the seal is sitting on, I wanted a completely different texture and that's why I switched over to using pastel sticks because you can get all kinds of funky textures using different tapping motions. I was using the side or even the end of the piece of pastel just to create something interesting for the seal to sit on. I wanted one side of it to be super bright sunlight so there's lots of yellow, lots of white because there was a lot of yellow also in the highlight side of the seal and more blues, cooler colors on the shadow side and then started working on how to put the texture in it. Some of that was done with soft pastels using a gray soft pastel and I can't tell you what any of these colors were, by the way, because when my mom kind of put all of her pastels into this big rack, there's like a giant container thing with all these little stacking shelves almost in it, she didn't mark any colors or any brands so I have no idea what any of it is. I just kind of look at it and say, does that look like a color that maybe I could use and then I try it. Like here I ended up using a pink. I thought that was more of a whitish color but it was pink and it was looking okay so I kept going with it because I don't know what colors anything is. At some point, if I ever get through using her older pastels, I did buy a set when it was on clearance at the Daniel Smith store when they closed a while back during the pandemic. They closed their retail store and they had a set of Jack Richardson, like all the colors and I bought that as a treat for myself and it's still in the box but I wanna use mom's first. So I'm just layering these colors on here using my finger to blend, sometimes using a tapping motion to retain texture but still get some blending going on, playing around back and forth and every time I would kinda get to a place where I thought maybe I was making progress, I would step back and look at it and squint and then I would go back and end more because I just couldn't seem to get the whole thing to look right. I wanted the shadow side to look like it was in shadow but not so black of a shadow that it doesn't look like the same rock and yet not have too much of the lighter colors in there either so using some of the blues and browns in the shadows and then I even went back and added some blues into the front of the rock just so that would tie together a little bit better and I added some of the kind of reddish brown in there and a little more gray. It was just playing around back and forth until I was satisfied with it which is kinda how things go when you're working on something that has this much texture in it. So I did use the pencils for the final touches and the final layer on the rock because then I could draw in actual lines and make different kinds of folds and holes in the rock and really play around with the texture and that probably the whole rock may have taken more than the seal did quite possibly but here again you can see my pencil is not sharp but it doesn't need to be because I wasn't drawing something that was like really really careful I was just drawing little shapes that every time you sharpen a pencil you're losing pigment because you're shaving off some of the pigment on the outside of these pencils and I want them to last as long as possible so I only do any of the sharpening when I'm really really really needing it. So there's my seal on a rock, well first seal, kinda cute and I'm really tickled with that rock and how it came out because it really does look like it has bird poop and everything on it, doesn't it? So there is my seal I hope mom is proud of this one. I sent it to her and I haven't got an answer back yet by the time I'm doing this voiceover but I hope she's gonna like it as my first drawing with her pastel pencils because I wanna do her honor that way. I did end up finishing off the rock out to the edge of the piece of paper when I saw the little border around it and I thought I don't really need that border so it goes all the way out to the edges of my nine by 12. So there's my seal, I hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you guys again, yeah, in a couple of days. I'll see you next week and I'll talk to you then. Have a great weekend, ta ta for now. Go create something every day. Bye bye.