Start Pastel Painting TODAY Materials Techniques More

pastels are such great medium used by Masters like Edgar dega and Mary Cassat who were friends and influenced each other and also modern-day Masters as well it's such tactile medium so much texture you're right there with the art you don't have to worry about learning how to mix color or about mediums and thinners and paint brushes you just get to paint but pastels can still be confusing medium so I'm going to give you all the information that wish had when was starting out in the next 7 minutes or so let's go we're going to break up this video into two main parts first the materials and supplies that you'll need and second important Concepts that you need to learn let's start with materials and supplies the most important Supply you'll need for pastel painting is pastel paper or some kind of surface you can try out pastelmat or uart pastelmat is unsanded uart is sanded you can also go to the Dakota pastels website and get paper sampler and it will have lots of options for you have video that reviews all the popular options that you can check out next of course you'll need some pastels now pastels come in lot of different shapes and sizes but if you want to save little money look for half sticks there are many different wonderful professional brands of pastels available and they all have their advantages and disadvantages some are softer some are harder some have more grit some are smoother Dakota pastel is ALS also has sampler pack of pastels that you can try but they can be expensive so when you're starting out recommend looking for the Celia Paris collection which is usually fairly inexpensive in the $120 to $150 range and this set of 96 new pastels which are harder pastel so that'll give you good mix of hard and soft you're going to want way to store your pastels and these trays were very inexpensive think found them at Target but you can find any type of tray wood plastic and like organize my pastels like this by color but when you're starting out you could just leave them in the box they come in and that's perfectly fine too make sure you pick up some painters tape or some masking tape found this on Amazon like black because the color doesn't conflict with the colors that I'm putting on my painting pick up some unscented baby wipes these are great for cleaning up as you paint so you don't leave smudges on your face or pastel dust all over your phone and you're going to need place to paint an upright easel works best so the pastel dust can fall straight down handmade this easel but you can find an style easel that's similar to this that works great or get piece of Masonite hardboard from the hardware store and just put it up on your wall makes great painting surface dust management is important you're going to make lot of dust and so you want to catch dust that falls you can just use piece of duct tape like I'm doing here to catch that dust or make pocket out of piece of foil and secure that to the bottom or build it into the easel also get cheap rug from the dollar store and that will help collect the dust that falls also if you drop your pastels and you will drop your pastels these can cushion the fall and keep them from breaking shaggier rugs are great cheap is great then you can wash them or just throw them away if they get too dirty lighting is critical of course when you're painting you can paint near window to get natural light but having lights like these which are cheap on Amazon they're LED they're adjustable the brightness the color is adjustable and these work really well so you can get the light in the right place pastel paintings can smudge easily so you want way to store them to protect them get pad of tracing paper like this and you can insert your paintings in between sheets of the tracing paper and that works really well but my favorite method of protecting the painting is using clear bags these clear bags are available at your local hobby store online Amazon other places and you can get them in different sizes just the right size to fit your paintings slip your painting inside fold over the edge and close it down and then you have nice secure way to store your painting and also to sell them you can give them to your customer just like this so those were all the necessary supplies and some helpful bonuses that you'll want to look into when you start out pastel painting and by the way if this is helpful to you please consider liking the video subscribe to my channel hit the notification Bell and now let's talk about some important Concepts in pastel painting underpainting is an important Concept in pastel painting it's similar to blocking in and other types of painting and here you're establishing your values your lights and darks and in some cases the colors that you want to use the base layer of your painting you can use watercolor as I'm doing here or just pastels as you saw in the previous clip you can also wet The Pastels with alcohol you can do monochromatic underpainting which is just one color as you see here you can do different colors in your underpainting called local color underpainting if you do use alcohol and this is called an alcohol wash you can find the isopropyl alcohol rubbing alcohol in the first St section of your local store and this will work great when you're pastel painting it's important to remember that you are painting you are not drawing use the side of your pastel stick and also always use light touch by default when in doubt use light touch now close to the end of the painting you might make some stronger marks some detail marks but overall you want to default to lighter touch and you want to work in layers lay down light layer and then another light layer on top and work up to the stronger values and then the most important advice can give when starting out is to paint lot and to paint small you can see here I'm working from smaller study to little bit bigger piece but I'm still working small this allows you to save material save paper and allows you to get lot of paintings done in shorter amount of time so you can get more practice in so start small and then expand to bigger and bigger paintings all right that should get you started with pastel painting if you have any questions about the things we covered today check out some of my other videos I've got that one about the paper and how to choose that I've got one about Mark making and some exercises you can use when you first get started so check those out but if you have some questions you want to leave in the comments go ahead and do that and I'll try to answer you or maybe even make another video about it all right now go make something