Pan Pastels Unleashed: Composition, Color Palettes, and Creative Expression

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone, and welcome to my Pan Pastels art class. In this fun course, I invite you to embark on an exciting journey into the world of Pan Pastels. Whether you're a beginner, seeking to unlock the secrets of this versatimdium, or an experienced artist, looking to add some versatility to your skills, this class offers something for everyone. Together, we'll explore the essential techniques from mastering tints and shades to understanding composition principles and color palettes. I'm Denise Love. I'm an artist and creative educator, and I'm excited to bring you this fun and exciting dive into Pan Pastels. Get ready to unleash your creativity, experiment with different pastel options, and embark on a hands on project that will inspire and elevate your artistic journey. So let's get started. 2. Class Project: Our class project, let's dive into creating a vibrant abstract piece using a limited color palette of four to five colors. Start by exploring mark making techniques with pen pastels and soft tools, focusing on building, texture and depth. Consider the principles of composition that we've discussed, such as the rule of thirds to guide your arrangement of the elements on the pastel paper. Experiment with layering and blending to achieve the desired balance of color and contrast. Your goal is to express emotion and energy through the bold strokes and dynamic shapes. By the end of the project, you'll not only honed your technical skills, but you'll also have unleashed your creativity in a captivating abstract composition. 3. Supplies: Talk about the supplies that I'll be using in class. For Pastels, you need some type of pastel paper. That would include this art spectrum paper or art paper, or pastel mat. I'm sure there's other brands out there, so you need some type of pastel paper. That generally is a paper that is sanded and has a you know, rough sandpaper type surface. I say sandpaper type surface because I've heard, don't quote me on that, but I've heard some of these are made by sandpaper companies. I use the 600 grit if you have a choice on grit. This one comes in 400 and a couple of others. The URt does. I like the finer paper. The 400 is just even grittier, like a 400 grit sandpaper. And then the papers come in colors. So the URt that I have here is black. We'll be using it in class and then art spectrum paper is different colors, and you can get white pastel paper, but generally with pastel paper, it's not necessary to start with white, sometimes sometimes even easier to start with a color that's in your color palette and go from there. I love these colored papers. They are super fun. These are about a nine by 12 size. So it doesn't really matter. I don't think on abstracts, I would test out whatever papers you have available to you and just figure out from there which you happen to prefer. These all work about the same for the abstracts that I was doing. You need a paper. You also need some pan pastels and most art supplies, there's different brands and stuff, you have a choice. With pan pastels, there's not different brands. Pan pastel is made by the Pan Pastel company. You don't get a choice on brands and prices and stuff like that, but there is a way to be a little more economical with your choices in color. I show you in class how you can do that. All of the colors come in a main color like turquoise, and then they come in a lighter shade of that color, which is the tint, and they come in a darker shade of that color, which is the shade, and then they come in an extra dark version of that color, which is the extra dark shade. If you just get the bright main color and you get a white and a black, you can create the tint with the white. You can create the shade with the black and the color mixed and you can create the extra dark shade with the black and the main color mixed. If you'll just buy the main bright color that doesn't have tint or shade after it, and like here, we've got permanent green. Permanent green tint, permanent green shade, permanent green extra shade or extra dark would be the ones with the white and black in it. If you would just get the bright version of the colors that you like, you can make all the other colors that are offered. That's the way that you can do this a little more economically. Now the reason why if you end up loving this and you're like, Okay, it's a pain to mix. Everyone that I want to mix with white and black, then you can say, okay, I need the tint and the shade of the specific colors I like without buying the entire line. I do show you how to mix colors in class. You need some pan pastels. I do that for large color blocking and you only get the one choice. I will also be using some Pastel pencils in class. Some of these options that I'm telling you about are options. You don't need them all. If you have something similar, you might try it out. Pastel pencils are super fun, and there's a couple brands that make them. You've got the Faber Castel pastels. And these are a little bit harder pastels, they'll give you a cleaner line. They won't dust off as much and leave dust powder as much as the softer pastels. So this is the harder pastel set out of the ones that I have. That's the fiber castle pit pastels. If you've got the option to get one or other of these sets, definitely get whatever set you could get or a couple of pencils or what have you. This set here is the um Carbonel the stabilcarbonthel pastel sets made by the stabillostab carbonthelos. These are chalk pastel pencils and they come in smaller sets. I have the 60 piece set, and I love these. These are a little softer than the pit pastels. There are a few more colors in this set than I had in the pit pastel set. I like the softness of these and the colors are nice and vibrant. So if you want to try these, you can buy little sets of the pastels or the carbonthelos. I just like having all the color choices. And then this set comes with an eraser, and this is a needed putty eraser. You can also buy a needed putty eraser, or you can use a kneaded eraser. The work just the same. It's just gray instead of white. You could also use any of the high polymer erasers. Those work well with these because you can erase things that you don't like, and the eraser could also become a mark making tool in your piece. So one of the R erasers is nice to have. I also like to have some type of artist panel or board to tape stuff down to. I'm generally using painter's tape or artist's tape. I did find that the sensitive tape, painter's tape works better on the art edges. It doesn't tear the little white edge that comes from that paper. But tape works great on these papers and I like painter's tape. You also want to have this is almost a must. These microfiber cleaning cloths because you're going to clean your fingers, you're going to clean your tools as you're working. These you can then because then you'll keep on using the same tool. That's not dirty and unusable. That just clean it off and go right back into the next color that you need. These go a long way. These microfiber cleaning cloths are my favorite tool in my art room and you can wash these. I just wash them in their own load. By themselves, they don't muck up my washing machine and they come out clean and ready to be used again. Microfiber cleaning clause is almost a must with pastels. Then you need some application tools, and what I'm going to be using in class is the one tool with this oval edge. These come in different shapes. You've got a square edged one. You've got one that's a little tighter oval. Several different options there, but this is the one I'll be using in class. You don't need them all. They can just provide you different mark making and stuff. Then as you progress in your pastel journey, you might find a reason to need the other shapes and stuff later. You could also get these ones that are just shaped and it's that same material, but it's just separate, not on a wand. I don't generally use these at all. And you can get extra heads for your pieces for when they finally shred because these go a long way. You can do a lot of work with this. But eventually, that piece will shred and you can have extras ready to go on your wand when you need to. There's also these little tiny ones that look like eyeshadow wands and you might think, Oh, I'm just going to use some makeup brushes and you're welcome to do that. These are a very similar feel. I feel like they last a little longer than makeup brushes, but you could give it a try. But I don't use these in class either. These are nice for fine details. If you're doing wildlife and you're getting around the eyes or things like that, that might be a time to use those. In this class, I am mostly using this one wand and this one oval head. And then I'm blocking color. Then after that, I am adding details with pencils and soft pastels. The soft pastels I have is just a block here of half sticks. These are all sennelier colors. They are the half sticks. There's a couple of um, Canela and Finer sticks, but most of these are just the Snelle half stick pack that I bought, and then I added some other stuff to it later. I don't know the colors. I don't know what I'm picking when I pick out of this. I love this little antique wood drawer that I have sitting in and it lives on my dresser and I do pull this down and use it for the pieces in class. You don't have to. I show you some different options and things that you might try with your pieces. You might even try your Billow Woody's that works really good on some of the little samples I was trying out. I did find that the PascaPens didn't really work on the big piece that I pulled it out and tried it on. So for your color blocking, you can keep that down to the one wand. If you want, you can get the other stuff if you want to try those out. I'm also using color palette inspiration in class from the color cube. It's my own personal favorite art tool. These are the color cube by Sara Renee Clark. I love these. You can also be inspired by color palettes. On Pintrist, most of these are deck two. One of these is deck one. There's two of these decks. But you can get color palettes on Pintrist. You can be inspired by your own color palettes. You can, of course, use color palettes that are traditional art color palettes from the color wheel, complimentary, split complimentary triad, tetrad. You can do any of those that you want to jump into, so just be creative. You might just use your own favorite colors. You may have your own way to pick colors. It's your choice. I'm just showing you some of the things that I like to use as I'm going through. That is most of the supplies, if not all, that I'll be using in class today. I can't wait to get started with you guys, so I'll see you back in class. 4. Paper comparison: Pastel matte paper came in, and that is the paper that a friend of mine uses. So I thought we would do a quick video with a little paper comparison here to kind of look at the difference of each of these papers. A friend of mine paints landscapes and big skies with clouds and she likes to work with the pastels that are little sticks, and she likes to work with her fingers. And so I ordered some of this pastel mat, which is premium paper for pastel because I thought it would be fun to just take a look at it. Now, what I do like about this is it's got some sheets of glycine in it, which is the clear paper in it, and that is a good way to protect the pastel from being damaged when you're all done, you might wrap your piece in a piece of glycine or something like that. But I've noticed in this pastle pick of paper comes with different colors. But I noticed a really big difference right off the bat. Touching this paper, it doesn't feel like sand paper like these other ones do. It's maybe a textured paper. It doesn't even feel as textured as cold press watercolor paper, which is very interesting. I thought we could just take a look at very smooth paper, and then here we've got the art spectrum paper, which I've actually got little sheets of this also in deep black. But this paper definitely feels more like the URt paper. It definitely has a texture that's on the top of it. It feels like a sand paper. Let's just pull this out. This is the art spectrum, just not the colored paper. And then if we pull out the URt paper, it actually looks and feels like sandpaper. And if you get sandpaper from the paint store, you'll notice it has the grit on the back. This is 600 grade. And this feels like a 600 grit sandpaper. So you might even try the sandpaper at the paint store. So the black in the UARt is more of a gray, whereas the deep black in the spectrum is like a black black. These two feel almost identical to me. Just going back and forth, the art and the art spectrum feel like the same texture. And then I heard and don't quote me if it's wrong, but I heard a sandpaper company makes this art paper for them, which makes sense because, I mean, this really does seem to be like a piece of sandpaper. I like the 600 grade, the 400 grade they make also. I might make a making 800. I don't remember. 400 grid is even rougher. I don't like the super roughness. I like the smoothness of the 600 grit. I would say that the art spectrum feels the same as the 600 grit, and then the Pastelmte is very smooth. Then if we just test some of these out, I also got because I hadn't played on it before, I got some 600 grit sand colored paper just to oh, see, now, that really feels like a sandpaper. That almost feels and it's the same grit. It's the same 600 grit. But it almost feels even a little rougher than the black. I'm not sure why they did that, but it does have even more grit than that one. I can do that, but this one holds the finger and this one moves. Fun to experiment there, different options. I already got a little bit of pastel. There must be powder on my desk, which I don't doubt. So after I'm done with this class, I'll have to move everything off the table and do a good cleanup. But let's just take a look at our erasers that I have talked about in class. If you haven't got to that, we'll get to it. But I'm kind of thinking, I'm just gonna see if I can clean. Kind of thinking that even if you get something on the paper, let's just see if it erases like the other papers. Let me put that down here in the trash can. So it does seem to erase okay if you get something on it. So that'll be an interesting experiment on pastel mat if it erases or not. It doesn't matter if you get a little bit on there if you plan to cover the whole thing, but I thought it might be fun to just give a little test out here to these different papers. Just so I can give you an opinion. And whatever you happen to be able to get ahold of, go for it. I, so far, like the UART and the spectrum, about the same. So I just want to do a little comparison here on, you know, applying color and just see how that works if we mix in anything. Do we like it? What do we think? So let's just see here. Oh, see, now, this was a tiny bit smoother than that one. As far as spreading this paper, this pastel on here. So now that I'm doing a direct comparison of the which one? This one is the AS Art spectrum. This one's the art spectrum. So the UART, which is that 600 grit paper, it was smoother than this one when I actually spread those on. I don't know if you can see the difference, but there's actually a little more texture in here and maybe even less powder than you see here. So the more grit, the more it'll hold that powder. That's interesting now that I'm doing an exact direct comparison. So this one feels rougher than the gray, and I can feel it with my finger, and I can definitely feel it putting on the pastel. Might depend on color with the UR ones as to which one is the smoothest seems to be the gray is the smoother, even though it's the same grit. That was super interesting. Okay. Let's try the pastel mat, doing the same thing. This actually feels more like a piece of paper as I'm spreading this on, and I can definitely tell a big difference in the way that the pan pastel works on it. I would say not my favorite at all for working with pan pastels. Um, I definitely like the sanded paper. It grabs it better. This is just almost feels like a piece of hot press watercolor paper. And I can definitely see why if you like to work with your fingers or you have a smudge tool and you want to smudge things around, I can see how you might build those layers. But I think it would be a very few layers because there's nothing to grit after you get that color on there. So, wow, pastel Matt not my choice. So I would definitely recommend you go with some type of sanded paper, whether it be the art or the art spectrum, and just your choice as to what's a better price, which one that you can get wherever you're at. And I do like the art spectrum colored pack. So if you wanted to test out, the different colored pieces, I did like working on that in class, and we'll see one of the couple of the projects, we'll use a colored piece as far as the amount of grit kind of feels like it's more like this one, it does feel like the black black one, in between. But I'd say between all of those, whichever one appeals to you after you see the different projects in class, whether it be something colored or maybe you want to work on the black and work your way to light. A lot of people like working on the dark paper. The white paper just seems to be harder when you're working with pastels to get that depth in the darkness for some, so they like to work from dark to light. I like to work on the colored papers too. So definitely pick a sanded paper. If you're doing the pen pastels, the pastel Matt, not my favorite. It's very choppy. It looks like it's on plain paper rather than one of these others where it was a much smoother transition and that color really grabed into the grit. I hope you enjoyed this little look at different Pastel papers, and I will see you back in class. 5. Different Pastel Options & More: Let's talk about the different kinds of pastels that I am going to be focused on in this class, and you're welcome to use or not use any of the different options that I'm showing you. Let me get my microfiber cloth ready. This is the best tool ever working with pastels is a microfiber cloth that cleans your fingers and it cleans your tools, and you can wash these in the washing machine. I just do them on their own load. It does not muck up my washing machine, and it's my favorite art tool. For pastels. This pastel product that I have over here is the pan pastels. There's only one brand of pan pastels, so you don't have an option on multiple brands or qualities or whatever. You have pan pastels by the pan pastel company. These are super highly pigmented and they've got very little binder and they are squished into the tub that they're in, and you can break these. You could drop it and break this pan, the pancake up. And if you do that, then you can fix it. Don't despair. If you've got some isopropyl alcohol, I've got 91% aprob alcohol in my art room for alcohol in projects and stuff like that. I keep one of those. But you can mix the pigment up with the alcohol and then put it back in the pan and flatten it back out and the alcohol will evaporate and it will leave you with a pan of pigment again. That sometimes happens in shipping if you order pan pastels, if at all possible, if you've got a good art store, that you can actually go look at the colors and purchase and take them home. That's always good. But hopefully they'll package them up well enough not to break in shipping also because I have had some shipped to me. I got some in my sketch boox art subscription a month or two ago and they came in not broken. So they can ship and come in just fine. And they've shipped them a couple of times. This one is a neon green one, and you can see just a little bit of bubble wrap, and this one came in not damaged. So it can be done. But if you do damage it, it is fixable and you can Google how to fix a pan pastel and probably watch somebody doing that process. But I just want to tell you it's fixable. So the pan pastels are put on with an applicator, and so these applicators come in a lot of different forms. And what you'd want to do is practice and play with the different options and the ones come, and then you would put on whatever different tip that you want there. Here we go. The ones come in different shapes and then you can just flip these tips on. You might think that these look like makeup applicators and they are very similar to a makeup applicator, but I do think they're a tiny bit sturdier. If you've got eyeshadow applicators or whatever that you want to try, go for it, I do feel like these are really made for the abuse and last a little longer, but they do eventually wear out. I like having different shapes. Here's one that I've wore out pretty good because it's tearing. Another thing that another artist mentioned was that these do dry out. If you've had one of these for a long time sitting out in the open air, then maybe you'd want to maybe it gets stiff. Each little applicator has its own shaped one, and the ones that I use the most generally or this oval one and this one that's a little more rounded. I hardly ever use this triangle one. Sometimes I use this square one for mark making and interesting dabs and stuff. But you can see all the different shapes here that these come in. But if you only could get one, I'd either pick the oval, the tight oval or the bigger oval personally because that tends to be what I use. Then you can also get this is why you might think they look like eye shadows because you can get these little bitty applicators that look like eyeshadow ones. These look like makeup. Applicators too. But they're a little thicker and they're just well made. And so if you get some pan pastels in a kit, a lot of times they come with a few applicators, and then you can get some extra soft applicators. If you find the applicator that you love, and there's some long ones, lots of different choices. I tend to instead of using all of the different ones now. I don't tend to use these at all, so if you've got them use them, and if you don't, that's okay. I just tend to use these and some of these others just don't get used. Sometimes I use the little applicator, but for the abstract art, it's not really necessary unless you want to make some small marks and stuff. But you could also do that with the tip of this tighter oval one. I'm thinking in my mind, really just a couple of these are fine. You don't need them all to do what we're doing. That's the applicators. Then I'm going to pull this two back out. To put this on your paper, let's just take one of these because I'm going to show some of this other stuff in a moment. But you're basically just putting it on the paper in the area that you want it, and then you can just wipe that powder off on your map fiber cloth and pick up the next color and just come right on in there and do your thing. You can just keep building on that and doing it in the different areas. They're very easy to paint with. I like them because it's different than paint that's not wet and you could just run over and do a little more of your project and then go back to whatever it was you were working on and you could have a lot of fun coming out and playing every once in a while without it all being wet and not a ton a ton of cleanup. There we go just getting some colors out here to look at. Then I just keep using the same one and keep going back and picking up the next color. If you've got white and you don't want any bleed through of some color, then maybe start with a clean sponge. But other than that, it's really beautiful just working on it like that. Because I don't have these on an easel because of the way I'm filming, a lot of people work on a tabletop easel and you can just tap your board and the powder will come down the board. I generally keep a wet paper towel at the bottom, and then I can just tap the dust off. You don't want to blow the dust. The dust will infiltrate everything it hits and then you'll contaminate all your art forever. It's hard to clean up. If you can avoid blowing dust, avoid it. If you need to blow dust, go outside, blow it off and come back inside. Now that's how easy the pan pastel is to spread and use. It's very vibrant. Um, the pastel paper comes in different colors. This is the UART 600 Grit, which I might have mentioned in one of the other videos. I think this is made by sandpaper company and I wonder if I could get 600 grit sandpaper at the paint store. You might look at that just test it out. This is another brand, UA, sorry, art spectrum. This one's UA, this art spectrum. It's also Pastel Mat. I have ordered some Pastel Matt so I'll have that available for another project. Hopefully, while I'm filming, it'll come. Um because I want to test out the pastel map. This art spectrum stuff. I got it the **** Blick, I believe, and it's got different colors. What I like about this is the colors. They're not white, they're not black, they're colored with pastels, it's nice if you're starting with something other than white. But that being said, my friend is a Pastel artist and she prefers to start with white. So you just have to test some of these out and kind get your groove going. Now, one thing that these have that this U art paper does not is these have a white border on it. And in my play, where I was playing with these, I discovered that that white does tear if you tape it down, the tape tears. I know all the little tape tricks, little heat gun, pull the tape off, put tape on your clothes if you don't want to tape so sticky, but I like to test out tape to see what surfaces it sticks on and what surfaces it tears so that I know going forward, and then I can tell you that it does that. I know that it does, and I'm using painter's tape. You can also use artist tape. It's almost the same exact stickiness. I also taped off these center sections and it did not tear the paper and it gave me a nice clean line and I just used a thin painter's tape to do that. That was an excellent experiment too. You could start off with paper with no edge on it and you can make an edge with tape. But I also have a tape trick for not having edges, so we'll see that later in class. But I do like knowing what services I can tape on and the differences in the paper. Now, you may find a paper that you like better than others depending on what type of pastel work that you end up doing. I happen to like all of them about the same for abstract work, so I'm wondering if I like the Pastel math the same too. In addition to pen pastels, I will be using just a variety of Pastel pencils. I do have a video on how to make more pastels out of fewer colors. If you just get the brights and the white and the black, you can make all the tints and the shades and the extra dark shades and all these colors. You can make all of those. You don't feel like you have to buy all the pan pastels that are available. If you want the full range, just buy the bright ones and white and black and you can make the others. Now, that's not as fun. It's not as convenient as having all the other colors. I just didn't know early on that I didn't need all those other colors. But if you work on it all the time, it's more convenient if you have the colors that you use the most. So I did make a video on how to do that, though, check that out. You might just start off with a range of your favorite bright colors in a white and a black and you'll be good to go. I also like Pastel pencils. I got a few favor castles in my sketch box. And these are a little different than my pit pastels by faber Castle. It is interesting that there are more than one that faber Castle makes. These are basically going to be your mark makers, your details, you fill things in and just see what fun things that we can do. This feels a little less pastel and a little more oil based and it may or may not be, but it just feels that way. Whereas these pit pastels feel more chalky and there's a bit more drag. I can feel a difference between this gold faber and this pastel both made by Faber Castle. These are more chalky. Now, also in addition to the faber Castel ones, I have got the carbonthelos, and I like the carbonthelos too. Let's just see drawing on here. They are also very chalky and create a lot of drag and they are a little bit softer, you'll notice as I drew with that one, I created some chalk dust, whereas I did not create chalk dust with the faber castle. The carbonthelos are definitely a little softer and they will create some dust, which you do not want to blow off of your paper, you want to take your towel. And tap it off. Then I just set that to the side or I'll have it on the bottom of my easel if I'm using an easel. Yeah, look at the difference that you get there on some of those. The carbonthllos are softer than the pit pastels. I like them both, but the pit pastel does give me a finer more detailed line, and then these other pastel pencils are a little more oily. Almost like a almost like this the stab Woody Just testing out other materials now that I'm thinking about it. You can draw on top of pan pastel with some other stuff. That's the first time I tried the Woodies that was fantastic. Now that I thought of that, kind of thinking, No Color two. Let's see. This is oil pastels. These are the mangos. Now the thing with you is an oil pastel, is these never seem to dry and you cannot hit these with the pastel spray which I showed you in the video where I was doing the different tests. You can't hit this with the pastel spray because you'll ruin all the pan pastel underneath it. I'm kind of thinking opening up my cabinet drawer here to get to my neo Color two crayons. This used to live on my desk, but I never pulled it out. But I love the No Color two crayons. These are you do not have to fix. Let me close my drawer so that it doesn't dump out stuff, it doesn't fall. So NeoclorT crayons, yes, they are excellent on top of here also. I'm just trying to give you different options. If you don't have exactly what I'm using, it doesn't matter. There are some choices, look at that. Yes, for the neocolor twos for mark making, let's put those out over there. Then the other thing that I have that is definitely a yes are soft pastel sticks and the soft pastels, these are the half sticks biconilia. They're very soft. But what I like about these again, can't use fixative on them. But what they're super good for is vibrant larger marks. I can get the white in there. That's how I did the white on some of those other little samples. That's this white here, and then these big splotches are the colors. It's a way to get an extra punch of color and to get extra things going on with your piece. I could get a pop of these colors over here, but you see how soft they are and how much pastel dust that makes a lot. Microfiber cloth to clean your fingers in that genius, you don't have to go wash your hands every couple minutes and then again, tap all the dust off into a wet paper towel and then you're ready to keep going. Look at all those fun choices that we can use with the pan pastels to top our abstracts with other marks and interesting things. I particularly liked the Stabil Woodies. That was a good one. That could be a really good choice for you. It marks on top. It does smudge the powder underneath a little bit, but that could be a nice feature of adding those to your piece. As far as markers, paint pins, stuff like that, pasta pins, I probably would not use these very much with the pan pastels unless you had one that you're like, Okay, I'm going to sacrifice this one because you might end up with pastel powder on your pasca pin, and if it's important to you, I probably wouldn't do it. If you don't mind that because this is acrylic paint. If you don't mind that, then yes, it's a good mark making, dot making extra tool that you could use, but just know that pastel powder could possibly buck it up, but it might not. So just depends. Here's my favorite. If it's a pin that you're okay with possibly sacrificing, then yes, you can use it. If it's a pin that's important, then no, you cannot. Just FYI. Got my little favorite gold pen, got some of that on there so you can see you can do other things on top as you're working with your pieces. I wanted to show you lots of choices that you might look at going forward and I will see you back in class. Oh 6. Composition: Talk about composition. An abstract art because it's abstract, sometimes you're thinking, Oh, you're just going to throw a bunch of stuff on the canvas and then you've got your abstract art without a lot of thought put into it. But I want to challenge that thought and say that even though it's abstract, it needs to have some points of interest or something that pulls your eye through the canvas and gives it a reason to exist basically. There's lots of compositions that can help you achieve that goal. I can give you the interest in the piece that maybe somebody's craving and they don't know that that's what they're looking for. And there's lots of wonderful compositions out there in the world, and I'm going to just show you different ones that you might consider using in your pieces. Now, what I might challenge you to do rather than trying to create all your pieces and all the compositions, maybe pick one or two compositions to work with for a while. For instance, my very favorite compositions is Rule Thirds, um and horizon where you have a high horizon or low horizon. Generally, and this comes from my photography background too. Usually, when I would frame up my subject, it was very easy to frame the subject and then shift a little bit to the left or shift a little bit to the right. I made it easy for you to get the rule of thirds without thinking too hard about it. It just became an automatic thing that you just did. You're like, let me get that okay, shift a little. We're there and the photo is more interesting because the subjects not dead in the center. And the center composition is very common also, but it's not the most interesting one. You only use it if you really got something good to put there. So let's talk about the different ones that are out there. One of them is the cruciform or the cross and it's basically the cross form, but it's not necessarily a perfect cross. You could have the two legs skewed from each other. You could have them going different directions. You could have it offset a little bit and then skew the legs. You could get creative with that. That's the cross or the cruciform. And then another good composition is things that are horizontal. Everything's going along in the direction of the horizon. Then along with that one, you've got verticals, that's where you've got nice tall something. Think of bamboo socks or something that are standing up in the composition there or something. So there we go. Then of course, something in the center, a center mass. I know that's a little bit off, but pretend it's directly in the center. That I would only do if I really had something dynamic that was amazing and it needed to be the center of attention. Otherwise, I personally avoid that. Another good one is things that radiate out, so think like the sun and the sun rays that radiate out from the sun. That's another good composition. You can Google and look up a lot of these so that's radio. You can Google any of these terms. These are standard art terms that you might learn in art school or taking a class and I'm just popping off the top of my head all the ones that I can remember. I'm sure there's more out there. This one here is my favorite. That's the Rule of Thirds. You're basically separating up your sheet of paper, your viewfinder on your camera, whatever into thirds. Then you're trying to put your subject either on one of the lines, whether it be the vertical or the horizontal line, or you're trying to put your subject on one of these corners. A lot of times with abstract art, this is really easy because then you've got four focal points on your piece that you can put interesting aspects there and drive your eye around your piece and that might be the one that I'm probably going to focus on, but that is rule of Birds. Then another good one that could be interesting for abstract art is something that's like a frame and a frame. You've got something in here, maybe offset, maybe to the side, maybe something white and skinny, whatever. But it's frame and frame. Another one, think of a snail shell, spiral or radial. It's basically things that radiate out like a snail shell. Another good composition and this is especially good if you're doing landscapes or some type of abstracted landscape thing which you see a lot of where you see a color and then another color and it separates out with a little horizon line. This is high horizon. The top third is sky, bottom two thirds is land. The exact opposite of that would be a little land and a low horizon. Then here's one that would be really good to lead yourself through the eye. Think of windy roads going in the mountains and stuff. This would be your S curve and you're winding through the piece. Maybe it's the garden path that goes up into the woods, that kind of theory. This is a good way to pull the viewer through your piece. Another good one is something that's triangulated. Triangle or points of interest that go in a triangle, that's a good one. Then let's see. L shape, that's another good one. This is where your focal interest is in this area creating a L. Maybe it doesn't look like an L, but in that kind of visual interpretation. Another good one things on the diagonal. So you're going to position the things running through the piece on the diagonal, driving the I through the piece. Another good one is very similar to the cross or the cuciform and that would be the Y shape. In this one, you've basically with the cruciform, you had the four legs and with the Y shape, you have the three legs, more like that. That one is real common. Your main focal area is wying off into stuff giving you some interest. Let's go back to some other rule of thirds. Um compositions and think, how could we separate this out? Think of this like a grid. A grid one is another good one also. We'll do that here at the bottom. But what could we do to make these interesting? We could use each of these squares as part of our composition. We could pick a third, we could pick a third, we could pick a third, we could pick third, third, third. There's all kinds of things that we could do here. Say we could pick a third and we could come across on this third and then maybe we have some interesting focal point there on that third line. Here we could come all the way across and do the exact opposite that we just did there. But maybe we pick that box and now we've separated this out, so it's two colors and a color and a color thing. We can fill those in even more. As you're painting and going and getting inspired, I'm just showing you some interest. Break up your piece into thirds and maybe your subject is super interesting on the third line here on the right. Then we could come over here at a third and we could block off this top third and we could actually put some interesting in that third slide over here. Again, we could cross off diagonal with two lines here, and then maybe we've got something crossing those on the diagonal. Be looking at how you could maybe even combine a rule or two if you've got something really interesting and you're like, I think I could do this. Here's two things that we have on the third. Then maybe we've got our subject crossing it in the upper part and crossing one of these lines over here. And maybe over here, I've got something at the bottom on the lower third and maybe my subject is a little more centered, but we have some interest in the breakup of that. The grid, let's talk about the grid. The grid is almost identical to rule of thirds, pretend we're starting off. With our third lines. We're still looking to put our subjects on the most important lines. But the grid actually has some additional lines in it so that your paper looks like a great big grid. A really easy way to grid out your piece of paper is if you've got one of these cutting mats, or even one of these grid rulers. This is used in quilting, you'll find this with sewing supplies normally, but I love using it with art. You could map out your grid lines on your paper with something like this and then you don't have to measure it out or you could use something like this grid ruler. This is by T is called OmnigridOMN IGRD that could be an easy way to grid stuff out and draw lines on your papers or you can just use a ruler and then grid it out with a pencil. Just some options for you if you happen to have some of those and you might not have thought of, but I wanted to throw that out there. That's a lot of compositions. Look at all those that we just came up with in a few minutes. Almost filled two sheets of 12. So I've got an extra sheet that I will give you. I will photograph these and put them in a PDF there in your projects and resources so you can have this to look at. I'll also give you my blank grid here so that you can then brainstorm and think of other compositions for yourself or you could look it up compositions in art and see if there's any I miss that you might find interesting. I am probably going to do the rule of thirds or maybe the grid composition, but I'm going to keep all these other ones handy. These would be excellent for you to print out and hang on your wall and just have them available to remind yourself to think outside the box and maybe try something outside your comfort zone and do something a little different. I hope you enjoyed looking at different compositions that you might be thinking for class and I'll see you back in class. 7. Mark Making Ideas: Let's talk about different interesting marks that you might consider using in your abstract art. If you've been around any of my channels, then you know that I tend to go towards certain marks that are my own favorite. But sometimes you need to be inspired by something or maybe get outside your own rut. I find having mark making guides handy. This is one that I made in one of the classes a while back and basically drew squares of stuff and drew in them and then used a fancy little punch, which I don't believe is still available because I've looked for it because people have said, What is that punch? I don't know what that punch is anymore because it was not available. It's a pretty shape. Look for pretty shaped punches and you can punch little stuff out and stick it to a sheet that's pretty enough to hang on your wall. Along with your composition pieces, mark making pieces hanging on your wall is also something very inspiring to look up at and then say, let me try this or let me try that or let me try different things. I'll PDF my mark making sheets for you to at least have a start. I've got little art materials here on my paper where I must have had powder on my fingers or something, so it won't be crispy pristine anymore. But will be something where you can just get some ideas and think, oh, let me try this vine with these leaves or oh, let me try these squares. This is the one I've had the longest. And then I did this Clemt class in January and maybe 2024, so it's fairly new at the time that I'm filming this. I'm so crazy inspired by Gustav Clemt and all of the patterns that he used in his work and being able to look at and study some of the paintings that he did and be able to say, Okay, what are the marks that he's used in each of his paintings? Oh, so inspired me. I was so inspired that I'm still talking about it several months after I did this whole Master study. And then there's a couple of his paintings, the portrait of Adele Blockbauer and the kiss and this one here. This one is portrait of Hermingalia that you could look real close. At the aspects in the painting and come up with some very interesting patterns. I really like in this one, which is Judith. I like all of these kind of little rounded bits here in this background. So if I'm looking through at his paintings, that's something that I would put on my mark making sheet as a mark that I would want to go forward with. I like these rectangles and squares and outlining the rectangles with another color and varying the color here. So that was beautiful. And then I liked here in this one, the swirls and the circles on the color. And then coming back a little further, you got lots of swirls. Then you've got the kiss and who we go? This one is portrait of Adele Bokfoer. This one's one of my very favorite for all the marks and interesting pattern that's in there and you have to get real close even to see that there's pattern in the pattern. There's so many details that you miss if you don't almost blow it up. I'd take a picture on my phone and blow that up and be like, oh, because the first time I looked at this eye, didn't realize the eye was surrounded by a triangle until I blew it up and I'm like, Oh, totally missed the triangle in there, it was the pyramid with the eye on the pyramid. I'm like, If I had not blown that up to look a little closer, I would have missed that those were all with a little pyramid. Studying a master and getting excited about the marks that the master might make was truly an experience. I made other mark making sheets, which I'll include this in my mark making PDF to give you some ideas. These are some of the marks that I've came up with. Out of studying a master's paintings. That might be an excellent choice for you to study some of the master's paintings and get some ideas off of the ones that have come before us and see how can I use these patterns in my own work? How can I incorporate some of these interesting elements in work that I do? I will include that also. I just wanted to throw out there. Studying a master is an excellent way for mark making. Also looking on Pinterest or other artists just to see what marks are they doing that some of their favorites and then kind of make up your own sheet of favorites and things that maybe you want to include in your artwork. So I will PDF these. They'll also be over there in your resources and projects and resources. And then I'll give you a couple blank pages, and you can add your own interesting marks and then you can hang these up on the wall along with your compositions to be like, Okay, I'm in a rut. What can I do? You can look up and be like, oh, okay, I want to do that. I hope you enjoy this exercise coming up with, doing some spots with some interesting marks of your own. I'd like you to have your own mark making catalog. So even though I'm giving you the marks that I've come up with, I'd like you to use that as a jumping off point and create your own mark making guide so that to making stuff, you've got stuff that's unique to you. I hope you enjoy looking and doing that kind exercise, and I'll see you back in class. 8. Shades, Tints & Mixing: This video, let's take a look at how many colors do you actually need when you're getting the pan pastels. Originally, pan pastel made the original colors and then white and black and then they added in some of the tints and the darker shades of that bright color. Just to save you the hassle of mixing color, basically. I didn't really realize that I could get any color out of a bright white and black that they make in their line. If you want a whole set of colors, but you don't want to buy four whole sets of color because you can get a whole set of the bright, a whole set of the tint, a whole set of the shade, and a whole set of the extra dark shade. If you don't want to buy four whole sets of the colors, you could just buy the bright and the white and the black and you can make all the colors because that's how they've made these colors in a convenience form for you so that you didn't have to mix them. If it's a color that you're going to be mixing a lot of and using all the time, definitely invest in the shade or the tint that you need. But for our purposes, to save a little bit, I'm just going to show you how it is. I'm going to start with the bright color for all of these, and I'll just show you real quick how it is that we can create each of these colors and I'm going to put each of the colors down below it so that we can compare it. When I'm changing colors, I'm just going to be using my microfiber cloth to clean off my applicator. You can use this applicator forever until it basically shreds. If you'll just keep cleaning it off and then it's ready to stick into whatever color it is that you're wanting to use. That's our original, that's our tint that we're going to be working towards. This is our shade. These are all the turquoise. Thought I would do the turquoise for you and then that's the extra dark shade. What we're going to do to get this lighter color is we're going to clean off our applicator and we're going to go with white and we're just going to mix those and you can mix up the white and the turquoise. As many times as you need till you get basically the color that you'd like to have. When you get dust all over your paper, just like I just have with this, do not blow the dust. The dust goes everywhere. It'll contaminate all your surfaces. What I like to do instead is have a towel or a surface available. It's a shop tile. Then I just tap this, pick it up, tap it off, and then the water on this will help me contain that dust instead of breathing it in. But that's basically what we do to get the tint. We add the bright color and the white. Then this is the actual color. Now we're going to add some shades. We've got a lighter shade and a darker shade to get those, we're going to add black to our color and then we may need to add a little more of the bright on there, just to continue getting that color closer to where we want to be and we may even need a little bit of white in there possibly and you can mix all the colors. Is it a pain? Could be. That might be why if it's a color that you're using all the time, now you see I added white to the black to get it a little bit lighter and then more of the bright color on top of that. Then we're almost to the pre mixed color there. You can see, it's a little extra work to mix the colors, but we can get darn close just by mixing it until we get to the shade that we'd like it to be. You just got to work it. And so if that's something that you love doing, that's how easy that is to get that super close. If it's a color that you're using all the time, then definitely consider buying the pre mixed one. And you know, these things if you're thinking on cost, like, Oh, these are expensive, they're really not. These things last forever. I just saw an artist talk about in a pastel group, talk about how long she had been using her pastels until it got down to the very bottom and she finally replaced some of them and she's a portrait pastel artist, and she had bought the colors that she just now replaced seven years ago and she said she uses them all the time. I thought that was amazing that she's made those go for so long. So in the long run, it may seem kind of expensive, but in the short run, it may seem expensive, but in the long run, not expensive at all compared to how far these really go. Then these microfiber cloths that I'm using to clean this off of, I just throw those in the washing machine and wash them by themselves, not with my laundry and then keep on reusing these cloths. They go forever and just keep cleaning these off until it starts to shred, basically. These last a long time. If you're going for white, then I might not use one that has a lot of dark stuff built into it, I might start with a newer one or something that's got lighter color in there. But other than that, I just keep using this one until it shreds. And there we go. Now you can see for each of those, just mixing it with the white or the black, how close I could get to those mixed colors. If you just want to buy a few of the bright colors and white and black, you can triple the amount of colors that you have with the tints and the shades without buying all the tints and the shades. I thought that was really cool to show you. There's lots of colors in the pen pastels, but there's not all the colors. I feel like there's not a good orange, for instance, these just set right down in here, look how happy that is. I love that. A lot of times if you're thinking, Oh, I wish I had, say a lighter gray or I wish I had a better orange because these are more earth tone oranges. They're not um they're not a pretty orange or a pretty peach. Look, I got a light gray there, so that would be the gray tint rather than the gray bright. What is that? This is neutral gray shade, so that's actually a darker gray. There must be a medium one. It's probably this one over here. Let's see. You can see all these here's the neutral shade gray and a dark. You can see how I basically got from a dark to the bright color. And if I were to use the bright color, look at that. It did. Exactly that. You can see too, these all screwed together. Which I have them stacks of a couple because you never have enough lids. Yeah, that's basically a good way to get a gray. Let's say you want an orange or something in a peach family, maybe you need a little bit of red and maybe we want some white and that'll get us pink. That's a good way to get pink. And then maybe we really want more in the peachy orange family. That's a good way to now start mixing and just seeing like, what other colors can I get as I'm going? Excellent way to test out skin tones is to look at what all of these do. You can see I'm just tapping my brush here or my applicator on my microfiber cloth and then write to the paper and then mix right on the paper. That's the way I generally use my pastels and go. On the abstracts, we might be mixing color, getting prettier colors and doing fun stuff like this. Sometimes that means leaving color on the applicator rather than dusting it off. Is a nice choice, but just a little swish swish and I'm ready to pick up another color. You can see how easy these are to work and play with. Look how pretty that is. That's the prettiest little organic piece that we created. I might want to cut that out and keep it. It's so pretty. Just a little fun there with how many do you actually need? I feel like you need some favorite colors in the bright and a white and a black and you can create all the other colors with just those and then be willing to experiment and play with your colors to get lots of other ranges of color. Don't feel like this has to be the only colors that you have. I want you to have some fun playing and mixing and testing things out and then just seeing what you can get. I'll see you back in class. 9. Finishing, Alcohol, & Erasing: While I've got all these little pastels out, I want to show you a couple of tricks, and one of them, everybody always asks, Do you fix these pastels? We're using sanded paper. The samples I happen to be doing on a UR 600 grit paper. I like the 600. This comes in 400. The 400 is even grittier and rougher. I like the finer grit here This says 600 on the back, which I actually heard so I don't know how true it is, but I actually heard I'm going to put some color on here while I'm talking. I actually heard that this was made by a sandpaper company. And so it makes you wonder, could I go to the paint store and get 600 grit sandpaper and paint on? That might be something I experiment with because I'm like, uh, I wonder if I could get sandpaper and do that. I'm just going to spread some color on here to give us some working surfaces. Um and if you're using a colored paper or the black, it just makes covering the paper almost a little easier than if you're doing white. But you can do white if you need to also. Then again, don't blow if you've got any pigment powder, tap it into your paper. A lot of times you would work on a little tabletop easel with the paper on the easel. But for filming, I'm filming straight down, so I may create more dust than normal. What I want to do with this is I'm going to just get some there's another brand. This came with my sketch box subscription. But what I want to do on these and you should take this outside, but I want to film it real quick so I can show it to you. This paper, the sanded papers are really made not to fix. So the answer to do you fix your stuff? The answer to that is no because pastels are meant to be framed and this paper really is meant to be going to draw a line there for us. Wood really is meant not to be sprayed because the spray, as it dries and I have a couple of these that I've done, but we'll look at them in a second. Let's let that dry while we talk about the next thing. Let's go to the next one and we'll come back to the fixative. The next thing is you can erase pigment powder. If you've got an area that you're like, uh oh, that was a mistake or I didn't intend to do that or what have you. You can erase color. Off of your thing. You can erase whole sections and you can experiment with your different erasers, I have several different kinds of erasers and you can see they all basically do the job. This is a high polymer eraser. I like that because it doesn't make a whole lot of eraser dust. Then this came with my carbonth pencils, my carbonthpistl pencils, and it's a kneaded eraser and the gray kneaded eraser is what I always have here on my table, and it also works just fine. The thing I like about the needed erasers is we can just then knead the material into the piece and our eraser is ready to erase again. These are something that's super common and artists use these all the time and they're really handy to have at the table. That's an excellent eraser also. The ones that came with the pastel pencils and this other one that I just happened to have, these are white needed putty erasers. It's basically the same as this gray one. I've also got randomly some other erasers in my collection. You might just try. Here's an art eraser. You might just try whatever erasers that you happen to have and just see, how does it do? I mean, they all definitely erase pretty evenly there. Then once you erase, you are ready to come back and go right to it, you didn't damage your paper in that erasing. I really love that. If you've got a part that you're like, I don't like that, just erase it and go back again. You got lots of choices on erasers that I feel like do a fairly good job doing that. Practice and play with those. Another thing I want to show you is alcohol. I've got 91% isopropyl alcohol in my art room for playing with alcohol inks and stuff when I get in the mood to play with those. That's what I've got handy. I've put one of those in a little mini Mr.. The easy way to get the alcohol in the Mr. Is to use a pipette in the pipes also handy for I'm going to just spray that on there. But a pipe that is also handy for maybe some extra big drops. We could just pipe that p a little bit of that. We'll see what it does over there too now. Now the reason why you would use alcohol and not water. Water will soak into your paper and then it will warp. This paper is not really meant to be wet like watercolor paper. Alcohol will evaporate pretty fast and not warp your paper and it will give you cool texture. We're going to let that dry a little bit. And we're going to talk about the fixative. The reason why you don't usually use fixative on these papers is because any color underneath is then going to be able to seep through whatever you created and darken all your pastel and it looks terrible. Here you can even see on this piece, it got darker and it got a little grainy. This is a little test that I've done several times for myself. Here's one that you can really see it on with the same little thing that I was just doing. But you can see how it got really grainy. It darkened it. It's no longer got the vibrance that it had. And when you do it on a great big piece, it's super obvious. You might be looking at that thinking, Oh, that's not bad, but I did it on a great big piece one time and I ruined the whole piece. I felt like I had to repaint the whole thing from scratch, basically, because it ruined all the bright pops that I had in it and I was so devastated. So be aware if you put fixative on pastel paper, it looks terrible. Here's another color that I did. Look how dark. That made that. I just totally took all the vibrant out of there. It was such a bad choice. So no fixative on these. These are meant to be framed. You frame them under a mat with a mat. These might shed through their life. That's just the nature of the product. You can have your framer put a little tiny spacer in between the mat and the piece of art, give it a gullet for that powder to shed into if it wants. That's what you do there. Frame it, leave space for the dust to settle. Then here's one that sprayed with alcohol. I've done this a couple of times too playing around and you can see, and this one's almost dry, but you can see how doing a little alcohol can give you very interesting texture on your piece as you're going. It also will possibly do fixative and darken the piece, depends on how much pastels there. But it is fun to just sprit it and get a little of that watermarked texture in there. There we go. Don't fix it. You can erase stuff. If you're gonna add texture, use alcohol, not water. How fun was that? Okay, I hope you had fun checking out those little extra tips with me, and I'll see you back in class. 10. Checking Contrast With A Gray Scale: Let's talk about value in this video. This is one of the play pieces that I've done in the past just to experiment and lay down color and try different techniques and different mark making and we'll be doing one of these in class because I love it so much. It's so delightful to look at it and see all the yummy variations that we came up with. But how do you decide if you've got enough contrast. Now you've learned about mark making and you've learned about some composition elements. But how can we tell if it's got enough contrast? I questioned this one up here, question this one, but I actually really like it. What I'm talking about with contrast is do I have enough of the very light to the very dark? We have a grayscale value finder that I'm looking at here. And you want to have generally in a piece a nice range of values from the very lightest, which is white to the very darkest, which is black. One of the rules in art that a lot of people go by is paint your whole piece, but somewhere there needs to be a touch of black and a touch of white. That's where that comes from, sometimes I use that theory and a lot of times I don't. How can we tell if we've got enough value when we choose not to use that white black? Rule, touch a white, touch a black so that you've got the full range. What we can do is take a picture of our colored piece of art and it will help us determine where we might need to then add a little bit of extra dark or light or what have you to create the interest and finish the piece and give it a pop. I do this on my phone. I will take a picture and convert it to black and white. Now I can zoom into each piece, each little square, and I'll be able to say, Oh, now I can see because it fools the eye with the color. It's really hard to translate this color into a black and white value. Take a picture of it, make it black and white on your phone, and then you can compare that to your value. Do I have anything in the darkest range? Yes, I do. Do I have anything in the lightest range? No, I do not. I'm actually down here at value number seven, possibly number six in this area here, but I have nothing at all in this brightest range. Now I can see that, okay, I'm really dark and dull here. I need something that's going to give me a pop of brightness. We can evaluate each of our pieces in that way. Do I have something in the dark? Yes. Do I have a nice range of color in this second piece? Yes, I do. And it does get very close to the brightest, even if it's maybe in between a number nine or a ten. So this has no white in it at all and it has no black in it at all. But certain colors translate into white or black, this is that burgundy. They translate into white or black when we have something like a value that we're looking at without it being that color. How cool is that? Again, over here, we've got the dark, we've got the light, we've got the nice range of color. This one here, this light peachy color is translating into the brightest white forest. It's more like a value of a nine, but it's very close without being white. This one here definitely you can see I got white and the white almost glows. This one here has no white or black, but look at this. When we translate that into black or white, these lightest areas are coming up at the very lightest part of our scale up here and this pink. Who knew that that fuchsia color would translate into almost a black visually? Look at that. Super cool and there's no white and black in there, but it definitely has enough contrast based on our value scale. I want you to start looking at your pieces and seeing which ones don't have any of the darkest dark or the lightest lights like this first piece for me. Then what could you do to then resolve that, bring that brightness back, take another picture of it and see did I get enough values for the interest? Because then as we now know this and we go back and look at the pieces, I can go, Oh, yes, this has got pops of interest. I really like that. I feel like this is too dull, almost in the same color range, so I might look at that and think, what can I add to that one to give me the pop? I know I'm pretty good on all the other pieces that I created. I hope you enjoy figuring out, did you have enough value in your pieces, and that this made it a whole lot easier turning it into a black and white so that you could then actually visually see it rather than just imagine it. I can't wait to see what discoveries you make with your art trying out that technique. I'll see you back in class. 11. 12 Sampler Squares - Color Blocking: This video, I thought we would do one of the little sampler pieces, very similar to what I made for myself that I just like looking at, that's really pretty. You can approach this in several different ways. You can approach it as a mark making sheet. You can approach it as a color experimenting and mark making sheet, which is what I've done. You can approach it as, I'm going to work on different types of color palettes for each square. In doing so you can get a color wheel and perhaps you want to work on complimentary color palettes, which are ones that are across from each other. Maybe you want to work on split complimentary palettes, which are color palettes, which have a dominant color and then the two colors that flank it across the way, not the one directly opposite. You could do a triad color where you've got a little third of the way around the color wheel if you feel like going for a color palette is going to make it easier for you to create. One of the known color palettes is a great way to do that. Another way that I have really leaned in Sir, I'm dropping stuff over the last year is pulling color palettes and my very favorite source of that is the color cube by Sara Renee Clark. You can look up color palettes on Pintrist. There are a lot of free resources out there that make little color palettes if you want to make some of your own, which I have also done. I've made some of my own color palettes from my own photos and I have a skill share class on that if you want to check out the skill share class on making color palettes from your own photos. But basically, this concept is taking color palettes from a photograph and pulling the colors from it, which is why I like things like the color cube and I challenge myself with color palettes that I wouldn't normally choose or I wouldn't think go together. This one's actually really appealing to me. Even though I didn't use it as my inspiration, it's very similar to this one right up there and look how well those actually work together. Um, this one very similar to this blue and green one here. You can see how I'm gravitating to color palettes like this, even if I didn't intend it, that's very similar there to that one down there. You can see how having a set of colors immediately makes it easier for you to choose what you're going to put with that. It's easier to pick your pans, it's easier to pick your colors that go with it with the complimentary pieces like the pencils. So I want to do a she of these. I'm just going to show you how I did that and I used it doesn't matter which pastel paper that you go for, but I used the art spectrum warm pack of paper. These are nine by 12 sheets of paper. And what I like about it is it comes in different colors. And usually when you start a piece of art, you start white. But with pastels, it's super cool to start with different colors underneath and seeing how that affects the piece of art when you're done. I'm almost tempted to use the gray personally because this is not a piece of art that I'm wanting the base to really matter. I'm thinking the gray because then it will frame out my squares like this piece did. This is the paper that's got the white framing around it, only the colored part has sanded paper. The white is smooth. I'm just going to tape it down so that we keep our white edge. If you're using the papers that go edge to edge and you want to have a frame, you can just tape on top of this stuff, which I'm going to do in just a moment to give us a grid. Um, and then that'll give you some nice lines if you like the framing. If you don't like the framing, then what you can do is take your tape on the backside and have the tape sticking out enough to grab another piece of tape, and then you would take your second piece of tape. This is our secret tape method for going edge to edge if you're painting edged edge or you have one of these that doesn't have the border on it. Then you just come right up to the border with the second piece of tape and then you can tape that down to your surface. That's a fun tape trick for being able to go edge to edge, but still having your paper secured. Because if you're working on an easel that's standing, you'll want to be able to secure that paper down. I'm working on a wood artist panel. Then you see how easy that just comes up, but it held my paper just fine. That's how you tape it if you don't want to tape on top. Just put a tape on the bottom and then a tape on the top to finish it. I want an edge, though, so I'm using painter's tape. The other one, I used a blue painter's tape, which is the stronger painter's tape. This purple painter's tape is sensitive painter's tape for more sensitive surf. I'm going to see if that works and doesn't tear the edges. I just like to experiment with that. I know all the tape tricks for not tearing paper with the heat gun and all that stuff, but I like to test things out, so we're going to test it out. I'm going to actually just I ball these and then we'll secure it in a minute. So I'm wanting to get, you can measure it out if that's what you want to do. But I want to get about even squares. We're just looking for about even. Let's see. Did I get even enough? Yeah, that's pretty good. Then I'm just going to tape it down. Then we'll do the same thing this way and it tapes, it's just sticky enough to give you an edge but doesn't affect the surface at all. If you're wanting to know what size this tape is, I know somebody will ask me, this is a 1 centimeter. Or not quite half an inch. Yeah, it's well, about half an inch. It's about half an inch or 1 centimeter. All right, let me just ab all these kind of even. You can measure it out if you want. I know some people. This is going to drive them crazy that I did this this way. Just not about perfectionist. Not about perfection at all. I was a drafter and I worked in CAD for many years, and now I'm like, no perfection anywhere. It's like I'm anti perfection now. Okay, so we got our grids, and what I want you to do pick the application tool that you want to use. This could be a good chance to explore all the application tools. Do a different tool on each of your squares if you want to figure out what tool that you like for doing the abstracts, I like working with the wands. Here's the different shapes that I have, but I have decided that I like working with this big fat wand with the abstracts, but the skinnier oval is fun also. Then I do like mark making with the square one. I'm going to use this one. Got my microfiber cloth here. These are fantastic for wiping the brush each time and getting it clean to go to the next color. If you're using white and you need the white to actually be clean, then get a clean little thing, clean whatever this thing is, I clean one of these on my palette, I've got the white and the black so I can add that to anything I want. I've got the turquoise, the turquoise tint, and the turquoise shade, and the turquoise extra deep. I've also got halo green shade. This is chromium oxide green. Then I've got bright yellow green shade. Let's see if I can move this over so that we can actually see all the colors on my palette. There we go. Then I've got right here is Magenta extra dark. I love that color. I think this is probably magenta. Yeah, that's the magenta bright and that's the magenta extra dark. This is the gray shade, a neutral gray shade. This one is permanent red. And we've got burnt sienna. I love burnt sienna and we've got orange shade and dilte yellow. And this one is red iron oxide, and this one is yellow ochre. I like yellow ochre, but it's fun to have some brats in there, which is why even though that's not my favorite color, it is pretty down. I put pines gray in here, and then this one, which I just popped a little bit off there, yellow ochre tint. Yeah, if you break a little bit, don't worry about it. It's not a huge deal. You can just pick that up with your applicator and use it. Or if you broke the whole thing, you could use the alcohol to fix it, which you'd have to Google how to do that. I've never actually had to do that, but it's alcohol mixed with the pigment, pushed back into your palette and then alcohol evaporates and you're good with a palette again. This is just mostly the colors that I already had in here from whatever I did years ago. I just put a pains gray in here because I had an empty slot. I do have a lot more colors because I don't know, randomly, sometimes they come in my art boxes that I get every month or maybe I thought I needed other colors for what reason ever reason, I've got a gold, h. But the rest of them just live like this until I'm like, Where is a color that I need? You don't need all the colors. You might just pick out a palette of the brights with the white and the black and then create your own tints and shades. That's the best way to do it. You might start tackling these in any way that you want. You can pick a color palette like red and green, purple and yellow or blue and orange to go with those complimentary colors. You could pick a color palette card, which I'm definitely going to pick color palette card probably for bigger projects. But what I really want to do with this is just experiment with the colors that are on our paper. This is the perfect time to test out the different compositions also to see how can you do the different compositions? That's what you want to play with, hop into that. I'm using this more as a color tester. They're so little that we're going to do some mark making on here and maybe finish them off like we did the lovely little abstracts that I showed you. But it's almost fun to just jump in and add color and see what do these do if I combine them, and what color are they? If I'm just grabbing some. You might just take it like that and don't blow color off of your paper. Go ahead and keep a paper towel. I usually wet this down and then I tap color onto it. Yeah, I'm going to just pick colors to be like, what is this and what would it do if I did this or if I combined this? It's the perfect chance to mix colors and see what do these look like next to each other to test out your pan pastels. If you've never tried pan Pastels before, perfect time to play and experiment and just see. Generally, when I'm doing that, I start from the edges and work my way towards the center. I don't normally start in the center. I start on each edge and then come in from there. I just don't ask me why I do that. I've always done that and it seems to work for me. See, even though that's the brightest, most obnoxious yellow when you mix it in with some of these other things, look how beautiful that is, gives you that warmth and loveliness. This is the time to play, experiment, test out, see what the different things do. You might also, if you're like, what does that mark making do with say the square one? Perfect time to test it out and perfect some of your techniques for mark making. I like that. And we could even take the other one, come back in here with some shape maybe. You can see how you would benefit from having some different shapes if you're looking at that and you're thinking, yeah, I like that. Mark making would be an excellent reason to have a couple of shapes and then use your big flat one as your color blocking. This is color blocking. We're going to color block it and then come back and mark make and then we've got 12 little mini masterpieces. Again, just wipe your applicator once or twice there and you can go pick up more color. If you color block and you're like, I don't really have any focal points, then reframe your view with Rule of Thirds and come back and be like, Okay, now with my mark making on top, I can now go like, Okay, where can I put that focal point? I want you to start thinking of some of these things as you're laying color down. I want this green to come back out. I love it. Let's go over here with some blue. You can see I've got some color coming up underneath. That's what happens if you don't clean your brush. But I like that sometimes. That's actually rather delightful in an abstract to have the lovely surprise come out like that. I don't always clean my applicator completely. I like the color merges that we get. Oh, I'm kind of liking that one. I'm liking that one. I'm wanting more of this green. That was not the color or was that the color? Yeah, I think that was the color and it had other color in it. Alright, I like that. I mean, just look how pretty these squares are just even getting started. They're just delightful. Pan pastels are really fun to work with. I think people don't know how much fun that these can be. I go back and forth on pulling them out and using them, so I haven't had them out in a while. Then I just forget how much fun this was when I get them out. Now I'm almost feeling like, what class can I film after I do this class? Because now that I've got them all out, I'm getting all inspired by working in them, I'm like, What else can I do with these for a while? Right. Let's see. Let's go with this bright color here. I don't remember the names off the top of my head, so that's why I told you what they were when we got started. Let's use this. That's yellow ochre. I do know that one. Then that brighter yellow. See, I'm telling you, if I were just picking out a few of my favorites, I never, ever would have picked that yellow ever never, ever. I would not have done it. It would not have made the cut. Let me tell you. But, man, it's amazing. Let's see what else do we got? Let's go with this gray maybe let's do this bright red. I mean, really the brighter colors are the prettiest ones. They make everything pop. If you do the whole thing in darker colors and bring these brighter colors on the top, that's when you bring the light back in. You get that good pop. Years ago, Thomas Kincaid was super popular and now I know he's taboo in the art world. Everybody's like, no, not him. But his whole thing was painting everything really dark and then coming back and painting in the light. That just made a light bulb click for me when I heard him say that that's how he worked in his art. It's like, Oh, because he's like if you watched him paint, you wouldn't see. They almost look like the globe off of the canvas. They just were amazing with the technique that he used there. And now you can see how working with the shades and putting the bright on top, you can see how that would really work. I like this purple and this yellow mixed. It's made a really delightful brownish color that's very similar to that one there, which I don't remember off the top of my head. What that is as I'm working. Let's see. I want that to have a pretty pop of something. This is the time to be like, what would happen if I put this crazy color right in the middle of whatever. If it didn't work, just put more pastel powder on it or don't forget. If you're like, totally ruined that. Don't forget that you can use your erasers, you can erase parts that you don't like and just add more pastel to it. I think as we're working, we forget some of the things and then we get stuck on, no, I ruined it, but you have not, you have not. Everything is erasable. Let's see. I want's throw some paints gray in here and maybe some creamy color here. This might be the best paint days ever when you do something like this because every time I look at my fun little piece that I had already done that I showed you guys every single time I look at it, it just gives me a little dopamine of look how delightful that is. I just love it. Let's see. I haven't used this bright one here. The goal is whatever colors you got, get them out, try to make them do stuff. Go ahead and use them. Experiment with them. See how it is that they work together and blend together. Ah, we got some fun stuff here with a little stripy of color that I'm doing. We like. Maybe some green. Oh. Loving that. I'm loving it. Let's do some of this delightful one. Nice. What about this one thrown in the middle there? Super super fun. So you just throwing color down. You're not really even trying to get anything crazy or amazing. You're just like, Okay, let's just color block it and make some color. I know when I come back to adding some marks on top, we're going to have something super cool. Let's see. Got that green. What do I want to put with that? Feeling like this crazy magenta. Look at that. Let's throw some of this bright red in here. See, we're like red and green color pallet here. We have pulled into the complimentary colors there, and that doesn't mean that you have to stick strictly to just one shade or the other of that color. You can go around a little color spectrum of that. Look how cool that ended up. Okay, so let me scoop this right here. I'm actually going to go ahead and put the water on here. That just makes all that powder stick to my paper towel and we are going to tap the powders off. Here we go. Then I can just fold it back up and set it to the side, and I don't have powder blown everywhere. So try to get into the habit of not blowing on your piece. Now we are done with this for a moment. I'm going to put the lid back on. I do like having at least one of these pilots. It's very convenient for working here on our table and not blowing stuff everywhere. And I did tell you, you've got the Faber Castle and I've got the carbonthelos, and you've got the Woodies and you've got the pasta pins. I mean, so many choices, but I'm going to pick this one and work with these and mark make on top of these lovely squares that we created. Just looking at those are making me pretty happy. And I can just go ahead and clean off my applicators. And even though it's still dirty, it'll pick up clean colour the next time you use these. So just don't even stress about having to have tons and tons of these every time. You use these until you wear them out, basically. Okay. So I'm gonna set those to the side. And now we're ready to play. 12. 12 Sampler Squares - Mark Making : Now is the time that you'll just look at each one and you'll think, let's just create and see where that takes us and you might look at that and think, I need some more pastels for markmking or what have you. Just do it as the mood strikes you. I'm just going to maybe do some mark making over here. I like having so many because you can really get creative here with all the different ones. Then I like to look at it too and think, what color would be just a huge surprise if I did it, which I'm not doing right now with this, but I'm just some of these, I'm like, what color would throw a wrench into that? What color is going to be like pow Sock them now, pow maybe a purple. Then if I do it in one place, I generally do it in more than one place. That way it's not like, oops, I didn't like it. That way, it's like, that was on purpose and we liked it kind of thing. If you do it just in one place, it looks odd. Then refer back to all your mark making sheets for different mark makings that you might consider. We've got dots and we've got where we surround stuff, we've got lines, we've got scribble, you've got all kinds of options. I want you to start looking around at the different pieces and saying, Okay, what if I did X Y Z? I like this one here. That was a good choice. Then definitely keep a pencil sharpener handy. This set comes with a sharpener. I've got lots of little sharpeners handy on my table above here because you might need some points, you might wear the points out, you might think, I need some points. Just keep a pencil sharpener handy and you could work on one piece at a time and finish it or you could come back to several different pieces and just add as things inspire you. Again, if you get pastel dust, do not blow this. Use your paper towel and tap it off. If you need something to hold your hand up, I use this paint stick from the paint store as my handhold to keep my hand off of things that smear, definitely consider having something to help you there. Now, this is that mark from that painting Judith from Gustaf Klemp that we looked at early on in the mark making video. That's where that inspiration is coming in from. I'm feeling like maybe this brat. Even though I just did that, maybe this bro let's do this over here. If you get to the point where you're like, I think I'm done, but I don't know. You can pull your tape and look at it. Sometimes that'll help you see if it was finished, or you could leave these and come back to them later and just keep adding to it. If you don't like it yet, you don't have enough layers. That's my favorite judge of if something's done. I like it. I I don't like it, then let's add some more layers to it. Don't get hung up on perfection and straight lines and trying to create something specific. I like the challenge and the play like we're approaching it where it's just like, what could inspire me here on this piece? How many different marks can you think of as you're creating? I like that. Let's see, like this. Let's do this over here. I do like lines of scribble. I like to hold it way back in the back so I can't get perfect and straight. That's a secret to getting really organic. You can't hold it up here and be nice and loose. You got to hold that way back here. I do that on purpose. I'm not looking for perfection. I'm looking for the fun in the play. This is a pretty color. A. That was a good choice. Oh, look at this. Okay, that I love this one. I'm loving that. I feel like it's gonna need something else in there, but I'm loving it. Oh. Oh, I like that. Okay. Okay. Filling it. Filling it. So we're looking to fill up all 12. You can use your color palette cards. If you're feeling stuck for color, you can see I'm just pulling some different ones that are within the color palette that I randomly put down on the paper, but they were not on purpose. They weren't specific color palettes. I do want to do a piece with my color palette cards just to see how that would work. But I also like the play and the experimenting because this is how you could discover some color palette combination that's crazy. I would not normally have picked these if they had not already been in my palette and I just thought, let's just try it. That's fun to approach it with that abandon. Oh, look at that. Wow. Okay, so there we've done our top six. Not saying that they're done. We're to the point where we could go to the next level with those. Kind of feeling like, look at these colors up here. Oh, I didn't even see those. Look at that. Whoa. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like this one needs that blue in there. What about this blue? Let's do this one. I feel like I'm going to need more blue than that. That might be definitely a good one in the soft pastels to pull this color in for me. But I'm liking where we got that right there. That's good. And we've got these lines that we created with that pastel. That's kind of fun right there. So, let's see. What can we do over here? I'm kind of definitely filling this purple pencil maybe. All right. I just picked up a crazy pink and look at how fun that is. This is number 14325. It's a fun color a pinky red. Okay, that's fun. All right down to the bottom set here. Let's see what we can do down here. And then we'll come back with some pan pastels, with some soft pastels. All right. Definitely like that green in there. We could even come back with the brighter green. Oh, that would have been even better. Look at that. That's a fun pop of that brighter. It's almost like I used the bright in the shade. Now I'm thinking everything in terms of tints and shades and how did that Do we add white or black to that? Well, I like that. This one's fun. Let's see. I think this one's fun. Let's go back up here and pick this brighter pink than we even had a minute ago. Let's see. What do I want to do here? Oh, that was fun. Good one. Good one. Alright, let's see. What else do we got? I'm kind of looking for, like, the brightest funest colors now. I feel like I'm in a bright, fun mood. Well, what about this? No, I'm not feeling that. Another little pop up color, that's a crazy yellow there. If you pick a crazy crazy color and you're like, I don't know about this. You could do super thin lines and then it's not as crazy as you were thinking, but at the same time, you get the excitement of that color in there without it being overwhelming. Yeah, I like that. Good choice. Let's see here. We've got some black. What is this black. It's a random black. This is a pastel by Brnzel. Must de came. This is a Holland black. Must have came with one of my boxes, and I just threw it in here. Let's just use it and see what we think. Caflling like maybe in this one. Oh, yeah, it's definitely a nice. It's a little firmer, I think than the fiber castels. I'd say these are closer to the closer to the pit pastels. I'm thinking. These carbonthelos are definitely the softest ones. Thinking, these are a little harder and they'll give us a stiffer line. Maybe we would like that. I really like that a lot. Thinking, let's do that over here. Get a little pattern in there. Oh, yeah, I like that. I like that. I like it. Okay, now we can let's see. We've got a pretty it's kind of like a burgundy brownish color. Kind of feeling like, maybe some of that over here. Yes. Good choice. I like that. I like it. All right. So you can see how you can while away an hour. Let's see where do I like this. You can very easily while away an hour. And when you're done, you have 12 little mini masterpieces because this time is just flying by this morning making these. And they're so delightful. I can't wait to peel the tape. This is a pretty color. Oh, it's more of a gray down. Kind of something like it's, it's a nice kind of grayish blue. That's pretty color. Oh, yeah. A little extra scribble color in there. I like it. I like it. I like it. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. I like it. Yes. That's a good choice. I'm just playing. I'm just picking up random colors and we're like, Okay, what if I did this here or what if I did this there? It may work, it may not. I don't know that I love that. Feeling like, feeling like I'm ready to pick up the soft pastels and get myself. Let's go ahead and tap these off on our paper. On to our wet paper towel. You need to have the paper towel be a little whiter than the piece of art, obviously, or you'll have powder on either side. I definitely have to do a good cleanup after I do a Pithel something because I don't know, I still managed to get stuff everywhere. Now, let's do crazy pops of something. I really love the magenta. And on my little sample sheet here, that was such a gorgeous pop of color on the green. I loved that and on the ones that were like this color here, nice pop of that. I really love the papa red. I love this green here so you can see where I'm looking for pops of stuff. Another thing too that I did not mention is I actually did on this one. I used one of my stencils and did a little pan pastel through the stencils that's another option that you could try with your stencils, pan pastel through the stencil. Trying to give you some extra ideas there. I really liked it on our green piece. I'm feeling like this piece up here could use a pop, it's not green, but it's close enough in that family where I think I like it. These definitely create a lot of dust. We will be tapping this off before we probably see the final final. Let's see. Let's put a little dab of that over there. I like that. Also feeling like maybe this is too semi like this color, I do. Just as something that can maybe come out of here. That was fun. I like that. I do like this color here. I feel like this one down here could use that little pop of something, little something, something. That's fun. I like that. I also feel like this could use a pop of something. What I want to do there? Do I want that to maybe be a brighter ochre, an ochery color? That could be fun. That is fun. That was a good choice. Let's just go ahead. That was a good choice. I'm really loving that. Good choice. I'm wondering could we do that over here too? Oh, yeah, liking that. Now I'm also thinking I'm looking at them, are any of them too Sami? Did we leave the contrast out where we didn't intend to? Look at this brown. This brown over here might be nice. So you got to start thinking too before we're done. We got to start looking at this and thinking, did we bring the contrast in anywhere? I like the brown. Good choice there. I like to just spread it out a little bit. Got a dark blue here. What are we thinking? Thinking here, maybe. I'm thinking dark blue on this one. While I choose to do dots, you may choose to do ovals, you may choose to do something completely different than the things that I've chose to do in the projects and that's exactly what I want you to do. I want you to figure out how to make the different techniques your own and how it is that you can work with these I like that. This color. This color. I'm liking that. That's fun. Oh, yeah, I like that. Where else can I stick it? I think that was best on that one. Okay. Let's see. So down here, maybe something crazy on that one would be fun. I'm feeling like something to really pull the eye and be like, pow. Again, I'm still not really heavily thinking about Uh the color matching as much as what's inspiring me. It's more of an organic trip for me as we're doing some of these today. Because this is the fun sheets. I'm not trying to create something I can sell. I'm trying to experiment and learn from the different things that I've got and how they work and how they work together, and then that might lead me later to something some breakthrough that I'm like, think I've got it. I feel like this one down here is definitely missing something and I feel like this one's missing something. I do question whether some of these have any contrast. I'm feeling like maybe this one needs extra darkness, maybe. Even though I did a little bit of some darkness, maybe it wasn't enough, I feel like it needed more. You might do that and think, I ruined that piece. That's not what it's about for me and I don't get hung up on those anymore. It's about the play. Let's try this. No. I stuck on this one. I'm wondering how my contrast is looking. Feel like maybe this one could use some white. Okay, I'm filling that. Let's tap these off. Let's take a picture of this and get enough contrast in these. Well, let's tap all the do the best you can. If you need to take it outside and blow it off, you could. Now I'm questioning whether we got enough of the darks. Let's take a picture of this. Then we will take that picture and edit it. Look how pretty that is on my phone. Sometimes you need to take a picture and just admire it on something like your phone because it really gives you a better look. Okay. Now that we're looking at this, I do feel like we've got some good contrast up there and I'm not sure where I set my contrast card. There it is. Remember, we're looking for something from the very lightest to the very darkest. In the earlier photo that we looked at, I'm going to set these pastels out of the way of my hand before. I make a big mess. Before, those are almost black, but they're a little bit later in this one. This one I did pick up some good contrast, but I don't know that I have enough of the darkest color. I've got that burgundy that's showing up, but I do have it. This is actually missing some lights over here. As we're looking at these, you might consider. Let's just pull this back. We might consider going ahead and saying, I can see here that I'm missing something that needs to bring back the light, bring my eye in a little better. I'm liking that. It's a way too. This one I can see we're missing all the darks. Somehow we need to put some dark over here and it doesn't have to necessarily mean black, but it could be a dark blue and we might just come over here and just add some in. Then I'll know that I got it. This one down here, I'm missing anything light. I thought I might be. I could come back in. With white dots and you could do this with your woody, you can do it with your pastel, No color two pastels. We could do it with the pascaPen. We could fill in with some of these other pieces. I might just want a little dangly line coming through there. Let's just see. I know I got the light in that. This one I've got W one is that? This one right here. This one right here, it's got the light in the dark but maybe not the light light. We could come back with acrylic pin, but I'm pretty happy here pulling some of these little tiny dots with the white Snelle half stick of pastel. Just depends on what you got and what you want to mix on top of here. But I know now if I've got the white, I've pulled that in pretty good. This one I'm missing all the light, so I can tell I've just totally missed out on that. Let's come back in here with our dab of white also. I like white dots, so I'm good with adding white dots. I just about any piece, I'm pretty happy with it. We come down to the bottom. I do have a mix of the light and the dark. This one is missing it's missing, let's try this. It's missing something exciting, I felt like. I don't know if it's finished, but it definitely added to it. This one definitely has a mix of the light because that green is showing up as white. I don't necessarily have anything down to the black shade. That's one that I might consider maybe adding maybe some black Touch just that dot of black in there. Okay. Yes. Okay. Feeling good now. Now you just want to look and say, Okay, am I done? Let's peel the tape and see if we're done. Again, having a couple of these microfiber cloths handy to clean your fingers. Always wise. Let's just tap in. We're going to create more dust when we pull the tape. You know what? I'm going to wait a second before I do a final tap. All right, so let's move the pencils out of the way. And let's see. No, this is already making me happy. Look at this. So we're going to create dust, peeling the tape because the tape has some dust on it. So just don't touch anything. Don't smear anything, don't touch anything, let it do its thing. And then we will tap all that off. And remember, you can erase things on this paper. So if you've got something that sticks where you didn't want it, you can erase it. All right. So feeling like maybe we'll tap this off before we keep going. Then test on the purple tape. Oh, the purple tape does not tear our paper like the blue tape did. The sensitive purple paint tape gives us a clean edge without tearing the white edge on there. I could heat it with a heat gun and pull it off there, but I like to test things and see. I did pull a little paper there, but it's nowhere near what the blue tape is doing. So yeah, for that, not like I'd want to keep the white edge on this piece, but it's all the ways that I test the different things out. So it does pull the paper a little. But look how pretty that is. Now, I'm almost thinking that, you know, the paper color that we use is kind of dull. Um compared to the brighter paper. That's an interesting edge on these, but look how delightful those are my inspiration one that I had done earlier, I think these are even prettier. Than my inspiration piece. I mean, every one of these that you do are just going to get better and better and better. So Holy mole. We could cut these all out of here, but I'd be very careful doing that until you are ready to actually frame them or do something with them. I just like having them as lovely pieces of art. Then you might be thinking, Well, how would you store this? I personally would take some of the deli paper, the butcher paper, any of that kitchen paper that's kind of the waxy papers, that would be my top cover of that. And then I would store those in the clear art sleeves, like I store the stencils. I would store that in an art sleeve if I needed to protect a piece that I actually really loved until I went to have it framed. I absolutely would not spray these with fixative on the papers because it dulls it down and it basically ruins all your contrast, and then you almost feel like you have to repaint it again. I hope you enjoy this exercise. One of the most fun projects to do. I love how these pieces turn out. You can do it on any color paper that you have. You might have the black paper, you may have white paper, the Pastel paper, you need the sanded pastel papers, but any color, these are just fun to experiment and create. I hope you enjoy trying this out for yourself and I'll see you guys back in class. 13. 4 Color Palette Minis: Or everyone. Today, I thought we could do some small samplers to play with color and to hone in on color palettes and just see what we could create. You can focus on any of our compositions that you want to focus on for doing these. What I did was I pulled some cards from the color cube because it's my favorite art tool for picking color. This is cube two by Sarah Renee Clark. And I really do love how easy that makes it to play and pick colors on our little mini pieces, we just went for it, whatever color we thought was going to be fun. This one I want to be just a tiny bit more deliberate and you can use color palettes from the color wheel. If you want to go with one of those color palettes, you can look on Pintrist where they have lots of color palettes if you Google color palettes, I choose to pick these because I can hold them in my hand and they're easy to work with. And just see what we come up with. I've got a couple of cards that I like so much when I did a project with them that I have them hanging on my wall and this happens to be one of them. I pulled some colors out that closest matched, but I'll still be color mixing. I still also can use white or black in our colors. I do have black on the table already with this one over here. I'm going to bring white out just to have it available. In this one, I pulled raw umber shade. I pulled violet shade. And then this one, I pulled Magenta Extra dark, and then I actually found just an interesting pearlescent color. So pearlescent red. I just thought that was pretty, so it's close and bright yellow green, which I've never used. It's noxious color, but I loved it in this and I thought, why not? For the second color palette, this is another crazy color palette. My goal with these sometimes is just to pick the craziest one I can find something I'd never choose to pick on my own and see what I can come up with. Then my other goal with these is not to be exact exact. If I'm a shade off in one direction or another, that's fine. My goal is to work within a color palette and just go in a direction I wouldn't have thought even if my colors are slightly on or off. For this one, I've picked bright yellow green shade. I've picked an orange that's not quite as bright as that orange. I still think it'll be nice orange shade. Pines gray and then turquoise and turquoise light. I thought that got us pretty close to our color palette. This is another one that I loved the project so much that it was hanging on my wall. I thought, let's pull this one out again. I pulled Turquoise shade and then this one is So blue, and I pulled out burnt sienna for that orange, and then this is red oxide shade, and then I pulled out black for that black. I've got black on the table. And then this last color pallet was this one and I just liked it, so we'll just see what we get. I have actually pulled yellow oxide, trying not to get stuff all over our paper. This one. I've also got yellow ochre tint, which is that ivory color, and then I pulled neutral gray shade, and then I pulled a red. This is more of a pink, but this is permanent red shade. There's not really there is. I can mix that a little bit with say, magenta and get that color. We'll see and then permanent red tint. Again, my goal is just to get within a color palette whether I match it exact, exact or not. I'm not really worried about powder on the piece. I thought what I would do is start off by just color blocking each of these, keeping in mind, say, rule of thirds. You might even mark off your paper. In whichever rule that you're considering, and then you know, here's my focal points. If you're thinking grid because I also like the grid, you could fill those in and then you could have an idea of your composition on your paper and the black is pretty easy to see on, even though it's black, it's like a charcoal color. You can draw on it and then paint on top of these and you're not going to see all of that. But it is nice to give yourself a visual guide. I like the Rule of Thirds and that's a good one to start off with, but use any of those that we covered and maybe pick one to focus on and get really good at. It doesn't have to be exact here. We're just getting close, giving ourselves an idea of what we want to do. Then I'm going to just start color blocking in each of our color palettes and I know that I want some darkness in there. White and Black are my neutrals. I can come back in with white and black at any point. I might even let me get this color off of here since it's on my applicator, but I could come back and say, well, let me throw some dark stuff in here and just see how do I want to drive people through the piece? That could be my interest points, and then I can come back and start filling in. Then if you're applicator gets too muddy, you can definitely switch out your applicator, but I find if you just wipe it off really good with your microfiber cloth, it works just fine. You can treat your grid. For instance, you could go fill in squares. You could treat it as an idea and then do half a square and come up on the diagonal. It's just giving your eye something to corner things in different spots. And then other than that, have at it and have some fun. So this purple. Then you'll see as you're painting with the pan pastel how easy it is to control it and get pretty detailed with a great big applicator that doesn't really look like it would be so easy to control, but it really is. That's pretty cool. I really want to see what this pearlescent red looks like. I don't remember using it, but it is really, really cool here. And then my goal mostly is to color block and then come back in with pencil and pastels and then lay other details in there. Then we also have this brown. If you get started, there's always going to be an ugly stage where you're like, I don't know about this. But don't be afraid to mix and blend and change stuff up and just play and add some layers. If it's not good enough yet, my favorite little quote there is you don't have enough layers. That tends to work for me. I'm like, as I'm going and I'm like, I don't know about this, you probably don't have enough layers laid in here yet and maybe do some blending and some moving and just switching stuff up and then you'll come back in with your pencils and your pastels and you'll be able to change it up a bit. Then if you get something where you didn't want it, remember, you've got an eraser. You can also just take your fingers and blended in. I chose to work today on a piece of the U art 600 grid paper and it's in black. Black is nice because it makes your colors pretty vibrant as you're working. That's fun because it's really different than trying to cover all the white in your piece and it's nice for already having some darkness in there that you don't have to create all the darkness. I'm just adding some black in here. Because remember, white and black, those are your neutrals, go with it. You don't have to have that in your color palette to include that in your piece. You could be a lot more deliberate than I'm being. I'm just at this point just playing, getting some color laid out, exploring. Don't blow your piece if you can resist. Take it outside to blow it. I'm going to scoot around here and color block out. This Maybe I'm going to give myself some darkness in here perhaps on my focal points. If you pick a color and say you pick the shade and you're like, Oh, maybe I'd like the bright in there, you know, go grab that bright. You're not locked into any particular colors or ranges. You can switch it up. The only reason why I start with a color palette is to give myself a direction to go and stuff to focus on. Doesn't mean you have to leave it there and doesn't have to be the only colors that you're using. And then use your marker as a mark maker to add in some interesting details. You know, as you're going. I like that. Use it as a mark making tool. You know, so you can use the edge and start bringing in some interesting marks. Kind of makes me want to go back up here and maybe do some more mark making. You know, as you look at stuff and you're like, oh, I love that. Let me try that. You know, go back to your pieces and start experimenting. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I'm going to kind of come over here and start color blocking this one. That is a bright blue. Holy cow, look how bright that blue is. Oh, my goodness. That was a bright bright loveliness there. And I just taped these down with painter's tape. Start blocking in this fourth color one here, but I just taped it down with painter's tape. And on this project, I taped the edges because my favorite part of making art is peeling tape, and I know this. And I want to peel tape on these because they're little samplers and let them have an edge so that they're finished. It's where I was thinking there. But I'll do on the bigger project, a different tape method so that you go wall to wall, edge to edge with your painting and you don't have any tape covering the edges there just to give you another way to do it. I've focused on my little Third, I'm not put anything directly in the center mostly that detracted from the center. I want to drive my eye through the piece. But in the color blocking, that's not the end of the game, don't get stuck if you're like, Oh crap, I missed my focal point, I lost my focal point. Don't stress about it. We can add focal point back in here as we go. I already did the gray, didn't I? Let's do this brighter pink here. When you come back in mark make, you can come back and add to your piece with the marks. Don't get hung up on you lost a focal point somewhere because we're not done until we're done. Then it's fun too to just mix colors on the palette mix things up on the palette and get some different shades and colors and interest in there. See, this was off. I had the brighter red in that one instead of that pinky red. But you saw as I mix a little bit of pink and that light yellow ochre, I can get it closer to that magenta pink rather than red. Definitely, use your mixing with your applicator. You can get some texture in there like that without having solid color. Now I'm just playing with some mark making, playing with my tools, getting some interesting elements to work with as we're going. All right, so that's super fun. Then I'm going to kind of now kind of put all these to the side so that we can come back and mark make on top of here. I'm going to keep them close. They don't have to completely go away, but I might put some of these back into my little palette that I took them out of, put the lids back on some of these. I don't want to blow this off. I still got my paper towel that I've been working with. I do like to wet this down, and then the color kind sticks to the towel, but then you can tap it off into your trash can. Um, after the fact. If you're working on an easel, it really makes it easy as you're going to just tap the powder off as you're going because the easels are on an incline. But don't blow stuff out. You're going to blow powder all over your work surfaces and stuff and you really want to avoid that. Let me get some pastel pencils and stuff out and I'll be right back. So I think I'm going to start with the carbonthelos, and then I might top off with some soft pastel, but I want you to keep in mind all the different things that we tested out on here and pull out all your different art tools to play in. But I just wanted to remind the color palettes. I think we did really good sticking within our palette here on each of these pieces. I'm just going to have these sitting right in front of me so that I can when I'm pulling more things to put on top, still keeping my color palette in mind. And maybe pulling from those to continue to play on. Then I do have a wood stick here that I will be resting my hand on, so I'm not smearing back and forth. This is just a five gallon paint stick from the paint department at the hardware store. You can use a hand rest. If you've got one of those clear hand rests, you can use lots of different things to rest your hand on. Just try to avoid resting your hand on your paper. So now I'm just looking at my color palette versus my pencils and I'm starting to think, what colors might I want to use in this piece and pulling out maybe some of those colors. Then as I go along, I might pull some other colors as a fun contrast because let's see. Purples pretty here. There's a brown in there. Here's the colors that are in my little thing there. Now I've got some starter choices and then I will pull pops of whatever as I look at things and think, I need this or I need that. This could be a time to redefine any marks that we might have put on here. I could come back in here with some marks and if we put a nice contrasty color on top of a color that we're going on top of, we'll really see it. If I were to put this green on top of the green, you're not really going to see that pop. But if I put it on top of that maroon, pops back off the page for us. Now it's just like you've got your mark making things hanging on the wall, things that you find interesting. Now you can look up at the wall and say, Okay, what would be interesting marks here? I like thoughts and I like thin lines and I like scribble and we might circle out some things that we made a dominant element. We could come through our pieces with some lines and some different stuff like that. We're just now taking the different elements in and saying, Okay, where do I want to have some focus? I've got some dark in here, but we might redefine that dark. With some pencil, we could redefine it with The soft pastels, we could definitely just do all kinds of stuff in here to just draw the eye and start leading the eye through the piece. Everybody does abstract a little different. So this is kind of where I'm leaning today. And the next time I come back to abstract, I might be thinking something different. I like it. I like it. And if you really hate something that you've done, take your eraser and you can erase it. Just keep that in mind. You're not locked into anything specific. And then you just put more collar blocking and more marks on top. Because if I thought, I don't like this part over here, I could come back and say, I know, I don't know if I like that. Let's just erase some of this right here because maybe I didn't like it. Then I've got a little fan brush. I like these little stiff brushes because then you can just get rid of any eraser dust and then you might be like, Okay, let's see, what do I want there instead? You could come back with something else. I'm just going to pick a different color here. It's not really in my color palette, but it's the one I picked up. Let's go back into here, let me pick up one on our color palette here. Oh, yeah. I've got this pretty purply color, and we'll just mesh right on top of there and you're like, Oh, yes, no, I like that or what have you. And you can easily correct things just like that. So don't get stuck. So now I'm just playing. Just mark making, playing, adding in some stuff. In the areas that I've got extra things going on, and then I might move on to the next piece and pull some colors that are coming out of our piece. From there, so I'm going to just start picking and pulling from my palette here and I'm in this color palette, so I can look at that and think, Okay, I've got the black. Got a pretty blue or till, like this. I'm going to start doing some details over here. I like doing detail with pencil and then at the very end, come back with the bigger soft pastels or whatever it is that I decide I want to work with there because then I'm layering up in levels of messiness, basically. The pencils are a little messier than the pan pastel and the soft pastels are a little messier than both of these, so I'm just working my way up in levels of messiness when I'm doing these. Levels of hardness, so we can add some more intensity around a color that we've already got there that's the same color. That's fun as a nice little detail. Oh, made. Look at that. That made like let's just do it. A little vine with some leaves on it. Now that we've got that there, if you're a botanical person and you want to have some type of botanical in a piece, this is a good time to maybe add some fun details like that in there and making a scribble line might take you along that path like it just me and you're like, Oh, wait. I like that fun little detail that I just accidentally created. Now I'm thinking pretty little vines over here. Oh, yeah, okay. I like that. That was pretty. You know, orange and blue are opposites on the color wheel. So, if you'll put that contrasting color as, you know, on top of the color that is opposite it, you get those wonderful pops of stuff. I love that. Let's see. We had teal and blue and then about this kind of Burgundish color here. And if you feel like, Oh, I'm stuck, I don't know where to go, just keep moving around the pieces that you're doing. Don't get hung up on one piece. So, if I feel like, okay, I'm not sure where I want to go with that, move to the next piece, and continue on. And then you'll get there. Soon as I do some more over here, I might think of something to do over there, or I might go back and look at it and think, Oh, I really like how I finished that out. I do think I'm done. You just got to just loosen up, let it do its thing for a bit. Going to do some scribble. Sometimes you need to look at piece for a bit and then you're like, Oh, now I know what that needs or or it's done and I just didn't know it. Then don't forget that you can use your camera to assist you in your gray scale. Do you have enough contrast after we lay all our marks and everything? Then I like to look for contrast. I like to see, did I get everything in there that I wanted? I want to go ahead while I've got the black pencil out and maybe put a little black here and this piece over here. Then you can work on more than one piece at a time. I'm still just keeping my colors in mind over there as I'm going. I like this one. I do. I like that. That was pretty cool. Let's see. I like this funky kind of maybe it's this one. I like this funky green that we've got in here. I like these little details that we added over here, thought that was fun. Then we've got this really light bluish color. Alright, and then let's see what else we got over here. So, in here, we had these pretty tans and this pretty kind of reds. We'll look at that one. And then I like this later one. Let's do this. And then, don't you think, Okay, I got a lot of mark making. Do I have my contrast? So let's take a picture of this with our phone and see, do we have good contrast? I took my picture, let's just edit this and then we can go into our little actually, I like to do the little auto and then go into our filters and go right into the black and white filter. Now we can look at our pieces and I can see this top one definitely has plenty of contrast. We've got from the very light to the very dark and a nice set of grays along in there. Then this one, again, I've got a nice contrast of light and dark. And then this one here, I've got a whole lot of light but not very much dark, so I might think, okay, I may need to bring some darkness into that. Then just the opposite on this one, I've got a whole lot of dark but absolutely no light. Now I'm going to think, what can I add to this to bring in the brightness. Really great tool to look at. If you turn it black and white, you can tell what colors are doing because you can't really tell what those colors actually do. Um So for me, at this point, I am going to bring in the soft pastils. You can bring in Woodies, you can bring in anything that you want to tap on top of this that we already looked at and talked about, thinking that we could bring in a super light blue. It doesn't necessarily have to be white, and then we can get that extra lightness as something on the very top of the piece. If you're not sure what that is, you might and make a copy of that picture and then play, take a picture of this, make a copy of it, and then start to play and add some other stuff to it because we all get into the I don't want to ruin it feel and I get that. I don't want to ruin it either. But at the same time, most of these things I'm not super precious about. I'm playing, I'm experimenting, I'm looking at it, and I'm thinking, what can I add to it? But I'm not stuck on I don't want to ruin it. I used to be stuck on that. I used to get really stuck on that. I'd be like, Oh, my gosh, this is the best thing I ever made. I don't want to mess it up. Now I just don't worry about stuff. It's not as precious to me. Okay, this one is going to have to pull in some dark, it could be a black. It could be I could come in more with black. I could bring in a brown or something else I can introduce whatever I want to introduce. There's nothing saying that you can't pull in an extra color and pink and brown and yellow. Those always look really nice to me. So I'm good bringing maybe bringing in a deep brown, not necessarily a black. You could do posca dots if you've got your posca pens. And you don't want to do pastels. Again, we're not spraying these to finish them because on this paper, it will ruin everything that you did, so don't be tempted to spray this with spray because it gets so dark, it ruins what you did. I'm almost feeling like little pasca dots. Let's just see. I might not get any. For some reason works on the paper, does not want to work on my does not want to work on this. What about this yellow? This just soaks up the powder is not working for me today. I feel like I wanted yellow dots. If you play with something and you're like, not working on here. We've learned something new today. That's exactly how you learn. You try it. Although I feel like I tried that on that other little sample, but it did not work on this paper. That was an interesting. That was interesting. This had enough and that had enough, but I feel like this needs something. I'm almost wondering, does it need a pop of the dark, the pans gray? Does it need a pop of the white? Does it need a pop of the green this green could be a fun pop. Pop of the orange. Do we like it like it is? Now I'm getting to the point where I'm like, does it need anything else? Do I need to live with it for a while? I'm feeling good about that actually. I'm feeling like I want to use this green on something. This one had the green in it, so maybe this one needs some green. Then you'll see this really off powders a lot. This is definitely one that I don't want to blow everywhere. I don't want that powder all over all my surfaces. I'll tap this into my towel again or into my trash. Oh, see, I like that pop of color. I like it to go pow and be that little bit of excitement. Now I want some of that orange over here. Look at this orange. I want to maybe pull that orange up just a little bit. Oh, that's what it needed. That's totally what it needed. Just some little surprises of a brighter color. It's like the little icing on the cake. Now I'm kind of wondering, can I use a little pop of something like a little extra of that orange that's in this piece? I think it could. Let's do it. Just like the extra brightness on top of the shadow. Okay, I like that. That was good. Oh, that's fun. If you don't like it, smudge it out, erase it out, start again. I like it. Kind of wondering if that bright blue up there. Look at this. Here's a bright bright blue. Crazy bright blue. I don't know, maybe not might be the wrong blue, but it's a fun blue. I could just tap a little in there. Some fun. Okay, at this point, I think I'm ready to take a look at it. I'm going to tap off our powder. And I do keep microfiber cloths here to clean my fingers because I don't want to get up every few minutes and go wash my hands. These are the best things to get almost all the powder off your hands so that you're not smearing things around. And let's just see what we got, we'll still have powder coming off with the tape because I've got powder on the tape, but that's okay. All right. So I think I got all the powders off. Then I just taped these down. I'm just going to peel this and I'm going to put the tape where hopefully it doesn't powder up everything in my art room. If you get powder in the clean area, and you're like, you can just erase it. That's what's good about an eraser. This is what I love. I just bopped myself in the nose with my patickThis is what I love about peeling tape even with a pastel because now we've got some defined borders around these lovely little pieces. And they become like finished when you can see it with a border. I just love that. Okay? I've got powder everywhere here. Let's see if I can get the had it on my board, too. Just want to resist sucking in powder and blowing powder on everything if you can. Take it outside if you really need to blow it. Look. When we're done, oh my goodness. Whoa. Whoa. This is super exciting. Holy cow. Look at those, look at those look with our color palettes, how we did there. We did so good. Oh, my goodness, look at that. Look at that. Wow. Okay. I hope you give this little challenge a go pick a composition and play. I was picking Rule of Third, so I was trying not put anything right dab in the center, things that drew our eye through the piece. I've Rule of Thirds here and I've got things that go through the piece and little interesting elements that are hopefully drawing you around and not throwing you out is the goal there. But super fun paint day today. I call it a paint day. We'll call it a Pastel Day, great color choices and a fun experiment. I hope you give this one a try and I'll see you guys back in class. 14. Medium Blue Green Palette: This video, I want to show you the other tape method on those little fours that we did. I taped on top of the paper, and this is still that same UR 600 Grit. I think this is the one that's made by sandpaper company because if you go to the paint store, this is what the Bk of Sandpapers look like. But this is how you are going to tape your piece down and be able to go basically to the edge of your paper with your painting. So we're going to start by taping the back of the paper so that we've got a surface to adhere tape to now. Then we can simply go up to the edge of the paper. It doesn't matter if you get any that's left open because pastel will just stick to it and you just pick it up later. But it's a good way to give yourself a taped down surface without taping the paper itself. It's the the other method there for getting that page nice and stuck down. I wanted to give you another option. If you don't want to tape the paper and have an edge and want to go edge to edge. This is how we do that. Might have got the top edge of the paper on this one. Let me just pick it up. Let me just pick that up so that I don't have a raw edge when I'm done. All right. And then we can just now start painting. If you like to create a specific something if you have something in mind, like, a flower or something that you're wanting to follow, you can draw right on this paper, whatever it is that you're wanting to create. I'm just visually for myself creating my rule of thirds and maybe the grid, and that wasn't the straightest, most perfect one, but that's really not the goal for me. The goal is to give myself direction and know that focal point areas are in this area here. It's where I want to get that going. With our little bitty sample pieces, I love just picking color range and going for it. I'm thinking maybe, let's see. I know there were some that I really liked. Let me grab that real quick. So this was our little sampler piece that I loved. I really loved this one in the blues and the greens with a little bit of ochre thrown in and black, a little bit of black there. That's one of my favorites on here, so why don't we create a larger in that color scheme. Now I've given myself some colors to work with and a direction to go. That's what I'm going to do and had this pretty green in it. This is the bright yellow green shade, it also has turquoise extra dark, it might even had this creamy color, which is yellow ochre light, which I have broke, but I'm still using it. Then we had some black in there and just some other colors. That's where I'm thinking that we're going. I'm going to put these in right here as my color range. I might even pull that yellow ochre in. Then I've got my grid on here. I rule third in it and just looking and deciding what direction do I want to go. I really like starting in the corner, so I'm feeling like that's what I'm going to do. Just because you're working, a grid doesn't mean you have to just fill every box. It just gives you some areas to concentrate on. I could fill half a box. I could come in a circle and come further over. Right now I'm just color blocking and getting some ideas. I could fill in half a box. You could fill in every box with a different color, working with something like that. I'm going a little more organically, but looking at my areas and seeing how do I want to fill this in. Then I've got my cloth here that I can clean this off. If I need to have this clean in between color switches, that's what I'll be doing. But I do like it when this green and blue mix. I'm going to mix them. I let them do their thing. Also had this lovely ochre in here. See, I can pat this back down flat and use them. I could use alcohol if I needed to get that really meshed back in there because I broke it enough, but I just broke one edge, so I'm just not worried about it. Go over there to the black and grab some black and pull some darkness in here. Then we can do some mark making with our pastels before we get into other mark making on top. If you've got too much powder going on, don't blow it. Tap it off on your towel like we've seen. It's not bothering me yet, and I'll tap it off in a minute. I like this little pattern that we're getting here with a little bit of mixing on my applicator, gives us a whole lot more texture and says, grid like a little bit so you can see the grid we were working. Liking that. Alright, I'm liking where we're going. I feel like I want to. Now I put details on top of that. So I'm just cleaning off my applicator. I'm going to pull my paper towel back over here that I just kind of kept handy and tap off any dust that's extra. And now I'm ready to maybe put the pastels up and pull the pencils over and do some mark making on top of that. I've pulled the carbonthelos over. I do have the faber castles handy if I want to use them. They are a little bit tougher, stiffer, not as soft as the carbonthelos. I do like the carbonthelo ones, and I'm still looking at my inspiration piece. I got some yummy, yellow ochre in the soft pastel, I've got marks in the pencils, and so that's where I'm thinking. I really like say this green, and I think I need a little more tip on this. Let me just use my little sharpener on that. What I really liked in this smaller piece was this scale pattern that we put in there. I'm feeling good about that. I'm feeling like, right here, let's do that. Bleeds into the green that's down here, so it's a natural extension of the color that I put down there. Okay, I'm really liking the scribble. Really liking the scribble. Alright, so let's keep this pencil out. Let's see here. I'm kind of feeling like Let's see. Kind of like this kind of dusty blue in there, so maybe we'll pull this kind of turquoise color back out maybe too much. But we're going for it. Okay, that was a good choice. I like that. You might not like it, but I like it. I'm kind of feeling like I could use some white and I could use some definition in the yellows, maybe a little black in here in the black parts to give some extra movement to those. Okay, I really like that. I'm kind of wanting to pull the pastels down. Let's see. Pencil sharpener sitting there. I feel like this is that color. Maybe I'll go ahead and define these, so it's like a shadow under the color. I like that. And I'm kind of thinking a bit of that collar out here might not have been the right choice, but I like it. If you do something and you're like, I don't know about that, put it in more than one place. It's like, Oh, that was on purpose. Not like, oops that was a mistake and I didn't love it. That's how I get around not loving something versus loving it. Make things look like they were on purpose instead of a mistake that I then see every time I look at a piece. Did something that I'm like, why did I do that? So let's tap off the dust so that I can come back up here with something that I like or at least blend it in where I don't see what I did what I didn't like. But I'm feeling like maybe this green back up here. You can get your pan pastels back out if you do something you didn't like, but I'm feeling like green scribble is fine. Yeah, I didn't like that. I do like how everything's kind of moving around now, and I just need to decide, did it need anything else? Am I kind of there? I kind of like this goldish color yellow ochre, maybe a little bit of that. I want even a little more of it back over here where I had it. Then you can keep working your pieces until you're like, oh, I love that. Until you got it until you're finished, you can just set it to the side and keep coming back to it. I'm like where we've ended up here. Do feel like I need a little more of this. Go a little further, it stopped. Oh, there we go. I kind of like that. Alright, so there we go. I think I'm for this piece for the moment. I think I'm there. I can tap off any extra pastel that I've added, and then watch how easy this is to peel the tape off of here for our finished piece. So now we can just peel this off. We could just basically pick the paper off of the tape, but it is kind of easier. And there we go. See, that was almost as good as peeling tape. That was so pretty. Look at that now that we've got that out there and finished. This was my inspiration piece there in the middle. Look how pretty that turned out, and we hit right on the money with our little inspiration piece. So I'm really loving how that one turned out. Hope you enjoy giving that tape method a tryout and just maybe creating a little bit larger piece of one of your smaller squares and seeing where could you go with any of those that ended up being your favorite. I'll see you guys back in class. 15. Large Color Palette Project: Everyone. Today, I thought that we could do a larger abstract piece and I'm going to use one of these art spectrum sheets. I feel like with all the different ones that I've tried, the art spectrum or the UART, I have some Pastel MAT coming in today, so I might do one more project on the PastlMT. But I feel like for these types of projects, any of these pastel papers work very similarly. I'm blocking color, I'm putting pencil. I'm not doing an overly amount of blending like clouds in the sky or something like that. I've got a friend that does landscapes and she likes the pastel mat because it's not as rough as the 600 grip paper and it does well for blending. But I feel like for the abstracts, I don't actually have a favorite. I do like that this comes in other colors. I like that this one has a nice frame around it so that it looks finished when we're done and framed out when we're done. I like that it comes in different colors because it really is nice not to start on white and have to really fill up all the white space. If you left any of this paper showing, that's a really pretty color. I feel like out of this warm pack that I think that maybe this orange or this aubergine color because those are both pretty. The purple fits in my color palette even though it's not one of these colors, it is over here. This is the color palette I think I'm going to go with. My first impulse was to go with this purply shade. I think I'm going to stick with that and save these others for later and maybe create a large piece. So I am going to I'm not worried about any dust on the paper. I've been working with pastels for a couple of days straight, so there's probably powder everywhere. I'm going to use the purple painter's tape to just clear off the white edges here and I'm going to just tap it down very gently so that it's not super stuck because it's not my goal really to stick it down super hard. It's my goal to just keep the white part clean. It's just my goal today and keep the paper sitting where I want it. I work on artist panels, so it's very easy just to take this off my work surface and go and work on another piece or just work on it until I'm done and still be able to do something else here on my table if I need to move it out of the way. I want to keep the edges white. I like the white on the paper. I've pulled a color cube card from the color cube again because I love it. Color cube volume two, and I love the range of colors that I might not have put together myself. I might have picked in the pink and orange range, but I wouldn't have gotten more complicated and in depth with my color range by going with the green and the blue. I like that it pushes me into more complex colors. So there's not really a pink in the pent pastel, so I can mix. I mean, there is. There's a light pink, but there's not this deeper pink. I can mix maybe the red, orange, and a white to get that salmoni color. I've just pulled out magenta and permanent red shade to get in these color ranges. I've got permanent red tint. I have pulled burnt sienna, and orange shade for these colors here, I've got white and black and then I've pulled Thalo green and I have probe turquoise for these other shades. Again, it's not my goal to match it 100%. It's my goal to get set in a direction and be like, Okay, I think I'm ready with what I'd like to do. These are nine by 12 sheets of paper. I can mark these off with a pencil if I want to go ahead and just say, rule of thirds. I can mark these off in a grid if I want to be more exact than I have traditionally been on the smaller pieces, if I just want to give myself some direction. I'm not worried about any pencil lines on the paper because we can erase it if we need to. I just visually gets me started and I'm not even worried if the lines are super straight. I'm just trying to get visually oriented and give myself maybe a grid if I even want to grid that off, I could throw the grid lines on there. That was not a straight grid at all, but that's okay. Then I'm looking at focal points being in this area here. So I'm thinking, okay, where do I want to go? I'm going to go ahead and I could pull other colors into this later if I get going and I want another color. Let me find my applicator. Got my cloth using. These are the microfiber cloths and they just clean your applicator off. You don't have to get these completely cleaned to get fresh color. You just want to get all the loose powder hit off of this and then you're ready to start going. These I just wash. These are the microfiber cleaning cloths that you can get just about anywhere now. I just put these in the laundry by themselves and they do not muck up my washing machine. I love that about those. I'm just going to jump in with a color. I like to start in the corners. That's my own choice. I just might spread this around just to get me started and then start filling stuff in. I'm thinking rule of thirds. That's why I gritted that out like that and I don't even have to use the grid squares. I can cut grids in half, I can move stuff around. But I did give myself a starting point and direction. I'm almost running around the page, not thinking too hard about where the colors are going. You might be a planner, but I'm more of where do I want this to go? What feels good? Where can I intuitively move around the piece? I'm just very quickly almost picking a color and moving around. I could actually mix these two colors to get closer to that pink. Could even mix these three colors to move into the pink rather than it being that red. You'll see as I mix those, that is a lot closer there to that pink that we've got going on there. Doesn't have to be exact. I'm just thinking as I'm going. And then I got the red on there, so I can go ahead and add some red. It's at this point that I'm working very intuitively. I'm thinking, what can I do with these colors and where do I want to maybe lay them down. But I'm not too focused at the moment on the composition and where I'm going to end up. I'm working intuitively and then we're going to tighten it up in the end. I've put that green on my focal point there, so that might help move the eye around our pieces and maybe I'll get some mark making in here as I'm going. Then I just hit that off and move into the next color. And when we're all done, might not love it at all, but there's always an ugly stage. You want to get through this ugly stage into the now I see where I'm going stage and it's interesting to start on this purply color that I've never used before, this aubergine paper. I've never used this color as a starting point, but it is really cool to see, how that paper lives under the colors. If you did two pieces at the same time, one, say on black paper and one on this purple paper, it'd be really interesting experiment to see how are the two different? How is that undercolor really affecting my piece? And now I might just start coming in here and filling some stuff in. Now that we've just color blocked it, now I might just start saying, What happens if I put this here? What happens if I put that there and just see where will we end up today? All these have an ugly stage. Don't get discouraged yet. If it's not pretty yet, it doesn't have enough layers. My favorite thing is if you're not loving it yet, you don't have enough layers yet. Alright, so I actually find it challenging personally to go bigger. I like that smaller scale stuff. Personally, I find it easier. I enjoy it more. Going bigger is more of a challenge for me. So if you're creating and you're thinking, Oh, going big is hard, going big is hard. I agree. Going big is harder. So now I've kind of got a lot of collar blocking and stuff going on in here. I might go ahead and start using some pencil work. So let me grab my pencils. I've got my carbonthllos, and I've got my wood stick over here if I want to move around the piece and work on stuff. I got my color card still sitting here just giving me an idea on what I could grab. I'm going to start maybe mark making and get in a direction here with some pencils and some abstract marks. I might go back to the pastels. I might pull out the soft pastels, which is one of the things that I really like to do I Again, you don't finish these, you don't spray these because you will knock all the brightness off of your piece if you spray this with a spray, definitely resist anything like that. I'm almost thinking. I like this lighter blue. I feel like I can start getting some marks here. Now I'm just playing and adding two stuff. And if you like botanicals, you might put a big botanical piece on here. If you have a particular mark that you like, now's the time to start playing with your marks. Okay, I've got quite a few little marks in there, but maybe I want to do some pastels and maybe I want something that's going to give me a fun pop. Kind of like this pink, which I know is kind of lighter in here and I've got a few spots of that. I could kind of come back in and redefine some of those a little bit. I could also do some big dots somewhere feeling like this one's going a little crazy. I do want to point out, I always reserve the right to cut stuff up. If I end up doing something and I'm like, maybe this one corner is not my favorite and turned out to be a little bit crazy because I definitely got crazy things going on in this piece. But if I do decide, I didn't like what I did somewhere, I still reserve the right to cut these up. Don't get stuck on anything that you've created that you're then thinking, why did I do that? 'Cause trust me, I've been there. I want you to think instead, uh, that's interesting. What can I do that's in here that I could cut up? That's kind of how I want you to think of that cause I get it. There's some things that, you know, I've just done that I'm like, why did I do that? Always doubting right up until the point that, you know, I peel tape a lot of times. And some of it's just building layers. Think of these as I'm still building. If I don't love it yet, maybe I'm not there yet. I'm adding a few colors outside of my color palette, but for some reason, they're calling my name and I like them. Don't be afraid to deviate from your color palette if you get going and you're like, Oh, you know, I like this color for whatever reason, maybe if you put it in more than once, then you know it was a conscious choice. It was not a mistake. But actually like this yummy purple here. I think that was a good choice. Get some pretty dots in there. But let's see. What else do we like? I feel like it needs some. Le like it needs. I don't know what does it need? Trying to look up there in my camera to kind of suss out what else? I like this color here and it's kind of that color in my piece. So I almost want to pull that even bigger than I did with the pencil there. Okay, there's a lot of craziness going on in here, but I'm not sure that I've got my darkest contrast in here. So now I'm wondering, should I come back in with a little bit of black or darkness or even dark brown or dark blue kind of feel like there's not the darkness and the contrast. I could take a picture of it and look at it and really evaluate that, but I'm feeling like somewhere that darkness didn't really get in here. So I'm just doing some scribble because I want to. I really like this oranginess down here. I feel like I've lost some of that yummy yummy oranginess. There's a lot of craziness going on in this today. I want to peel the tape and see where I'm even at, I could keep working on it. I could search out compositions. But I want to see where I even ended up in this paint session. Let me knock that dust off one more time, and then we will see where we've even ended up, and I'm just cleaning my fingers off 'cause remember, this has got a white edge on it. Let me scoot these out of the way. This might be the busiest piece I've made, but the little ones are busy too, but they're not quite as big. Let's just see. I'm going to very gently pull the tape because I'd like it not to tear. I could use my heat gun on it also, but I did find this purple tape if you are very careful, peels off of this edge. I did get some pastel on the white mat there. So let's get our eraser and just see how that works on this white edge. And of course, you might get fingerprints on these, so be careful with whatever's on your fingers. All right, so this is definitely a little crazy today. And just to show you what I mean, when I say I still reserve the right to cut stuff up. Let me pull one of these mats out. We could search out a composition within our piece that we like better. We're not stuck with the entire piece. If you decide that went sideways, where could I have gone with it that I would have liked better? You can now search out compositions in there that then you could if you wanted to keep working on, say, a piece that you really liked and you're like, I love that, but I need something else in it. Now you can search out those pieces that you love the most and cut it up. I doesn't bother me a bit to cut stuff up. I love it. I start projects now with the thought in my mind of, I'm probably going to cut this up and I'm okay with that. Now that right there feels really good to me. I like that this round bit is the center of attention and it drives the eye around there. I like that. You could also take the piece that you're working on and look at it in different directions. You don't have to leave it the way you painted. I painted it this way. But after looking at it turned around. I actually like it better that way. Hope you enjoy exploring doing a larger piece. Don't be afraid to say, I'm going to cut this up. Your approach might be completely different than my approach, but I wanted to show you that blocking your color and then topping with other things like pastel pencils and soft pastels would then help you bring in the details is how I generally work with the Pastel product. I hope you enjoy trying a little bit larger piece, and I'll see you guys back in class. 16. Final Thoughts: We conclude this Penn Pastels art class, I encourage you to continue exploring the endless possibilities of this versatile medium. Remember, mastering the fundamentals from creating tints and shades to understanding composition and color lays a solid foundation for your artistic journey. Embrace experimentation and play with the different techniques and tools, whether it's using alcohol for unique effects or exploring various pastel options. Let your creativity soar as you apply what you've learned to your projects, whether they're small samplers or large abstract pieces. Keep pushing the boundaries. Stay inspired. Above all, enjoy the process of creating with pen pastels.