✨ The Magic of Soft Pastels — Part 1: Why Soft Pastels?

Welcome artists to Monae Cafe Studio and my four-part course called The Magic of Soft Pastels. This four-part course [music] will be excellent for the beginner pastel artist who's wondering, "What do I do now?" And it will even benefit the experienced [music] pastel artist as well. Come discover the remarkable beauty, versatility, and pure [music] magic of soft pastels. This is part one called Why Soft Pastels? [music] a deeper look into this exquisite medium, its remarkable qualities, and just [music] what is it about soft pastels that makes us love them so much. I'd like to share with you a little of my story and how I fell in love with this beautiful medium almost by accident. I bet it's similar to some of yours. My kids were getting a little older and I was finding a little more time for myself and I decided I wanted to pursue painting or trying to learn how to paint. I loved art when I was a kid. I majored in graphic design, so I did have a little bit of artistic experience, but not a lot of painting classes. So, I didn't really know where to begin. I went to a craft store. I don't know what my kids were doing, but I decided to go visit. I can't remember if it was Michael's, um, Jo-Ann's, there's different craft stores, and I went to their painting department, and I was perusing the different mediums and supplies. Of course, I saw the acrylics and oils and watercolors, and my eye stopped at these little jewels of color, and I thought, "Wow, that looks practical." Uh, I was imagining not a lot of mixing. You're just holding these beautiful colors in your hand. I had no idea what I was doing. And this is back when YouTube wasn't even a thing. So, I bought me a set of pastels and just some paper. I didn't even know what kind of paper to buy. And I took it home and I started playing with it. And I also started trying to find online uh images of pastel paintings or anybody who was creating pastel artwork. And I was so disappointed. my work looked nothing like theirs. I felt like I had a little bit of skill with drawing. Um, but I wasn't getting the results that I was hoping for. Well, I was very disappointed and I almost gave up. But I started searching around and I found a site. Some of you, if you're as old as me, may remember, again, YouTube wasn't even really a thing. It was called Wet Canvas, which kind of goes against a dry medium, but they had a forum for soft pastel artists. And that's where I started just hunting for information and trying to learn more. And I'm going to try to make the story short. I made every mistake in the book. But I started recording myself. And that's where Monae Cafe started. I started sharing my successes and talking about my mistakes. And so that's why I think you're in the right place if you're here trying to learn about soft pastels. I've been learning about it as a self-taught artist for many, many years. So, I think you're going to learn a lot and it's going to be great to get started. Before we begin, just a quick note. This complete lesson is available to everyone, but my Patreon members receive all of the companion materials that go along with this course, [music] including the PDFs, exercises, helpful links, and additional resources. So, throughout the lesson, whenever you hear me say, I'll [music] attach that below or I'll share that with you. I'm referring to the extra materials available to my Patreon family. [music] If you'd like the complete course experience, I'd love to have you join us on Patreon. My teaching angle is to keep you guys from making the same mistakes I made and enjoy this process from the start. And fortunately, you don't have to be overwhelmed by all of these pastels because I learned through having to budget myself. There are definitely brands of soft pastels that are budget friendly and a great starter set for beginner pastel artist. I will also be sharing with you some of the mysteries about the hardness to softness scale. Yes, they're called soft pastels, but different brands have different hardness to softness degrees, and that's a question that beginner pastel artists have all the time. When do I need hard pastels or medium softness or very soft pastels? You'll also learn that fortunately, you don't have to have all of these pastels, and a limited palette often produces a painting that's more beautiful and painterly and harmonious. And I often will work just out of a little appetizer tray like this versus my whole workshop palette. So, that's exciting to know. So, you'll be learning about all of that and even more. Are you ready to get started? I'm going to change the camera angle. And here we go. Before sharing more about the many different brands, I want to share a bit about well the title of this course, the magic of soft pastels. They are indeed a magical medium. There's one obvious difference that they have from many of the other different painting mediums. Can you think of what that might be? Well, we've got oil, we've got acrylic. I'm just going to do the basics. Oil, acrylic, watercolor, gouache. Uh what is the obvious difference? Well, they are dry. And that is actually such an amazing advantage in so many different ways. So, let me share a few of those advantages. One is, well, they don't dry up. They're already dry. And I always like to say they sit there waiting patiently for you to begin your project again. That was one of the attractive things about pastels that I loved. My life was busy. I didn't know if I had time for all of the mixing and the extra products. So, they're just a really userfriendly medium. Another thing I love is what I'm doing right now. I get to hold the color in my hand. There's no need for brushes with this medium. And I think it's just beautiful. It's very organic that we are holding color and painting with it. Of course, another magical thing about soft pastels is pretty obvious from just looking at the colors and one of the reasons so many people fall in love with them, their brilliance in color. And they are the most brilliant in color of any medium over oils, acrylics, watercolor, and more. quality soft pastels are almost 100% color. Now, a pet peeve of mine is when people mistakenly call soft pastels, you may already know what I'm going to say, chalk. Have you ever heard that? Well, the difference is chalk is almost all binder and very little color. I had the blessing of seeing soft pastels being made, good quality soft pastels, and I saw how the product was nearly 100% color and very little binder. So, that can tell you a little bit about how I started my story. The pastels that I bought at a craft shop, I don't even have any of those to demonstrate anymore. Well, they were more like chalk. And so, I wasn't getting the color that many of the pastel artists I was admiring were getting. Now, [music] let's move on to talking about some of these different pastel brands. You'll learn about affordability, [music] quality, where these pastels fall on the hardness to softness scale, and more about the lightfast quality of different [music] soft pastel brands and why that's important. Here we go. And now I'd like to share some of the different brands of pastels. I'm going to be discussing the affordability factor, uh, which often has to do with the hardness to softness factor as well. And the brands that you see out here, uh, by the way, I'm not going to have an exhaustive u presentation of every brand of pastel, but many of these are, uh, pastels that I have used in my tutorials. And also, I wanted to share that I am never bragging when I am showing all of my pastels. Keep in mind, I get many of these from the pastel brands themselves to do product review videos. So, I'm very grateful for that. But I'm just like so many of you who have to budget when I want to buy them myself. [laughter] And uh don't we want them all though? So, I have purposely put out some brands first. I'm going to be doing more um that are the most affordable um on the table here and then I have purposely put a couple of sets down here that are not the most affordable, but these are some of the highest quality brands. And this is a Terry Lwig and Hre Rocher pastel from France. And I will show you the differences. I thought it would be nice to compare very affordable pastels with uh pretty pricey. This one particularly. The pastel surface that I'll be using to demonstrate the differences of many of these different brands is one that I get from Dakota Pastels. It's a great site for everything pastel. This is the Missouli art pad. Uh they come in different colors and uh with different covers. I love this one by the artist Climpmpt. Uh this is a beautiful painting by Climpmp. Uh I believe it's called Woman in Gold. There's a movie uh called that too. That's a really good movie. But I like this pad because it has and I we will be talking about different surfaces in part two of this course. But this is the pad I'm using right now to demonstrate the pastels. I like this pad because it has a spiral binding so I can lay it flat nice and flat. It has uh glassine pages like tracing paper between the sheets so that each page is protected and the pages are this is a painting I did from one of my tutorials. The pages are soft pastel professional soft pastel paper. I don't know exactly the brand. It feels a little bit like a Canson velvet, but this is a great pad. Um, uh, it's a little more pricey, but it's because it's a good quality pastel paper. But I wanted to share I have a couple of paintings in here already. Uh, but this next painting is one I wanted to share because it was done, I think, almost exclusively with one of these more affordable brands. I'm going to start with the more affordable brands first, demonstrating them. This is why that tracing paper is uh is important. [laughter] It really protects the pages. But this was completed with this set. Uh, one of the colors is missing here. This 48 set of Paul Rubin's pastels. Now, I'm going to be talking about those in just a minute, but I just wanted to let you know, yes, you can, as a beginner artist, create pastel paintings using more affordable brands of soft pastels. So, I'm going to be using this pad. Uh, that's the only reason I was showing this to do some of this demonstrating. I'd first like to do a comparison that I think will be quite illustrative of the differences between more affordable and often that means harder pastels versus um more expensive which often means softer pastels kind of as a side by side. So brands that are still considered soft pastels but they lean on the harder side are brands like these Prismacolor new pastels. I use these pastels all the time. I have used them to complete complete full pastel paintings. Uh I have a lot of examples on my YouTube channel uh where I've used these for I like to use them kind of in a sketchy way and uh they're a lot of fun, but they're they're quite affordable. I've had this set for I don't even know how many years. Uh there are advantages to uh harder brands of soft pastels in that they're more affordable. Like I said, they also are less dusty typically. Um, if I had a bunch of soft pastels in this tray, there would probably be dust all over the place. I just keep them loosely arranged like this. So, they're great for travel, less dust, lot of other advantages to these, but they don't give you quite the color application that you're going to get with the more expensive, softer pastels. I want to give you a visual to show you about that. Another brand of pastels that leans on the affordable and harder pastel side is one called Color Block. Color Block. Thank you, Color Block. They gifted me this set for a tutorial and it's 100 pastels. I don't recall the prices. I'm not going to even go over prices of many of these because they change and you may be watching this video a long time after I create it. But they are very affordable, good color application, not nearly like some of the real softies, but you're going to see me demonstrate these compared with some of the others. And also, I have a tutorial. I'm going to try to share links to the tutorials that are affiliated with some of these sets. >> And this is a lesson where I used only color block pastels to create this entire painting. Next quite affordable brand that I've been bragging on recently. This is one that a lot of pastel artists have been talking about over the past year or so is Lightwish pastels. And this set, it's a double-decker. And I did a tutorial using I believe exclusively, maybe exclusively, this set too. They I would say lean on the harder scale of soft pastels as well. another brand of affordable soft pastels that aren't the softest of soft uh but they are more soft I believe I get I'd love to get your opinions on this than lightwish and definitely softer than color block but are Paul Rubin's pastels I have quite a few lessons on my YouTube channel and Patreon page using exclusively Paul Rubin's pastels for paintings and they have various sizes of uh pastel sets available ailable, but they are also considered uh soft pastels, but I would say medium to hard in their uh degree of softness. To visually demonstrate the differences between some of the more affordable brands of soft pastels versus the softest and more expensive brands of pastels, I'm going to use two brands uh to give you a stark comparison. And uh this brand, I have a video, it's called the most expensive pastels in the world. And I think they are they're Henri Rcher pastels. They're from Paris, France. And uh there's a neat story behind this company. They are very expensive. They are so vibrant with color, though. Um are they the most vibrant with color? I don't know. There's some other really nice brands that I think are pretty darn close to these, but I did love them. And I bought this myself. This these were not gifted to me. So, yeah, they're pretty pricey, but I do love this little set. Another brand uh and this one looks very used because it is I often forget to talk about how much I love Terry Lwig pastels. I love the company, too. The people are fantastic. Um I have a lot of different sets of these. Often you'll see I break my pastels. That's a that's another lesson. This is a particular lesson that I have where I used only one set of Terry Lewig pastels. I believe it was the Richard McKinley set. Um, but I'm going to use the Terry Lewig pastels because I believe uh these pastels and the Hre Rcher pastels are some of the softest. Uh, there's others, but uh, I thought they would be good representatives of very soft pastels compared with more affordable pastels. And I'll talk about the differences as I demonstrate. So, let's do a little mark making. This markmaking is literally just to show you the application and the representation of color for these different brands. On the left side, I have the soft brands we discussed. On the right side, the more affordable brands. I tried to keep these I wish I could have them all the exact same color, but it was hard to find those colors in the set. So, I've just stayed within the same color family. And I'm going to start first with the Prismacolor new pastel. Uh, these were the long rectangular sticks. And I'm just going to do a little mark making next to each one. Um, as you can see, some pretty nice mark making there. Little bit of dust. Not too bad. Uh, the next one is the color block pastels. And it would be easier if I break these, but uh, for this demonstration, I'm just going to apply them. Look at that. It's definitely softer than the Prismacolor New Pastel. Now, I want to share here that soft doesn't necessarily mean better. There are times harder pastels uh can come in handy. I'll talk about that more in a minute, but right now it's more of application and color example I'm giving. All right, so the color block I forgot it's pretty soft for an affordable brand of pastels. Uh this next pastel is one of the lightwe pastels. I couldn't find um a pink that color. So, is this the light wish? Let's see here. No, this is the um Paul Rubin's pastel. Actually, I'm going to flip these because I think the Light Wish are maybe a little more affordable than the Paul Rubin. So, this is a Lightwish pastel. Oh, yeah. Nice application. And you kind of have to feel them in your hand to know uh kind of the difference um of how they're applying. I'm surprised that color block was actually a little little dustier than this one. And this is the Paul Rubin pastel. I couldn't find a pink um that bright. So again, I really uh Oh, yeah. It's so soft. It's quite surprising it's as soft as it is for the affordable price. So there are examples of some of the more affordable pastels. I think you can see though the differences between the Paul Rubins and the Prismacolor New Pastel um with degree of hardness to softness. So, I'm kind of sharing brands with you and about the softness to hardness at the same time because they all kind of go together. Now, let's go here to the Terry Lewig pastel. I wish I had a really bright pink to share with you, but uh I'm just going to go ahead and Oh my gosh, these are soft soft. And uh I'm going to blend these two after I'm done to show you uh a little bit about how they blend. And this is the Andre Rocher Pastel. And uh let me oops. Sometimes I uh I have it dirty on one side cuz I've worked with it. But just look at that color. Oh my gosh. But also notice how much of the pastel came off. That's because it's almost pure pigment. There's very little binder in uh both of these brands. But again, I wanted to do this side by side because I think you can see you can still get good application of color even with the more affordable brands. Something else I'd like to discuss with respect to the quality of different soft pastel brands and it is the lightfast quality. If you notice in the lower left there, what does light fast mean? Well, it refers to how well a pastel color resists fading when exposed to light over time. The more lightfast the pigment is, the longer your artwork will keep its true color and beauty. So therefore, the more expensive brands are often the professional brands. Their lightfast quality is going to be much higher than the more affordable, what are sometimes called student grades. Now, why is that important? Well, if you want your artwork to last a long time, even for personal uses, but definitely if you're going to be selling your work as a professional artist, I highly recommend using the more professional brands. Now, it is just fine to use more affordable brands to play, to practice, uh to have fun, and I use them all the time, and many of my paintings using more affordable brands have lasted for years with proper care. But again, my advice is to use the professional, higher quality brands for finished pieces you plan to keep or sell. Student grade pastels are perfect for practice studies and exploring the medium. And when in doubt, choose the best quality if you can afford it. your future self will be glad you did. Now, back to the drawing board, literally. In part two, I will be giving mark making techniques and blendability of pastels. But I wanted to cover since I have these pastels here right now, I wanted to show you a little bit about how they blend. There's often two ways that you can blend soft pastels. You can blend them by layering other pastels on top. That's one thing I did not get when I started painting with pastels. I was painting like a paint by number and I didn't realize pastels, part of the beauty of a pastel painting is the layering process of color on top of color. Gentle layering, um, might I add. Um, but another way you can blend is blending with a a little blending tool. I often like to use little pieces of shammy cloth or shamwa, [laughter] the kind you dry your cars with, um, to blend with if you're working on a surface that's not overly gritty. But this surface and this pad is uh rather smooth for a professional pastel surface. So I can use this little shammy cloth. And so I'm just going to go ahead and use this to show you uh on one side how they blend. All right, there's the the harder um Prismacolor new pastel. I'm just going to turn this and and uh blend the different colors. This is the color block. A little bit more color. Um, this is the light wish and here is the Paul Rubin. And that surprised me actually that so much of that color came off when I blended it like that. So now let's go over to the Terry Lwig. The color stayed a little richer with this uh brand. And then the Andre brcher. Oh yeah. Look at that color. So pretty. Do you see how that one stayed more rich in color than some of these that just came off? This is uh this is a good demonstration for me, too. I've never quite done it this way, but like I mentioned, part of the beauty with soft pastels is the ability to layer color on top of color. In part two of this course called making your mark. That's when we're going to have fun and do a lot of different mark making techniques. That's when I'm going to cover more about the layering with other pastels. You can see how I've done a little bit of that here. And there are multiple different ways to layer. And we can actually even liquefy. Yes, you can wet your pastels and turn them into paint. So, we'll be having fun with that in part two. All right, let's explore some of these professionalgrade soft pastel brands. These are some of the pastel brands that I would consider more middle to soft. Um what is it kind of like uh Goldilocks uh not too hard and not too soft. And uh let me talk about some of these different brands. This is a brand that I often forget to talk about and share how much I love. These are Diane Towns and Pastels. And she also makes these terries I think they're called. They're larger. I love these. They're so fun. Um, but Diane Towns and Pastels, she has so many different sets of different color families. This one is, is it called smoky blue, smoky grays, something like that. It's excellent for clouds, mountains, distant trees. Um, so I got to be careful not to go on tangents talking too much about these sets because I want to get through this. But I love Diane Towns and pastels, but I would say they're more of a a middle to soft. Uh, definitely not hard, but but uh not the softest softies either. Another brand that I love, these are Richardson handrolled pastels by Jack Richardson. I love this little landscape set. And also many, many different sets of Richardson pastels. I like the size of Richardson pastels, too. Notice that some pastels, uh, even the Diane Townsens are a little bit longer, but uh, these are just such a perfect size for mark making. And I find that they're not too hard and not too soft, and they're pretty affordable. Now, Jack Richardson also has another type of soft pastely cells that's even harder than this one. So, these are called the hand rolled pastels. This is called color wheel neutrals. Nice little set of neutrals. Um, we'll try to talk about a little bit more about color temperature uh in another lesson, but for now, we're just going to share about these different brands that I love. So, again, Richard Pastels, I would say they're kind of middle hardness to softness scale. Another brand that I love and I forget to talk about them. I use them all the time is Mount Vision pastels. Now, they come in a big full-size stick. These three pieces that you see here, uh the whole you get a a lot for your money with a Mount Vision because it's a long um nice stick and I break them uh once I used to break them into equal thirds. And then I heard another artist say, "Don't break your pastels into equal thirds. break one of them in a one-/ird and one of them in a twothird side. So then you have two different sizes uh from the s same color of pastel. So uh that was something I learned after I already broke these. And now another reason I break my pastels is uh once again to make the size more manageable. Like I said, this is a nice chunky pastel, but also sometimes I want to use some of these colors in a little pler setup when I paint on location, which I don't get to do as much as I wish. Um, then I can take one of these and still have the another color in my workshop palette. And of course, wouldn't you know it, I have a video on that. I'll share that video in this link as well. This is where I am filling a Hileman box. It's a wonderful soft pastel storage box where you can paint on location. So, I'll be sure to attach a link to that uh video in this mini course. So, this is a a miniourse with courses within the course. I love my Hileman box. All right, back to these soft pastel brands. And this is the thunderstorm gray set from Mount Vision pastels. I love this set. Once again, kind of like Diane Towns and the smoky blues or grays. Um, it has so many nice colors for clouds and I find I use these neutrals for so many different elements in my paintings. But what's great is Mount Vision pastels. They're right here where I'm close to in the Tampa, Florida area. And I've actually been to the the factory, the plant where they make the pastels, Carl, he's such a nice guy, the owner. And I did a video, of course, I do a video on everything of how they make soft pastels. Of course, I'll share that video link in this course description as well. But here I am at the factory. Now, keep in mind these are much older videos, thus a much younger me, and the film quality isn't as good cuz I've improved my camera, audio, everything. But this is an example of what I was mentioning before, how soft pastels are almost 100% pure pigment. He's mixing a new color here. Those powdery things are the colors that he's mixing. And the liquid he's adding is called methylolate. I think that's how you say it, with a little bit of water. So hopefully this is a nice visual for you to witness the fact that yes indeed soft pastels, at least the quality brands, have a high percentage of pigment to binder. Carl also continued the tour and showed us how he mixes the pastels, how he rolls them out, and how he dries them in the sun. He also shared with us that at that time he had just made a new set of pastels that are iridescent. And of course, I couldn't resist. What do you do when you're at a pastel manufacturer? You got to spend some money. And now, let's start making some marks with these middle to soft pastel brands. Here are the three brands. I have the Diane Towns in here. And you can see that's a nice size uh stick as well. And I have the Richardson hand rolled and I have the Mount Vision. And I purposely again tried to choose colors of the same family, but I noticed there's some nice neutrals in this. I wanted to place neutrals down because I like to share that while we're attracted obviously to all of the beautiful vibrant, punchy, highsaturated colors, neutral colors are so important in your paintings. So, let's uh take a look at some of those. Again, the Diane Towns in here. Oh, that's nice. But I can already tell it's not as soft as uh say that um Terry Lewig pastel I applied. Um, and this one is the Richardson hand rolled. Ooh, this one is definitely softer than the Diane Townsen. But once again, don't be distracted or think that soft equals always what you want to use. I have so many times where these Diane Townsens, the consistency of them works great for what I'm working on. And here is the Mount Vision pastel. And again, I can feel as I'm applying this. Uh, and they they all have kind of a different feel. This one, the application of color is fantastic, but when I applied it, it felt a little not as soft as some of these. A little bit harder, but the color application is just fantastic. So, let's just blend these real quick. All right. I needed to get a clean shammy cloth. I was contaminating colors a little bit. Little blending here. This is the Richardson hand rolled. Now, you can see here that quite a bit of the Diane Townsen color came off, but the hand rolled uh Jack Richardson pastel uh is nice and smooth. And now, let's go to the Mount Vision. Oh, yeah. Another nice uh nice smooth blending. The next grouping of different brands is going to be pastels that I consider leaning a little bit more to the softer end of the scale. And I've I've purposely arranged it to where what I believe are getting softer as you move to the left. The first one here, I often forget to talk about Jay Luda pastels. I love them. And I even have a set that I curated with Jay Luda pastels. Fantastic company. They're based out of Romania. I believe they still have free shipping. Um, but this is my pretty and purple set. I noticed a lot of sets of pastels are missing purples. So, I wanted to uh have a set that had a variety of purples um with color temperatures from uh cooler purples to warmer purples and even neutrals uh and saturated colors. Um so, Jay Luda pastels are, I would consider, uh quite soft, not as soft as the ones I'm going to get to on the end there, but uh they have such beautiful colors, too. And uh again, just a great company and a beautiful application. So I'll I'll demonstrate one of those as well. And next is another company that I love. They are based out of Russia. It's Earthberry Pastels. I have so many videos where I've demonstrated their products. And I have uh once again curated a set through Earthberry Pastel. This is my curated set called Fields of Sunshine. As of the making of this video, it is back available again. It keeps selling out. Thank you guys. Um, but this this is not it. But uh but anyway, I I love Earthberry pastels and I have quite a few of their sets and they are I would consider pretty soft. Um another set these are my uh my overseas sets of pastels. These are from Spain Mammoot Pastels. I love Mammoot pastels. The owner of the company is fantastic. I I love the box that they come into and I would consider them quite soft. Next is Unison Pastels. Oh, these are so buttery soft and wonderful. I love that Unison Pastels also has so many different sets to choose from. And uh this is a nice little set. I think I've done a full video using just this set before. Beautiful greens and reds. It'd be great for a poppy field. And uh this other little set, Lucy Pitway, I believe, is the artist name who created this little set. U now that leads me to a difference in many pastel brands that some offer and some don't. uh is full sticks versus half sticks. Now, this was a full stick set. This is where you can see before I broke them, the actual full size, like that red one, the darker red one right there. That's a full size. And many companies like Unison offer half stick sets. And I always say whenever possible, buy half sticks. You're getting double the color for your money. Plus, I like the smaller sizes anyway. So, this is a unison half stick set. It's called their starter halfstick 30 set. Um, and another set that once you feel like, yes, I love this. I want to keep this up. I highly recommend their 120 half stick set. I have some of my colors out of place here and missing. Um, but this is a beautiful set with so many different varieties of colors and values, neutralities versus saturated. And I love the arrangement. It makes it very easy to find color families. Unison pastels are soft and buttery. The application is wonderful. Um, so you'll be seeing that in just a second. Uh, but the next set that I love, I talk about all the time is Selier Pastels. Let me move them up here out of the way. And, uh, this is their little 40 half stick set. Yes, Selier Pastels offers half sticks. I I believe uh from the ones I have up here, the only companies that offer half sticks are Senellier, another French company, and Unison. Mimmoot, I don't I'm pretty sure Mimmoot, Earthberry, and Juda do not offer half stick sets. So, whenever you can get half sticks, but this little 40 set, I have uh created full tutorials using just this set alone. I have a quite a few of them on my YouTube channel. And just like with uh Unison pastels, Sellier offers a 120 half stick set. So many of you have purchased this set. Every so often on Amazon, they have a great sale on this. Uh but it is also arranged very nicely. And these are so soft. The softness of Sellier is just, you know, really way up there. Now, I'm not going to try to color match with these. I just picked what I thought were some pretty colors. And I'm going to start with the J Luda pastel. Love this purple. It is from my pretty and purple set. So, let's make some some marks. Oh my gosh, isn't that color so beautiful? It's kind of like a magenta purple. It's color 30 L, just in case you're wondering. And that is quite convenient that some companies uh well may maybe only uh Jay Luda uh has their color numbers kind of embossed or engraved in the actual stick. Now, that is only as good as uh the color is fresh or the stick is fresh. Once you use it a lot, that will disappear. But man, that is soft and wonderful. And actually, I have these kind of flip-flopped. I wanted to do them in order of what I think is the uh the softest. So, let's see here. That's the Selier. All right, here we go. Now, we got it right. This is Earthberry. I love their purples in their set as well. And I love the shape of Earthberry pastels. It's a a rectangle like Terry Lewig pastels, but Terry Lewig is uniform in its depth all the way around. And these are a little more flat. It it really makes for nice mark making. And the edge of these makes really nice marks um for grasses and anything wispy like that. Um by the way, I said uh surfaces was part two of this course. Actually, it's part three. The next part to this course is mark making. That's what made me think of that. I'm going to share with you many of the different brands, their mark making ability, and just how to get uh uh creative mark making with pastels. All right, you ready to see this? Here we go. The Earth Berry pastels. Oh my goodness, look at that rich, gorgeous purple. So beautiful. And this one is the Mimmoot pastel. And I just love this color. Look at that. Just beautiful. So, let's Oh my goodness, it's so soft. [laughter] So, I I feel like I've I've actually um got this right so far from just how they feel. They definitely feel in the correct order from hardness to softness. This is a unison. I love this beautiful uh vibrant yellow green. And just as I suspected, this is so Look at that application. So soft. I wish you could feel these like I am when I'm applying them. And like I said, don't get frustrated that you can't get them all right away. Get what you can. play with them because you definitely can get great results with uh more affordable brands. Now, this is getting dirty with my fingers, but this is the Sellier, which I think is one of the softest brands. Let's see. Oh [clears throat] my gosh, [gasps] that is just notice too, not that you always want it to uh be so solid of an application. I'll try to zoom in on this after I speak, but uh it creates such a solid application. Notice how much of the paper is showing through. um gradually getting less of the paper showing through the softer the pastel gets. And that's a perfect example and reason why you often can't get a lot of layering on the softest pastels because they've already filled up so much tooth of the paper. So, I definitely think I got these in order from hardness to softness correctly. And don't forget at the very beginning of this, I already demonstrated the Terry Lewig pastels. Love, love, love those pastels. I I wish I'd demonstrated them a little more. And the Enre rcher pastels, um they're I would say not a lot of people are getting those because of the price, but they really are beautiful. But still, I'd say some of the softest, most affordable is Selier pastels, and they do come in half sticks. So, when you're ready to bump it up and [snorts] uh get more pastels that are perhaps uh I I don't always want to say a better quality, but have more uh b color to binder ratio and are softer. uh give the Sellier Pastel half sticks a try and maybe the Unison half sticks a try. Um but again, I still love these brands. You can't get them in half sticks, but they're still um really top-of-the-line pastels and they have beautiful color selections. Another thing I wanted to share about some of the different pastel brands is that some of them offer a color chart. Earthberry has one of the greatest color chart presentations I've ever seen. Uh they're just such a great company. a family. It's a family business. Uh the mother actually uh she was a chemist, I believe, if I have that story correct, and she kind of invented her own way of making soft pastels. The colors are gorgeous, but they are so fun. And these color charts are again the most creative. They have each color number is represented and they they're consistent with how they're laid out in the box. So, uh you have the color number along with one of the elements. Remember how I said these colors come from the earth? Where do these colors come from? You know, well, God created these colors and they're actually an earthn material that makes it and they have a little representation of that. So, you have Mine are dirty. I shouldn't have laid them down on the set, but you have the option to fill these colors out. Um, I often don't do that, but some of these sets you can't reorder individual sticks anyway. Um, so that's up to you if you want to go ahead and fill it out. Some people are really, you know, um, love getting into their color charts and keep a little notebook um, with their different color charts. Um, so you can refer to those, but if you can't order the other individual sticks anyway, you know, use that to your own um, desire. Another thing I wanted to share is I love free resources and Dakota Pastels has the it's called the pastel lineup, but it's a graphic that shows I'll I'll show it in this video. um the hardness to softness scale. You can get a quick idea of the different brands and where they fall from the hardest to the softest. It's a really helpful resource. Oh, I hope you've learned so much already. And the last part of this course, which is part one, is called the power of a limited palette. [music] Now, instead of reinventing the wheel and redoing lessons that I already have for this section, I'm going to share with you videos that I've already created using a very limited selection [music] of pastel colors and even some that are just using one set of pastels. This is footage from a winter road series that I did where I created four paintings of a beautiful winter road scene. And each one was using a different set of soft pastels. And I have many of these lessons on my YouTube channel. If you're watching this publicly, you can find them just by the titles. But my Patreon version of these lessons typically has real time lots more extra content, reference images, and more. >> [music] >> And if you are part of my Patreon family watching this part one of this lesson, you will receive the printable [music] PDF, links to the products and videos mentioned in this lesson and even more. Oh my goodness, that was a lot of information for part one. Are you guys excited for part two? I know I am. And I pray this was [music] a blessing for you. I would love to hear your feedback in the comments. And I am excited as we continue on this journey called the [music] magic of soft pastels. God bless and happy painting. >> [music]