I'm Using Neocolor II to paint outside in the Snow

I keep forgetting how brilliant these water-soluble pastels are. They're made by Caran d'Ache, which is a Swiss company, and they call these the Swiss Army Knife of water-soluble pastels. Sounds like a good thing to take on an adventure. I think I'll take them up here into the mountains and do some painting on my bike. What could go wrong? Oh, by the way, pencil in French is crayon. So today, we'll be painting with crayons. The first thing I need to do is get to the site where I'll be painting. I'll be taking my fat tire electric bike. Something doesn't seem quite right, though. Oh, my tire's flat, mostly. That's going to cut the trip short. That's okay, there are plenty of good spots up here. Let's get set up. As I said in the introduction, I'll be painting with these Neocolor 2 pastels. I'll also be painting on this Ampersand clay board. It's kind of an unusual surface for painting, but I like to try new things and experiment. I painted this pet portrait once on clay board using these pastels, and I really liked the result. So I'm going to give it another shot, because I bought three in a pack. I'm using a blue crayon to sketch this out and get the composition right. I used a light blue for the sky, and then a Prussian blue for the trees and the lower mountains. I just want to get a basic composition, and when I scribble here, it's going to blend out with the water just fine. When I start to use the water, I want to make sure I keep the white of the snow-topped mountains. I do a pretty good job of it, but I messed up a little bit. The great thing about this clay board is I can get rid of some of the color after it's put on. But first, I want to put a little bit more blue into that sky. It's so beautiful out, and I really want to darken up that sky. One thing that happens, though, is when it dries out, it gets lighter and lighter. But this is a good thing to keep building layers on. This clay board doesn't soak up the colors too much, so you really have to kind of work at it. In the end, though, I got too much water on this board, and it's not soaking in at all. So I'm going to try to air-dry it. We'll see how that goes. It didn't really work at all. It just got too wet. But I'll fix it up later. Now I need to get some color onto these mountains. This first bit is yellow ochre, and I'll put that down in the trees as well. And then I'll go back and forth between wetting and drying. If it's not obvious, I had this on double speed just to get through this painting. Here I'm using some more Prussian blue and some violet to add some spice to the color. Sometimes I can use some brush strokes to add some textures to make representation of those trees in the background. Now that it looks like the sky has dried up a little bit, I'm going to add some blue back in to see if I can get it back to normal. And I used a drier brush with very little water to help blend those strokes that the pastel made. It seems to be working good this time. For me, learning how to paint has been a lot of trial and error, but it's been fun, especially when you mix in going outdoors. It's just beautiful out here, and it's a fun, fun hobby. One of the reasons I was surprised that my tire was flat on my bike is because yesterday I rode up in this area with my son, and it was so beautiful, I just knew I had to come back up and do some painting. And this experience didn't disappoint. I'm starting to really like how this is turning out. I still have a ways to go, but I like where it's heading. If you've watched any of my other videos, you know how much I like an electric eraser. And this time, that's no exception. I need to get back some of that white snow on the mountains, and I used it on this clay board really well. It's designed to be scratched with different instruments, and this eraser is quite soft, but it does a great job of taking off the paint. Now that I have that mountain about how I want it, I need to start working on this middle ground and these aspen trees. I'm using a warmer color here to indicate that I'm closer to the viewer. Cooler colors tend to recede, and warmer colors like reds tend to come forward. I'm not too worried about details here, because the brush is going to blend it all together. Some of the brushwork will actually show some of the whites of those tree branches, which is a nice happy accident, as Bob Ross would say. You would think that snow is always white, but it actually reflects the things around it, especially the sky. So I'm adding some blue here to help bring out the contours of the land that it's sitting on. Speaking of happy accidents, I had an unfortunate accident at this point of the video. Some of the snow I was standing on gave way and I sank to my knees. When I got up and tried to move the tripod that I was painting on, everything fell over and all my pastels fell on the ground. It was a mess. Since they're water-soluble and snow is water, they started to bleed. I decided to just clean up and get out of town. After I got home and dried things out, I was excited to finish the painting off. There's no rule that says you have to paint it all outside. I like painting inside, and it helps me remember the experience. So I painted on this for the rest of the week, and it was fun to remember the experience. I'm not even mad that everything tipped over. I obviously had plenty of video references of the places I paint, so I used this one primarily. But I took some artistic liberties on that tree on the foreground on the right. Red is a complementary color to green, so I like to use it as a base layer on these trees. I also like to use some violet for the shadow areas. It gives some interesting mess to the texture of the tree. Those trees are in bright sun, so this also warms them up. Here you can see that I got a little crazy, and so I needed to lift off some of the paint with a dry brush, but as you can see, it came right off. I was able to carve out the places that I didn't want. As I wet this, I just make sure I dab so I leave some of the strokes of the pencil, but also have it be smooth. This green is going to go over top, and I don't want to blend it completely because I want some of that red to peek through, and some of the cool purples to peek through. So this is just kind of the way I work. I paint impressionistically, and I really like the looseness of this painting. I've enjoyed seeing how to use these Neocolor pastels. They work great dry, as you can see here, and they work great wet, and they blend really well. I can put in these branches, I can leave this dry as I intend to, and I really like the versatility on this clay board. One final trick that I'll show you is the ability to, as you saw before, use this eraser, and I'm going to carve in the light side of these trees as I go back and forth and just get some loose feeling of branches. It's really fun to do that. Then I go back in and fill in the dark areas, and again, I'm not going to wet this. I'm just going to keep carving things out and filling in darks and lights. If you have any questions or tell me how you use Neocolors, place them in the comments. I'd love to hear it. Thanks for watching, and be sure to check out some of my other videos here and see the other experiments I've been up to. Thanks for watching.