New easel + how I sharpen oil pastels || oil pastel painting process

Hi everyone! Medin has kindly sent me this easel to try and I'm gonna be using it to paint today's oil pastel painting. They've also shared a link with a discount in case you want to take a look. The link is in the description box. Just know that it's not an affiliate link and that I do not make any money if you purchase it. I know that they have an affiliate program but this is the first product of them that I ever had or tried and it wouldn't feel very honest of me to participate in it. I really don't have anything bad to say about the easel. I actually think it's very good. It has the perfect size for what I tend to paint. It's lightweight but sturdy and I appreciate the fact that once I'm done painting I can fold it back and store it anywhere because it takes very little space. So yeah, that's my short review. Many of you have asked how I sharpen my oil pastels and this is how I do it. Excuse the out of focus not doing a very good job but despite the camera going crazy I think that you can see what I'm doing. I only do this with Neopastel and Mungyo. I don't feel the need to do it with an LES because they are very soft and I can get a point on them just by rotating them on a scrap piece of paper or on a paper towel. I've been thinking about this for a while and I'm considering melting together a few of Sennelier oil sticks and then making my own shades. I especially want a very pale yellow like this Neopastel that I'm using in this painting for all the highlights and maybe some other colors but especially a very pale yellow. So I may try it and see how it goes. I don't know how I would do it yet but I will come up with something. Also a dark indigo would be nice like the color of the background where I have to mix indigo and black and maybe some light purples, light everything, I think pastel shades the most. If I try I think I would record it. To mix indigo and black to make this dark blue I use the paper stamp a lot. I feel it helps creating a very uniform color but it also makes more texture so I had to smooth everything out with my fingers afterwards. I prefer to use my fingers overall but my skin is a little bit patchy at the moment from so much scrubbing and blending so yeah for large areas like this I think it's better to use it but I didn't for the skin just because I have to smooth it out anyway. Today's video is a bit shorter because I didn't do a really good job at lighting my space so there is this very annoying cast shadow in many of the frames and I have to remove the ones that look the worst. Yeah they didn't look very pretty so... But I still try to show most of the process. I'm sorry about that and it's quite a shame I think because I'm pretty pleased with how the painting turned out but yeah there's nothing I can do now so I will try to do better next time. I hope you still liked it though and thank you for all the lovely comments that you leave. They are so nice to read. I really appreciate them so thank you very much. And that's it. I hope you have a nice day and see you soon. Bye bye! you