Preparing Painting Surface for Pastel Painting

Video Transcript

"Okay. Let's say that we've got a nice white ground, and we could work directly on the white water color paper. This happens to be an arches kind of paper. One of the things about any of the grounds that you use, whatever, whatever ground, you should use some ground that is absolutely PH-neutral, 100% rag. You don't want to have any acid in this because acid can shift the color of the pastels, as well as create brittleness in the paper itself and be, and self destruct your painting. So what we're, we're going to put a coating of watercolor acrylic and sand mix on this to create a colored surface on which to start. So I've got some water here, and I've got some sand. And I've already put sand in, in my jar, enough to get going, and I'm going to mix it with a red-toned acrylic, thinned a whole lot. I'm not going to add a lot of acrylic here, I just want to add enough to get some color. And then with a big brush I'm going to mix it all up so that it's a very thin, and I'm going to try and pick up enough of the sand. Now you can also use pumice which is a little finer. And I'm going to apply it liberally across this whole surface. And you can see the sand, the little speckles of sand all over. That sand is going to help this stuff stick real well. The pastel to stick real well to this colored ground. And I don't care if the brush strokes show because we're going to cover 99% of it up anyway. I just want to make sure I get a nice even coating of the sand so that it's all over the place. And because this is acrylic it'll dry very rapidly. So let's let that dry. I'll probably give it a second coat so that I have a second coat of sand, and so that the sand is more evenly distributed, but that's how we do our ground."