QUICK & EASY Faber Castell Gelatos TRICK for STUNNING Mixed Media Portraits!

Maggie and I are here today on my studio floor to talk to you about

gelatos

. Well,

gelatos

are some of my favorite tools for making

mixed

media

work, so I wanted to tell you why I use them so much and what I use them for. I feel like every

mixed

media

artist has their own way of using gelatos so today I just want to show you my way and I really only use them one way which may seem a little silly and uncreative but they are really good. for this specific thing they do and I'm not sorry it's just the way I use them and I love them and they're a great tool for this so let's back up a second who I am my name is Karen Campbell I'm a mixed media artist I post a lots of art books and I love mixed media and I love creating tutorials on my mixed media YouTube channel.

I also have a drawing channel here in case you like to draw too, what do I do? I like to make, I like to make mixed media art pieces that have a different foreground, so I like to make a background and then I like to stick something on top of it that's very different, whether it's a dog or a girl or a girl or a girl. and a cat, okay, so that's my style, so I like to make amazing backgrounds. The way I typically see artists using gelatos is for background work. It's great to use them.

Many people like to put them through templates. They print very well. If they're water soluble, I'll get to all of their properties in a second, um, but a lot of times they're used with baby wipes and like mash through stencils and a lot of that is just background work, uh, which is Awesome. , the way I like to use them is only for one thing, like I said, and that's just to accentuate the shading and tones in my acrylic pieces or they go on top of my acrylic, so I'll do a demo in two seconds. I just wanted to tell you what everyone normally does and then what I do, but let's also get back to what ice cream is.

The ice cream is made by Faber Castell, which is a producer of many fine art products. I wouldn't consider the ice cream to be excellent. artistic product, however, I would put it more in the craft category, they claim it is lightfast. I know a lot of artists who say no, so I don't think it's an artistic product. Oh, weird things about hair. A small tube of lipstick or lipstick has a very blunt tip, as you can see, and comes in an incredible variety of colors. I will also say that they have a metallic line and the way the metallic line works the way I use gelatos, it doesn't work, so if you are going to use and follow me on my projects, don't use the metallic versions, use the flat matte versions the normal kind, like the normal ones, is fine and they are made of a very creamy water soluble material, which means that if you put it on a piece of paper and add water to it, it will melt.

There are now many other products on the market that act like gelatos. There is a marabou art crayon which is one that I like to use um you can find relief crayons there are many brands there are many manufacturers they all work very similarly some have better light fastness than others I think the ones from marabou are, but what I like about the gelatos in particular are They're not as water soluble as some of these other brands and the way I like to use them, which is on acrylics again, I'll show you in a second um and then I use a coat of sealer on top to blend them out. perfectly, so not too much, we don't have Mcgee smeared, which is what happens when I use my marabou art crayons.

The relief crayons aren't super fast so I don't even use them anymore, but the gelatos are perfect for blending. product for me and I love the level of water solubility that they have so those are all the reasons why I think they are very special and now I want to show you exactly the ways I use them I think they are amazing for adding shading to skin tone and I think they're amazing for adding any shading on whatever object you're making for your mixed media project, so right before I'm done, I demo real art stuff, like you.

I can see here that these are great examples for this piece. I just use a shade of yours to select the colors that are included in the shade of paint that you're using, like a little shade darker, that's all you need and then you can add it, blend it with your finger, go over it with your sealer. Magical shading takes two seconds and it looks great and I personally like mixed media projects that are

quick

and fun and get instant hits and those gelatos let me I get instant hits, my faces look so good that I don't need to know how to mix my paints, although I do, I don't even need to bother with it and it's so

easy

and fun, so here's another example from this girl. she is a very very pale color and just by using gelatos on her cheeks we can use a different shade under here, now there is also a little bit of pencil that goes on the sealing layer which is also part of my process and by this way, if you want to know what this big process is that I keep referring to, it's called my mixed media hamburger system, you can Google it and you'll see my whole video series pop up on that, but I'll put the link there as well. the description box for you if you want to see my entire video series, but the gelatos are the bomb and they are very

easy

and

quick

to apply on your acrylics to do shading, it is like you are making a great investment for your money and it is very easy . so let me do a little bit more of a demo in person so you can see what I'm talking about. um yeah, and I hope this video really helps you understand why gelatos and a cool, maybe new, way to use them that's more than just making. fun background stuff hope this helps okay let's get to the demo right maggie maggie are you ready maggie is really tired because I walked her well so the first thing I'm going to do is prepare some faces for you because I want to show you exactly how I use gelatos to create my skin tone, so I thought, well, what the heck?

While we're at it, we might as well make some little samples of good acrylic paint and gelato combinations. This is just to show you my exact process and also at the same time we are going to take a color swatch so I have four girls with different skin tones so the first one is like a very light one I think it's Santa's flesh . I like to use craft paints for the skin tones because it just comes out of the tube as the perfect skin tone and then I put my gelatos on top and voila, here are four shades for you, depending on where on the scale you like to go. hang out with your own girl drawings and I only have the classic gelato set, I wish there was one more brown in their set.

I feel like there's a big jump between the chocolate, which is like a super dark brown, and the next, um, but still, that being said, usually the paint color itself can be filled out. some of the white space in terms of what colors you might need when and where so it actually all works out fine sorry these faces are like one second faces so don't laugh too much at mine I'm just trying to scribble something I wasn't even going to draw anything here, but I thought, well, if we're going to put shading, I could at least show you real quick where I would put the shading, but I mean.

These are like split second faces so don't laugh at me I can draw I swear so these are funny just to get us started on something so yeah four things about this poor girl you can't even see. black on top of his skin is very dark um and I really have a hard time filming and also photographing um dark skin which at this level is very hard to see so I hope you can see what's happening in person It looks great but for some reason reason it doesn't photograph very well, so I apologize for that, but we have our four daughters, they all have different beautiful skin tones and we're going to go one by one.

I'm also going to write them down so you can take notes, it's very helpful, this is like the classic white girl and the first shade is peach, it's really the skin tone itself, the second one is guava, it's like that's the shade that I'm putting. Right now it's perfect if you're too afraid to shade and you want to start very slowly, you can use guava and then melon is the third shade, so with every face and every skin tone that I'm doing I always like it. to have three shades of gelatos and this is like my preferred philosophy or how to shade anything, it could be like a lamp, I like to have it, excuse me, I like to have different shades and values ​​for whatever it is.

I'm shading so it creates more drama and dimension and reads better everywhere, so I'm just adding a little bit of white. That said, I'm used to it. I always get carried away with my white paint pens but you can also use white ice cream and I end up going back and making white ice cream too and that's a great way to stand out so white ice cream is a must in your arsenal because you can put it on the cheeks for a while. highlighter and produces a soft glow when you blend it with your finger, so don't forget the white.

In this white girl we have peach, guava and melon, and if you put them all together on a nice Caucasian skin tone, it shows. Awesome, so I'm literally writing all of this down for you, so if you want to take notes and write it down with me, it's great to have in your resource library when you like to make a lot of mixed media girls. because I know I make it really fun, so the next girl has an ivory based skin tone, um, it's more yellow than pink, which is the last one, um, there's this caramel color, that's my initial paint color . but you can caramel is an ice cream color which is the same shade of yellow so if you are starting with a lighter shade like a base still yellow but a little bit lighter than this ivory then you can do your first shading with caramel and then do the butter, the caramel, that's what you're seeing me, lay down right now and then the chocolate is last and there's a big jump between the caramel and the chocolate, um, so you can walk slowly, but you can actually do this . shadow and you're okay um but those would be the three that I would use so again I tried to match them with words with my fingers so you can see how one really grades into the next really well and I go back and add the chocolate um afterwards because that's the next shade in the line, if you wanted to add more drama and go a step further, you would do chocolate as the third and there I am using the white and again it makes a very nice highlighted bright section, okay, so for the third face this it's like, um, this is probably the darkest I would paint as a base because again it gets really hard to see, so this is what I'm doing with the chocolate and again if you can only choose one shade to shade.

I would just do the chocolate and be done with it, but you can have a lot of fun with a skin tone because it's so dark that you can experiment with tangerine, caramel, or mango colors. and all of those I added them all together and really especially with the tangerine it's like orange, it really created a very beautiful mix of colors that really combined very well now the light color, you see, I just played placed everywhere there is caramel, which is a kind of base color of this skin chain from the previous girl, so you could use it for highlights instead of jumping to white on the dark skinned girls.

I recommend just using a lighter shade of gelato, as white looks better. a little bit, sometimes it's too much, so using just a light shade produces that nice kind of natural glow as much as you can have a natural glow like a mixed media girl, but you know what I mean, more realistic, I guess I could say like this. I'm there, I'm putting chocolate because the background caramel is next, then mango, tangerine and caramel, although I actually labeled them as tangerine and mango they are backwards, so the tangerine that I add later is the orange because I love it.

You can see it on his neck and you can see the places where I put it next to his eyes and I think it's really so I added it right there. I think it's a really great addition to that, like that skin tone line, so yeah, don't look down on orange, it's definitely something you could consider and caramel is the lightest, like I just said before, so there's the most variation for that one again. I apologize, this one is a little hard to watch, but bear with me. It's definitely a great and useful value scale, it's kind of like what we just did, except we're going to add black to this since the base is very dark again if I just chose one dark shade to do everything.

The shading I would choose black because it's next on the value scale, but what's really fun when you start with a deep dark bass is that you can then increase the values ​​with your lighter colors and the gelatos work great too. In this sense, instead of just doing black and being done, now you can introduce more highlights and dimensions, so I'm using caramel and caramel to highlight these highlights and again there's the tangerine, which is delicious, delicious, but if you can highlight the places of the face that you would normally highlight, then those areThe places that stick out like your chin, your nose, your cheeks, and your eyelids all get this beautiful caramel shade and look how it all looks. how the dimension starts to really form on your face so it's kind of magical what happens on these dark skinned girls when you start using um the highlights and the shadows um so yeah it's cool it's cool I hope you try it and do it, you know, if you're like me and you did it with white girls for 10 years. years changing it is really interesting to watch and it's fun to do different characters that aren't all the same all the time.

I just finished a 15-week series on my YouTube channel of Karen Campbell drawings, drawing women from around the world and us. I did all the different skin colors, it was super fun and I learned a lot, my students did amazing and by the way, I just published a book about it that came out yesterday while I'm filming this, so yeah, you can go check that out, It's so capricious. It's called How to Draw Whimsical Women of the World and I was able to highlight the work of 54 of my students, so it was pretty amazing. Some of you are probably watching this video right now.

I'm so proud of all of you and I'm just so grateful to have so many amazing people drawing with me every week, it was pretty amazing, so for the value scale skin tone chart here for this dark skinned girl, we'll start at the bottom with black and then the next deeper tone is chocolate and then I added the tangerine, that orange because I love it. The caramel is that yellow ocher color that you see and then the caramel is the lightest one on top and again you can see the whole kit and caboodle here now before I leave you with this video, I'm not quite done because this one isn't It's my entire process, my entire process if this were real, not just a values ​​scale exercise that I'm showing you right now. but if this was a real mixed media project what I was doing, I would like to show you what I would do next to really show you the real application, the real way that I use this because apple ice cream showed up like There's a lot in my group of Facebook and just online and people a lot of times have questions about how to use it and again I added the chocolate in there to that small scale of value and like I said a lot of people use them just to make backgrounds and there's a lot more you can do with them, so I'm going to show you a clip of a lesson that's from my mixed media magic book, it's the video lesson that accompanies one of the projects there and I'm going to show you exactly the next step and what kind of links this whole process has. , so I just wanted to show you a project so you can see exactly how it all comes together, so this is again the dragon girl and dragonfly girl project. from my mixed media magic book and as you can see, I have that same kind of yellow, just a very Caucasian color, honestly, and then I'm going to use those same three shades that I showed you on my first Caucasian girl and me.

I'm just layering them in order to make the color lighter, like you remember it being peach, then I do the cheeks first with guava lightly and then when I want to give it more oomph, I'll use the melon. Now this was before I realized that relief crayons are not lightfast at all, although I have to say that because I also shaded with pens on top afterwards, the shading doesn't diminish in any way and I did this project in 2017, so it's been good. This distress color um by the distress crayons is also a great skin tone so I used to mix and match them quite a bit so if you have some amazing ones and it's not like they faded like I said but I also used another product afterwards to seal everything, so keep that in mind.

I don't know if this might have faded underneath, but since my pen shading is still on top, okay, you know what I'm saying, so more products are available. In addition to the ones you're seeing, which appear later anyway, I'm using the exact same process, though, for shading, so I'm putting it all over the place, I'm using my finger to blend it all together and then I'm using the white and I could have used white gelato here again, the bridge of the nose, the chin, the cheeks just to create a really beautiful soft glow, then I go in and finish painting her eyes and her lips and then when I have things, that's the melon that nice dark red, then I take mod podge and I run it all over and that's my entire process pretty much from start to finish in terms of how I use the gelatos after that layer of mod podge dries, as you can see, it's actually just Come in with my pens and finish all the details and shade some more with my pens.

I'm going to link right here to a playlist on your screen. You can actually right click on it if you're on your phone or computer and it'll take you to my whole series of hamburger layering systems and you'll be able to see the whole process from start to finish and learn about all the different things, but I hope you this video has been super informative for you about ice cream again if you want to learn more about the whole system just check the link here for you