Oil pastel paintings are (for me, for now) faster than watercolours, so are the ideal…
Candle In Oil Pastel
I’m not in the mood at the moment to take my time and come up with perfect paintings. I’m feeling loose and energetic and wanting to rattle off some fast, energetic works instead. Today, I tried to follow an exercise from the Bill Buchman book, and for starting material I used the same pose from Candle as yesterday.
I followed bill’s instructions pretty well at first. I put down the drawing without putting a grid on the paper, although I admit I worked from a photo with a grid to help me put my first marks in the right place. I first drew the figure with a tiny spare chunk of yellow oil pastel, then the same with red, then blue. In all three cases I would twist the chunk in my fingers to vary line thickness.
What I ended up with wasn’t too bad and is where I should have stopped, but I disobeyed instructions and carried on. First I tried some finger smoothing to harden some of the edges. Then I used white oil pastel to smooth out some colours in highlighted areas. Then I did loads more finger smoothing. I thought the painting was missing a bit of yellow, so added more of this at the end and tried to smooth it in.
The final result was just a bit bleh. If there’s anything encouraging about this it’s the gestural shape to the bottom but otherwise it’s like something that’s been rushed with little or no care. Which it was. But at least I can say that I completed one of Bill’s exercises, even if I carried on working and ruined it. To be fair, Bill does say in his book is that knowing when to stop is the difficult bit.
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