And so straight on to the right eye. The same techniques as I used for…
Artistic Left Eye
It seems the best way to learn how to use oil pastels is to watch videos on YouTube. Today I watched Scrooge The Profit describing the rule of three, which is that any area of colour in a pastel painting should have at least three colours mixed together. This is the sort of thing that Fisher should have been telling us in his book rather than talking about melting pastels in frying pans. And then I watched BlackBean CMS drawing a couple of eyes. Two great videos that are well worth seeking out if you’re a new pasteller.
After watching those videos I had to have a go at drawing my own eyes. I started with my left eye. As this eye is connected to the right side of the brain, this is my artistic eye, yes?
Anyway, I drew the eye down lightly and roughly in pastel, then added some darks in sap green. After that, I just kept adding more colour on top of what was already there, thinking all the time about what colours needed adding where to improve the painting (something I learned from the BlackBean CMS video.
Once I was happy with all the pastel, I finished it off by scraping textural lines out with a scalpel (revealing colours that were underneath – wow!) and smearing things out with a finger in places, generally around the edges rather than in the eye, which I wanted to be focused.
And the end product is amazing. It actually looks like an oil painting with textures, impressionistic colours and all. Obviously there’s lots of green there but that’s because I have the landscape colour selection.
This isn’t going up for sale – it’s a self portrait and nobody wants one of my eyes staring at them from the wall.
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