Oil Pastel Testing

First, though, yesterday’s job was to buy some more gear.  I got some colour spreaders, which look like brushes but have rubber on the end and are great for pushing and blending the paint when I’m at too small a scale to be able to use my fingers.  And then I bought what I thought was a retractable scalpel but which turned out to have no blades.  The blades will be arriving in the post later today.  My pastel box had six spare slots which I’ve turned into three extra long slots to store two colour spreaders and the scalpel.  It was hard to find colour spreaders that were short enough to fit but I eventually found some at The Works.  Nothing beats the feeling of not being able to find something in specialist shops but the finding it at The Works at a ridiculously low price.

Anyway, my first experiment was a landscape scene in Hartlip.  I put the scene down first in pencil.  Didn’t bother rubbing stuff out and correcting the drawing because I’ve learned my lesson.  I picked this scene because it would be a good workout for all the greens in the collection.  It was only when I was looking at the sky in this afterwards that I realised I needed to bite the bullet and start tearing paper off the pastels so that I can use then on their sides to paint big areas like the sky.  Scribbling then smearing doesn’t really work.  It also became clear that for landscapes like this I need to work on bigger paper: this is six inches by nine, the size of an iPad.  Oil pastels don’t have the sharp points I need to add detail on something this small.

Next up, I thought I’d try a portrait, even though the selection of colours I have was chosen for landscapes.  This just means that any portraits I draw will be colourful and impressionistic, probably with a definite hint of green.  I picked out a photo of Sam Allardyce that I’ve drawn before and that’s fairly easy to get a likeness of.  It’s not a great likeness today but that’s because I was working quickly and not correcting errors.  I found that I enjoyed this one.  When it came to smoothing and mixing colours with my fingers, I was trying to follow Big Sam’s facial creases in some places and trying to create 3D effects in others.  It’s interesting that my initial pencil marks left grooves that show up on the final painting – that’s both something to be aware of and avoid and something to take advantage of (by, for example, marking in grasses with a cocktail stick before painting).

Then I tried out some figure drawing, using a Kristina Marie pose that I drew not too long ago.  I was a bit inspired, to be honest, by some figure drawing by Bill Buchman that I’d seen on YouTube.  But I’ll need much bigger pieces of paper to work on if I’m to copy what Bill did.  Anyway, with the pastels, I just did what I do with the inktense pencils, starting in the darker areas, moving into lighter ones, adding reds and blues in interesting places and then finishing it off and trying to turn it three dimensional, albeit with the finger rather than with water brushes.  I’m pretty sure at won’t be doing more figure drawing with the pastels – figure drawing is way too much fun with inktense pencils.

So, interesting experiment.  The portrait and figure look better than the landscape but I suspect landscapes is where my pastels are heading once I’ve finished the pad I have.  I don’t rule out the occasional portrait though, especially if I find any green looking subjects.  I’m looking forward to those scalpel blades arriving so I can try some scraping out techniques – these will be great for window frames.

None of these experiments are for sale, obviously.