I've just reached the end of my first 12*8 inch oil pastel pad and thought…
Oil Pastels!
It’s my birthday and the front page headline on stash news is that I’m going to be trying out oil pastels. The wife bought me a set of 24 Sennelier oil pastels (quite possibly the best ones out there) and my oldest bought me this Schminke box to keep them in. I mean, if you’re going to use oil pastels, you need a wooden box to keep them in, don’t you?
I’ve already had a go at splitting the colours into, what’s the word, those on the outside of the colour wheel and earthy/neutral colours, so that I could organise them in the box and start swatching. One tiny frustration with these pastels is that they only have numbers on them, not colour names. Not only that, but the colour chart that came with the pastels (that I used to find the names of the colours) wasn’t even in numerical order! But I got there in the end. Here are the swatches:
There’s a nice split there between outer ring colours and earthies/neutrals. The neutrals look like they’d be good for portrait drawing, although I’ve not decided yet what I’m going to be doing with these. On the outer ring colours, there are a couple of garish greens (the cinnabars) that could only be used in realistic colour schemes for things like shop signs but that I could quite easily use in an abstract or a colourful impressionistic drawing. Still, I might have swapped out a green for a blue if I were at Sennelier choosing how to put the set together. I might even have looked for a way to add an extra red or an orange. Still, great set and I do have six empty spots in that box.
In other news, I do have three new books so far (including one on pastels – smart move there) and maybe more on the way. Rather than list them here, I’ll just let them make their way through to book reviews.
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