It's my birthday and the front page headline on stash news is that I’m going…
Oil Pastels: A Pause For Reflection
I’ve just reached the end of my first 12*8 inch oil pastel pad and thought I’d use this as an excuse to review my progress with the oil pastels. I started with a 6*4 pad just to get used to the pastels. The eleven paintings I did in that pad are shown in the featured image (the other page was used for swatches). I started off not knowing what I was doing, with the landscape, portrait and figure drawing in the top left. But then I watched some YouTube videos and learned some techniques. The next eight paintings were of a much higher standard, especially those two eyes, which I need to incorporate into another work at some point. So I did learn techniques quite quickly. But I felt frustrated at working on such small pages.
So I bought a 12*8 oil pastel pad and here are the twelve paintings in it. I can’t believe how competent I’ve become so quickly. Some of these look like proper oil paintings. I’m even starting to wonder whether I should be entering for Portrait Artist Of The Year because with oil pastels I can do anything.
I will keep painting with oil pastels but I also need to keep painting watercolours. The one thing watercolour has that oil pastels don’t is the randomness. That part of the painting where I can’t claim responsibility and just have to credit the paints with doing half the work themselves with no help from me.
Interesting times.
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