The Face Of Harakbut In Oil Pastel

The plan was to do another soft pastel painting today but looking through all my potential source photos I couldn’t help remembering how short I am of warm colours. Yesterday’s flop didn’t just remind me of some forgotten lessons: it also reminded me of how much more I’ll enjoy soft pastels after my collection of colours is expanded after Christmas.

So I did the next best thing and went for oil pastels. I won’t be submitting any oil pastel paintings for LAOTY because filming is in June and July when the Sennelier oil pastels are too melty to use. So this was just for fun. As subject matter I picked the Face of Harakbut in Peru, something I’ve painted before.

There were two main stages to this painting: the rocks and the greenery. For the rocks I started by stabbing in loads of dots in interesting colours. At one point I was losing my underdrawing, so went over the darkest bits in a dark colour, leaving me some shoes to hang everything else off, something I do with non-posterised watercolour portraits. Once I thought I had enough colour down, I added white, making longer strokes to start blending colours together. I completed the blending with one of those rubber things in sticks, pushing it down hard into the paint.

Then for the greenery I also stabbed in loads of colours, mainly greens but reds, yellows and blues too. My marks here were bigger, with the idea that they might work as leaves. I kept adding more colours until there was no who paper showing. Then I looked at what I had and decided my marks weren’t leaf like enough. So I changed the texture by stabbing into the paint in different random directions with a wedge shaped rubber thing on a stick. That looked better.

And then it was just tinkering, adding more colour to the rocks and greenery wherever I thought they were needed and working the colour in as before. And to help the painting work compositionally, with lights against darks, I darkened and lightened the background behind the front of the face next to light and dark areas respectively. I los added yellow and white marks in front of all the stones and dark green marks behind them. I made sure my stones were ok sharp edged by going over them again with the blending tool. And I added more greenery over the face in some places. And that was me done.

And I think I’ve ended up with a decent enough painting. There’s nothing fantastic for me to sing about but, then again, there’s nothing about this that I don’t like and that’s unusual. I enjoyed painting the rocks more than the greenery but that’s how how it goes for me with landscapes whatever the medium.