Oil pastel paintings are (for me, for now) faster than watercolours, so are the ideal…
The Road To Glencoe
I risked doing an oil pastel painting indoors today. This landscape is based on the road into Glencoe from the East. I’ve been to Glencoe a couple of times and would recommend the Clachaig Inn as a great place to stay if you like a beer and don’t mind being surrounded by people as young as I was when I visited.
As usual, there’s not much to say about my methodology. I put down a pencil outline, then filled up the shaped from the back to the front, trying to keep a good mix of colours everywhere.
I wonder whether I’m being a bit too literal with my values. I was often looking at my photo and trying to put down darks in the same places as on the photo. It’s probably not that useful having an iPad plugged into the mains as it lets me develop these bad habits. The mountains didn’t come out too bad but I spent too long in the foreground trying to get those darks right. The foreground ended up turning to mud and had to have some heavy scraping with a credit card. Even then, lots of mud stayed put because these Sennelier oil pastels do like to soak into the paper. I ended up putting another foreground over the top but it’s still too dark and muddy.
I tried to distract attention from that foreground by turning it into a middleground by adding super foreground in the two bottom corners. I scribbled in red grasses on the left against a blue middleground and vice versa on the right, then scraped out some marks with a credit card.
What I’ve ended up with is less than perfect, with the middleground being a let down. Not good enough to go in the shop window.
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