I decided to try out my Sennelier oil pastels. I have been keeping them safe in a drawer for quite some time.

I had few portraits sketched on a canvas panel, with an acrylic under painting (toned base color). At some point I decided that I would use them for oil pastel portraits. Why?

From my experience with soft pastels, more tooth on the surface is good. However, I feel it is perhaps not so good with oil pastels. Unless you want to create thick layers as the board eats the pastel stick as breakfast very fast. I smoother surface would have allowed for thinner blended layers.

My inspiration was a cold and sunny clear blue sky winter day during sunset. I had an idea for two portraits. One with white/blue/yellow main colors, the other white/purple/orange. I did the first one now, although white is in lesser role than I intended. I lacked very light hues. I could not get an opaque white from the Sennelier brand (shop was out of it again). So, I had to use the harder Neopastel I had. This scraped the buttery layers I had built with the softer pastels.

Oh well, in addition to that, I am a noob with oil pastels. It was hard to get details, so I tried a few techniques.

• Colored pencil (oil based) not so good with the thick layers and the rough panel surface with plastic on top
  • but the pencil dipped with linseed oil somewhat worked
• Palette knife would have probably been fine but the color I used was quite hard so I could not get much color to the knife
  • anyway requires practice/accuracy to be able to craft details
• Brush with or without linseed oil was ok for both details and blending purposes

Video on process and some thoughts:

I think I need to redo the surface for the other panel, to get nicer smooth surface to work on.

So, to be continued at some point 🙂