Until Recently, I Never Knew...
(This is my response to the current Blog Topic of the Week...)
Until recently, I never knew anything about oil pastels.
Now, granted, I still don't know much, but I've tried working in this medium for the first time and I've found it's quite interesting and enjoyable. I love drawing with markers, but Tony has banned my beloved Prismacolor markers at least until after the baby is born, because they smell SOOO bad. He generally errs on the side of being too over-protective, but in this case, he probably has a point. They must be pretty toxic to smell that strong, which is too bad because I love them! They come in a huge variety of colors, and they have two different tips so you use them for both wide spaces and for finer detail. They also blend together nicely, if you add some color on top of other color before it dries.
But I digress...this is supposed to be about oil pastels, not about markers!
I wanted to see if I could figure out another satisyfing way to draw - which is so much easier/quicker than painting. Painting tends to be more of a "production" with more involved, where drawing with colors can just happen quickly, any time, anywhere. Colored pencils don't do it for me...I just don't care for pencils in general (for some reason, I sort of get the creeps when I have to write with a pencil - it's something akin to running fingernails across a chalkboard. I don't know why, but I've always been that way). I wondered if maybe oil pastels would help me get the really deep saturated color that I like to get with markers, so I bought a set and gave them a try.
So here are my first two attempts at working with oil pastels. In the first one, I was really trying to keep the color really rich and I was resisting the "smudge" factor which is so inherent in oil pastels. I basically was using them like crayons, trying to replicate my usual experience of drawing with bold colors, like I do with markers. I also tried to outline parts of the drawing with a pen, for more definition, but this didn't work out well because I ended up ruining several pens in the process. Apparently pens and markers don't like to go on top of oil pastels! (If anyone knows of a pen or marker that will work on top of oil pastels, please let me know!)
"Balanced Beam" (click to view in full size)
For my second attempt, I gave over to the "smudge" and allowed myself to play with this as a NEW medium. It's a very different result:
"ART Is The Axis On Which a Balanced World Spins" (click to view in full size)
For the "smudging" for this drawing, I used paper towels, rubbing each area as I went...and boy, it's actually good exercise to do that vigorous rubbing while working! Who knew...phew! :-)
For me, I think the limitations of working with oil pastels will be:
a) I got impatient having to rub all the time (draw, color, rub...draw, color, rub)
b) I don't know if I can ever get the colors as deep as I like
c) I don't think I'm not really skilled enough in some basics (i.e. shading) to take advantage of what oil pastels can do -- and that feels frustrating, to be so aware of my limitations
But, even those things notwithstanding, I am curious and interested in continuing to play with oil pastels to see where I can go.