Tag: oranges

Play with Oil Pastels

Ages ago when people thought the world was flat, I tried out oil pastels. I hated them. Messy, unresponsive, and just unpleasant to work with. I threw them away. 

Ignorance, though, and a lack of the internet, can make art materials mysterious and frustrating. Today, now that the world is round, YouTube and other media outlets show me what can potentially be done with oil pastels. Choices of paper, solvents, blending methods, brands and qualities of the oil pastels themselves has changed considerably. I bought some – Caran D’Ache, Sennelier, and Mungyo. I also bought some PastelMat paper and board, and I also have different papers here at home to try. And YouTube and oil pastel artists on Instagram.

‘Tis tangerine and mandarin season, so here we go with some locally grown. I used the Caran d’Ache as underpainting after outlining with a graphite pencil. The pencil blurred and created a bit of a fuss. To get the colors blended, I used tortillons and mineral oil, gentle touches and pressure. All play. I was rather pleased with them.

Then I decided to see how it would be to work with a very pale subject, namely a pale white and beige tiger cat. The green eyes are a combination of white, green, and blue, blurred together with a tortillon. The sharp edge of a black pastel crayon made the dark eye and nose lines, and even some colored pencil at the end to provide further sharpness in detail. Eye highlights were sort of a gamble with the white pastel – which one to use, softer, harder? And placement, too. The cat’s white whiskers wouldn’t show up no matter what I did, so I opted for a beige-y color and then some white over the lines.

Neither of these is spectacular – the poor cat is suffering a lopsided face – but the point was to play with the colors and work with blending. I did use some mineral oil on the tangerines, but everything dissolved into a gooey mess, so after the first scan, I scanned no more.

Now, on to my knitting! The acrylic painting is still vegging and that is fine for now.

A Prelude to Round Things

Given my frustration with painting grapes the other day, I decided to look at some YouTube watercolor videos on painting the highlights and shadows of spherical objects.  I found two which I really liked, and the result is I did a number of studies, as can be seen below.  Techniques include both wet-in-wet, glazing, and a few others.  Sphere Hightlight & Shadow (2)-Edit

The purple balls were done with glazing; the shadows were wet-in-wet.  Here and there I went in with a damp brush to soften the edges of the shadows in the grapes, or to blur paint over areas which seemed weird.  Not too bad, but I do not find glazing appealing; it may be I need to improve my glazing technique.

These orange goodies are preludes to a potential painting of oranges.  The one on the right was done first, but as the ink was bleeding – it was ordinary fountain pen ink – I moved on to the one on the left, which is drawn with Sailor’s Carbon Ink.  I like the on the left quite a bit – the bleed into the shadow, as well as the colors themselves, which are Hansa Yellow, Pyrrol Orange, and Organic Vermilion.  The brush I used was a large one, a Cosmotop 14, and the paper was the Canson pad of watercolor paper (not the Montval).

Soooooo!!  Things are beginning to improve!