Fun with oil pastels

 

This top picture is the latest experiment with oil pastels. I quite like it, but I really had to produce some horrid stuff to get there. I don’t understand why I’m drawn to oil pastels: they’re messy, smeary, thick, and generally hard to use. I like the vibrancy of the colours and the transparent effect of the smeariness which I am beginning to harness.

These are the first experiments with oil pastels I did last year some time with some old pastels I found. When I came across them again I found them intriguing rather than just a mess, as I had dismissed them, but it took a lot more experimenting to identify that the interesting effect was obtained by using one colour on top of another. 

 These are the two little doodles I did to experiment with the smear effect.

The squares were to see what would happen systematically if you run different colours into each other, (one of the squares is done with felt-tip). In the other one, I noticed that even if you draw a line and then run over it with the same colour you get an interesting smeary effect.

The cathedral-type drawing was an exercise in how not to exploit the properties of oil-pastels. The only interesting thing about this drawing is the colours; I particularly like the vibrancy of the towers. This was before discovering the miracle of smeariness

The two drawings at the bottom, the face and the mad figure, were when I was discovering what happened when you superimposed different colours on one another. They’re pretty hideous, aren’t they, but, you know, “defer judgement.”

These are two of the ugliest doodles I have produced so far. The one with the little monsters (below left) is a type of doodle I do when I can’t think of what else to do, which consists of scribbling on the paper and then drawing whatever images emerge from the scribble. The kind of cowboy picture was born of a doodle I did last year, where I was experimenting with picture frames, trying to embed picture frames within each other. The effect was quite interesting, and I intend to play with it again.

New year’s resolution

 I hereby resolve that for at least the month of January, I will doodle every day, however rubbish what I draw is; I will suspend judgement, go for quantity rather than quality, experiment with different media, try new things. I will post as often as I can.

This was the alternative banner for this blog. Unfortunatly it looks crap scanned, and it’s also the wrong size. I don’t understand why the colours look so faded. The paper version is much prettier.

I bought some oil pastels over Christmas and yesterday I played with them for the first time. I think the result looks a bit like a child’s crayon drawing. I never liked crayons, they were too messy and not bright enough. Mind you, I didn’t like colour when I was little. I wasn’t good at colouring in because I was too much of a perfectionist to enjoy it.

I was quite pleased with this portrait copied from a photo cut out from a newspaper obituary, drawn freehand with a light brown pastel and then with a bit of dark brown for extra emphasis. Not because it looks particularly like the original, but because it looks vaguely life-like.