I’ve been thinking about how the sennelier oil pastels are so soft that you can get full on painting style soft and hard edges etc, and I picked up a few small canvas boards to see if they were a useful substrate for faking oil painting effects!
Unfortunately the sennelier pastels are so slippery that they really don’t grip the canvas at all, and it became hard to layer the way i wanted. but there is definitely still a painterliness to this that excites me! i think for my next try I’ll pay down a first pass with a much thicker, stickier oil pastel – haiyas or mungyos maybe – and see if that starts to fill in the weave and give the developers more to bond with when i get to that layer.
One of the challenges of oil pastels, at least for me, has been finding a medium with the right absorbency, texture, grip, etc. I haven’t been that big a fan of the pastelmat I’ve tried – even before i had softer oil pastels, things seemed to build up to an unmanageable amount of greasiness too quickly for me, due to the inabsorbency of the sanded paper.
Unprimed wood, heavy cotton bristol, and cotton rag printmaking paper have been the most successful for me so far. The wood gives me some texture while still having a little absorbency; the bristol is utterly smooth but again, the pastel does set a little on it as it absorbs the oil; and the heavy cotton rag paper seems to absorb an incredible amount of the oil from the pastels while usually still having a decent rough or cold press texture to offer my markmaking. if anything, because of how dry it renders my oil pastels, it’s been the least blendable by far.
So i should probably go back to the cotton rag soon and see what that level of control gets me with the sennelier oil pastels; but I’m intrigued by this canvas potential and I’ll probably do another still life on a canvas board first!
oh, technical note: these canvas boards are all pre-gessoed rough canvas, making them very unabsorbent and giving them a large resolution weave texture. Maybe it would be worth trying a linen canvas? or an unprimed canvas with more squish?
Also, going through my photo collection, i think i could paint still life strawberries every day for the rest of the winter and not run out of reference. Is this a good idea? is there any chance someone might want to own an oil pastel drawing of a strawberry someday? there’s only so many i can hang up in my own home…
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