I painted this one on sanded paper, the much admired pastelmat type, and found it desperately unintuitive. The grippy surface could be nice, but it’s completely unabsorbant, and i found myself unable to layer the way I’m used to on rag papers, or honestly even on wood. that said, you really can blend infinitely on this stuff, so if that’s your jam you might get more out of it than i did!
Subject-wise this is based on my own photograph from a recent roadtrip, and it was a delight to get to zoom in on something I shot myself and try translating it into oil pastel! I’ve been playing more and more with macro lenses and extreme depth of field, and have been meaning for a while to experiment with translating that effect into paint of some kind of another.
That said, abstracting, blurring, and softening things is both really easy to do with oil pastel and really tricky to add nuance to. I can see some places in here where the effect is really landing, and others where things feel almost into only two planes, rather than the three or more I’d like to have had throughout. So, much to learn down this path, but I’m excited to keep going with it!
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