6 x 6″, sennelier oil pastels on unprimed wood.
My partner gave me the full set of sennelier oil pastels for my birthday last week and it’s been excruciatingly hard not to abandon all my other commitments and responsibilities and just play with them incessantly because they are an incredibly enticing and beautiful medium that really doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve ever used!
They are buttery soft, and instead of the consistent opacity of other brands, they actually have a range from opaque to fully transparent stocks, based on the pigments in them. What this means is that they work much more like my watercolours, and allow me to transfer over my payment and mixing knowledge from watercolours to these oil pastels! This also means that they can produce super vibrant mixes, which you can see at work in the crystals in this piece especially, but which really helped me being everything here to life.
Finally, they are so soft that even the gentlest touch with a fingertip or blending stump blurs and spreads the pastel around, making them a constant temptation to soften everything. In this piece i tried to balance my hard and soft edges, and i think the tree leaves are a great success in doing that in an appealing way. I’m very excited to try applying some of my Russian academic oil painting principles to solve oil pastels paintings in future; since i stopped using oil paints and solvents, i really haven’t had a medium available to me that can actually achieve all the fat over lean, hard and soft edges, glazing, and value grouping techniques I was taught. suffice to say I am pumped on this!
have you played with these before? do you have any advice, or questions? and what do you think of this somewhat amped up painterly approach?
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