Your Guide to Vibrant Oil Pastels
- Jacqueline Supra
- Dec 16, 2024
- 3 min read
Unlocking the Vibrant World of Oil Pastels: A Beginner's Guide
Oil pastels, with their rich, buttery texture and vibrant colours, offer a unique and rewarding artistic experience. Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting, this medium can bring your creative vision to life with stunning results.
What to Look For
When choosing oil pastels, consider these key aspects:
Pigment Concentration: Look for brands with high pigment concentration for intense, vibrant colours.
Texture: Oil pastels come in various textures, from soft and creamy to harder and waxier. Choose a texture that suits your preferred working style.
Lightfastness: This refers to a pigment's ability to resist fading when exposed to light. Opt for pastels with high lightfastness ratings for artwork that will last.
CiciAI - Oil pastel and nature
Mastering the Technique
Oil pastels are incredibly versatile, allowing for a wide range of techniques:
Layering: Build up layers of colour for depth and richness. The oil base allows for smooth blending and subtle transitions.
Scumbling: Use a light, back-and-forth motion to create a textured, layered effect.
Impasto: Apply thick, heavy layers of pastel for dramatic texture and dimension.
Scratching: Use a sharp tool to scratch through layers of pastel, revealing the colours beneath.
Paper Matters
The right paper can make a world of difference in your oil pastel artwork:
Tooth: Paper with a textured surface, known as "tooth," provides a better grip for the pastels, preventing them from slipping and smudging.
Weight: Heavier weight papers are more durable and less likely to buckle under the pressure of pastel application.
Surface: Experiment with different surfaces like cold-pressed watercolour paper, textured drawing paper, or even canvas.
Inspiration from Masters
For inspiration, explore the works of renowned oil pastel artists:
Jasper Johns: Known for his iconic American flag paintings, Johns mastered the use of oil pastels to create bold, graphic imagery.
David Hockney: A master of colour and perspective, Hockney's oil pastel landscapes are vibrant and full of life.
Alan Bean: This astronaut and artist used oil pastels to capture the beauty of space, creating breathtaking depictions of the lunar surface.
Embrace the Adventure
Oil pastels offer a unique and exciting artistic journey. Experiment with different techniques, explore various papers, and draw inspiration from the masters. With practice and exploration, you'll discover the endless possibilities this versatile medium has to offer.
Jasper Johns
“It all began...with my painting a picture of an American flag,” Johns remarked in 1959 about this work. The flag was made on a cut bed sheet using oil paint and then encaustic, a method involving pigmented melted wax. Johns dipped strips of cloth and newsprint into the hot wax and then affixed them to the sheet to fill in a pencilled outline of the flag. The result is a picture whose process is registered on its surface, a focus on materiality at odds with the expressionistic gestures dominant in painting at the time of Flag’s making. Johns went on to use encaustic to render familiar forms—flags, targets, numbers, letters, and a map of the United States—time and again throughout his career.
A flag constitutes both a thing (a flag) and its representation (a painting of a flag). This built-in ambiguity is the work’s innovation as well as its provocation. MoMA’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., hoped to acquire the piece along with three others from Johns’s first solo exhibition, in 1958 at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery. However, the Museum’s Committee and Board of Trustees deemed Flag to be potentially “unpatriotic.” Barr circumvented their objections by asking architect Philip Johnson to acquire the work and donate it to the Museum at a later date.
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