Colour

I tried using pastels for a couple of sketches. The first was less successful – that was in oil pastels and I did that about two weeks ago. Here it is:

I haven’t used pastels that much. Also, the oil pastels I used were quite cheap and it was difficult to mix the colours.

The next sketch I feel was a bit more successful. I did that one today. This time I used a small set of chalky pastels. I think they were quite good quality and straight away it felt really nice applying them, whether using them to add a light amount of colour over the rough paper I was using or applying them thickly and mixing them with other colours. Using my finger to carefully smudge colours together and add shadow also worked nicely – I couldn’t do that with the oil pastels. It was much easier to mix colours stright onto each other too. I don’t know whether this is true of all chalky pastels versus oil pastels, or just because the quality of the chalky ones I was using was a bit better. Here is the second drawing:

I think the bowl of fruit was also perhaps an easier subject, so to carry out a bit of an experiment, I am going to try drawing exactly the same bowl of fruit with the oil pastels and see the difference in effect.

I like the soft feeling of the image produced by the chalky pastels. It also feels a lot more like a painting than a drawing as you are filling in blocks of colour rather than adding lines or tone. I tried oil painting a few years ago, really enjoyed it, and I think you could achieve similar effects as those in the bowl of fruit picture with oil paints – but I guess the latter are a lot more versatile.