Drawing large scale

Thinking about oil pastels again and colour I was struck by the contrast of the bright orange of a shaving foam tube against the bright blue cap of a plastic bottle in the corner of our bathroom. I thought these glossy man-made objects might come across quite well in the bright colours of oil pastels. I also wanted to draw a lot bigger. I felt that I would have a better chance of mixing colours and trying different techniques with this media over a larger surface.

Below is a preliminary sketch in 2B pencil in an A4 sketchpad and then below that the finished picture in oil pastels which I did on an A1 sheet of fairly thick white paper. In hindsight, using coloured paper with a rougher surface might have worked better as shading could have then made use of the paper colour rather than superimposing this onto the white surface.

I think we look at scaling up drawings later in the course – but again, I think it’s okay to jump ahead if the interest has grabbed you.

I realised only right at the end that the persepctive isn’t right – the sink opens up a bit too much and the towel rail should in fact slant at an angle in line with the mini wooden drawers. Anyway, apart from that a big part of this was messing around with pastels on a bigger scale and it was quite fun trying to achieve the effect of different textures – the towel, the mini drawers and the sink. I tried different techniques – not just drawing pastels over each other, but also rubbing over these with my finger or thumb, rubbing away with a paper towel, and scraping into the pastel coating with a craft knife.

I tried avoiding black for the shading but ended up using it anyway on the metal surfaces to create a more definite contrast and the effect of shiny, reflective surfaces. I found I used a lot of white and ochre yellow – I wish they just sold extra sticks in those colours – I found I often worked lighter colours over darker colours. The shading is not consistent across the picture – so that is something else I’d want to work on for next time.

Despite all the faults (or perhaps because of them) I feel like I have extended my use of oil pastels with this creating this picture and would like to try some further large scale drawings on coloured paper next time. I’d also like to do some large scale drawings with charcoal, which I haven’t yet tried out for drawing since the warm-up exercises and practice markings at the start of this unit.