Eric D. Greene

Drawing in Oil Pastels is awesome!  When drawing with oil pastels, you get many of the benefits of both painting in oil as well as drawing.  You get to experience mixing and use of colors, like you would with painting, but you also don’t have to put all your drawing skills to the side in favor of a brush, mediums, and the extra time it takes to get into an oil painting.  Just pick up a stick of your oil pastels and start drawing with them!

I’m writing this blog post because I am seeing a growing number of people hitting my blog from the search phrase “How to use oil pastels”.  I have some experience with these, which you can check out some examples of my work on this site.  One of which is this one:

An Oil Pastel Drawing, 8x10
© Eric D. Greene

Practice!

So let’s get right to it.  The best way is to just jump right in and start drawing!  The fact is, you’re going to have to experiment with them a little bit.  Grab an apple or orange, set it on your desk in front of you or on a piece of paper, and just start drawing what you see.  Feel free to play around with it too.  The great thing with oil pastels is, there is some room for error.  If you mess up what you’re doing, you can cover it up, to a certain extent.  Just pick up another color, and draw right over it!  Yes, sometimes it is going to blend and mix with the other color, but it’s much better than having to pick up an eraser and try to remove a pencil line.

Avoid mixing too many colors at once

Of course, the key to success in drawing with oil pastels is how well you learn to blend and mix your colors.  This will take practice and experimentation.  Just keep in mind one thing – the more different colors you try to mix in, the muddier and duller of a color you’re going to end up with.  At a maximum, try to avoid mixing in more than 4 colors.  If you’ve already mixed 4 and you’re thinking that it needs more, you might want to re-think that color choice overall.  Best advice I can give again – practice, practice, practice!

Get decent quality oil pastels

I will say this about the quality oil pastel you choose, and yes I have mentioned this on other blog posts – it does make a difference which brand oil pastel you decide to purchase.  Unfortunately, oil pastels are like most artist mediums – the better quality pastels are going to be more expensive!  I recommend Sennelier oil pastels all the way, if you can afford it.  If money is no object for you, go out and get a 50-count wooden box of these!  Don’t waste your time with the lesser quality ones.

To the rest of us where money *is* a concern (that does include me!) – I do have some advice which I think you will find useful.  What you can do is get a nice set of pastels of half-decent quality, such as Cray-Pas Expressionist.  Use those ones to fill in the major parts of your artwork (so if it’s an apple, fill it in with a red), also fill in your background with these.  Then, what I do is grab my Senneliers and do my mixing and capture highlights and details with those.  That way I’m not using up a full stick of Sennelier just for filling in a lot of color!  For most art projects, you will only need to have like 5-10 sticks of Senneliers available, which you’ll use for those highlights and details.

I will mention, there is one stick of Sennelier which in my opinion you simply *must have*.  You have got to have a stick of Sennelier in white.  You will really need this to create your main highlights in your piece.  Trust me, the other oil pastels will leave you too frustrated, because what they do is they smudge the other colors around, whereas the Senneliers basically just glide right on top of the lesser quality pastels.

My Top 5 Tips for using Oil Pastels

Well I hope my article was of some usefulness for those of you looking for tips on using oil pastels. Here is a summary of each of the tips covered:

1. Practice practice practice!
2. Don’t be too afraid of making mistakes. Remember, you can often cover up with another color.
3. Avoid mixing too many colors at once.  The more colors, the muddier and duller it gets.
4. At least have on hand about 5-10 high quality oil pastels for highlights and details, with white being the most important color to have in high quality.
5. Just have fun with it!  Oil pastels are a truly unique medium for artists, in that they really combine the ease-of-use that comes from drawing, with the use of color and color-mixing that comes from working in oil paints.

So feel free to post a comment with questions, or if you would like, I can be reached at eric at ericdgreene dot com if you want to ask a question by email.

Self portrait in Conte Crayon

This is a Conte Crayon drawing I did for an assignment in Drawing 2 class last semester.  I felt the piece came out really well, with the chiaroscuro contrasting darks and lights.  Conte Crayons are pretty awesome to work with as far as drawing mediums go.  They can be messy, with a lot of dust accumulation underneath the canvas.

The assignment was to draw a self portrait using a medium of our choice.  I felt Conte Crayon would make for decent portrait work and in the end I’m glad I went with it.

For paper, I used brown Canson Mi-Teintes drawing paper which I picked up at Jerry’s Artarama.   The piece took roughly 8-10 hours to complete.  I had a lot of fun working on this, particularly getting the reflection of the camera in the sunglasses!

Ladybug drawing in Oil Pastels

My latest oil pastel art … a ladybug drawing for class. The assignment was to draw a bug, up close, using oil pastels. I wish I could post some of the pieces that others did for class too. Several of them were amazing! This one turned out pretty good, I think. I am pleased with how the reflection and shininess worked out, and the water drops seem fairly realistic.

This time I used mostly Sennelier oil pastels. A few Cray-Pas Expressionist were used for coloring in major areas, also some black from that set. But I think from now on I’ll be using Senneliers for the majority of my artwork in oil pastels. They’re richer, blend better, and I also am noticing they actually stick to the paper better.

I didn’t do anything for a background. The green is 100% from the toned paper (Canson Meintes).

I have listed this piece for sale at ArtWanted.

On Saturday, I won an award at TCC’s 38th Annual Student Art Show.  The award was in the drawing category, specifically, the Tidewater Art Alliance and One Eleven Art Award of Excellence in Drawing.

It was a tremendous honor to be selected as an award winner.  There were some seriously amazing pieces by all the students in the show, and some of my personal favorites there did not take any awards (which made it an extra honor for me).  It came down to judge Nicole McCormick Santiago’s personal tastes and choices, and as she mentioned during the show – if it had been another judge, there would very likely have been a different list of award winners entirely.

My piece that won was “Cow Skull” in india ink wash:

Cow Skull (links to 800x600 size)

The full list of award winners for the show is as follows:

• President’s Award – Michelle Bradford (“Toy Collection”, oil on canvas)
• Purchase Award – Wendy W. Maness (“Sunflower”, photograph)
• Vice President’s Award – John Gregor (“Rich”, oil on canvas)
• Provost’s Award – Jennifer Ditona (“The Price of Gas”, photograph)
• Provost’s Award – Kelly Conway (“Stop, Caution, Go”, glass)
• Provost’s Award – Jacqueline Poutasse (“In the Moment”, charcoal)
• Provost’s Award – Heidi Kerger (“Crane in Water”, stoneware)
• Dean’s Award – Jerry Whitehurst (“Fountain Ballet”, alabaster glass)
• John and Karen Kise Award of Excellence in Graphic Design given in memory of Dr. and Mrs. Mearl A. Kise – Melissa Murch (“Stravinsky Poster”, computer generated image)
• Director’s Award – Donald McIntire (“Pixieparts.com”, web design)
• Jerry’s Artarama Award of Excellence for a Master Interpretation – Brittany R. Callis (“Van Gogh’s: Road With Cypress and Star”, oil pastels)
• Shelley Brooks & Chrysler Museum of Art Award of Excellence for Expressive Content – Kavita John (“Unrevealed”, photograph)
• Award of Excellence in Design/Foundations & Peninsula Fine Arts Center – Michael Draeger (“Foundation Compilation”, mixed media)
• Darrell and Sally Craig Award of Excellence in Drawing – Ferracino Freeman (“Mos Definitely”, silverpoint, chalk)
• Brutti’s & Chrysler Museum of Art Award of Excellence for Craftsmanship – Shela Edmonds (“Spring”, clay)
• Richmond Camera & Portsmouth Museums award of Excellence for Photography – Samantha Crow (“Cake”, photograph)
• Award of Excellence in Photography – Clara D. Pennix (“Bricks in Ice”, photograph)
• Award of Excellence in Painting – Stephanie H. Jones (“The Naro”, oil on canvas)
• Award of Excellence in Graphic Design – Patrick Spalding (“In Our Shadow”, computer generated image)
• Award of Excellence in Glass – Meghan Justice (“Orange and White Vases”, glass)
• Tidewater Art Alliance & One Eleven Art Award of Excellence in Drawing – Eric D. Greene (“Cow Skull”, india ink wash)
• Award of Excellence in Ceramics – Erin McDonald (“Blistered”, stoneware)
• Everett and Ann Johnston Award of Excellence in Animation – Trisha Midgett (“Glass Animation”, digital movie)
• Hartung Gallery and Art Supplies Award of Excellence for Color – Lynette Lavallee (“Emo”, oil pastels)

Congratulations to everyone.  The show will continue to be held at the Visual Arts Center, through April 26th (9am to 8pm).  The address is 340 High Street in Olde Towne Portsmouth.

By the way, if anyone listed above would like a link back to their site, I will be happy to oblige.  Just let me know at eric@ericdgreene.com.