Two New Oil Pastels

For a medium that I was somewhat dubious about, I’ve some how managed to amass quite a number of oil pastel drawings over the past few months. I feel like I understand the medium better now. It’s useful to me as a way of sketching ideas I might want to pursue in oil on canvas, but I’m also kind of liking it as a sketching medium on its own, because the chunky sticks keep the work from becoming fiddly or too detailed. That’s good for me.

I can’t mix the exact colors I want, the way I would with oil paints. I only have about 50 colors, and while you can blend them on the paper, I find the color range quite limiting. There aren’t enough dark colors, for one thing. However, in accepting their limitations and not trying to make them into something they’re not, I do find myself using them and enjoying the process much more than I did.

The one at the top of this post is of a lake, a cherry orchard, and rocky hills near Edessa, Greece. These particular cherry trees grow in a kind of slender V-shape; all of the hills in this area were covered with them. There were also wild fig trees growing in abandon on both sides of the road. We had stopped to take pictures of a flock of swans on the lake, when a local car came by, stopped, and a middle-aged couple got out. In my rudimentary Greek, and their rudimentary English, we were able to talk a little bit - they asked where we were from and how long we were visiting Greece, and wanted to know the reasons why we liked it. Then they noticed the figs, some of which had small ripe fruit on them. They picked a handful and offered them to us, miming how to eat them, so we all ate the delicious sun-warmed fruit, while the swans swam, unconcerned, on the lake. Eventually the couple took their leave, but before that we all introduced ourselves by name. The man told me, rather proudly, that his wife’s name was Chryseis. “It means golden,” he said, smiling.

The second drawing, done today, is of a Quebec field under windy thunderclouds - the picture it’s based on was taken from the car yesterday.

I kept the sky deliberately sketchy.

When it was nearly finished, I scraped a few lines in the foreground with a thin x-acto knife to better indicate the stems of the tall grasses.

Each of these drawings was finished in approximately fifteen minutes. I tried to make a process video but the top of the picture was slightly cut off and my head kept getting in the way! I’ll try again.

(If you’re interested, here are the two reference photos. You can see, perhaps, the liberties I took, and what got simplified and exaggerated.)