Painting With Oil Pastels

Happy Holidays everyone! Recently I completed a pastel portrait as a holiday gift and it turned out pretty darn good. I hadn’t worked in pastels in over 10 years but for this particular project, I decided to break out a stash of soft oil pastels and see how it would turn out.  

The tools I used in this project were:

·      Mungyo Soft Oil Pastels

·      Blending Stump

·      Acrylic Paint

·      Krylon Spray Varnish

The portrait part of this painting was done entirely from the pastels and I chose to use acrylics for the background. I found that painting with pastels is really quite similar to painting with oils or acrylic paint. I did however find that it’s a little bit difficult to get fine detail with the pastel crayons but I was able to gesture in or suggest certain details as opposed to making them finely detailed. I also found that instead of using mounted canvas as my subsurface, I could have used pastel or Bristol paper or un-stretched canvas. All in all, I’ll definitely do more pastel work in the future, so stay tuned.