Lately...

Its interesting the response that I get when I tell people that I'm using oil pastels - most often they look at me like, you're a glutton for punishment. I always have to respond that they're not as hard as watercolors. I used to think that I was doomed to be a failed watercolorist for the remainder of my life, but I was quite pleased to discover yesterday that I'm actually enjoying the pastels more.

To be honest, I still struggle with the oil pastels, but I made a pretty exciting discovery - the colorless extender. There's two of them in my box of Erengis that have been largely ignored, but I tried them out as a replacement for the white that I sometimes lay down first. Here's the result, which gave me some nice translucent areas in the background and on her face:




The nice thing about it is it gives you some nice washy effects, and if you color your paper first you can scrape back to the white of the paper.

Another thing I've been playing with a bit is mixing the pastel with linseed oil, and because I was doing some washy areas I used some mod podge as a size. This was maybe less successful because of the blotchy areas, but maybe worth exploring further someday:



Anyone else out there having fun with oil pastels?