Info 4 - Medicine and Revisiting Oil Pastels (Patreon)

I rarely ever talk of my own creative process or the feelings behind anything, but it feels right to do it here. Thank you for your continued support. This post may be a bit lengthy.

Around the time Medicine was released last year, I was making lots of progress with the practice done using oil pastels.

My monitor was starting to burn my eyes, but I wanted to continue doing something creative. My thoughts turned toward traditional art mediums. I always had difficulty working with acrylic paints, it just wasn't for me. I owned a watercolor set from a class in college, but rarely ever practiced as the time to prepare was too great, and the process of doing watercolor paintings was often upsetting. Colored pencils, copic markers and everything similar were also much too expensive. 

So I bought a $5 set of oil pastels from a grocery store.

Mint looking out at her backyard

These oil pastels were more like fancy crayons. They didn't look great, but trying to mix colors on the worst type of paper for this medium was fun (glossy cardstock). The pigment often just fell off or never stuck to the paper. I loved it. 

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Some of the first images I drew using the fancy crayons are here.

It's easy to think about where I was mentally when this happened.

The original scanned page used for the cover art

Mint's home

Something about the process of using them felt so homely, nostalgic and just cozy. It was a welcome change from digital. 

That summer I would leave the windows open, while a breeze would roll in and the drawings I pinned to the wall would sway back and forth. I visited the reservoir, rode my bike on the straight roads, and just took in the outdoors.

It was from these feelings that Medicine would take shape.

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After the Medicine artbook, I found a better set of oil pastels. 

Pentel oil pastels were a bit more malleable and had a deeper color when applied to the sheets of paper that were specially made for pastels. 

Mech-Hisui and a dead plant

With this brand being more malleable, I was able to smudge and layer colors on top of one another to create new shades. This was especially helpful for skies and clouds, but I still struggled with drawing and shading people.

Tornado warning at Costco

Another discovery made was during the making of the barn fire image.

A barn fire

The process of creating landscapes at this point for me was to start from top to bottom, setting a layer of darker colors first, and gradually working the lighter colors on top. You can see how that worked by zooming in really close.

The flames and embers were made by pressing down hard onto the darker color with the pastel, this actually broke a few of them 

Later in the year I would create more oil pastel paintings

Imperial, Hase, and Richmond Hill 

Though I did eventually run out of steam and switched back to doing digital drawings toward the beginning of 2018. While oil pastels were nice and warm, they made a huge mess and I didn't have the space for it anymore.

I eventually revisited oil pastels last month, finishing a painting I started toward the beginning of the year.

A season I secretly love 

From this, I decided I truly loved these fancy crayons.

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I am excited for the future! I keep finding new things and ways to manipulate oil pastels to create more convincing images. 

This Mint and tree are both about the size of a quarter

Scraping.

It's a well-documented technique in oil pastels, but I've never tried it myself until a few nights ago. By pressing a hard layer of pastel onto the paper and then overlapping with another layer, you can scrape the first layer off to reveal the color underneath. This is especially useful for creating fine details, sharp lines, colors and lights, everything! 

I use an old debit card to do this, and you can see from above that the edges on Mint's hair are much more sharp than what I could've done months ago. The tree also has edges scraped off to give it a more defined form.

It's especially useful for faces, which used to be the hardest thing to do with oil pastels

I don't consider myself to be in the position to teach anyone about how to do this or to even do these things "the right way", but I encourage you to research artists that use oil pastels and to try it yourself if you can. I hope that everyone can create beautiful artworks someday.

I am working on a few images using scraping, and I'm very excited to show you all soon!

Thanks for reading 💚