After my adventures in soft pastel and gouache this year, I’ve been feeling the urge to go back to oil pastels, especially with what I know now about different paper and texture and how it changes the soft pastels. this painting is a test run of some of the things that I learned about soft pastels being brought into oil pastels, and especially on that level I think it is success.

One of the tricky things about both mediums is that you can’t pre-mix the color before you put it on the canvas. If I have red and blue pastels, and I need purple, I can’t mix red and blue on a palette and see the purple I get before applying it – I have to do the mixing on the page itself and be prepared to modulate it on the page until it hits the exact purple I want. that’s really counterintuitive if you come from painting, especially acrylic or oil painting where mixing on the canvas really just isn’t standard practice. it’s much closer to glazing watercolors than anything else, I think.

When I started using oil pastels last year – or maybe the year before? – I spent a lot of time watching a few different people on YouTube share their process. one of them was Yolanda Blazquez, who does beautiful, very gently and softly blended oil pastel portraiture. I went back this week and rewatched a lot of her videos, and was able to get so much more out of them this time around! it’s wild what context can do!

Her process of building up pigment in many layers, and using the pastels, her hands, and paper stumps to do the blending, makes a lot more sense after I’ve spent half a year getting to know soft pastels as well. I wonder if this is because she herself also uses soft pastels, and if her process in both mediums is a result of the influence of both mediums? either way, while I started this painting with the intent of figuring out how to handle the transparent and opaque variety of my senellier oil pastels, because of the limits of that range and the high key of the photos i chose to reference, it actually became an exercise in figuring out Yolanda’s mixing methods. And now that I have those figured out – or, at least, I’ve dipped my toe in them – I feel a lot more confident tackling things like portraiture myself.

I’m starting a character design workshop this week, it’ll run for the rest of the summer, and while I’m doing that I want to spend some time doing more academic studies of the face and hands, and I think it would be fun to do that in oil pastel! it might also be kind of absurd. we’ll find out!

Also, on the subject of horses, they are hard to draw! I have been working on drawing horses since I was a kid and they remain difficult. I’m not unhappy with this piece as a final, as long as I never look at the reference again. but that is just the way of it with some subjects. further practice is always needed.