Author: Shel Kahn
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Oil pastel dragon riding team
really love the colour palette i achieved here! not sure the drawing was strong enough to support it though, and the canvas was definitely too small for me at the level of precision in comfortable with right now. in the end i called this off before feeling 100% satisfied, but that’s simply the nature of…
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Sun through the Forest in oil pastel
Presenting: this huge oil pastel painting I created this past August! It’s nearly two feet tall, painted in a variety of brands of oil pastel on stonehenge cotton rag paper, with an underpainting in watercolour. I created it based on photos i’d taken while on a roadtrip around the great lakes through Canada and the…
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Three Pine Grosbeaks
my latest oil pastel experiment is this painting of three pine grosbeaks, referencing a CC0 photograph shared as part of an observation on inaturalist. this one was created on illustration board, with a full under painting in watercolor first, which you can see in the third image. The illustration board texture has a wonderful grain…
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oil pastel sweat bee
I painted this one on sanded paper, the much admired pastelmat type, and found it desperately unintuitive. The grippy surface could be nice, but it’s completely unabsorbant, and i found myself unable to layer the way I’m used to on rag papers, or honestly even on wood. that said, you really can blend infinitely on…
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macro fishbowl asters
i have been having a lot of fun making some intentionally messy photos with clip-on macro lenses on my cellphone camera, and trying more and more to get the blown out, bokeh’d background to be a more intentional element. this one feels like it’s showing me some potential!
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Moss and grasses
Loved this hike and felt immensely inspired the whole time and yet still wrestled with all the green in the photos. I never understood how people could say green was hard to deal with until I tried to post process digital photos.
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mixed media test: failed haha
i did a quick watercolour (first) and gave it a coat of fixative so i could try out layering oil pastels on top for a mixed media look (second), but I’ve hit a few challenges: so likely I’ll toss this now and move on, but it has taught me a fair amount of interesting technical…
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WIP Knight in Oil Pastel
this is the biggest thing I’ve painted yet with the oil pastels; gonna be working in it for a while i was looking at digital paintings from 2022, and thinking about the method I had started using back then of having a mark making stage and a blending stage as two separate things; and the…
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Your Cellphone Camera’s Digital Processing Settings and You
I am mad about cellphone cameras hiding the processing they do to my photos, and I am glad about software I found that lets me control it and opt in and out.