Flat Seascapes in oil pastels
Working with oil pastels has its limitations. While working on my latest piece – an Adriatic seascape – I discovered I didn’t have the “exact” color match from my blue oil pastels to the shade of blue I needed for the seascape. The photo from which I was working suggested little variation in the sea. I tried mixing several colors directly onto the paper, but I didn’t like the end result.
color mix on plexiglass palette
What I came up with was to use a small piece of plexiglass as a palette. I selected the five colors which I wanted to blend (white, grey, violet, medium blue, ultramarine), and forced a bolus of oil pastel onto the plexiglass.
Then I pulled the colors I wanted to blend onto a fine-pointed paper stub. In most cases I blended just two or three colors at a time.
For the seascape, I wanted to make the surface of water appear more lively, to suggest a seascape where the afternoon breeze is stirring the water’s surface, but not so much as to suggest a storm.
I created a cross-hatched texture by making small ‘x’ and ‘y’ marks with the stub. I made the effect more pronounced in the foreground, less so in the distance. I deliberately chose a distinct texture for the leaves/branches in the foreground.
sea texture using grey, white, violet & blues
Here is a sample of using the above technique. The next posting will show the completed piece.
[…] The first issue with which I struggled was to duplicate the color of the sea. I didn’t have the “perfect” shade of blue in my pastel collection that matched the photo. I describe how I solved this issue in my previous blog. […]