Palette Knife for Oil Pastel Textures
Textures for sky and sails by using a palette knife
This week I began experimenting with how to use a palette knife to create textures in oil pastels. In the past, I’ve relied on other techniques, most notably:
- Fingertips – to flatten colors to a uniform finish, for calm water, reflections, etc.; and
- Paper stubs – for combining colors, drawing lines through colors, building raised areas.
I knew that oil painters use the palette knife with canvas, but I wanted to determine whether it would work for oil pastels on paper.
Scraping the oil pastel evenly across the paper works well to combine different colors into a very flat surface. It also can suggest a uniform surface, for example, the texture of a canvas sail. For the mainsail, I combine luminous yellow (Sennelier 233) with white & charcoal. By dragging the flat edge of the palette knife across the paper, I create the horizontal lines of a canvas texture. The vertical strand of pure white down the mainsail suggests a concave sail.
But as I gained more confidence, I learned that substantial papers – in the above case, Arches 140-lb. Oil Paper – can withstand serious pressure. I can create both raised areas (e.g. cloud surfaces), as well as “negative areas”, where I create a depression against the paper that gives the image depth. In the above example, I needed to avoid creating a lifeless, placid sky. Sailboats move through (invisible) wind – my work needs to suggest moving air, so I wanted to suggest dynamic movement. Although close examination looks quite “busy”, that appearance dissolves when the viewer takes in the image as a whole, from a distance. At that point, the viewer sees a very three-dimensional sky. The small wisps of white become distant clouds, the greys draw the eye back towards the horizon, so that the boat & sail can pop into the foreground.
