Exercise: Using Oil Pastels

I completed this exercise on 5th April 2013

After fiddling with the hatching exercise and several iterations of the marker pen and dip pen exercise I was ready to loosen up and get a bit scribbly. I enjoyed doing the thumbnail sketches for the oil pastel drawing. However, it was only after drawing the first one that I realised that my view finder was not proportional to the size of A4 or A3 paper. I had to cut a new viewfinder and template. I settled on a landscape format arrangement of vegetables and some wild asparagus our neighbour had brought us after a foraging expedition. Wild asparagus is long and spindly (but has a very intense flavour). I had to cut a few inches off the stalks to make a good composition.

I loved using the oil pastels. I used to use the cheap version when I was a child but haven't even considered them as a medium after the age of about 12. The colours are really rich and dense and you can layer one colour over another to mix the colour on the paper. I really enjoyed the exercise. The pastels were especially well adapted to the glossy surfaces of the pepper and aubergine. I deliberately stopped myself from continuing for too long with this exercise as I thought there was a risk of me getting carried away and everything getting overworked. I have deliberately not completely filled the tooth of the paper in places to allow its texture to show through.

Although there are more individual objects in this composition than the previous one, I have left more negative space and to me it feels more aesthetically pleasing; less overcrowded than the marker pen pictures.