Art : Oil Pastel Layering

[This project was done MANY months ago... ;-p]

Jan Van Eyck was known to be the first to experiment with oil paints and brought it to "perfection". Oils, unlike egg tempera (a common medium before van Eyck's time), gives paintings a certain kind of shine and lustre. Colours are thick and rich. Some of the characteristics of oil paints can be achieved using oil pastels. We experimented with more blending with oil pastels. In this series of pieces, I was trying to demonstrate the effect of layering.

All the pieces here are done on small postcard-sized paper. The adventage of small sized paper is that you try out techniques and complete a piece in a short time. Each took about 50 minutes to complete; a comfortable duration for my active 8 year olds.

This is one of my demo pieces... I was trying to show how putting a yellow under a green could give some interesting effect...


Boys gave it a try with many pieces from imagination. Here is one by B. He did manage to mix a few colours but have not really work one colour into another... Nevertheless a start in the right direction :-)


D attempted a beach scene. He was able to mash the colours more thoroughly in the sky and sun (pink?!) ...


For more practice, we googled for images using words like "sunset", "mountains" and "sky". (not much inspiring scenary here in Singapore I'm afraid) I preselected pictures that have some interesting colours but that are not too complicated. I was hoping to give my boys more practice in "getting the colour" with oil pastels.

[I have included the links to the photographs we used so you can make the comparison if you so want.]

This is D's country road winding through a scenic field in the Tuscany, Italy


B's picture of another country road.


I am always captivated by sunsets, so here's my attempt of Lake Audy in Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, Canada. This little exercise was really quite a challenge even for me ...


Boys are slowly getting the hang of it. I was pleasantly surprised one day when B suggested we capture a beautiful scenary on paper when we saw one. :-)

Here is a related website, an interactive landscape adventure - it is effective in bringing one to an awareness of how artists can create different moods and weather in a landscape.

There is more technical information on oil pastels here: How to use Oil Pastels