
28 Aug Oil Pastels: Techniques for Beginners
By Sydney Brink
Oil pastels are a pigment, a wax, and an oil mixed together—they’re like big, soft crayons that emulate oil painting. They’re nice to use as an alternative to painting because they are significantly cheaper, require fewer supplies, are more portable, and are more forgiving than other media.
Oil Pastel Techniques
- Stippling: Stippling is a technique that basically just means “lots of tiny dots”! In pastels, stippling is frequently used to put lots of colors next to each other, so that when you step back from the painting, the painting fools your eyes into mixing the colored dots together. Think Georges Seurat!
- Feathering: This is lots of quick, light, “feathery” strokes you make with the pastel crayon.
- Scumbling: This technique is laying color down in circles. If you “scumble” two colors together, they layer in a way that mixes the colors together.
- Blending: You can blend two colors that are side by side together using a paper towel, your finger, or a tortillion.
- Hatching: Hatching is just coloring by making parallel lines—using the edge of the pastel to get a thin line, using the top of it to make a large line, or varying pressure on the page with the pastel can all give you different effects.
- Cross-hatching: This is just the term for layering your hatching. If you make one set of lines up and down, the next layer can be side to side to create a darker tone!
I used all of these techniques and the pastel colors provided in Ignite’s kit library to make a landscape, a portrait, and a still-life drawing. I think they turned out good despite this being my first time using them in a long time! Anyone can come down to Ignite and quickly make masterpieces out of pastels.