"The Wednesday Model" - original oil pastel figurative sketch

 For this drawing I used Pastelmat paper, and mostly Sennelier oil pastels, with some Caran d'Ache and a few CrayPas Specialists.  I just didn't have time to finish her body so gave her a black dress. This is really a value drawing with not so much attention paid to local color, plus no "correcting".  You can probably tell that😀. And in my typically disorganized way, I didn't have my box of mostly portrait oil pastel colors, so I had to work a little harder.  One of my instructors often had me do my figure drawings with hues that one would never ever use for paintings of humans, but it always worked.

And now a bit about oil pastels.  You always hear that they cannot be blended.  Well, that's where fingers come in.  At least my fingers do from time to time, but you can also use blending tools such as pastel blenders which I find very useful.  In addition, I use Eye Tees which are actually for applying eye makeup, but they are helpful for working in tight areas as well.  I would say, however, when using the lipstick-like Senneliers, it's best sometimes not to pass any kind of blenders over the area and just to let it dry - or as much as oil pastel dries. 

Here's an example of blending when I wanted a particular color that I didn't have.  It was for a dress that needed to be darker than the light greenish-blue on the left, and lighter than the dark blue on the right, so I worked this darker, cooler blue over the lighter one and then vice versa and got a close match for the dress color.  It mostly involved mooshing the sticks over each other on the support until I achieved the color I was looking for.  The lighter color peeks through in different places and I like that a lot.  I didn't blend with my finger or a blending tool because one was a juicy Sennelier and the other a Caran d'Ache which is a little bit drier.  The two brands work fine together, but I didn't want to disturb them while they were setting.  After a few weeks and the painting was dry to touch, I sprayed it with fixative and one pass of varnish.

Recently I read a recommendation to spray four applications of oil pastel fixative and then four applications of varnish.  May give that a try.  

 If y'all have suggestions about oil pastels, I am very interested! Please let me know how you're doing these things because I'm always looking for better ways to work with this medium.  Thanks so much for stopping by!