Tips for bringing oil and soft pastels into your everyday art practice

I love pastels. All kinds—soft, oil, hard, wax.

Their incredible pigmentation and the immediacy of using them made me eager to work with them as much as possible. When I was first trying out these media, I could find a lot of information about using soft pastels (the ones with the chalky texture), but there wasn’t much I could discover about oil pastels—their potential uses, basic techniques, or, of most interest to me: how to incorporate them into a sketchbook practice.

Since I’ve been using them fairly regularly, and have learned a lot from experimentation—and from taking classes with Jo Blaker and reading Sarah Dyer’s posts for Jackson’s—I am sharing a few tips for bringing this wonderful medium into your everyday (yes, sketchbook, too!) practice.

I hope you enjoy, and that this inspires you to pull out your pastels.

—sarah

P.S. Sorry about the varied audio quality in this video! I know I need to buy a mic, but haven’t had the budget room for one. Also, I recorded a lot of this in the very early morning, and my voice betrays my recent waking. I hope you enjoyed the video all the same <3

Links:

Natural Earth Paint Matte Medium
Natural Earth Paint Acrylik (or Gloss) Medium