Oil Pastel Demo part 2

Green Window - pencil, charcoal and oil pastel on paper - 11 x 14

It's done (tentatively, as always). I decided I really didn't like the green on her face, and I always have the pic of it from above, so I scraped it off as well as I could. That's one of the fun techniques with oil pastels, especially in the later stages when you're putting it on thick over top of the wash drawing. I have a nifty little tool called a burnisher (seen below) that I keep in the box with the cray-pas because its so amazingly useful when working with them.

These things are sold through the MicroMark website as a burnisher, for burnishing down the edges of masking tape and similar type stuff - they also make great sculpting tools and excellent oil pastel tools. The end that's close to the camera, with the red wax on it, is a little spoon shape - the back side of it is for burnishing and smoothing things down, but turned up like this it's good for scraping off some color from a stick of oil pastel. Once you've got a little glob of colored wax you can sort of place it oh so carefully right where you need an accent and then burnish it down to make it permanent - it becomes like a thick little glob of paint there, totally opaque. I used this trick to put the highlights in her eyes and a few other things. The other end of the burnisher is a little blade (not sharp really) that I use to scrape off unwanted wax, like the green on her face.

I discovered charcoal is excellent for making dark parts (the wall behind her). Just be sure to always blow off any loose charcoal dust carefully before it gets stuck in the wax anywhere and makes a nuisance of itself. Then you need to rub over it to sort of blend it down into the wax.

You can manipulate the wax in all sorts of ways - to finish this one up I was rubbing with my fingers, scrubbing with paper towels, using the point or edge of the scraper to remove tiny little dots of wax that just didn't look right (it's easy to get those when working with something as messy as cray-pas).