Bird of Paradise flower in oil pastels

I had an urge to paint loud, in-your-face colour, so I whipped out my oil pastels for this.

Oil pastels are great for when you want to just paint bold strokes and not have to worry about pigmentation. The oil pastels I used are Mungyo Gallery soft oil pastels. These are by far, my favourite - soft and creamy with pure, unadulterated colour. The paper is Clairefontaine Paint On - it works very well for all sorts of dry media.

A note about blending oil pastels: When I use oil pastels for backgrounds, that's easy - just scribble it all in and then blend well with a paper stump. For flowers and main subjects and delicate details, however, it's a different story. When you blend oil pastels, you take away some of the vibrancy in the colour and dulls it (the same as with soft pastels). Hence, I don't like to overblend. But you also can't NOT blend oil pastels because they leave visibly streaky marks on the paper that look untidy and unfinished. So I use those foam tip shapers which mostly just moves the pigment around instead of smushing them in. It's not perfect and it's a tedious process but I haven't found anything better.

The long tentacles were the trickiest. Oil pastels come in fat sticks and it's difficult to get clean lines with them, especially once they've lost their edge with repeated use. So it's a lot of careful maneouvering, more shaping and then cleaning up the edges with a black coloured pencil in the negative spaces.

 

To give it even more pop, I draw in some highlights with my Sennelier oil pastel white and then it's done! Perhaps this will satisfy my colour-loving heart for a while.