Rain I and II - Oil pastels on black paper

On Labour Day, I was in the mood for something different, so I whipped out my oil pastels for an hour of furious scribbling.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting much, I simply intended to have some fun and there's something very therapeutic about drawing with oil pastels - the colour payoff is just amazing. I had never done a city scape with oil pastels before, I was drawn to the bokeh background because it didn't require too much accuracy. 

Here's a progress pic: can you see how much of it is just squiggles? I used mostly Mungyo Gallery soft oil pastels, they're the best as they layer well and give bright, rich colour. I used some CrayPas as well, but they're only good for the dark underlayers. 

As it turned out, this was one of those happy accidents where the outcome was unexpectedly pretty. The bright oil pastels were a nice contrast to the black Clairefontaine Paint On paper, and my friend liked it so much she asked to buy it. It makes me happy when my art touches someone. 80% of proceeds was donated to charity.

After that experiment, I was eager to do another. This was was a more complex night scene of Chicago, reference photo from Unsplash. I started with a rough sketch using a white coloured pencil. Coloured pencils pair well with oil pastels. Then I worked left to right, to minimise smudging.

One important thing I discovered is that if you want the pigment to remain vibrant, you need to minimise blending. Once you blend the colour in, it loses its luminosity. So as far as possible, I tried to smoothen out the colours just using the sticks. I used the tortillon to blend out edges only sparingly.

At this point, I realised that the shopfront was a 7-Eleven, so I used a white oil pastel to correct the logo. There, now it looks right! Then I drew in the reflection and it's hard not to go overboard. There's always the temptation to add more and more colour, when actually there are a lot of black patches on the pavement.

What I love about this sort of scene is that it's very forgiving. Nobody is going to notice if you paint an extra puddle or an extra bokeh light. As long as the major shapes are in place, our brain will piece together the information to make sense of the scene, which is a very liberating way to paint.

Rain II