How to Use Oil Pastels

Oil pastels are tools that you can use to draw colorful pictures. Oil pastels may look like crayons, but they produce results that are much smoother, brighter and easier to blend than crayons. Once you have your oil pastels, you can begin to make dynamic art. You just need to learn how to get the most out of using them.

Difficulty:

Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• oil pastels
• drawing paper
• blending stick
• turpentine and paintbrush
• scraping tool

1. Get rich, thick color by building up layers of oil pastel on paper. Start by putting in very light amounts of dark colored oil pastel. This dark color should be barely visible, but it should also fill the general area where you plan to put your figure on the paper. Keep adding different colors, a little at a time. As your layers build up, the color will be richer and you can blend the colors more and more.

2. Scrape away extra color. Once you have many layers of oil pastel on your paper, you can remove some of this color by taking a scraping tool and pushing away some of the top layers of color. This will let you remove colors you don't want and expose some of the layers beneath. This can also help you to create texture as you draw.

3. Blend colors together. Aside from building up layers of oil pastel, you can blend colors in other ways. You can use your fingers to push the oil pastel around your paper. You can use an artist's blending stick to blend different oil pastel colors on paper. You can also use a paintbrush with a small amount of turpentine. The turpentine will dissolve your oil pastel, and then you can blend colors together as if they were paint.

4. Draw in small details using a blending stick to get more control. Oil pastels are generally pretty fat tools that do not form good sharp points. If you want to draw small details, you can take a blending stick, and remove some of the color from your oil pastel. Then use your blending stick to apply little bits of oil pastel where you want them.

Resources

• Look through step-by-step demonstrations of oil pastel technique on this site.