How to Paint Faces With Oil Pastels

Painting faces with oil pastels is difficult but can be mastered if you use simple flesh colors with shadow. The first step is to draw the face, eyes mouth and hair, and then mix your paints. To make flesh color from oil pastels, mix ocher and a lot of white. You should also use an under painting of yellow or red to give a real flesh color look to your painting. Faces have many colors in them like pink, rose, red and blue. Study color photographs and real life faces to see the different colors and tones and expand your own pallet.

Things You'll Need

• Paints
• Pallet
• Canvas
• Drawing pencils
• Brushes
• Knife

Instructions

1. Paint your under painting. Paint over shaded areas of your drawing with a darker red color, and the lighter areas with yellow. The under painting is done with a watery mixture of paint and a lot of oil base or liquin.

2. Mix your flesh tone and set it aside. Then take some of it and mix it with black, blue or red for more shaded areas. Then paint in the shaded areas around the chin, under the eyes, on the forehead and around the nose. Paint from dark to light, using a steadily lighter mix of flesh tone and black for the shade.

3. Work the painting until you are painting a full flesh tone. Paint the fleshy areas on the cheeks, forehead and nose, blending slightly with the shaded areas. Flesh areas directly in the light (the lightest areas) are nearly white, and shaded areas have a lot of blue, and gray in them, but are not totally dark.

4. Paint in the eyes using a white color mixed with a little blue or gray. Paint in the pupils using ocher or blue, and add eyelashes with a darker color. Then paint the lips, mixing red with your flesh color and then adding black or blue for the shaded areas. Paint these in the same method you painted the rounded shaded areas.

5. Add the hair. Using a mixture of brown and black, paint in the shaded areas and then work to the lighter areas by adding white. You can paint the hair anyway you like.

6. Add highlights to your face on the nose, cheekbones and forehead, anywhere the light strikes head on. Use a very light flesh color with a lot of white for this and paint on the highlights liberally. This gives your face a three-dimensional look.

Tips & Warnings

• Pay attention to the smaller details of the face like the lips and how they blend into one another by looking at pictures of faces. This will give you a better understanding of how facial features work. For instance, eyes are not just simple ovals, they are set inside the skull and change as you look at the face from different angles. The same can be said for the mouth. Also, when using oils, you can get different colors by layering. A face isn't always just flat tan. There are blue, red, yellow and many other colors in the face.

• Shadows on faces can sometimes appear blue, depending on how the light is positioned. Don't make your shadow too gray, even though black will always be used too some extent in your color. Use blue, pink and other colors with your flesh color.

Resources

• A good oil painting of a face
• Examples of faces painted in oil
• Classes on painting portraits in oil