Dead branch - oil pastel

 

Over a month ago, just before our Christmas vacation, our country (The Netherlands) got in lockdown again. Not much of a problem, but I had waited for those weeks off to go and shop in my favourite art supply store. So I ordered online and with the order came a free set of oil pastels. Not the most expensive quality, but still it is something new to me and I want to explore the possibilities.

After watching several 'How to draw with Oil Pastel' videos on the internet I gathered courage for my first experiment - since I left school of course but that is a long time ago.

The dead branch, that was a subject for a pencil study a few weeks ago was a nice subject for this. I am familiar with the subject and it's one that needs layering colours for mixing and placing different colours next to one another. 

For this first experiment I did not use the black that is in the box, but tried to mix the shadow colour with brown and blue, as I do with my watercolours. Also the colours of the branch are layered, mixed (with my finger) and more layers added. The layering itself is also a way of mixing the colours. For the background I mixed only by layering and added some shapes of dead leaves. The grasses were made with a sgraffito technique using a small wooden skewer. I learned that I have to prepare this, for making all the grasses stand out the bottom layer should be a very light colour.

I learned a lot from this first experiment. As there are more colours in the box, I will certainly make more of these drawings, if only because it is fun to do.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this drawing and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Dead branch - pencil study

We still have our Christmas Vacation, my husband and me both work in schools now. So we went for a walk in a forest area near Rucphen, where we had walked before. The walk was nice and being there in wintertime made it different from the previous time we made that specific signposted walk.

Lying close to the path were several dead branches, already stripped of their bark by - the animals, the weather, time or.. 

What I noticed were the colours of the bare wood that were showing. It had rained a bit the day before, so the moist conditions helped a lot but still, there were shades of yellow, some orange-red, greens and shades of brown. All that was inviting me to make reference pictures and make a (watercolour) pencil drawing showing as much of these rich colours as possible. Of course the reference pictures were not perfect, but I have used my memory as well.

 Using the pencils, I have layered and mixed colours until the shade I remembered was on the paper, adding the small bits of bark on the branch, some holes and the very small mushrooms near the middle of the branch. The branch was lying amidst dead leaves and some grasses. The leaves are only suggested by colour variations in the background and the grasses are 'drawn' with my eraser, trying the effectiveness of that technique.

While making this work I have learned a lot so the 'study' idea worked as it should. The result is even better than I hoped for at some point in the process.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this drawing and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.