Oil Pastels Painting – “Veronica”

I have a new piece of oil pastels artwork, based on a monthly challenge in the Oil Pastels forum at WetCanvas.com.

Veronica is the name of the model in this piece. The paper surface is from a pad of Canson mi-Tientes colored pastel paper, and the oil pastels used are Mungyo and Sennelier. As usual, I start out with Mungyos for the base colors, then move into Senneliers when I work out my details and layers of color.

I didn’t start out taking pictures, so the initial sketching is missed in this step by step. I do have 4 good pictures showing the main steps along the way, once the sketching and some base colors were done.

Step One

Again, moving past the first sketch (which was done with a white pastel pencil), here in the first step I have all my shapes and forms and have begun filling in base colors. At this point I had already taken the time to get into some details such as the hair, her face, and the dress. But the background and sky are all just light base colors to start out. I like to have a sense of the whole composition of a piece, and so I like to at least get a feel for where all my colors are.

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Step Two

In this step I am continuing to work on filling out my base colors. Getting the colors in for the rock, some of the blues in the lake, and the distant green of the trees in the background. Here I also darkened some of the shadows outlining the figure, such as the shadow under the dress and under the hands.

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Step Three

Next I have filled out most of my base colors and I felt good about getting the green in from the background trees. I also began putting in some whites and light blues for the sky. I have also concentrated here on Veronica’s skin tones, as well as made some adjustment in the details of her face. Getting the face right was tricky, but I felt was very important for this piece. She has a contemplative pose here, as she looks down and dips her toes in the water. Finally for this step I have smoothed out and blended in the whites with some of the creases in her dress.

Step Four

Finishing the piece, I felt I got my blues right for the surrounding water, and also darkened some of the areas in the background trees. I have also blended in the sky and really darkened the bottom of the rock Veronica is sitting on. I was going to take more time to work on the details of that rock, but I got to this point and ended up feeling good about it. Probably getting too detailed with the rock would have taken away from focus on Veronica.

I also paid closer attention to flesh tones and some of the values going on in the figure. I continued to work on making adjustments in the details of the face and her hair.

This was a fun challenge to work on this piece, and I hope you have enjoyed this step by step. Thanks for reading, and if you are interested in keeping up with future articles on this website, please subscribe by RSS here: Oil Pastels Artist RSS Feed

If you have any suggestions for future articles, or any questions about oil pastels, feel free to comment below, or email me at eric@oilpastelsartist.com.