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Author: Julia_Lesnichy, Contributing Editor
| In this introduction I would like to draw your attention to differences between oil and dry pastels. Oil pastels are harder and have more intense and saturated colors. They don't blend as easy as soft pastels. This quality enables a painter to use oil pastels in a cross-hatching technique, putting them down with short strokes and dots. Oil pastels can be easily diluted with a turpentine, which may be neccessary for blocking in darks or local colors of major masses in a landscape or still life. Colors of lighter values may easily overlap previous layers to produce a vibrant colorful painting.
Oil pastels may be used on usual cold pressed watercolor paper primed with Colorfix primers, Acrylics or watercolors. Canson and Fabriano pastel and sanded Colorfix paper are very efficient surfaces. However any paper holds dry pastel particles better than oil pastels. Besides the first layers of dry pastels may be fixed by a pastel fixative, which allows an artist to build up more color layers. No fixative is allowed with oil pastels, which make this medium hard to handle. No more than two or three layers of oil pastels may be laid down. Due to this reason a preliminary drawing is required in oil pastels, as it's difficult to remove drawing errors later. Initinal errors may be eliminated by scumbling some unwanted colors or wrong details with a palette knife. The thicker the pastel layer the harder it is to correct a mistake. |
| At this initial stage I blocked in local colors of major masses of a winter landscape. I picked out a cool violet for the trees in the shade and warm orange, red and yellow for them in the light. I put down ultramarine blue and cerulean blue in the snow shadows. I added warm yellow to the sunlit patches of the snow. |  |
 | I began the following stage working more on the snow shadows, as the winter day light was changing rapidly. I added warm violet, violet rose and light pink to distant shadows to connect them with the violets of the background trees. In the foreground snow shadows I saw emerald green light. I added more white to the light in the snow, which made it look really cool. But I kept it in mind to warm it later. I started blocking in a nearby tree, putting more cool violet and red-brown into its trunk. |
 | At this stage I focused on the background adding more warm red to the sunlit bushes and blending in more muted colors, warm greens and violets. I sketched some distant trees too. I also saw more warm pink in the sunlight on the snow and laid it carefully down. I kept on developing the key tree adding warm olive green and ochre to its sunlit bark. |
 | This is the final version of my oil pastel drawing, which I finished in the studio during two hours after my plain-air start. I considerably darkened the background and lighted the sky adding some emerald green to cerulean and ultramarine blue. I added more yellow to the light on the snow to show its inner warmth. I laid down more warm pink and violet to distant shadows and softened the siluette of the tree on the right side. I painted a small bush in the left lower corner to balance the composition. In the foreground I placed more warm violet and pink shadows. I also lightened up the foreground shadows on the snow to make them look airy. They seemed too sharp before and looked like slits in the snow. |
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| B i o g r a p h y | |
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http://www.artwanted.com/jles |
| I'm a Russian-born oil painter working in the technique of French and American impressionists. I was largely influenced by art of Claude Monet, Renoir, Childe Hassam, Theodor Robinson and Henry Hensche. In 2001 I took classes with Lois Griffel, former director of Cape Cod School of Art founded by an outstanding American impressionist painter Charles Hawthorne in 1899. In the school I learnt about the development of color masses in a landscape and outdoor still life painting. Later I applied these color principles to my plein-air work. My goal as a painter is to study colors in nature and relationships of color masses in a landscape in different weather, lighting, and season. I do mostly plein-air landscapes using an impasto technique with palette knives and brushes. I also paint outside and indoor still life, florals and do charcoal nude drawings and oil paintings of female models. I love to use oil pastels for short outdoor sketches and have been a member of US Oil Pastel Society since 2005. My art in is private collections of the USA and Russia, including Kimberly-Clarke Corporation in Roswell, GA. | |
| E-Mail: jlesnichy@yahoo.com Web Site: http://www.artwanted.com/jles | |
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