Can you use oil pastel over oil paint?

[Art_Rabbit]

I’m going to try it anyway, for practice, as I have some old canvases from my student days and nothing to lose, but I wondered how it would work. Would it be following the “fat over lean” rule?

[Art_Rabbit]

Or would it be better to use oil paint sticks – or use them in between the original oil painting and the top layer of pastel?

[halthepainter]

Hi Art Rabbit. You certainly can use oil pastels over oil paint. If you do then you have the problem of framing your revised painting under glass.

Oil pastels have a non drying oil as their binder as well as the wax and never fully dry although the wax will harden a bit.

If you use oil sticks over an older oil painting you should have no issues of adherence nor with framing since the oil sticks will dry just like your oil paint. Oil sticks blended or applied directly over a dried oil painting will be fat over lean and there should be no cracking issues.

There will no cracking issues with the oil pastels since they will not harden and crack.

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[Art_Rabbit]

Thank you, Hal! The works I might want to paint over are stretched canvases, and I work mainly Abstract Expressionist, and prefer gallery-edges to frames, so those issues shouldn’t be a problem. Some of these may also end up being mixed-media with collage materials attached. I’m just going to play around with them and have fun, see what happens.

Some of my oil pastel brands are softer than others, too, so I can kind of follow the “fat over lean” rule with them if necessary, layering the richest ones at the very top. I need to get a can of OP fixative maybe when I get them done, to “set” it all.

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