How to Begin Coloring Faux Stained Glass with Oil Pastels

Bethany Thiele, Art Teacher
197 followers
5 Video Views·Aug 28, 2026
AI Generated·May contain errors
Video Summary
AI GeneratedThis tutorial guides art students on how to color a faux stained glass project using oil pastels. The instructor emphasizes the use of gradients by blending at least two colors per section, maintaining clean lines, and filling the paper completely to achieve a vibrant, professional look.
Hi art students! I am ready to start coloring my faux stained glass with oil pastels.
I have elements from nature, more than three in my scene. I have a decorative border and I've
broken down my shapes into additional shapes to look more like stained glass. And I've traced my
pencil lines with sharpie. To get started, I'm going to choose one area to work on and I'm going
to make sure I use at least two colors for a gradient in each individual section. So if I want
to begin with my pumpkin here, I might want to choose orange because pumpkins are orange, but I
also have to use another color to mix with it. I could use white in some areas and do orange to
white. I could use yellow in some areas and do orange to yellow. I could even do orange to red
or orange to brown. Let's start with orange to white. I'm going to begin here with some orange
on one side. I'm trying to stay inside my lines and I'm trying to make sure that I'm filling in
all of the paper. Where I want to layer in some white, I'm going to use less of the pastel.
And now I'm going to take my white and I'm going to blend the white on top
of the orange where I had less heavy pressure. Now it's mixing. The orange is mixing with the white
and I can then continue to apply white until I have a nice gradient from orange to white.
So maybe this time I'll start with orange at the top and maybe instead of mixing orange to white,
maybe I'll do orange into yellow or orange to white to yellow. I can use more than two pastels
if I choose. Let's see what happens if I do orange to yellow and then I can decide if I want to add
in some white later on as well. Orange to yellow, putting the yellow on top of some of the orange
where I had less heavy pressure. I could always add in some white again too here if I want to.
That's helping to create a nice gradient. Now it looks like I've missed some little spots right
here of paper so I should go in and add some more orange in that area. I do want to fill in
everything fully. All right I'm going to do just one more example. So here I don't want to start
with the same exact color or same value again. I want to change it up a bit so maybe I'll start
this one with some yellow but my pastel has orange on it so I'm just going to take a bit of my paper
towel, clean that off first, that way I can just control the color. So I want to make sure that
it's yellow that I'm applying first if that's what I choose. So I'm going to start here with some yellow
and once I'm ready to move on to my next color I can grab that. I think I'm going to do
orange again here. Now in this case since orange is darker than yellow it's really starting to
cover the yellow up and if I need to I can go back in with some yellow again there
but maybe this time I'll actually use a little bit of red as well. Red is a similar or analogous
color to orange so that's going to blend real nicely together too and kind of create a red orange
over here. Okay so you can see how this is going as long as I just take my time. I can work one
shape at a time to fill in my spaces. I would probably want to work on the pumpkin first
then move on to another object maybe like a leaf. You know that way I can make sure I'm not
putting the colors for my pumpkin in the sky or putting colors for my tree into a cloud. I do want
to watch what I'm doing and make sure I'm using the colors in the way that I have really chosen.
When it's time to clean up today you'll be putting your work
on your class label drawing rack. Even though this is not a wet project we want to make sure
that our oil pastels are not getting on anybody else's drawings. This is not an assignment you
need to rush through. Focus on your work and take your time because we'll be working on this
for multiple class periods.
