Oil Pastel Guided Landscape, Part 1

Hello art students! This video is intended to help guide you through your first oil pastel landscape. To begin we're going to first create a folder to protect your work. You're going to take two larger pieces of paper, copy paper is simple for this, and just tape those two pieces together and then they can be folded in half on the taped edge. Write your name and block on the front and then reopen up the paper. You will next need a piece of pastel paper. Pastel paper is very bumpy on one side. This is called the tooth of the paper. The texture is the tooth showing and you're going to draw on that bumpy side. So please write your name on the smooth side which is therefore the back. You're then going to be taping the paper into your folder and you're going to do this by taking a piece of tape and making a loop so that the sticky side is out. Put the sticky side out of the tape onto the folder and just tape down your pastel paper. You're going to use a reference photo to begin and you're going to want to lightly draw the main things you see in the reference photo. Start by drawing in the horizon line and the tree trunk. Then draw the five largest branches that you see in your reference photo. If you struggle with this, try paying attention to the negative space between the branches, not just the branches themselves. When you're finished with this very light and simple drawing, you are ready to start adding color with oil pastels. We're going to be working from the back to the front, meaning we're going to start in the sky. This means the space between the branches. You're going to want to leave plenty of tooth showing as you add in this light layer. We'll be putting other colors on top. We're going to go to white next. If you need to clean off your white, do so in your folder and add white to the lightest areas in the sky. Look at your photo and see where the sky has lighter areas and clouds. Next, add dark blue to the darkest areas in the sky. I see more dark blue around the edges of the reference photo, so that's why I'm placing more dark blue in those locations. Finally, repeat with light blue to smooth and finish. As you're smoothing, you'll be filling in more of the tooth of the paper. You could even go back to white or dark blue again if needed. When you're happy with your sky, you can move on to the middle ground of your landscape. So we're going to begin with yellow here and just add some yellow underneath the horizon line and anywhere else in the land where you see more of those bright yellow colors. Again, allow the tooth of the paper to show. Next, apply a dark green to the ground where you see the darker green. You can layer some of the over top of the yellow as you go through this as well. And then go on to dark brown. You're going to want to just outline your tree and the branches as well and then begin lightly filling in the tree trunk and the branches with the dark brown. But still, allow the tooth of the paper to show because this is just the initial first layer of color that you're adding. And while working with brown, add brown wherever you see any shadows on the ground. And again, this can be overlapping some of the green and the yellow that you've placed before. Lastly, with brown, go ahead and just draw in some of the extra small branches that are seen, placing some more lines where you feel like there's going to be additional clumps of leaves needed. This is as far as we are going to go today and we will continue these landscapes next class. Stay tuned for part two of this series to see more.