This beautiful coat is our drawing subject.

Inspirations, stories and tips from Kim.

Testing oil pastel with watercolour paint.

My first oil pastel drawing.

First try at using a water colour wash over oil pastel and my original drawing.

Our teacher’s work, oil pastel with watercolour wash in white.

Teacher’s project from the 80’s

New supplies on way home.

The ferry commute home.

It has been too long for an update!  I realise also that my last entry was on our drawing lessons at school but I promise there has been lots in between, including a fair bit of knitting.  A big project is in progress at the moment and there will be more on this later.  However, for now, I thought I would try to share some inspiration in drawing and trying out different techniques and materials.

We had a lesson with our wonderful visiting teacher Kim who began by giving us tips on how to combine oil pastels with watercolours and also showed examples from her own impressive portfolio (pictured.)  The coat she brought in for us to draw was a beautiful hand-woven fabric with an array of colours and textures to savour and to challenge in terms of trying to capture its character on paper.

The main tips I got were:

When outlining a form which is rather heavy and woollen in fabric, don’t be afraid to draw a jagged outline. By avoiding a clean outline it immediately gives the sense of a weighty and full fabric.  You can even paint outside the edge to take the texture to a fuller level.  Emphasis and exaggeration is ok!

Using oil pastels I did an A3 sketch and began adding a little watercolour.  However, my teacher pointed out that I had already used my pastels to indicate the shading on the coat and using watercolour to indicate shadow requires a back-to-front approach.  That it, what should be the darkest, in black paint, should actually not have oil pastel as that prevents the paint from taking hold on the paper.  The areas of shadow actually needed to stay clear in order for the paint to fill in these areas to create depth.  So I began another version with this in mind.  (Both drawings are pictured.)

We also discussed how to represent designs that contain a lot of white (which my design project does) and Kim suggested that I start with a coloured background paper first.  Then pastel oils can be used to show the other colours (in my case blues) and the white can be added as a last layer with the watercolour.  Also some highlights can be added with pastel white if preferred.  Her own work shows a great example of this technique on brown wrapping paper.

On the way home I stopped off to buy some more art materials as I am so inspired to test out more and just love the creative and meditative process in drawing and painting!

Hope these tips prove useful and encourage you to try a sketch or two!