Cattle Egrets

 

Still on my oil pastel passion. This is a place I pass occasionally in Middleburg, Florida. I just get a kick out of the cattle egrets hanging out on the larger animals.

Fort Macon

Still in love with my Mungyo oil pastels. This is a 9x12 on the same paper as my previous painting. This is at Fort Macon State Park in North Carolina, near my sister Amy’s home. 

Leslie’s Lake

 

I might have thought I’d be more artistic during my Covid lockdown but actually I was much less so. Depression? Who knows? Less interest? But my FB artist friend Gary Garrett began posting some fabulous paintings he’d done with Mungyo oil pastels. 

I’d always thought I’d like oil pastels and had several sets: Holbeins, NeoPastels, CrayPas. But my attempts were always awful. It just never occurred to me that my actual oil pastels could be the problem. Now Gary is a far better artist than I am, but I did love his Mungyo review so I bought a set. 

And I fell in love! These Mungyos are such a pleasure to use. This was my first attempt at using them. My friend Leslie has a little cottage on a lake which I’ve visited a few times, and this is the view from her cottage. This on a 9x12 sanded sheet (darned if I can recall brand name) which I bought a few years ago to try with my dry pastels. It was awful for them though, but I love it for the oil pastels.!

Sanderlings and Waves

I'm not getting much accomplished lately since I fell and broke my wrist a couple weeks ago. Granted it is my left wrist, and I'm right-handed, but I still felt so washed out for days! And so many things are hard with just one hand - including this blog post typed with two fingers, LOL.

However energy is coming back a bit, and I'm still on my love affair with oil pastels, and with beach scenes.
This is done with the oilies on an 8x10 Ampersand Pastelboard - my fave surface for these.

More small paintings

 Breaker

Sunrise II

I'm still having fun playing with the oil pastels. They are fantastic on Ampersand boards, and then blended with some turpenoid. Finish with three coats of varnish and you have a well-protected surface. I did both of these the other day - just small 5x7's on Ampersand, using my Holbein oil pastels. They have three coats of varnish each and could easily be framed without glass - a nice savings.

Winter Morning Fishing

Today a group of us from the Art Guild of Orange Park went to the Isle rehab center in Fleming Island, FL. We had several artists who brought various items for sale, and others who worked on art projects with the residents, and a couple of us who worked on art work in public spaces. There was a potter who was quite popular, but I was set up to paint right in the main lobby, and I had a great time talking to people as I worked.

The above is the painting I did this morning, from a reference photo I took last Thanksgiving weekend when I went up to NC to visit my sister and her family. Every morning I took my dog for a walk on the beach just about sunrise, and got lots of great photos. Regular pastel would have probably gotten dust all over the floor so this was done again with oil pastels. I'm learning a little more about them, like the fact that they don't layer well if laid down with too heavy a hand, so on this painting  I worked on multiple light layers. This is done with my Holbein and Caran d'Ache oilies on an 11x14 sheet of Richeson sanded paper. It was a fun morning.

Breakfast Time

More and more lately I'm having fun playing with my oil pastels - most of the benefits of the regular dry pastels but not all the mess and dust. They are a great medium to use with my grandkids! Turpenoid works great for blending them. I've been coating them with varnish and so far it seems to create a hard surface with no mess and stickiness - and could easily be framed without glass, or so it seems. The best of all possible worlds.

We'll see, so far so good. I saw this pelican just a couple miles from my house, picking up a fish at a local boat ramp on Doctors Lake and I had to take a few photos. I guess my biggest issue with the oil pastels is that they don't layer very well, unlike the regular dry pastels. The oily surface seems to prevent it, so some of my brights are not as bright here as I wanted, but could not add any more layers on top of the darker colors. Still, I'm having fun and it's all a learning experience. This was done on an 8x10 plain Ampersand board which I coated with a couple coats of the pre-mixed Art Spectrum ground, using a mixture of both my Holbein and Caran d'Ache oilies.

Working smaller

I'm really having fun using my oil pastels and turpenoid and creating small works. These two which I just did today are both 5x7 on Pastelmat boards I primed with Art Spectrum primer. I seemed to be working backwords. Many artists do small paintings first as studies for larger works. Me? I did larger works and then did these small ones afterwards. These are small versions of the paintings seen here and here.

Little Kiawah Sunset

I had such fun working with oil pastels and Turpenoid yesterday, and when I was done the painting seemed so much safer and secure than a normal dry pastel which is always smudgeable. Yes, my grandkids have proved that! But the oil pastel seemed almost firm and dry enough that it seemed I could possibly even varnish it as you might an oil or acrylic. Was that possible? I some googling on the subject and, as with anything you google it seems, there were conflicting opinions of yes, no, maybe, and all sorts of caveats about the possible process,

So I decided I would just experiment, but I didn't want to risk the painting from yesterday which I was pretty happy with, so I actually repainted the scene as seen here, but on a 5x7 ampersand board, this one coated in Art Spectrum ground. The oil pastels and Turpenoid also worked well, so I tried a coat of Liquitex non-yellowing acrylic matte varnish on top of it. It went over smoothly and dried to a clear, hard lacquerlike finish. So far I've done two coats. I like how it looks, and the painting surface no longer seems capable of smudging. Of course I don't think you could layer any more pastel over it either, so this is a technique to try only when you are sure a painting is "done".

Kiawah Sunset

Last weekend I spent the weekend on South Carolina's Kiawah Island, just outside Charleston, visiting my friend Beth's vacation home. Her family owns a marvelous old place right on the banks of the salt marshes on Kiawah and the sunsets are spectacular. I took a number of photos so had to turn at least one into a painting. This was done today on an 8x10 Ampersand pastel board using my Caran d'Ache NeoPastel oil pastels. I used Turpenoid for blending. I quite like oil pastels, sort of the best of all worlds for me.

What a great weekend in SC too. I was there for the launch of Beth and friends' Low Country cookbook. Wonderful food. I cooked dinner for the family last night using recipes from it: Shrimp and grits, spinach and strawberry salad, collard greens with cabbage, and the Darby family lemon pie. All yummy. :-)