Crayola Portfolio Oil Pastel Review and Artwork Share

For a long time now I have coveted the portfolio oil pastels from Crayola. When I was at college we were told to buy oil pastels but then we never ended up using them at all. Just as well I bought the mega mega cheap ones! They were so so cheap. I mean total cheapies at £2 for 48. Sufficient to say they were pretty useless too. They were dry and chalky not at all like oil pastels should be, all smooth and creamy.

Anyway I have never been that bothered that my oil pastels were next to useless but then I watched a video on youtube of a lady creating a page and she used oil pastels and I thought that they looked worth a go! (I can't remember what the video was now or the brand she used now).

I asked on the Art Geeks Facebook page if anyone had any recommendations for oil pastels and they all said the Portfolio ones so with that many recommendations I thought I had better get those ones lol!

Here is my review of using them for the first time along with a share of some of my artwork...

Explore You with collage

This week at college we moved on to collage to get us to look more at the shapes of things. When we draw it is easy to just get on with it but when we collage from still life we have to look more at the shapes so as to make the correct piece of collage material. I have to say I got on far better with this method and I had fun.

I started off doing  a collage of the still life in front of me and this is how it turned out:

And then I decided that I wanted to have some fun and do my own thing so I created this which is far more me as you can tell from the piece "Explore You"

Another share...

Okey dokes another share from my learnings at college...

This was created using dry soft pastels again another medium that I haven't used before. I really enjoyed using them actually and had a lot of fun.

I am not terribly great at drawing from an object in front of me. I find that I look at the object, my brain processes it and then I draw what my brain thinks it is seeing or wants to see not what is in front of me. It is so weird and I think the tutor is finding it as frustrating as I am. I think I will find it a lot easier when we move on to creating from imagination!

So here we go:

As you can see it does look like a shoe but it doesn't quite look like the shoe that was in front of me!!!

Back to School

I decided to go back to art school. I just felt that there is a lot to be learnt from taking courses, learning new things, meeting new people. Everyone creates things in their own unique way and it is always good to find out how people create certain looks.

It was really daunting for me as I am now in my thirties and I envisaged the entire class to be full of 16 years olds but I was really relieved when I walked through the door into the studio to find that it was mainly women of similar age and older. Phew! It's not that I don't like 16 years olds it's just that I didn't want to feel like the granny in the corner unable to keep up.

We got straight to it which was both great and again daunting. The teacher gave us a white A1 piece of paper and loads of materials and told us to just go with it. Make marks, learn how they work and how you can use them for different textures etc. What do you do in a class full of other people and a white sheet of paper staring back up at you. Argghhhhhhh!!! No pressure to create something good then!

Well anyway I got to play, I mean use, oil pastel sticks, carbon, charcoal and drawing ink, all mediums I have never used before. I'm not sure to be honest whether they will become a favourite, I am unsure at the moment but we will wait and see.

I quite liked the oil pastels, the way they were so rich and creamy and you can use them to blend together. I did find them easy to over blend and smudge though. They were a bit like using a wax crayon to be honest.

I can't wait for next week though and really looking forward to using new things and getting really creative so watch this space and if they are any good I will share them with you!