Surprisingly, after four years of further education in art and design, I never knew that there was such a term as painting with pastels, or indeed that you could use water with soft pastels to create what I found to be a similar finish to watercolour. With this in mind the first thing for me to do was experiment with different swatches of both soft pastels and oil which I was more familiar with out of the two. With the soft pastel I experimented with blending colours, applying water onto swatches of the medium and applying the pastel from different parts of the stick. As for the oil pastel which I already had a decent experience with, I began with creating different marks and blocks of colour through cross hatch, colouring and stippling the stick directly on the page. My last experimentation with the oil was my least favourite technique and always has been which I blending, creating colour combination and smooth gradients of colours joined together.
As the soft pastel was my favourite of the two, I produced a study again of a pineapple using both water blended with the pastel and pastel straight from the stick. As one can see even observing the piece, I have not yet completed the leaves which will be finished in the next week.
It was great to delve into an area I had not come across before, and pastel has quickly become one of my favourite mediums.
SOPHIE FAWCETT'S OCA LEARNING LOG 