Dick Blick Demo by Savoir Faire Representative, Camille La Point-Lyons

Five participants gathered around the table on the second floor of Blick’s Art Store in downtown Chicago Saturday June 10th. Camille began her demonstration with a history of oil pastels and the Sennelier family. Her techniques follows the old masters oil painting techniques using a limited palette. She chose a single, light colored neutral to block in the lights and darks with very light, squiggly lines. She gave us soft press Fabriano paper and a whole box of 50 oil pastels to share as we followed along.

Camille choose a light colored compliment of the first color to develop the shadow areas. She explained how you can, when working this way, layer lights over darks. She used white to cool and lighten some areas and the pastels themselves to blend areas. She prefers a painterly look so does not use blending tools or stumps. (No ResN-Gel either).

She blocked in the trees (not using any green at this point) and began to lay in the reflections of the trees and the bridge shadow on the water. She applied long vertical strokes to make the water shapes for the trees using the same colors she used for the trees themselves. Then she applied some of her sky color to the water area that showed between the tree shapes using horizontal lines. She then used a lighter value to create gentle lines of light (contrasting against slightly darker shades) in a horizontal direction.

Tree shapes were not specific to any kind of trees and she continued developing them as irregular lines. Her light values were sprinkled on the light struck side of the trees and she used darker values both to anchor the trees to the ground and develop shadow areas within the trees themselves. At this point, she did use several cool and arm greens that added a definite tree color the foliage. She added the tree trunks and branches last so that they had a lost and found appearance among the foliage.

In laying down the sky colors, she used Ronald Searle techniques to squiggle in the colors. Camille said when you lay down a thick horizontal layer of pastel it flattens the sky. Using several pale values and scribbling in the sky gives it more depth.

As you can see, we all had a great time. Kelsey and I met WC members Serena and her aunt Jaspal as well as Serena’s best friend. I’m posting drawings from Kelsey and I that are definitely WIP’s! But may help you to see some of this interesting process!
I'll have to down load the images later. Blogger is not up loading images anymore this morning.