Impressionist Oil Pastels Art

I have recently created some oil pastels art in an impressionist style.

The first piece I worked on is below:

The location is of a park in Suffolk Virginia where I often go with my wife and son. During certain times of the day the shadows of the trees make for interesting effects and I tried to capture that in this piece.

After reading this great book on impressionism: Painting the Impressionist Landscape: Lessons in Interpreting Light and Color, I decided I was going to experiment with an impressionist, pointillist approach and it kept working out well so I continued on until the piece was finished.

I felt that it turned out so well that I did a few more of them.  Here are two more:

I feel that oil pastels are a great medium for this type of impressionist or pointillist style. The one recommendation I would make with doing this is to use a softer oil pastel like the Sennelier brand. The student quality brands don’t pick up quite as well when doing pointillism, although if you want a more subtle look then a student quality brand would work there.

The surface used on all three of these are Pastelbord, which as always works so well with oil pastels. I use other surface sometimes but always return to Pastelbord as they are created for pastels and oil pastels.

I welcome any comments or questions in the comments form below. – Eric

P.S. Have you checked out the Oil Pastels Artist Facebook page? 🙂