Live Lessons: Oil Pastel Landscape - Woodland

Oil pastel landscape of woods and trees
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This lesson series features:
2 Hours of Instruction
2 Videos

About This Lesson Series...

In this lesson series, we draw a landscape with oil pastels on Canson Mi-Tientes pastel paper.

Lesson 1 (1:05:38)

In lesson one, we begin by establishing the background and work our way down to the middle ground.

Lesson 2 (1:05:25)

In lesson two, we continue developing the middle ground with layered applications.

Lesson 3 (1:03:50)

In lesson three, we begin working our way to the foreground and continue to push the colors and values.

Lesson 4 (1:11:47)

In lesson four, we add finishing touches and complete the drawing.

Resources for this Lesson...

References

Photo Reference

Finished Result

Here's what you'll need...

  • Oil pastels
  • Canon Mi-Teintes pastel paper

Lesson Discussion

  1. Very nice. I really enjoyed the strokes with the white and grey in the background. I loved it just the way it was. LOL! But, the branches and trees on top of it are nice, too. I can’t wait until the live lessons go back to Thursdays. 🙂

  2. Hi Matt! Absolutely loved the color theory live lesson. Yes, please invite Ashley again – you guys were a great tag team! While watching this Oil pastel lesson, I was wondering if you had ever considered taking a reference subject such as this forest scene and doing a series of live lessons with each medium, using the same photo reference. It could be a great way to appreciate the differences between each medium and provide a comparison between them. We don’t begin the same way in building up our image or colors from one medium to the other (watercolor, dry pastels, oil pastels, colored pencils – they all have their own sets of rules). I think it would be interesting – especially for newbies – to see the evolution of an identical subject using each different medium. I realize that this could be a lengthy process, so I suppose a simple and smaller image would still allow to showcase each different medium. What do you think?

  3. I like the idea too. In fact, some time after Matt critiqued my acrylic painting of the monarch butterfly in the field, I re-cropped the photo reference (as he suggested in the critique) and “painted” it with pastels. I needed a time lapse between the pieces so I could look at the reference afresh but it was fun and I learned from it. It would be fascinating to see how different mediums might capture the same image – when done by someone who knows what they are doing!

    Are you up for it, Matt? Perhaps this could be an idea for another course…

  4. I like this idea, because when I saw this reference photo, I thought, “Hey, this may be a good subject to try my new Graphitint pencils on! May have to also use some watercolor, but I think most can be done with Graphitint.

  5. Hi Matt I loved this lesson. I’m blown away so far and we just started. I’m back after 11 months of illness. Due to circumstances I’m still a beginner. This lesson is way above my pay grade – meaning I’m still in the graphite world. And may well be for the foreseeable future. I love your lessons. This is so kool and something to look forward to. It is now Feb 13th 2019. A lot to do. Keep the learning coming……….

  6. A book I have suggests cooling the surface of the image with an ice pack (covered with a towel of course) before covering a previous color application with another when you don’t want the underlying color to show through.

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