Mordecai Park and Meet My Pastels

I've been working on the Mordecai Park painting (talked about here), and have some progress to share.  I'll begin introducing you to my pastel collection in this post, too.

Mordecai Park
22" x 30"
Sennelier oil pastel on Arches Cover

I've adjusted some proportions and am slowly filling the paper with color! I've been using my La Grande Sennelier oil pastels on this 22" x 30" piece.  La Grande pastels are eight times the size of Sennelier's smaller pastels, which is very nice when working large scale.

regular oil pastel versus the La Grande
buy them here

I am noticing that my 36 color set is lacking in some of my favorite shades from the smaller sized pastel.  Most noticeably I'm needing Sap Green 087, Violet Alizarin Lake 076, Sky Blue 226, and another White.  My white La Grande finally disappeared, as it's my favorite white oil pastel and it gets used so much!

I've had my precious La Grande set for 6 or 7 years.  It was my first major investment in oil pastels.  Since then I've been supplementing my collection with the smaller sized Sennelier oil pastels.  I've also been trying out Erengis and Gallery Extra Soft oil pastels, both of which are good to layer underneath the more creamy (and expensive) Senneliers.  To give you an idea of cost, individual smaller sized Sennelier oil pastels cost about $2-3 each and the La Grandes are about $7-8 each.  These are not your grade school pastels!

I'd love to add some Holbeins and Neopastels to the mix.  My dream would be to add a Holbein 225 piece boxed set, which includes 5 shades of each color.  They aren't making these anymore, so my time is wasting away before these will be all gone!

Holbein 225 piece set

If you're looking for more information on oil pastel brands, check out Robert Sloan's site.  He offers great reviews and information about oil pastel brands and materials.  I'll be sharing more about my experiences with oil pastels in future posts, so stay tuned!

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Painting Local Landmarks: Mordecai Park

I've started what I hope will be a series of pieces based on local landmarks.  The first of these will be based on Mordecai Historic Park.

Here is the progress of the first piece:

1. Reference picture I took with my Nikon D40
2. Thumbnail sketch, about 5" x 7".  Note that I overlapped the left and center buildings.  The space between the buildings was distracting! 
3. Begin painting on Arches Cover primed with clear Colourfix primer, 22" x 30."  Sketch/underpainting with Lyra water soluble pastels
4. Current progress.  First layer of Sennelier and Erengi oil pastels.   

The next step is to go back and correct perspective, correct some layout problems, and lay down more color!  I'm kind of wishing that I had primed the paper with my favorite terracotta Colourfix pastel primer so that there were some pops of color peeking through.  But I think that the white ground will make for a brighter sky and white in the central building.

22" x 30" Oil Pastel on Arches Cover

Stay tuned for updates!  I have several other images from Mordecai that I'd like to paint, perhaps a bit smaller than this one.