Realistic Oil Pastel for the Curious Beginner

1. Welcome to Realistic Oil Pastel for the Curious Beginner: Hello friends, welcome to realistic oil pastel for the curious beginner. My name is Diane. I've been teaching art for about 17 years and I've been making art my entire life and I love it. I hope that you are inspired to love it as well through this or any other courses you may take or just personal experience. Welcome, I'm super excited to get started with you today. In this class, we are going to be practicing and learning how to draw using simple measuring techniques, replicating a realistic image from a photograph onto our paper. We're going to be copying this apple into oil pastel. So we'll end up with something that looks like this. We're going to learn how to layer oil pastels, how to apply soft pressure or hard pressure, when to apply more or less pressure. How to blend colors to create other colors. How to create sharp edges, soft edges, soft blends. How to make sure you have a finished look to your piece. How to go back and add textures, highlights, shadows. The works. We're gonna do a whole bunch in a small period of time with a very small apple, and I hope you're going to enjoy it. So grab your cup of tea, light your candle, get your coffee, whatever suits your mood. And let's get ready to make some art. 2. Materials: Okay. So before we get started, I'd like to walk you through the materials you're going to need for this class. First, you're gonna need a desk or a table, or a flat surface in a well-lit area somewhere, you don't mind getting a little dirty or that's covered with paper or cloth to protect it. You can have scratch paper that's optional. As you can see from my sample. I used the edges of my paper if the gutter for my scratch paper where you can have extra sheets if you prefer. You will need to have some drawing paper. So get some paper that's suitable for oil pastel, or sometimes it'll just say pastel on the cover. If you're buying a sketchbook, you can certainly ask an associate in an art store what's a suitable paper, but there's plenty of different types of paper that are suitable for oil pastel because it's a very versatile medium. You will want to have a pencil and an eraser, just a regular old pencil for drawing your Apple before we begin and the frame, you'll need a ruler so that you can measure out and draw the frame. And you'll obviously need oil pastels. The kit I have is Pentel brand, which is a very, very common brand. You'll find it in any art store. It's very inexpensive. It's really a student grade, great for introductory, but also very versatile. I really enjoy these old packaging, so you won't see this exact look in the art store, but the name is the same Pentel. And you slide it open and there's your lovely set of pastels minor, slightly used. You'll want to have a nice set of those. They do come in different amounts. Pentel makes a 1216 twenty five, thirty six fifty set. This is their 25 set, which is perfectly adequate for this class. If you have fewer than that, you can mix and match colors as we go. I'm gonna be talking as though you have all the colors here. But if you don't happen to have all of those, then for example, if I'm using the Great Green, which it looks like that, you can use gray and a little bit of this light yellowy green and you'll get a very similar effect. Those are in one of the smaller kids. I'd also like to mention that you can go with really any brand of oil pastel. There's lots of different brands out there. Lots of really great quality products. If you happen to have some at home, just use those, that's fine. This is just if you want to follow along exactly with what I'm doing, you can have this particular kid. You will also need a printout of the apple photo, which you'll find in the resources section. You can have this, you don't need to print it out. I'll be talking about this. It's just kind of what I like to call the anatomy of light and shadow on a round object. Which will help you to understand what we're doing when we're putting the colors on your Apple. Anyway, you can print it if you want, but you certainly don't need to. Another optional saying is a palette knife, which looks like this. It's actually used for mixing paint in oils or acrylics. But in oil pastel, it's useful for scraping off color that you don't want anymore. So if I'm a kind of lightening an area, I can scrape off some color. But your fingernail also works really well. A penny, a credit card, anything was kind of a hard edge. Anything you might scrape a lottery ticket with will be fine. Lastly, you can have an apron or old clothes on if you care a lot about your clothes. Oil pastel isn't very messy, so you probably don't have to worry about it. But if you're wearing a nice silk white shirt, that's probably not the best option. So use your judgment on that. Otherwise, let's get ready to get started. 3. Mindset Plus Light & Shadow: Before we get into the drawing, and now that we've talked about what materials we need, I just like to talk to you a little bit about the mindset of this class and also orient you to how light and shadow play on a round object. As in terms of mindset, it's just nice to have an open mind and be open to making mistakes and getting back on your horse if you fall off and writing into the sunset, if you make a mistake, don't sweat it. You can usually fix it or go over it or turn it into something else that you like even better maybe. Or you can always start over. You can take this class multiple times and just do it to your heart's content. With that in mind, just to have a great time and don't worry about mistakes. And then I also wanted to show you this little map, sort of The Anatomy of light and shadow on a round object. This is available in the resources section. You can download and print it out for yourself if you'd like, or you can just look at it here. But we have a highlight which is the brightest part of the light on the object. That's where your light source hits the object directly. You have a mid tone that is just sort of a medium area of color, the main color of the object. You have a core shadow, which is the darkest part. And that is usually right next to the reflected light, is always written right next to the reflected light. But the core shadow sometimes will go right to the edge, but it makes it look much less three-dimensional. And it's usually because the lighting conditions are so bright, you can't see the reflected light, but in most cases you'll have a reflection. And we definitely want to include that because it makes the object look really three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface. You also have the cast shadow, which is the light casting the object, casting the shadow of the object onto the surface that it's sitting on. You have an occlusion shadow, which is the darkest part of the cast shadow. That's where the object is actually touching the surface and where the shadow will be the darkest. So that's just to orient you a little bit, kind of wrap your mind around the anatomy of the structure we're going to be replicating before we get started with that said, it's time to pick up our pencil linked get going. 4. Measuring & Drawing Your Picture: Okay, Now that we have introduced all the materials and talked about how to get our minds ready for this class and learned a little bit about light and shadow. We're going to start drawing. So we're gonna start with the frame. The frame is going to be six inches wide by 4.5 inches tall, which is the same as our photo reference. So just get your ruler parallel to the top or bottom edge of your paper. You can center it or put it off to the side. It doesn't really matter. You'll have kind of a gutter of space around the matter where you put it. And that's great for scratch paper. As I mentioned in the material section, I just drew a six inch long line there. And I'm going to draw a 4.5 inch long line right next to it. And I'm just eyeballing to make sure it's parallel to the edge. But if you want, you can really measure it to make sure that you've got it exactly parallel. If you care. That's 4.5 by six. For this one. Just to make sure this line or that line didn't get crooked, I just made a dot and I'm just going to check to make sure this is 4.5 this way. Yep, it is. So we're good there. 4.5 by six. You could also use a T-square if you prefer to make it really parallel and make all your corners 90 degrees. But there we have our four by six rectangular frame. And now you can put your ruler off to the side. And now we're going to talk about drawing the apple. Grab your photo reference, have it handy. And what we're gonna do is measure off of the photo reference and transfer our measurements onto the paper. I'm going to show you how to do that with your pencil. Use the tip of your pencil and line it up against the edge of the apple. And then use your thumbnail and line it up against the right side of the blue ends, the edge of the photo. That is the same amount of space as you're going to have on your paper. And I started here because it's the largest space. It's usually best to start large and go small. And I'm just going to align my thumbnail up here, tilt my pencil down and make a little mark. Now I know exactly where the right edge of my apple needs to be. And from there I can measure everything else. Now I know where the right edges. So I'm going to see how far across it is to the left. And I'm measuring at the widest part of the apple, right through the center. And that'll help me to get the most accurate drawing. And then I'm going to transfer it over here. And sure enough there should be just a little bit of space there. There's a little bit of space here. We can measure it if we want. That looks right. You don't have to. It's your call. And now I'm going to measure the largest space from the bottom of the frame to the bottom of the apple, and do the same thing. And then from the bottom of the apple to the top of the apple to see how long that is. Tilt down to make a little mark. Onenote, I'm making my marks fairly dark, should probably make them darker so that you can see them. And I'm gonna be drawing very dark so that you can see it. But when you're drawing, make sure I'm press very lightly with your pencil so that it doesn't show through your oil pastel later. So that's really all you need. If you want, you could draw any number of measuring marks. Say you wanted to find out exactly how low this corner is. I'm going to measure from the edge of the top edge of the page here down, make a mark there. And I know how far it is horizontally, excuse me, vertically. And then I'm gonna measure the horizontal. And where those two meet should be where that edge comes through. You could do that 30 times if you want to. You certainly don't need to. Four is adequate. If you don't want to do any of this measuring, you don't have to do that either. You can just skip it and eyeball it. It's totally up to you if you want to learn this method. And if you've taken any of my classes before, you will have seen this in just about everyone except probably the color mixing classes. But I show this method quite a bit copying from a photo reference. Now I'm just eyeballing the shape of the apple. I'm going to cut off a little bit on the bottom. You can adjust it if you want. If something seems wonky or savory to you, it is an organic shape, so it's not going to hurt if you change it a little. Now I'm going to measure down from the top of the apple to where this little belly button is, or the stem comes out. That is that low. From there, I'm just going to eyeball the shape. It looks like kind of an eyelash on its side. Then I'm going to measure how tall the stem is sticking out of the hole. And it looks like it starts a little to the left of the whole and leans a little bit to the left. I'm going to do that. And from there, I'm just going to draw kind of a bulbous tip and a straight shaft. The stem. 5. Testing & Matching Background Colors: Okay, so before we begin testing colors, you can erase any marks, stray marks that you don't need anymore. You may have already done that. If your lines are as dark as mine, go ahead and lightly erase so that you can just barely see it. I'm not going to continue that because like I said, I want you to be able to see my Apple really well. I'm going to put my dark lines back in, but you go ahead and lighten your lines if they're dark. Now we're gonna talk about how to figure out what colors to use for our picture. So obviously the background is blue. We're going to start with the background. I'm going to figure out what combination of colors or what colors to use for that space. It looks like the dominant one is definitely this blue, which is called cobalt blue. These particular pastels are labeled on the bottom and this one says cobalt blue here. I don't know if you can see that very, very tiny black type. But anyway, on your set you may or may not be able to see it. To test the color, just either use your scratch paper or the edge of your paper like I'm using here. And color a little patch. Color actually kind of color a big patch because you want to try different colors in it. Now that looks pretty darn close to what I've got there. So I may just end up using that. But this seems a little bit turquoise E2 me. So I'm going to try and put a little bit of green and part of it and see what happens. That's a bit much so maybe if I go back over it with the blue oil pastels is a lot about layering. Know, I really think it's just best as it is purely. Then I'm going to try some lighter blue over it. This is pale blue. And see how that works really well for these lighter highlighted areas. So I'm gonna keep these two out. Then for the shadowy parts, I'm certain that one of these dark blues will work or maybe both of them. This one is Prussian blue. We move these out of the way. And this is ultramarine. It is more of a purply blue. Those look great. I'll just layer those right onto the cobalt as I'm going. But as a test, let's see what happens when I have cobalt first. Then put some ultramarine over. That's pretty weak. It doesn't show up very well. Prussian is a little stronger. That's better. I may end up using both. Actually, I probably will in these shadowy areas. That's pretty much all we need to get started for the background. So we can get to that. Now. 6. Applying Base - Cobalt & Pale Blues: So now that we have figured out what colors to use for the background, we can start applying the colors. I'm going to put the dark ones away for the time being just to get them out of the way because we don't need them right now. We're going to start with a cobalt blue just coloring over the entire background. But I want to talk a little bit about pressure first. When I did these samples, I was pressing pretty hard because I wanted to see what the color would look like, kind of finished. But as a first layer, you can color fairly lightly, something like that. You see some white showing through, that's fine. That's actually preferred because if you put it on too heavy at first, then it becomes very difficult to adjust later. I'm going to be very careful around the edge of my apple to try to not get any, get any inside. But if you do, it's not the end of the world. You're going to color over it anyway. And you are going to get some blue into your apple no matter how hard you try to keep it out. Because the fact that it's touching the edge is going to mean that later when you color the apple, it's going to blend into it a little bit, and that is actually a lovely effect. It's going to make your app will look more realistic because it reads as sort of a reflection on the Apple of the background color. So try to keep it sharp, but don't worry if you get a little bit inside because like I said, it's a good thing. So as I get to these lighter areas, I'm going to color even lighter, just very light pressure over here. With oil pastel pressure is pretty key to achieving the colors and the density of color that you want. I'm also kind of loosely starting to color more horizontally here because the fabric is going in that direction. And really anytime in art that you're trying to replicate something, it's best to try to replicate it from the get-go because it just, each layer will lend itself to subsequent layers. And you will end up with a more accurate product if you start from the beginning. The colors a little darker down here. So I'm pressing a little bit harder and feel free by the way, to go outside the frame. I encourage it. It's also fine to stop right at the edge, but don't leave any space showing on the inside of the frame. Because if you want to frame your picture later, you want the frame to have some color to overlap onto. As you can see, I just completely covered up that line I drew earlier. If you want to leave your showing, then just don't quite color all the way up to that edge. But it really doesn't matter. You can absolutely eyeball that. Maybe you didn't draw it in the first place and that's fine too. So there's our first layer of cobalt. And now I'm gonna go in with the pale blue and brighten the lighter areas and what? The pale blue, I am going to press hard. And that is going to create that opaque effect. Part of the reason I'm pressing hard is that a lighter color will be less dominant than the darker colors that it's going over. I'm doing this in order to give the pale blue more of a voice, which it needs because we're coloring in the lighter areas. And I'm focusing mainly on all of these lighter wrinkles that I see in the photo. There's some here and I'm following it loosely. You know, it's never going to look exactly like the photograph because this is my interpretation as yours will be your interpretation. I'm getting into the darker area here, so I'm going to lay off on the light. I'm gonna put a lot of light right here. This dark area, excuse me, in this light area in the corner. That's sort of shaft of light. And right at the top edge. Sorry, my hands in the way I suppose I'm going to try to lay it down so you can see better. Top edge of that light wrinkle in the fabric. Then color down here, lots of light down here. There's still some white showing through. I'll go back and cover that up later. For right now, I'm just focusing on getting large areas blocked in putting large blocks of color in going around that dark part, the cast shadow, which is that part of the shadow that's being cast onto the mat that we talked about earlier. Then I'm going to go back with the cobalt and really darken those parts a little bit more. And again, I'm not focusing too much on getting rid of all the white. I'm just kind of creating a roadmap of darks and lights right now. And I can go back and adjust shortly. There we go. 7. Blending & Enriching Blues: Now we're going to go back and blend a little more and kind of enrich the backgrounds, the blues that we've already put in. So I'm going to go in with a cobalt again and now I'm pressing more purposefully trying really to get rid of those whites. Now, at the end of this section, we don't want to have any white showing. That's my primary focus at the moment. Actually, Let's get rid of the white here. I was gonna say I'll put darker blue there, but we're gonna do that in the next section. So I don't need to do that at the moment. Some of you may have noticed I did tape my paper down to the table, which I probably should've mentioned earlier. I just do that to keep it really stable so that it doesn't move during the filming of this and that way it's not distracting to you. You don't need to tape your paper to the table unless you find it helpful. You certainly can or tape it to a drawing board or something like that. I'm getting into that dark shadow now. I'm going to go back and put a little more cobalt over this right corner because it's slightly darker over here than it is on the left since that's the area of the light source is coming from. But I'm not trying to get rid of all the white with the cobalt because I know I'm gonna go back and blend with the pale blue in a minute and that's going to get rid of all the white. Now I'm going to take the pale blue in color and press pretty hard to both get rid of all the light, the white, excuse me, and to blend the colors together. Oil pastel is so nice because it's so easy to apply, It's easy to adjust and it feels so nice and soft. I like to think of it as when I feel like oil painting, but don't want to take the trouble to mixed paints and squeeze everything and all that. This is just an instant gratification. I'm keeping this edge sharp by not going into the dark blue so much here. I was coloring a little more loosely and just kind of drifting in and out of the dark blue and softening that edge. But there is a sharper edge there in the photos. So I'm trying to just be a little more deliberate about that. Getting rid of any last little bits of white showing in the light areas, lighter areas. And that looks pretty good in terms of getting rid of white. Now I'm going to look back and focus on edges. So I'm just going to look at each edge and say, does it need more blending or more sharpening? Here, I feel like it needs more blending. Blending, as I showed you down here, just color very lightly with the lighter color. Anytime you're blending, it's usually good to use the lighter color to blend. Just press really lightly and do little circles right over the edge where the two colors meet. And go over and over it as much as you need to. In order to get the effect you want. Here. It needs to be a little softer. Here needs to be a lot softer. Look at that hard edge I made completely by accident. And I'm going to press pretty hard here and do big circles because I want to blend it much more here. I was just trying to soften the edge here. I want the light-blue to disappear pretty seamlessly into the dark blue. So I'm pressing a little harder and doing dark, bigger circles. The reason I'm doing circles is because they tend to leave less impression of the direction you were coloring. Whereas if I wanted a straight edge or a hard edge, I would do, I would be coloring and more of a line like here, it's a little harder, some coloring, more of a line down here. I want it softer, but not as much of a fade there. So I'm going to color sort of medium-sized circles. You'll get the, a feeling for this as you go. Like how big should you go in order to spread the color the way you want it spread? I'm going to put a little bit more cobalt here because it feels like that got too light. You can just kind of go through this and nitpick as much as you want. Or maybe you don't want to nitpick it off. Maybe you're just happy with the way it is and that's great. So as soon as you're happy with the overall effect and don't worry about the fact that these aren't dark enough. We'll get to that in the next section. Just sort of the effect of the cloth and how things are blended. Whenever you're happy with that, then you can stop. 8. Adding Shadows & Adjusting Blues: Now that we have gotten all the whites taken care of and blended fairly accurately, we can move on to the dark colors. And I'm going to start with the, excuse me, the ultramarine blue, which is the purple layer one. And just see what happens. It's, like I said back here, it's very weak, so probably not much is going to happen. It does darken and add some a little bit of purple, but not that much, not as much as I'd like it to. That's where you can scrape. You can go in with your palette knife, your credit card, your fingernail, your coin, whatever you want to scrape with and kind of scrape off the cobalt blue. And of course initially because you're scraping off the color, it's going to look lighter, but don't worry, that's the reason we're scraping it off is because the oily kind of bulk of it has built up and it's not allowing the new color much traction. We wipe off the earliness, but it leaves the base of the color. And then we can go in with a darker color and color fairly hard, and that shows up much better. Oil pastel is often about layering, but also removing and layering again, removing and layering again to some degree depending on how deep you want to go, how sophisticated you want to go. This corner seems to have darkened fairly well. There wasn't very much pastel with the cobalt there to begin with. So that's probably why that worked better. Going to put a little bit more here. And I'm going to soften that edge with the pale blue. One thing to mention, you may notice that oil pastel kind of gathers up on the edge. You can wipe it off on your scratch paper. You could even use it, wipe it into the pastel itself and keep coloring. That's sometimes useful, especially if you want a big blob of it somewhere. You just spread it around. And then there's paper which eventually you'll run into and you'll just need to peel it. It's best to just peel off a little bit on the top. And that way you can still have the paper to hold onto and your fingers don't get all full of oil pastel. But if you want to peel the whole thing off, that's totally your call to now I'm going to go into the cast shadow and scrape off just the bits where it's really darker. There's a couple little patches here. One, this bottom one is kind of shaped like a triangle. Then this part right next to the occlusion shadows, dark. Wipe that off on my scratch and fill it in with ultramarine. Ultramarine is actually a really good match for this particular dark blue. It's just not very strong. So I think we will use some Prussian blue to help give it the, oops, it's looking for, I've got three stripes are three patches. One big 11, smaller triangular one, and then this little one here. I'm going to put a little bit next to this edge just to darken that a little bit here because that seems to be a darker part and a little bit here. Then I'm gonna go back and use my lighter color, very, very lightly coloring little circles around the edges to blend them. That's pretty well blended. This could use a little bit more over here. That's a fairly sharp edge, so I'm going to keep that lend out along the bottom edge though. Then I'm going to use the cobalt inside the shadow because the cobalt is sort of the lighter of the two between ultramarine and cobalt. I'm just very lightly going around the edges of the ultramarine with the cobalt to soften very, very lightly. Then I'm going to scrape again in the darkest areas. They're a little tiny bit right here, right next to the occlusion shadow, which we will come back with black at the very end of the picture and put that in. I'm going to scrape a little bit off in the center here and add some Prussian blue to all those places I just scraped. As you can see, the darker the color, the less I've scraped because the less I want those colors to dominate, they're just sort of hints of darkness, which will help to round out the three-dimensionality of this image. Not sure if that's really a word, but we'll call it one. Here. I'm going to use the pale blue to blend bottom edge of this. I'll use the pale blue. Then. I'll use a little bit of cobalt inside the shadow just so it doesn't get too light. At the top edge over here. It looks like that's it. 9. Testing & Matching Apple Colors: Now that we have our beautiful background put in, by the way, we will go back later and adjust the whole picture. So don't feel it has to be to a level of perfection. At this particular moment. It's just mostly done. Now that we've done that we're going to test colors for the apple itself. So we're gonna start with the yellow, yellowy green parts. Looks like. Why not start with the yellow green pastel? By the way, if you have dirty pastels like a little bit of color, kind of on the tip from previous uses. Just use your scratch paper to wipe it off before you put it onto your paper. I'm sorry, I didn't mention that with the blues, but blues typically don't have that problem anyway because they're darker. Anyways, just a good practice to get into. Let's try the yellow green. And it's definitely way too bright for this. So let's add a little bit of gray and see what happens if we add that gray has got a lot of black on it from another thing. Wipe that off. Put a little bit of gray over the yellow green. That's just kind of muddy. Maybe if we put some yellow on it to brighten it back up. That is okay. But I think I can do better. Actually, let me just try and see what would happen if I put some white over it now. That's actually pretty decent. So that's a good, that's a good combination, but that's four colors. Let's see if we can knock that down a little bit. Let's try the gray, green, green, gray, whatever, because it's already got gray in it and maybe that will be a better match. So I'm going to put a patch of that here. And then let's just try the lemon yellow over it and see if that kind of achieves the same thing with less layering. Then I've got some white that's probably going to do it. Yeah. It looks like I made pretty much the same color, but this one only uses three colors, the gray, green, and lemon yellow and the white, instead of four colors for that patch. So we'll go with that combination. Then the red, there's only two reds in this kit. One is an orangey red and the other is a deep red. And it's pretty obvious that the orangey red is not the best match. So let's just try the deep red. Yep, that's gonna be it, but it's obviously very bright. We're gonna be working with that too. Dull it down. In order to adult a color down, you can use gray, but you can also use its complement. So in this case, I'm gonna try this really dark green, It's called deep green. I'm just going to put a little bit. I'm not pressing very hard. You see how much of an effect that had already. Then I will blend it with the red. Just not really blending it, but just doing another layer of red to see how that matches up. And that looks much more appropriate. It's not quite perfectly enough, so we can probably add a little bit of purple. Yep, I think that's pretty good match, at least for the main local color. And then the dark green we'll put in where you see the core shadow on the red. We will, as we go add blues and other things into the apple. But we just wanted to get the main colors, which are the red and the green. So we can put a first layer of color onto our beautiful apple. 10. First Layer of Greens & Reds: We're going to start in with the first layer. Greens and reds are not gonna be too particular about this. We're just kind of like we did with the background blues. We're just blocking in colors, putting colors where we see them so that we can kind of create a roadmap for layering down the line. I had mentioned before, you could clean your oil pastels on your scratch paper if they were dirty, This one's dirty, but I'm going to use yellow is gonna be my base color and then I'm gonna put the green right over it. I'm not going to clean it because I actually want there to be green in my yellow anyway. So there's no point. I'm going to start by coloring kind of a curvy and in a curvy direction, because that's the direction the apple's going. And just like I was talking about in the background, when you're coloring, adding color even from the very beginning, if there is a direction involved, which they're usually is, things are very rarely just smooth and flat color in the direction you see because it will lay the groundwork for everything you do after that. You can see I'm kind of Acts I accidentally got the yellow into the blue and the blue streaks into the yellow. That's fine. Actually, enjoy that. Use it. It's going to make a lovely reflection from the background into the apple. I'm coloring just yellow, where I see yellow going into the apple. I'm being fairly liberal with the yellow because yellow is the weaker color I'm gonna be using. I'm going to be layering all sorts of stuff next to an over this. It's other things are going to dominate. So I want them to have more of a presence right now. That doesn't mean I'm pressing hard. It just means I'm creating larger areas than I think I might need or that I see in the photo rather. Over here it gets modeled with both greenish, yellow, and red. But because the yellow is the less dominant color, I'm going pretty wide with that large area of yellow. And there's a big patch of it down here. And that's probably good for the yellow. So now I'm gonna go over that very lightly with the green. Again, just a first layer. Not too worried about making it thorough or in any way. Perfect, just trying to get a presence of this color down here, there's really no direction. So I'm coloring in circles. Then coming from the inside of the apple, the green is a little darker, so I'm going to press a little bit harder here. Gets lighter around the outside edge. Very light inside into these patches. That's pretty good for the greenish, yellowy parts. And now I'm gonna go in with the red same thing, just coloring in the direction I see pretty lightly, casually, not too concerned about making it perfect, going very light around the bottom edge because that's where that reflected light is going to be. And I want there to be. I'm going to put light blue there later and I don't want the red to be impossible to cover. I do want it to show, but I don't want it to compete with the blue. I'm pressing a little harder with the red and the darker areas of red where the core shadow is going to be, and where it's just plain red, where the mid tone is or the local color. Local color is kind of a word for mid tone. When you're looking at a colored image, mid tone is more of a value based word. And value is referring to darks and lights. Like in the black and white. Or if I showed you earlier the sphere. Here we're getting those curvy strokes again. Going into the mouth of the volcano, the belly button, the DIP or the stem comes out. I don't know if there's a name for that. There probably is. If you're an Apple person. Now I'm just getting a little more specific. I'll finish this off by coloring that part light red, light with a red. There's our first layer. 11. Next Layers on Greens & Reds: All right, So now we're gonna go back in and do another layer. I'll start with lightening up or lightening and sort of dulling the yellows and greens by adding that white, especially in these brighter areas. And I'm going to start to kind of cut into the edge of the apple because it's very crumbly around the edge. I can just find a sharper edge on my white pastel. Let me see if I can show you this where I've been coloring it's eaten away. I'm going to try to find a sharper edge. There's one right there or a corner just from having created one by accident. And I'm going to use that corner and just go back and forth of going into the blue and you see what a sort of ghostly sharp edge that creates. It's really a lovely effect. We're gonna do that around the entire apple at some point, but I'm just sort of starting to show you that. You can also do it intermittently as you're coloring. If you get into wanting to do an edge, go for it. You can always do more later too. I really like that. Now I'm being much more careful about coloring the direction I want to go because I'm going into the red with the white and out. And you see how that's causing the red to bleed into the yellow a little bit. And that is a perfect effect like so perfect. It makes me giddy that, that it just really creates that same texture on the apple skin. So we're gonna keep going with that up here. Pressing fairly hard with the white so that we get nice blends. Inside these yellowy green parts. Still following the direction of the apple texture. Then I'm going to go down here. Do the same in the yellowy green patch there. Coloring in circles. Because there really isn't much direction there again. But then as I'm coming out of it, I'm kind of going in the direction of the lines of the road. That's pretty light, so I'm going to add some gray to it because that particular patches in shadow. So we want it to be a little more subdued. That worked well, I'm actually going to do the same here and here. Because those areas are in shadow too. Now I'm gonna go back and add another layer of red, pressing a little bit harder, going in the same direction and not so much over the reflected, not at all over the reflected light, but more in the darker areas of red and the brighter areas. And then in order to adjust that color because it's too bright, I'm going to add that purple we talked about earlier. Now we're gonna get into the dark green, which is going to be the core shadow. Not that easy to spot in this picture, but it's kind of going right through here like a half-moon shape, pretty thick band of color. And I'm not pressing very hard, it's just a very dominant color, so it's coming out very dark, all up into that band and right until I get to the very edge of this light yellowy patch. Then down here for the reflected light, I'm going to start with gray. Blend into the dark green I just put in. Then on the bottom edge I'm going to put a little bit of dark green blend with a little purple because there's a very purply reflection here on the very edge of the apple. I'm going to also go back with the red now and blend in the dark green. That is good for the adjustment part. And now we'll get into some more details. 12. Adjusting Greens & Reds: Then we're just gonna go in and make some final adjustments to the color. I've still got a lot of kind of dabbled paper showing through here, yellow showing through. I'm gonna go in and adjust that. I'm going to put a little bit of gray down in this area because that's modeled area and I don't want the red or the yellow to dominate. I'm not pressing very hard with the gray. I'm just using it as a blending tool to try to nullify some of those little white specks popping through. Another thing is you may actually enjoy those white specks because there's these specks on the apple itself so you can leave them if you wanted to, but it tends to look more finished if you don't have those. I would like to personally get rid of mine. The other additive effect to this gray is having on the bright reddest part is it's making it a little more dull so that it's just not quite as glaringly red. I'm going to use it down here where I have kind of a sharper edge that needs more blending over here. Now that my yellows are next to the reds, you can see how bright they are. So I'm pressing really hard with the gray to kind of get those into shadow. And then I'm coloring into the red on purpose to force a blend between the red and the yellow. Same thing here. I'm going to come across the top and create some lines going into the direction of the stem, curving from the right into that stem hall. And then on the left here, just creating a little bit of a ring around the top edge. Ring of gray. I guess. That's not quite getting dark enough for me actually. I'm gonna put a little green gray and see if that works better a little bit. But right here where it's especially dark, I'm going to put some of those really dark green, the deep green. Since it's definitely not supposed to be actually green, I'm gonna neutralize it by putting a little bit of read over it. Then it should, they should greet each other down. Back, got nice and dark, so that's good. And now I'm gonna go back with the gray and just blend. I'm kind of coloring and little strokes out to the edge of the green red patch going in the direction of the lines and coming into that little hole there where there's a little bit of lighter color next to the stem. So I'm pressing harder with the gray to make that pop a little bit. Then here on the right, there's that green gray little shadow right at the base of that hole. And I'll use the gray over it to neutralize that a little more. Then very softly color around the edge to soften it out towards the yellow. I didn't get quite as dark as I wanted. I'm going to put a little bit of the deep green there too. And I'm just literally tapping the paper with a deep green just to get a hint of it there. Because I don't want it to dominate. And then I'm going to do the same kind of tapping with the grade to blended. That's pretty good. Now I'm just going to look around. I feel like the core shadow could be darkened and purples. I'm going to add some purple which isn't going to help much with the darkening, but it's just going to add to the color. Then a little bit more green for the darkening effect, just in the very darkest parts of that core shadow. And then read to blend. Same thing on this bottom edge, I'm going to add some more purple. Then in the reflected light where had colored gray earlier, I'm actually going to put a little bit of the pale blue because the reflection is coming from the mat, which is very blue. So we do want a presence of blue in that reflection. And you can see just by looking at its very blue in the photo. There's definitely some along the bottom edge here on the left. I'm getting these crumbs into it, getting a little bit muddy, but that's okay. We're in shadow, so muddy is actually a nice thing. If you don't want that effect, just get rid of your crumbs and don't blend them into the color that you already have and you'll be fine. Now I'm very lightly coloring around the outside edge of the pale blue reflected light so that it blends into the red. Still doesn't feel blue enough for me. I'm gonna get the cobalt blue back and kind of go in and attack with that, particularly right here at the bottom edge. And then I'm going to spread that around with the pale blue color along the edges. Blend it more into the reflected light that I just put in. 13. Coloring Stem & Surrounding Area: Now before we get into the stem, I'm just going to have you look around at the shadows around the stem and the surrounding area. Make sure it's just about where you want it to be. It doesn't have to be perfect, but the more you can get it to where you want it to be before you put the stem in, the less you'll have to work on it after you put the stem in. And it's very difficult, not very difficult. It's just harder to work around a really precise thing. So the stem is going to be very dark and precise. And working around it after you're done will be more challenging than it would be now. So if there's any adjustments you want to make there, go ahead and do it. If not, you can start testing colors. So I can see already there's a light brown, very light brown. So we have this pale brown color, which will be great for the light and then just a regular brown for the medium color. That's gonna be pretty warm, pretty orangey in nature compared to what we see there. We're actually going to use a little bit of black, which I use very sparingly. But because black tends to make things look a little dead, but actually that stem is dead, so it's appropriate in this situation. But it's also going to help deaden the warmth of these browns without taking away their lights. As I mentioned earlier with the white pastel, you can find a kind of a sharp edge on your pale brown pastel. And as best you can color in the stem. You can also technically sharpen oil pastels in a tiny handheld pencil sharpener, but they are so soft, they break really easily. So be very careful when you do that or you can use like an exact dough knife and chisel away a little bit at its very malleable. So that's very quick thing to do if you prefer or if you just can't find a sharp edge. I'm going to zoom in a bit here. You can see better what I'm doing. I'm going to take the darker brown and just kind of dab it into the center of the stem and the top, there shouldn't be much of the light brown showing still. And then lastly, I'm going to take the black, find a sharp edge on there. And the black is what's really going to help to find things. I'm going to dab some into the top edge and you can see already, wow, that really popped that out. And then I'm going to dab some into the body of the stem, kind of starting at that fluted top and coming down the right side. And I'm just putting little tiny dabs of it. It's so dominant and strong, it won't take much to get that on there. And to get the stem to look like it's actually really going into the hole. I want the bottom edge to be pretty blunt where it meets the comma stroke. The other thing I'm noticing is now that I've got that stem in there, the shadow behind it seems to light. But first, in order to make sure I'm doing the stem justice, I'm gonna take a little bit of white. Take a sharp edge there. Oops, I put it in the middle. I meant to put it on the left. It's so tiny that could easily happen. Fine. I'm sure we've experienced that throughout this process because I put it too far over to the right. I'm going to put the black back in here. The key to getting the stem to pop is making the shadow dark enough and the highlight light enough. And the shadow next to it dark enough. So I'm going to go back into the shadow next to it and put just a little bit of black. Like I said it dozens things. So you don't actually want this shadow to look black. All you're doing is putting a presence of a darker color there. It helps that the white edge of the stem pop out more. And then I'm going to use my gray green to blend it. Barely, barely touching the paper. Lastly, I can take my palette knife or your fingernails such as the case may be whatever your sharp edges. And scrape a little bit where I want the highlight. Oops, I scraped too much there. That's okay. I'm going to scrape a little off the top because I scraped too much on the right. I'm going to take my black and go back in and dab that in. A little bit darker there. Now I'm just gonna noodle a little bit. So I'm gonna scrape some more black off the edge here I'm using the flat edge of the knife. So I can see a little better what I'm doing. I'm gonna scrape a little bit more off of the left side here to emphasize the highlight again, because I really dug into that with the black. There we go. You can just noodle it as much as you want. But I'm pretty happy with that. I'm going to move on to the next section, which will be coloring the highlight and the darkest parts of the shadows. 14. Highlights & Occlusion Shadow: So now we're gonna put it in the bright highlight here and a little highlight right there next to the stem, as well as the occlusion shadow. Start with the highlights and start by just using your scraping tool to scrape off a large patch where you see the highlight. Again, don't worry about the fact that the color isn't actually mostly coming off. It's just the kind of oily residue you're scraping off so that the white has something to grab onto. And I guess I should scrape back here too. These will be less obvious. That's fine. They're just sort of subtle hints at light. And my white is very dirty, so I'm gonna mostly clean it. I'm not gonna be too particular about it though because I am coloring into a reddish yellow surface. But I definitely don't want blue on there and there was blue on my white. I'm going to color a little more down here to make sure I don't have blue in my white or any other really dark colors. That's pretty good. Now I'm going to go in color pretty hard. Let me zoom in here again. You can see better color pretty hard with the white. I just get a nice big white patch there. Then using little circular motions coloring very lightly around the outside of the highlight will help blend it into the surrounding color. And just do that until you're happy with it. And then same thing back here, but I'm gonna wipe my white pastel off because now I have pinkish color all over it. And I'm going into a yellowy area. I'm going to press pretty hard with the white here. And these two little highlighted areas, again, just go around the outside edge of each highlight with little tiny dabs in circular motions to soften it into the surrounding area. There we have our highlights. For the occlusion shadow, you can actually use black even though it is deadening. But again, we're using it very sparingly. And just put a little thick line right where the apple touches the ground. Don't make the thing kind of follow the curve of the apple because it'll look like it's underlined. What we want is just where it's actually touching the mat, a thick dark line. It's gonna get thinner as it goes to the left because that's where the light's hitting. And as it goes to the right, it's going to open up a little bit and get a little bit thicker. And I'm using very light pressure now, I'm just dabbing at it so that it blends into the dark blue there. And then I'm going to get my ultramarine blue back since I want it to look very purply there. And that's gonna be my blending tool for the black. I'm just coloring very lightly on the outside edge to soften it into the dark blue shadow that's already there. Then on the very bottom edge, I'm going to use it just to barely soften the bottom edge of the black. That is it for highlights and occlusion shadow. 15. Touching Up & Optional Signature: Now that we've finished all the major parts of our picture, it's just a good time to go back and reassess and decide where you want to make any changes, adjustments, lightened, sharpen, smudge, etc. So I'm gonna start here. I want to have a little bit more of a bluish reflection on this edge of the apple. I'm gonna go in with my pale blue and press really hard, see if that does take really well. So I don't think I need to do any scraping off of color next to it. I'm going to color lightly just to blend it into the color that's already there. I'm gonna go back with a little more cobalt. This whole area. For the same reason just to kind of add more of a blue presence to the reflection. Then I'll use a little bit of red to blend it on, just on the edges. Coloring very, very lightly here with the red. Just enough to soften that blue. I kind of lost my edge here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think I want to get it back. So I'm going to put a very light line of red there just to redefine the edge of the apple against the background. Looking around, what else do I want to do? Feel like my blue got a little too dominant there. I'm gonna grab my yellow and go back. Blend that a little bit more. Soften the edge of the blue a little down here. I want to clean up that bottom edge of the occlusion shadow. So I'm going to use light-blue, the pale blue since that's more dominant in that area than the cobalt is. And just kind of go over that edge. Yeah, That's softens it much more nicely. The further away from the occlusion shadow you get, the softer the shadow gets. So I'm going to kind of blend in little circles out here. And as I get closer to it, I'm going more horizontally to try to keep the edge sharper. Up here, I'm going to sharpen the edge of the apple against the background a little more. Get rid of some crumbs. I can't get rid of those crumbs. So I'm going to use my ultramarine to go back in and kind of go over those crumbs. I'm pretty happy with the sharpness of the edge, the stem, the shadow inside, like the highlights. Think I'll blend out a little more here. You get the idea. Everything I'm doing is probably not the same stuff you're going to choose to do because your picture is probably not going to look. It's definitely not going to look just like mine or anybody else's because we're different artists. And even if I tried to replicate this, it wouldn't look the same because each time you do it, it's gonna be different as part of the beauty of the process. Just make your heart contents and you can adjust things as much as you'd like until you're very happy with it. Then if you'd like to sign it, you can just use a regular pencil. I've got my pretty rainbow pencil here. It's just a regular writing number two pencil. It's best to sign in a bottom corner because it's not as noticeable. And you want your signature to be pretty subtle. You want to sign inside the edges of frame a little ways so that if you imagine, if you frame it, your frame is going to overlap a bit of the blue so you want it so that your signature isn't covered up by the frame. You can sign your initials or your full name or just your first name or however you want to sign or you don't have to sign it at all, It's totally your call. But whatever you want to do, you can go ahead and do that. Now. I'm just going to assign how I usually do, which is my full name and the year. We're done. 16. Congratulations!: That's it, friends, We did it. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you had a great time. I had a great time. Just to recap the things you picked up today, the skills you learned, you learned how to layer with oil pastels to create natural textures. You learned how to press lightly and press hard and when to do that in different situations. How to make colors mix to create new colors. You learned how to add shadows and highlights, how to remove oil pastel and add more oil pastel in order to build up the color and create more nuanced textures and colors, we also learned how to draw using simple measuring methods, copying from a photograph onto our paper. If you're interested in learning other media, I have graphite class classes, colored pencil, charcoal, chalk, pastel, watercolor, acrylic, just a variety of other mediums if you're interested in learning other things. I also hope you take from as many instructors as possible because the more people you learn from, the greater your breadth of skills will be, in my opinion, the more kind of joyous your art experience with that. Thank you again for joining me so much and I hope you have a beautiful day.