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Posts in How to Draw
Loosen up Your Style With Oil Pastels

Oil pastels are an exciting and versatile art medium. Their convenient versatility can be the aspect of oil pastels that make them confusing to beginners. There are more than a few ways to use oil pastels. Which way is the right way?

The good news is, one of the greatest freedoms in art is that we are not bound to use the mediums in the same way others use them, or for that matter, how they’re intended to be used.

If you can get comfortable with that, then you can have endless success in oil pastel. This post is about making the most of the oil pastel’s ability to be loose, expressive and imperfect. I will introduce you to the benefits of oil pastel in its loose form. At the end of the post you can find the link to an oil pastel tutorial in the style of my children’s book illustrations.

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How to: Expressive Oil Pastel Illustrations (in the Style of the Children's Book Little Birder)

Do you want to use oil pastels but don’t know where to start? In this tutorial I will walk you through the steps to illustrate an oil pastel bird (or any subject matter) in the style of my children’s book “Little Birder: A Field Guide to Birds of the Alphabet”. This stye is bright and impactful and makes the most of oil pastel’s appealing qualities, but it does not require perfection or years of mastery and can be painted in a relatively short time.

This is a great place to start your oil pastel journey or continue to develop your own style using the versatile medium of oil pastels.

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How to Draw Realistic Birds- Part Two- Final Drawing

Let’s pick up where we left off…

When I talk about the two different stages of a drawing, I will often refer to the sketch stage as the “thinking part” and the drawing stage as, “the artistic part”, because that is essentially what they are. The sketch is the stage of a drawing that forces you to slow down, use your brain as you measure and study and adjust until your drawing is as accurate as possible.

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How to Draw Realistic Birds- Part One- Starting with a Sketch

Drawing skills are the foundation of any art practice. Knowing how to draw opens a world of possibilities on which to build your creativity. That is because the basis of great drawing skills is observation. In order to draw well (realistically), we have to draw accurately. Drawing accurately means obeying the rules of nature, tapping into the way the brain works, and knowing where it sometimes steers us wrong.

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