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Melting Oil Pastels!
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Message
Posted
Has anyone melted oil pastels to create different textures?
I’ve got some really cheap ones that I don’t use anymore. I’ve seen on YouTube, melting them with a hair dryer, microwave, oven and solvent. But they only show them ending up like a ‘thick blob’.
I want to be able to add textures to my acrylic paintings. I already use gesso and gloss to do this, but I had the idea of melting oil pastels, based on the article in The Artist about cold wax in paintings set me thinking.
I would want them to be liquid enough to apply texture by knife/plastic card. And would they need sealing if by some wonder it worked. I usually seal my oil pastel paintings with sealant.
Any suggestions?
Ellen
Posted
Ellen ....dump them and take up Encaustics which is the best way and does not involve using cheap materials like oil pastels which will only give disappointment and mess.Encaustics will give you an exciting way to give body and rexture to your art I am sure. Acrylics can giveyou plenty of texture on their own and theres loads of sand and stuff to add to the paint. personally i just paint the texture in to the paint instead of all the weird suggestions which are not suited to acrylics . ihave painted in acrylics since the fifties and have never fond them wanting.....Syd
Edited
by SydEdward
Posted
I would call Syd's advice on this tough, but good.....
Of course, you can experiment with anything you want to experiment with, but oil pastels aren't oil, they're basically wax - so they never really dry, and cheap ones are likely to be fairly garish as well, so won't work too well with any subtler paint. You can melt them - just leave them on the car dashboard in the sun for an hour or two - but they're not going to work like paint whatever you do with them, because they aren't paint.
You can get plenty of texture with acrylic paint alone - with or without (and here I agree with Syd again) all the additives and texture pastes and all the rest of it: just use a heavier duty paint - the one I use for that sort of work is Cryla, and the Winsor & Newton artists' acrylic. I admit to being generally unimpressed by additives in almost any medium - egg-shells, pastes, polyfilla, glass beads, bits of string, I've seen the lot and, at least for figurative work, generally passed it by. You can mould paint with a painting knife, layer it with a stiff brush, carve into it, add a bit of resin medium if you must (and sometimes you must) - and if you're a real fiend for texture, try oils instead; but do try a knife with the acrylics, and I think you'll get the texture you're after (layer the paint, then add touches of impasto with the knife).
Posted
I use them sometimes as a sketching medium, but won't be joining you and Tim Fisher in melting them - (though just because I wouldn't do it doesn't mean it's a bad idea, obviously!). But what I will do (shortly) is paint an acrylic with a knife - and no additives of any kind - just to show what can be done without any of these additives.
I am curious though about melting oil pastels on the back of an iron: I'll have to grab a copy of the magazine - I'll send Tim Fisher the bill if I get melted oil pastel all over my best shirt..........
(My oil pastels by the way are so old that they've got 'clouded' - there's a bloom of white over all of them, so you can only tell what colour they are by shaving bits off of them: yet I don't think this happens to them when they're applied to a surface; strange things....)
While you're experimenting, have you thought about using dry pastels, or neopastels (or available equivalent) with watercolour or acrylic? You can get into a fearful mess, but now and then this can produce some very interesting results.
Posted
Always exciting to get a letter published Ellen, well done!
Tim Fisher does present an interesting article on creating special effects in the current (November) edition of Leisure Painter. Plenty of good ideas to try, and I am quite interested in giving some of these a go for myself. I've never fully taken to oil pastels for various reasons, perhaps this article will do the trick and inspire me to explore new avenues.
I am however, slightly less enthusiastic about using a hot iron for anything other than its intended purpose, melting pastels is not one. This could be a safety issue for some of us, and one that I won't be employing. I'm sure that there are many other readers who will not find it an issue mind you.
Edited
by alanbickley