Hey guys, I'm Hive account@blackjellyfish13 and today, I did a tutorial about making illustrations that looks like paintings but not really. Today, you will be reading something about an interesting medium. The said medium is oil pastel, an illustrating medium that is made up of pigments binded up with gum and oil. Its a really expressive medium with a rich variety of colors.

This tutorial is more targeted to beginners who are trying to look into illustrating. I suggest oil pastel to them cause of the range of things that you can do with it specially if you are using it with soft pastel which is a really good compliment medium with oil pastel.

Today, I opened up a box of brand new oil pastel. This box set of 16 colors costed me below 3$. Now, to rate this box of oil pastel. For it's value which is somehow cheap, I find it good. The color of this set under the name of Pentel is a good buy specially for beginners. It doesn't have every color that you will be needing but still its a good buy for replacements and just for trials. Just in case you find yourself not really into illustrating, you can just throw it away or give it to some kid without thinking much about it, cause it just costed you 3$.

Doing the Piece

So I started out with cutting a piece of illustration board around 15"x 10"

I drew a small blue circle with my sky blue pastel, this would be the imaginary source of light in the illustration

I then added a darker variety of blue, navy blue, around the sky blue color

Then I added another color around navy blue, it is cobalt blue. Just for added information, cobalt is literally color blue, so the name cobalt blue was directly adapted from that. If only scientific names were named like that science would be easier.

I then added a lining of sky blue then another area with cobalt blue

I then colored around it with black. Just color everything from start till here roughly but make sure that you get the shape
Then I added gray
I then started blending the color right from the where I started with my finger. I accidentally smudged some black pastel in the supposed to be white part. At times like that, just go on, those errors can be easily be fixed but overlapping them with another color. That is one of the beauties of oil pastel.

Rub it , fill up the grains of paper as much as you can. If clots form like what you see on the illustration below, just use your finger nail to chip it away, its easy really. And don't worry, cleaning your finger nails from the oil pastel is easy with any of alcohol, baby oil and paint thinner
I then applied white colored pastel over the top of the imaginary light source part to enhance the illusion of the light source.
Repeat the process to the other parts
At this rate, you will feel that applying the colors is smoother and easier. At this part, personally, I appreciate this medium more cause of how smooth the feel of applying it.Make sure to blend the edges of the colors to make it look more striking and beautiful
After reapplying colors on all the parts, I dashed off some black at the gray area. These dashes will give the illusion of the mix of black and gray, which I find beautiful.
There, see it? I also started to add details here. Just in case you can't see it, that's a human being in silhouette.
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Then I added trees

Beautiful!Now, another interesting trick(is this even a trick?). We call this trick etching, where we use a thin piece of hard object to etch the surface of the pastel illustration to create detailed line variations. This is a really useful trick if used in a good way. Here, I'm using an empty ball point pen for etching. Tools for etching shouldn't be expensive, it could even be free
And there, we did it! This illustration isn't really that detailed. I just wanted to show the beauty of colors of such medium. As you can see in this illustration, the colors really look rich and beautiful. I hope this inspires some artists and aspiring artists out there.

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Thank you, see you tomorrow!