Drawing With Oil Pastels | Art Project

By Spramani Elaun

Drawing With Oil Pastels

Oil pastels are a great medium for children to learn basic line drawing lessons. They are soft and easy to glide onto paper surfaces. Oil pastels are perfect for drawing bright bold colorful artworks. Oil Pastel artists use this medium because of its rich vibrant color selection.

Oil pastels look like crayons, but glide on paper surfaces oily. Oil pastels are a mix of non-drying oil, a wax binder and pigment. The finish is creamy and oily. Oil pastels can be very inexpensive, prices can range from $5.00 to $20.00, depending on colors and quantity count.

You can find these in most art stores in low to high grades. Note* Do not use professional artist grade, some colors have heavy metals. Use non-toxic student grades only with children under 12 years.

Blend Oil Pastels Without Making Messes

Oil pastels have a bad wrap for being messy because of the loose curds that build up and spread around.

You can avoid messes by showing students a couple techniques to use. Show children how oil pastels work, point out the loose curds on the surface after coloring with them. Explain how to blend them into drawings with their fingers or a Q-tip. Teach children how Not to blow them away so the pigment doesn’t spread around the environment. Oil pastel curds can stain clothes or surfaces if not wiped away.

Tip:

Walk to a trash can with art in hand and tap loose oil pastel curds left on the surface into the trash. You can also blend the loose waxy curds by pressing and smearing down with fingers, Q-tip or a blender. If you don’t explain this to kids they will blow them away.

Art Project – Oil Pastel Rainforest Drawings

Art Supply List:

• Oil Pastels
• Black uncoated Paper, You will need black uncoated paper, or black poster board, or black tag board. Be sure paper is not glossy or coated with a finish.
• Practice paper
• Pencil

White Oil Pastel

A white oil pastel will be what I recommend to outline first. This will give your art a great color pop against the black paper.

Book Inspiration

Books are a great spring-board for teaching drawing lessons. I like using colorful illustrations in children’s books. Inspired by the book We’re Roaming in the Rainforest, by Laurie Krebs and Anne Wilson. This book has fun bright bold colorful pop illustrations easy for children to draw. The book’s story is about creatures of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest.

Step 1.

Draw the outline of the animal with a white oil pastel on black uncoated paper.

Teaching Tips

Decide which species your student wants to draw. Help children choose very basic outline shaped rainforest animals. Practice the outline shape on a different plain piece of paper with an oil pastel. Your student will come to understand how oil pastels are greasy and glide.

Most kids might think because they look like crayons they will behave like one. Oil pastels are greasy and take a few tries to understand how to use.

If your student wants to draw their outline with a pencil first as a guide, that’s OK.

Tell kids to draw slowly, oil pastels can glide into the wrong direction. My oil pastel glided a few times in the wrong direction in my final snake example, but I covered up with un patterns and linemarks.

Step 2.

Have your student choose bright colors that will stand out against black paper. Then paint inside the outline drawing with oil pastel colors.

Here’s some other fun rainforest animals to draw with oil pastels.

Be sure to share your students’ work or comments on Nature of Art® Facebook or Instagram.

Warmly, Spramani

Buy 12 Oil Pastels $10.00

All rights reserved © 2022, Nature of Art®

No part of this blog may be used or be reproduced in any manner whatsoever including reproducing, publishing, performing, and making any adaptions of the work – including translation into another foreignlanguage without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Nature of Art® Publishing P.O. Box 443 Solana Beach, California 92075.