I have found a medium my 9 year old son loves, but it meant I had to share my Faber Castell Creative Studio Oil Pastels. I dug through my stash and found several old collections of oil pastels for Vincent to use, but upon testing them (one of which from my school days) they were either not good enough, or they had degraded. So I had no choice but to let him use my pastels.
Recently, we had been watching videos via a Facebook page called Deepak’s Art & Craft. There are countless videos on there to practice, and that is what we did to create these images you see here.
Faber Castell Creative Studio Oil Pastels
Oil-based pastel crayons offer wonderful opportunities of applying both extremely intense, strong colours and delicate pastel tones. Due to their high luminosity, the crayons are ideal for encaustic as well as various pastel and scraping techniques. Depending on the desired artistic effect, you can use your finger to wipe them or blend them with a paintbrush and turpentine (or white spirit).
Faber Castell Website
These pastels are great for a beginner. They are lovely to use, and are certainly vibrant. Having produced four images, two myself, and two for Vincent, I can happily say we’re happy with the finished results.
For 3 of the pictures, we used Canson Mixed Media Paper, for the forth, we used a cartridge paper. The latter is what we started with (the image above shows the results). Blending wasn’t great, though vibrancy is lovely. The cartridge paper didn’t like the washi tape we used to keep the paper in place. We tried this stock simply because I have a lot of it.
To give you an idea of process, we put the oil pastel down (not solidly) on the paper-stock. We used a small folded square of kitchen roll to blend together. The most satisfying part. What I was really surprised at, is the ease in which the graphite draws over it. However, the problems I discovered was that they don’t always blend well. This seemed to be colour dependent. Also, it’s not easy to cover another colour (you can see where Vincent went over the colour with the black).
To conclude, if you are looking to upgrade, I wouldn’t recommend these Oil Pastels. However, if you are a beginner or just want a bit of fun, these are perfect.
The Inked Crafter approves Faber Castell Creative Studio Oil Pastels for Beginners and casual users.