Archie McDougall : Pastel Drawings

Pastels

When an oil painting is not the best choice for a subject and I still need the colour that gets lost with charcoal, I turn to pastels. I use a few different types of pastel which includes the traditional chalk based pastels (favoured by the great artist Edgar Degas) and oil pastels (invented by Sennelier in the early 1900's at the request of Pablo Picasso). Although these two mediums are quite different they do allow for a full range of colours to be used in a painting/drawing.
The oil pastels produce a finish that is very similar to an oil painting but are more limited in the details that are possible.
The chalk based pastels I use come in two forms. A block which is held in the fingers and the traditional pencil format. The blocks lend themselves well to less detailed expressive sections whereas the pencils offer the possibility of much greater detail and control. The two forms combine well together to produce full featured paintings/drawings.

Both drawings shown were completed using just pastel pencils