How to paint a realistic portrait with oil pastels

Hi! Today I’d like to share and explain a little about my process painting this sort-of realistic portrait using Sennelier oil pastels and Caran d’Ache Neopastel on Pastelmat paper. Lots of you have asked me about it, particularly about how I blend oil pastels so I’m going to cover that. I hope it helps! And at the bottom of the post there’s the video with the process of this painting in case you prefer video format.

The first thing I do is to roughly cover everything with loose strokes. I’m only filling in with the local color adding layers as I need to. It’s gonna look messy and that’s okay. I’m not particular about which brand of oil pastel I pick at any given time. Sennelier is much softer than Neopastel like I explained in this post but I really don’t care because both blend well so I choose according to the color that I need.

As I add more layers of oil pastel, I begin to blend. If there’s not enough paint on the paper it’s much harder to do so I go back and forth painting and blending until I can move the paint around and the grain of the paper is covered. The green is lovely but I don’t want it to show on the face so I don’t leave empty spaces unlike for the background, where sometimes I like to show it through and it can also leave a nice texture.

At this stage I’m only using my hands (with gloves in this case so that I can take them off quickly if my baby wakes up) to blend. I don’t add anything to blend oil pastels. No solvent or oils of any kind. People always ask me about this so I guess some artists do but I don’t see the need at all because they paints blend very well by themselves without effort as long as there is enough pigment on the paper.

I sometimes use a paper stump to help blend smaller areas like you can see here on the eyelids. It helps to mix the paint if you need to and to make more precise marks. When possible I prefer to use my fingers because the result is smoother but if he area is too small or I would need to get close to the paper and turn my head to the side to see precisely what I’m doing but I’m recording and my head would get between the painting and the camera, then I’ll grab the paper stump. Otherwise for most cases I use my pinky finger.

When I blend, particularly in the early stages I don’t mind losing definition and that the features become blurry, I expect it. I go beyond the features in order to get the portrait to look as smooth and seamless as possible. For example on the eyelids, first I’ll drag my finger over them, over the brow bone and even over the eyebrows and once is all smooth, then I’ll bring back the features drawing with an oil pastel. If I want a fine line then I pick a Neopastel but if not, then a Sennelier stick, or whatever depending on the color but it’s much easier to draw details with harder oil pastels.

When you blend/mix several colors is normal to lose some saturation and the area looks duller (like on her cheeks) so I keep going over the top with more vivid colors like orange and pink, blend again and see if it needs more color. Same for the stronger highlights, those also get diffused and lost so I bring them back before blending with my hand again.

Sometimes I blend with my finger and the area looks too smooth like in the case of the shadow of her nose. After I went over it it ended up looking quite undefined and I wanted it to have more structure so I moved the paint along the bridge of the nose with the help of paper stump. If I had a matching color I would have use the oil pastel stick directly but I don’t and realistically that would mean I would had a huge palette with several hundreds colors (and unfortunately I do not ha ha).

The paper stump is useful for blending small areas but also for moving the paint to create marks and texture. You can see that around her eyes: eyelids, corner of the eyes… etc.

On the third picture I jump onto the hair. Look how fine the lines can be using Neopastel. In this case the oil pastel broke so I used the border but you can achieve the same thing making a tip on the top of the stick and using it like a pencil.

I go over the hair in the same way I do for the skin, blending, painting with several oil pastels and then adding some lines and texture with a paper stump. If you would like a dedicated hair tutorial let me know.

Lastly the most fun part and the one everyone seems to like the most myself included: the highlights✨It brings life to a portrait like nothing else. I prefer to do them directly with a stick and I almost always use Sennelier’s white. Out of all the oil pastel whites I’ve tried is the softest and most opaque and therefore the one that goes over several layers the best.