On the last day of school, we were able to borrow art materials from school to use at home. I took advantage of this opportunity and filled my backpack with acrylic paint, brushes, oil pastels, charcoal, colored pencils, linoleum, and watercolor.

A watercolor painting I created for a friend.

I first painted with watercolor and created cards to use for birthdays and mothers day. I do have quite a bit of experience with watercolor, however, this helped me with being able to create more detailed watercolor paintings, a skill that was useful for later artwork that I created for Art class.

I also created a very small acrylic painting inspired by a photo I took of a sunrise on a lake during a canoe trip in the Quetico Provincial Park. By doing this painting I was able to practice blending and details with acrylic paint.

A small acrylic painting I created of sunrise in the Quetico.

I then turned to oil pastels. I had never used oil pastels before so it was a challenge to learn how to blend the colors and how to choose where to place different colors in order to show the highlights and shadows. I first experimented messing around and blending colors together and then I followed a tutorial I found on YouTube to learn how to use oil pastels to draw a colorful eye. As you can see below, my skills of blending and color placing improved significantly from my first attempt (the blue and green eye in the upper left) and my second and third attempt (the other eyes shown in the photo below).

Oil pastel drawings of eyes I created by following a tutorial.

I an abstract drawing of a woman inspired by an artist going by the name BlackBean CMS.

After following this tutorial, I started loving oil pastels because of the ease when blending color together and the wide variety of methods to use oil pastels. I loved the artist who created this tutorial’s work so I found other oil pastel drawings of his of faces to practice how to expand what I learned from the tutorials for eyes in drawing an abstract face.

Two oil pastel drawings of noses.

I then want to focus on another part of a face with oil pastels and I chose to practice drawing noses (as shown below).

Quarantine provided me an opportunity to practice and improve previously known art skills as well as explore a new art medium that I had never used before. The oil pastel drawing skills I learned were very helpful when it came time to create an art piece for my IB Art exhibition in class.