Once you’ve had a chance to practice the fundamental techniques of water-soluble pastels, you’re off to the races! In this section, we’ll wrap things up, covering sketching, designing, potential projects, and caring for your kit going forward. You’ll likely find - as with any artistic medium - that it’s helpful to return to the fundamentals every so often as a refresher. Hold on to your practice pages, both as a reference to methods or color blends that you like, and as a way to continue refreshing and refining those essential skills. But with all that in mind, let’s dive into the next steps!

After the last post, you’re a veritable dry-blending expert – but now it’s time to add water and see the other side of this versatile medium. For the experiments in this section, you can play around with the color wheel or blending from your previous sheets, or create a new page just for watery experimentation.

In the previous post we touched upon the idea of blending using your finger to smudge two tones together. And that’s all there is to it, at its most basic – just layering one color over the other, then combining them gently together on the page. That’s a technique that’s referred to as dry blending – blending that occurs before any water hits the page.

Whatever you’re painting with, it’s a good idea to cover your table or work surface with craft paper, newspaper, or cardboard to protect it from staining. Similarly, we wouldn’t recommend wearing your brightest white outfit while working with oil pastels – it’s easy to accidentally transfer color from your hands to your clothes in a moment of creative inattention.

Whether you’re starting with your own supplies, or using one of our kits, you can follow along with this section to learn everything you’ll need to get started.

Water-soluble oil pastels are our new favorite medium - a magical combination of watercolor, the color density of oil pastels, and the smoothness and ease-of-use of wax crayons. They combine the best of the traditional art medium of oil pastels, with the fun and flexibility of watercolor.

Dyeing with avocado! This week I felt like celebrating my two favorite California fruits - avocado & oranges, both of which we're enjoying in abundance. A visit to the thrift store turned up some beautiful cotton & linen textiles that I knew I could use for a head-to-toe outfit. And why not AVOCADO head-to-toe?