This is an oil pastel drawing (or painting?)
You might not know this, but blue and brown gives black. By selecting the right blue for the right brown you can achieve a neutral black. However, any such combination gives a black. Add white and it becomes grey. The colour of the flesh is a brown. Light (therefore with much white) but brown – unless of course you paint Black person, where their brown is not (that) light.
This makes painting a nude body in a blue (or green, violet, any colour with a significant blue component) environment really challenging. Blues – unlike browns – are very strong colours and even just a hint of it can make the skin-tone grey. Not just a desaturated skin-tone. A zombie-like grey. Unless, of course, the blues have dried very well.
That’s why I made this experiment with oil pastels, instead. Oil pastels are much drier and much less mixable than oil paints, so the place where the body and the blue background meet each other wouldn’t make the whole body grey. Yes, most blues (and even more so the blues I use) are that strong, and the blending of oil paints would affect the entire body.
Overall, the experiment went quite well. There were a few points here and there I wanted to correct, but I though I’d smoothen it out first by using linseed oil. Big mistake!
Linseed oil did smooth everything, of course, but after that the colour was too fat for oil pastels to adhere on top of it. I should have known. 😔
I could have continued with oils instead, but I decided to leave it as is, and take note of the lesson I learned. But, as time passed, I grew to love this drawing, so here it is!
