Video Transcript

Hi everyone. My name's Gene. I'm a graphic designer and I'm an illustrator. I've been working in the field for about the last fifteen years. And today we're going to discuss oil pastel blending techniques. And we're going to use the tortillon and stump technique. So let's jump right in and get started and I'll show you how to blend some stuff up. So three things you need, obviously you need pastels if you're going to be blending pastels. And then obviously you need tortillons if you're going to use tortillons or stumps to blend stuff with. Now these when I first heard about them, someone was like hey, can you blending tortillon and I was like, tortilla? Like why would you blend with a tortilla. Those are pretty tasty, you can make a quesadilla out of it, you can make a burrito. There's all sorts of things you can do with tortillas that just seam wasted if you're using them to blend oil paints. But it's actually like a very tightly wound piece of paper. And a stump is more or less the same thing, but it's probably you're going to be winding a stump yourself. So it's not going to come out this exact. Basically what they do is they, now you can do this one of two ways. You can make these by rolling up a piece of paper so that it exactly diminishes, shortens, so that it's cut, that when you roll it, it shrinks and gives you this nice spike. But I suspect what they probably do is they just roll them up really nice and tight like this and then they just put it right into a pencil sharpener. Who knows. Until I go to the factory or I see that episode of how it's made, we may never know. Also not to be confused with the tortellini, although if you bend this in half like this, and sharpen the other side, and it's made out of pasta and some cheese or spinach inside, then that would be a tortellini. I'm just going to grab some pastels here, any old color. We're going to grab two opposite colors. We're going to grab some blue and we're going to grab some orange. So here we go. We've got some oil pastels. Just going to lay some down on the paper real quick because I just want to show the blending technique real quickly. Some blue and then we're going to butt the orange right up against the blue like that. Now the problem here is if you start going over top of the blue with the orange, you can blend it that way. But you see how a little bit of blue has come off on the orange? Well you don't want that because the only way to really get rid of that is to either take it off with your finger or to waste your pastel over in the corner and rub that area off. So we take these specialized blending instruments and you just start sort of working your way into the pastel. And the pastel's oily so it's going to, it's going to blend quite nicely and in this way you don't have to worry about messing up your perfectly clean pastel. You can continue to work and you can still get that nice bright orange. Now one thing to be careful of as you can see right there, is since these pastels, well these are actually kind of a little bit cheap pastels. Depending on how much you are in to pastels, you could get the more expensive kind, the better ones. These are probably the ones that you're going to want to buy for children though. Because they can get quite messy and these clean up really easily. But you can see we have a little excess blue on there. Now if we take that and we start blending over here, remember that that blue is going to come off and it's going to look like there's some blue on here. So when you blend you want to make sure you go from one color to the other and then possibly back in the same direction without changing the rotation of the tortillon. Alternately you can go in tiny little circles from one color to the next. And as you can see, we're not getting like a perfect little wash here but that's because I purposely decided to use two colors that are opposites. So when you blend orange and blue you basically get this brown color in the middle and it's kind of ugly. I probably should have picked something that was going to be a little brighter. But instead we have this nice bright orange, kind of ugly dark brown and a nice bright blue. So there you go, tortillon stump blending. So there you have it. It can get a little messy and you want to keep a paper towel handy so you can continually clean off your tortillon since the oil pastel is going to rub off on it. But using that technique you can blend virtually any color together. If you're real careful with it, you can make some nice just washes across you know, an entire length of paper. There are a bunch of things you can do with it. So play around with that guys and experiment a little bit. And thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.