Hi 👋🏼 I’m Jeff. Excited to be here with fellow creatives. My background is in traditional drawing and painting, and I’m now exploring how to integrate digital and AI tools through a human-centered design lens. I hold a BA in Fine Arts from Pepperdine and an MFA in Visual Development from Academy of Art in San Francisco. Looking forward to connecting and growing together. Portfolio: (http://www.jeffbiestman.com/)

Once upon a time… yes, long time ago when I was curious about using different art materials, I bought a lot of oil pastels, but to tell you the truth, they failed to convince me to become a better artist. I have a lot of used oil pastels that have been neglected and I am now giving them a second chance. There are now many artists who are specialized in oil pastels on Instagram, their works are eye opening to me. Instead of trying to recycle my old used pastels, that I found not too easy to use, I bought a box set of 50 colours oil pastels from Amazon. I tried to use these like most of the artists do, smudge the colours to make it look like an oil painting, but it is not really my style because I prefer the oil paintings in loose brushworks such as the portraits of John Singer Sargent. I have done some small study of kittens and puppies, then here I show my latest work of two cats sleeping together. I will be happy to hear from you on my work, any opinions or questions are welcome. Happy paintings, my friends! Midori

Hello everyone, I hope you are having great weekend. Here I share a video of the process of painting a puppy in oil pastel. I used my old oil pastel and a piece of paper for watercolour that I found in my studio. Nothing special. Also a cutter knife to scrape off the pastel if needed, and kitchen paper. I lightly sketch in pencil the shape of the puppy from the reference photo. Then started to paint the white part of the puppy. I used a light grey as well as white to suggest the light shadow. Then I move on to paint the darker colour, in brown and black and build up the darkness. The eyes were a little complicated so I left them until later, white part needed to be cleaned off using the knife gently and carefully before applying white pastel. The background was quickly scribbled and smudged by the folded kitchen paper. It’s not a perfect painting but my style is not to copy the photo for a surrealistic effect. In my mind I had the images of sketches of Dega and Lautrec, as they are the masters of the movement of the human body with quick economic strokes. I hope you like my video. Should you have any questions please let me know. Thank you for watching. Happy painting! Midori

Hello every one How is your art life going? I have not been so productive but I am now experimenting the oil pastel painting. So far I’ve found that the key to the success in oil pastel is to choose the right support. I did a painting of a kitten for change, the soft fluffy hair was the main challenge for me. The paper I used is a watercolor paper which has tooth on the surface. I thought it was better than acrylic treated smooth panel I used before, that was nearly a disaster but the paper with tooth was not that easy. Next time I will use paper with smooth surface. I posted the part of process to the YouTube shorts, the link is as follows. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask me. Happy painting! Midori https://youtube.com/shorts/nKTPxm4NhHM?si=zL5WghwM7twi2Opd

Hi dear members Hope you have started a good week today. It’s a half moon evening, and here I’ve been experimenting oil pastels on an unusual surface. I bought a bunch of small wood panel treated by gesso many years ago. I just thought about using it for the oil pastel painting, which I thought would be a good idea. It proved how wrong I was… the smooth surface of gesso on the wood doesn’t like oil pastels. The colours don’t spread evenly and when I tried to put different colours, the pastel stick just skid to show the white surface of the panel. I fed up with struggling so I stopped painting and left it over night. The following day, I use small amount of turpentine with a soft brush trying to smooth out the surface but the brush picked up most of previously laid paint, it was an another failure. “It’s a good job” I said to myself “that I haven’t got a fireplace” and I changed to the oil paint to continue working. Yeah, in my old house where I had a fireplace, I would just throw it in the fire. Still it was not so easy but at least the oil paints work on the panel surface better. Still not satisfactory though, colour mixing is more manageable. I haven’t finished this small painting, will continue when the oil paint drys a little. Trial and error… There is no shortcut to the success. So my friends, keep enjoying the art! Life is a process, there is no goal! Thank you for reading. Midori