Party Time – The 52-Week Art Project 2026, Using My New Oil Pastels

It’s week 37 of The 52-Week Art Project and this week’s prompt is Party Time! I did something very different this time: 2 oil pastel paintings and a couple of digital drawings. This is the first time in decades that I have used oil pastels, so I’m learning from scratch again and just had fun playing. The colours in this new set I have are so vibrant and the pastels are so buttery soft and yummy to work with. Not at all what I remember oil pastels to look or feel like. So excited to explore this medium more!

As usual, I will explain the techniques and supplies I used on them below. I hope you find this type of post informative and interesting and that it might inspire you to get creative too!

Although I’ll be sharing my art here today, you have the rest of the week to work on your creations for this prompt. Remember, you can interpret the prompt using any medium you enjoy!

The #CH52art Project Overview

• A creative project or those of us who can’t create daily, for whatever reason.
• There is 1 prompt per week to ​interpret in any way & take your time with.
• Use any medium (collage, clay, paint, photography, baking, knitting, lego, fabric, etc)
• You can skip a prompt anytime if needed, your wellbeing comes first. No stress here.
• You don’t need social media to participate, but if you share online, please use #CH52art
• Share your creations to the gallery on my blog (optional) & be inspired by other creatives.

Visit this page for more details.

Free Digital Art Summit For Procreate App

I’m currently enjoying a free digital art summit online. If you have an iPad and would like to learn from 29 professional artists for free, click here to check out the 2026 Summit. It opened yesterday 7 September and runs for 4 days, last day is 10 September.

Here are a few more sketches from lessons I’ve attended so far, many more fun lessons to attend and I’ve already learned so much!

I aim to post my creations at the start of the week, by Sunday evening or Monday morning. So I’m creating my pieces for each prompt one week in advance. That said, the gallery is always available, so you can browse or, if you’re participating, upload your creations, anytime.

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Wk37 Prompt: Party Time

I was not really sure what to do for this prompt, and even considered skipping this week since it was already late Sunday afternoon and I had still not made any art for the project yet.

Some weeks seem to just fly by! It’s not that I wasn’t creative at all, it’s just that I did other art adjacent things and hadn’t sat down to create something specifically for this prompt yet.

That was until I logged into the summit early and found a freebie tutorial to do in advance of the summit starting and it happened to match this week’s prompt. It also inspired the oil pastel pieces I subsequently made.

Getting Reacquainted With Oil Pastels

I also cut up the swatch card that came with the set and rearranged the swatches on my desk before sticking them into my art journal in the new order that makes more sense to my brain. I also placed a sheet of tracing paper between the two swatch pages so there’s no transfer of colour from one page to the other, keeping all the swatches clean.

That meant I had to also rearrange the pastels in the box according to the new swatch sheets I’d made. Now I can easily find colours and their various shades when I need them.

I’m not sure what sort of reasoning the company used to number the pastels the way they did, but that original order of things was not making any sense to me. Now I have them divided into colour families and arranged according to temperature and chroma. I love how it looks!

Please excuse any dull lighting on some of the photos below. I work in low light because bright lighting drains my energy (light sensitivity is an ME/CFS symptom). So progress pictures are often taken in low artificial lighting. I’ll try to correct the greyish/yellowish colouring, and get them as close to their actual colouring as I can, prior to posting.

* click on images to zoom in.

Party Time – Oil Pastels

Reusing some previously used washi tape, I started by taping off 2 rectangular spaces in my art journal. This is to create those white borders around the artwork, but also, in this case, provides a safe space to turn the pages without getting my fingers dirty or smudging the art over time.

Using my favourite brush pen for drawing, I sketched the two scenes. On the left, a bear with balloons and a stack of gifts. On the right, a bunny with balloons and a cake. This was my first time drawing a bunny, so there are some lines out of place, but I think over all these turned out pretty well for freehand ink drawings.

Starting on the bear side, I decided to use the blending technique to colour these. I scribble some colour in the general area I want to colour, then using a cotton swab, I blended the colours to fill the spaces. I will watch some tutorials on using oil pastels at some point, but for now, this is how I went about it for both of these drawings.

The cotton swab is not ideal as it’s so thin, it’s difficult to hold and it bends over time. The cotton on the tip also starts coming loose and becomes less precise. Purpose-made blending stumps would work much better as they’re thicker, more stable and have a fine point for detailing. I’ll definitely need to get some of those if I decide to do more detailed illustrations with oil pastels.

I also made a mistake here by adding the confetti before colouring the background. This made it really tricky to navigate with the cotton swab, trying to blend the green without picking up any of the other colours from the confetti. So I left a tiny white aura around all the confetti, which I guess has its own charm. Of course, I coloured the background first on the bunny side.

I decided to try an ombre effect for the next background by adding green to the bottom half and blue to the top. I think it blended nicely. Creates a bit more interest in the background. I wanted to use soft pastel pink on this side, as opposed to the bright primaries I used on the bear’s side.

So I used pale pink for her dress and cake. Then I used a light grey for the bunny’s fur and the shadows on the white cake stand as well as leaving some areas uncoloured, like the collar on her dress and the cake stand itself. I did go back in and add some extra colour with darker shades for the shadows, blades of grass and to add texture in some areas like the fur on the bear’s belly or the icing on the cake.

Overall, I enjoyed using these oil pastels so much. They are so buttery and soft and the colours are super vibrant until you start blending, then you can create some lovely variation in saturation of colour. I will definitely need to watch some tutorials and learn more about how to use them well, but for now, this was super fun.

Next Prompt, Wk38: Camping

Once again I have no idea what I’ll do for this one, but I’m focusing on the digital art summit this week, so I might end up using some of the new skills I learn there to create something for this prompt using Procreate on my iPad.

Would You Like To Participate?

The #CH52art Summer Gallery 2026

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