This post is all about how to clean oil pastels that have gotten dirty.
There’s nothing worse than drawing with your trusty pastels to seeing you didn’t properly clean one and getting unwanted colors all over your drawing.
Because of their soft nature, it is easy for little flakes of other colors to end up on your oil pastels especially when blending them.
The good news is cleaning them is super easy! In this quick post, I will explain the fastest and best ways how to clean your oil pastels.
Related:
Using Oil Pastels On Watercolor Paper
Ways To Clean Oil Pastels
Remove color on scrap paper
This is how I taught my younger art students when I taught K-12 art as it’s easy and was a way for them to experiment on a separate paper and not on their project.
All you have to do is draw out the color until it’s off the pastel and it looks new again. Remember to always use scrap paper and not your actual project!
When working with oil pastels, having scrap paper nearby is always handy for testing out mixing colors and techniques. 🙂
Remove color on paper towel
This is the same concept as using scrap paper, but honestly, this way is my favorite. I feel like paper towels remove the pigments smoother and faster than paper.
I use this method most of the time when I’m cleaning my pastels.
Scrape off unwanted colors
If you have some palette knives lying around you could easily just scrape off the little specks of color on your pastel. It’s a good way to clean them if you don’t want to waste paper or paper towels.
Conclusion
As you can see, cleaning your oil pastels is quite an easy task. It takes mere seconds to wipe off a pastel. It’s important to do this often because oil pastel colors can mix easily together creating muddy mixed colors on the tips of them.
Before starting a project, I always ensure my pastels are clean and ready to go. Make sure throughout your project to keep your pastels tidy as build-up with oil pastels is common!
This post was about ways to clean oil pastels.
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