Stained Glass Oil Pastels Painting Project

This informative and image-packet PowerPoint Presentation contains 112 slides designed to help you and your students to create beautiful stained-glass themed paintings using oil pastels. While many artists consider oil pastels a drawing media, the pre-planning, color blending, and use of baby oil and paintbrushes, certainly qualify the final results as paintings in their own right. The first 37 slides in the presentation cover traditional stained glass. You’ll learn the history of glass and stained glass, view amazing examples throughout arts’ history, learn about key artists who propelled the media forward, and see where stained glass has a presence in our world today. You’ll see different career possibilities, pictures and a video link to see how stain glass is made, and look at contemporary artists like Kehinde Wiley and Pinkie Maclure and others. There’s even a link to see which schools in your area teach the art of stained glass making in case you have students interested in pursuing this media further. This whole first section is intended to excite, inspire, and to appreciate all that the world of stained glass has to offer.

The Presentation then moves into our project. Numerous artist examples of stained-glass-like works of art done in oil pastels are shown and discussed. This grouping ends with examples that look too simple and also one perhaps too complex for you students to try (they are steered to try something in between these levels of difficulty). The next 14 slides deal with color schemes. Over a dozen different color schemes are illustrated and discussed and carefully chosen examples of their use are shown once again through oil pastel / stained glass. There are also two worksheets available for your print and use to help your students understand the color wheel and the different color schemes.

Next up is balance. Examples of symmetrical, asymmetrical, and radial balance are defined and illustrated through well known works of art as well as stained glass examples. Both the use of color schemes and balance are focused on and are measurable goals associated with the final project. There is a slide dedicated to all of the project goals, and slides that show how to use oil pastels in a variety of ways (including our notes from class). Perhaps most important in this section are the process pictures as you can see an example from start to finish with refinements made along the way.

The presentation wraps up with a whole classroom full of student examples which transition from okay, to good, to amazing. These are actual works of art created by my students after receiving the same information in this presentation. The examples also spark great discussions for why these works of art work or don’t, which ones met the goals, who fell short, and what it is that we like about those really good ones. There’s also a grading sheet / rubric for you to use or alter at your discretion, and even a recipe for getting oil crayon out of your clothes should you have any accidents in class.

This PowerPoint has it all so you don’t have to do a thing. You’ll simply need to walk through the presentation before-hand on your own time, gather your supplies (oil crayons, pencil, drawing paper, small paintbrushes or cotton swabs, and baby oil), and press play. I trust your students will enjoy this presentation as much as mine do. Enjoy!

-Bo (The Art Guru)