Messing around with oil pastels at the december sketchcrawl

I am not a big fan of Christmas markets, but for sketchers there are quite some challenges! For the last sketchcrawl of the year I prepared my oil pastels and some coloured paper to capture the colourful scenes.

 I am still learning to work with the pastels, and my first sketch came out too stiff, but I like the detail of the balloons and the little kid.

Then I tried to sketch the blacksmiths who were demonstrating their work on the market (also because it was comfortingly warm near their little oven...). One of the smiths wanted to buy my sketch. When I gave it to him for free he offered me one of his creations. Before giving him my sketch I quickly made this unsharp picture in the rain that had started to fall all of a sudden. One can see the tiny drops of water on the paper...

After an hour or so our sketcher´s group landed at our favorite place, Kaale Kaffi, where we enjoyed the beautiful decoration,  the delicate ginger and lemon tea, the cappuccino, the nice service, the sketching and last but not least, the warm company.

Leen