Look at your style of art and level of experience. If you are already used to mixing colors as a painter in watercolors, oils or acrylics, you will find a small set of an expensive artist grade brand will be much more effective than a large set of a cheap scholastic brand. Given how cheap the scholastic oil pastels are, you may want to purchase both a small set of good oil pastels and a big set of 36 or 60 cheap oil pastels for sketching, color notes and preliminary drawing. Consider trying just a stick or two of each brand that comes in open stock till you find the ones that are right for you. For one thing, you'll always need lots of white for blending! Get a small good set and then test the other brands to find your right brand.

Will you be selling your oil pastel paintings? If so, it's much better to use at least good student oil pastels like Cray-Pas Expressionist than to sell works done with cheap Pentel, Loew-Cornell and other brands that cost under $10 for a big set. Keep the cheap ones for preliminary drawings, sketches, color notes and works that will not be exposed to much light, such as collectible art cards. The big problem with scholastic grade oil pastels is their lightfastness.

The other big problem with the cheapest oil pastels is that they're not as soft and don't have as much pigment. It takes more of the stick to cover an area thoroughly. If you want a real bargain, you can take the cheap set and make your own lightfast test. Make a row of strong marks in each of the colors, then cover the top half of all the marks with a strip of cardboard. Tape that up into a sunny window for two or three months or until you start seeing fading. Some colors will fade more than others. All fluorescent colors are fugitive -- they fade very fast and are not suitable for serious artwork. But you can have fun with the cheap ones and they are great for practice.

 

If you are planning to sell art, invest in artist grade oil pastels. Fortunately, there aren't that many artist grade brands available! These are the ones to look for, more or less in order of price (lowest first). Daler-Rowney oil pastels are reasonably priced and available in stores. They may be artist grade or very high quality student grade. Van Gogh Super fine quality Oil Pastels may be artist grade, they list the pigment composition at Blick and are available in open stock.

Erengi Art Aspirer, available at Jerry's Artarama and ASW. Similar to Caran d'Ache Neopastels, available open stock, have a colorless blender stick as well.

Cray-Pas Specialists (square stick) available at Blick, Jerry's and ASW. Blick calls these student grade, but professional artists and several authors disagree. They are the hardest of the artist grade or best of student grade and reasonably inexpensive, available in open stock.

Cretacolor Aqua Stic watersoluble art crayons are considered oil pastels and come the closest to an oil pastel texture in artist grade watersoluble crayons. These are long thin sticks listed by pigment, water soluble and available in a range of 80. They are a bit hard, more like Cray Pas Specialist than Neopastels.

Caran d'Ache Neopastel are my favorites so far. Soft, pigment-rich round sticks, these blend very easily and have a pleasing opaqueness. Nontoxic pigments are used. These are available in open stock at Blick in a range of 96 colors, but have no colorless blender. I was able to get many subtle blended colors not in my set of 12 when I did the Water Lily illustration for this article. A good set to start with, unless you start with Erengi (which is less expensive and supposed to be very similar in feel).

Sennelier Oil Pastels and Sennelier La Grande. Sennelier created these for Pablo Picasso. They are extremely soft, the softest artist grade oil pastels available. Senneliers are often transparent but the Titanium White is very opaque. These do use toxic mineral pigments like Cobalt Blue and Cadmium Red, Orange, Yellow variations. Be careful handling them and use artist soap to keep hands clean. They are less dangerous than soft pastels though, because you won't be inhaling the pigments and they don't get absorbed into the skin fast.

Holbein Oil Pastels also use authentic mineral pigments and so far are the most costly. They are arranged by color with two to four tints (lightened with white) for each hue. The 225 color wood box set has been discontinued and the range shortened to 141 colors with just two tints per color, but the big sets are still available from some suppliers. In sets you can get the pure color plus all its tints in five color boxes. Very soft, opaque, no paper wrapper, a little messy compared to all the others that have paper wrappers. You can tape a piece of wax paper or Mylar around the square stick to keep your hands clean and mark the color number on it for easy replacement, or get a holder from Jerry's Artarama designed for square Holbein sticks.

There are some inexpensive alternatives, such as Cray-Pas Expressionist oil pastels and Portfolio watersoluble oil pastels. Student grade oil pastels aren't as pigment rich as artist grade, but may be lightfast. Student grade oil pastels are softer than scholastic grade, and most of all they do have some lightfastness. They may be harder and with less pigment per amount of wax and mineral oil, it takes more of the stick to cover an area completely. But they are good for sketching, for learning and for using colors that aren't in the artist grade set. Expressionists come in a set of 50 and do have a colorless blender.

Pentel, Loew-Cornell, Gallery, Mungyo and anything that only costs a dollar or two for a set of twelve is likely to be Scholastic grade. Suitable mostly for sketching within a bound sketchbook, doing color studies and practicing strokes. These are not lightfast and may be quite hard and crumbly compared to the artist grade ones. Neopastels and Senneliers didn't crumble at all, even if a crumb spiraled off it was easy to blend back into place. The better quality you get, the more blendable they are and the easier it is to layer them. As with soft pastels, it's better to use harder ones like Specialists for first layers and save the softest Senneliers for last accents. Going over a hard layer with a soft oil pastel will stick, but going over a soft layer with a hard oil pastel will scrape away some color.

Thinners. Portfolio Watersoluble Oil Pastels in a range of 24 and Cretacolor Aqua Stic oil pastels will thin with water, becoming semitransparent watercolor. Wet blending, washes and other wet techniques are easy and clean with these. All others require either linseed oil, other oils used in oil painting, Zest It (a UK citrus based thinner), odorless turpentine or turpentine. Oil painting mediums work with them. Erengi makes a "Take it on a Plane" kit that includes a set of 50, an easel, a canvas pad, a bottle of linseed oil all in a Creativo artpak backpack. Any wet effects done with thinners dry in the time it takes for that thinner to dry -- very slow for linseed oil, fast for turpentine or water. This is a good underlayer technique. Oil pastels literally never dry unless it's a thinner based wash though, so don't use oil paint over oil pastels.

Oil pastels are not the same thing as Oil Sticks or Paint Sticks such as R&F Pigment Sticks, Winsor & Newton Oil Bars, Shiva PaintSticks or Sennelier Oil Sticks. These much larger sticks are actually oil paint in stick format. A film dries over them and they do dry out in a painting. They can be used easily with oil paints without mixing mediums. Don't confuse these products, it will wreck your painting if you put oil paint over oil pastel unless it's a thin turpentine wash that's left to dry thoroughly. The paint film may literally slide off since oil pastels are made with wax and mineral oil that never completely dries.

Things to Paint On: Canvas boards, canvas pads, acrylic paper, sanded pastel papers such as Ampersand Pastelbord, Colourfix pastel paper, Wallis sanded pastel paper, Uart and so on are great. Sennelier makes an Oil Pastel Card specifically for use with oil pastels. Sennelier La Carte is a special heavy card made with vegetable flakes glued on with a very watersoluble glue. Its surface is a lot like the sanded pastel papers, but any moisture will cause the surface to peel off and expose bare patches you can't fill. Don't even sneeze on La Carte. If you can stay dry and avoid any wash techniques, La Carte comes in great colors and gives beautiful effects. Art Spectrum Colourfix comes in great colors too and does stand up to water or turpentine washes. Canvas boards and canva-paper are very inexpensive. You can also use oil pastels on regular pastel paper like Fabriano Tiziano or Canson Mi-Tientes. Any paper with a fair amount of tooth may make a good support, however some papers the oil may seep through. Test the paper with a scrap before using it. You can also use stretched canvas!

Remember that the higher quality artist grade oil pastels blend and mix easier than the cheap ones. You may not need as big a color selection if you choose wisely for good mixing colors. Try writing to the manufacturer and ask for a sample. Each of the artist grade oil pastels has a proprietary formula and binder -- this gives them their different properties. Like colored pencils, you can use them together for great effects, but it helps to put hard under soft. Once you have enough skill that your art is marketable, quality art supplies always pay for themselves. Be sure to use acid free archival supports whether that's pastel paper or sanded paper or board. Fixative can be used to protect oil pastel paintings from dust. Sennelier and Caran d'Ache both make specialized oil pastel fixatives intended to create a final varnish that can be dusted. Since oil pastels never completely dry and varnishes may yellow, there's discussion as to whether using these is that great an idea -- a conservator trying to remove the varnish may wind up removing part of the pigment too. I prefer not to use fixative, but to frame serious oil pastel paintings under glass with spacers or a mat to keep the art from touching the glass and smearing.

Various tools and accessories like Colour Shapers and pastel holders are handy. Colour Shapers ought to be the Firm ones rather than Soft, especially with stiffer oil pastels. These are great blending tools. You can also use inexpensive cardboard tortillons and stumps. Pastel holders are available from Jerry's Artarama and will pay for themselves by letting you use the best artist grade oil pastels down to the smallest stubs. If you accumulate enough small stubs of the same color, you can warm them gently and press them into a mold to make a new stick of that color.

Have fun painting with your new oil pastels! Whatever suits your style, your techniques and your budget, in time your skills will grow and your art become popular enough that the best artist grade oil pastels are not only in reach economically, but indispensible. Start with Loew-Cornell if you must go cheap, they seem to have the biggest range and their feel was a bit softer than many others. I used them for years and learned on them. But now I wish I'd tried Neopastels sooner! As always, look for deep discount sales at art stores, clip coupons or shop online and watch for coupons in your email! Why not spend less and get the best? Sign up for catalogs and mailing lists, they pay for themselves fast.