If you’ve never tried oil pastels, you don’t know what you’re missing! Try this delightful Sennelier Artist Quality Oil Pastels Test Pack and see if you like them.
Light-weight and portable, this little kit contains 6 small sticks of black, white, green, yellow, red and blue as shown in the image. The colours are highly pigmented and lightfast, however, note that like all oil pastels, they do *not* dry easily. You’ll need to spray your artwork with a fixative to prevent damage to your finished painting.
The Sennelier oil pastels go down soft and creamy, with a feel reminiscent of their oil paints. This is nothing like the Crayola oil pastels you may have tried before (I certainly have!), which are dry and gritty and nowhere near as fun to work with nor as capable of creating rich, oil-painting-like final products.
Like all the Sennelier products, this is a top-of-the-line set of pastels. The colours blend smoothly, just like oil paints. And yes, they have the familiar odour of a typical oil paint medium, too, so be prepared to use these in a well ventilated room!
This is a limited set, obviously, but it will give you a good feel for the product and help you decide whether oil pastels are a medium you wish to explore. If you do decide to invest more in the medium, you would probably want to go for the full set of 120 assorted colors which come in the wooden box, or the largest cardboard box set which contains 72 colors.