How I Learned to Love Oil Pastels

For a long time, I didn't take oil pastels seriously.

To me they belonged to childhood: waxy sticks in a cardboard box, colors that sat on the surface and refused to blend, a medium you grow out of on the way to "real" painting. I used them occasionally, for a quick note or a sketch, but never imagined them as part of a finished work.

That changed the day I first drew with a Sennelier oil pastel.

The difference was immediate. It didn't drag across the surface; it melted into it. The color was dense and luminous, closer to paint than to anything I associated with pastels. I could press hard and lay down a thick, buttery line, or barely touch the surface and leave a whisper of color. I could draw into wet layers, scratch back through them, smudge them with my fingers. Suddenly the line between drawing and painting disappeared.

It turns out I wasn't the first to feel this way. Sennelier, a Parisian colourmaker since 1887, created its professional oil pastels in 1949 at Picasso's request — he wanted a medium that would let him paint on any surface without preparation. Knowing that history makes me feel part of a long conversation between artists and their materials.

Why they became central to my work

Today, oil pastels are one of the main mediums I work with. I usually begin a painting with acrylic layers and then return with oil pastels to draw into the surface — to find the edges, to bring back a gesture I lost, to add a mark that feels more immediate than a brushstroke.

What I love most is how direct they are. There's no brush between my hand and the canvas, nothing to mix or dilute. The mark is exactly as fast, as hesitant or as confident as I was in that moment. In abstract work, where so much depends on the honesty of a gesture, that matters enormously.

Alongside the pastels, I use Sennelier's oil sticks for larger, bolder marks. They behave like paint in solid form, and they give me the freedom to draw on a big scale with the whole movement of my arm.

If you've dismissed them too

If, like me, you once put oil pastels aside as a "lesser" medium, I'd encourage you to try them again — but with good ones. Quality really changes everything here: a soft, highly pigmented pastel behaves completely differently from a hard, waxy student version. Start with a few colors you love rather than a huge set, and let yourself play.

You can see the specific pastels and oil sticks I use on my Studio Materials page.