Paul Rubens Oil Pastels Set, 48 Colours Soft Pastels Non-Toxic Pastels for Artists, Students & Kids, Ideal for Sketching, Decorative Painting, Making Pictures Like Oil Painting.

I'd recommend oil pastels, I personally love them for the easy set up and getting a bit messy like a child scribbling with crayons, but if you dig deeper there's cool techniques to try with them, also they're much more versatile with surfaces you can use them on than oil paint or soft pastels. With oil pastels the bare minimum you need is paper with a weight of at least 80lbs/160gsm, but you can use them on canvas, wood or glass too (I've also used mounting board scraps I got for cheap from my local art shop, those work well too). Some people like to gesso their paper anyway but I've never done this myself. You'd want a small variety of oil pastels to cover a range of different softness, you can do this cheap with a 50pk of Pentel, a 48pk of Mungyo and some Paul Rubens. If you want stuff more reliably artists grade upgrade the recommendations to Sakura Cray-Pas Expressionist, Caran Dache Neopastel and Sennelier oil pastels. You want to mainly learn how to layer oil pastels, starting with the hardest and working up to the softest, which I've listed in order already accordingly based on my own experience. If you can't afford all those off the bat start with Mungyo or Caran Dache, a medium-soft oil pastel is the most versatile and easiest to learn most oil pastel techniques with by themselves. If you work on large surfaces and use tools (like tortillons/paper stumps/palette knives) you can do fine detail with oil pastels by just scraping off bits of softer oil pastel and adding it as needed, you can also use colouring pencils on top (softer ones work best but I've gotten hard ones like Polychromos to work). The drawback is they never fully set/cure like oil paints do so you'll want to protect your works with fixative, framing or at bare minimum sheets of glassine paper (baking paper is a good substitute). If you want some reading on learning oil pastels I'd recommend these two, they're free to read at these links if you make an account and are still the best written resources on oil pastels available imo (oil pastels tend to be treated as a footnote in other pastel technique books I've read). https://archive.org/details/oilpastelmateria0000lesl/ https://archive.org/details/oilpastelforseri0000elli/