Pentel Oil Pastels - Set 50

I would say oil pastels are definitely one of the most beginner friendly mediums, especially for how low the barrier of entry is. All you need really is a good set of oil pastels, suitable paper and you're good to go. The tricky part is just knowing what a good baseline is when you're coming in new since there's a lot of choices and no real way to know what the oil pastels will be like without using them with your own hands, but I can recommend what I think will be a good starting point. If you want the absolute bare minimum to get started I'd recommend Mungyo Gallery oil pastels and a pad of Canson XL mixed media paper (or cheap watercolour paper works too). Mungyo oil pastels are a medium-soft oil pastel which are the most versatile and easiest to learn most techniques with. You can use these by themselves and get plenty of mileage out of them for expressing yourself and making landscapes. You can get a bigger set of 72 Mungyo pastels too (or 120 if you shop around) but 48 is a solid starting point. If you have the money and want to push the medium a bit further you'll want a firmer oil pastel to use for underpaintings and softer oil pastels for adding on top, this is how you do layering with oil pastels (you work from the firmest up to the softest, you can generally tell when to move up when you start to pull away oil pastels rather than add on top). For a firmer oil pastel either Pentel or Sakura Cray-Pas are a good option (you don't need a full set but if you do go for that option get the Pentel, 50 pastels for under £10 is hard to beat). For softer ones there's Sennelier but these are expensive right out of the gate, lovely to use though (often compared to drawing with lipstick). The best affordable alternative would be Paul Rubens which is similarly soft. I've linked just a set of extra white oil pastels which is a useful addition to a starter kit but you can buy a larger set if you want. Paper you have a lot of choice, I'd recommend Canson XL or cheapo watercolour paper as a simple starting point but the bare minimum is you want a toothy paper with a weight of at least roughly 80lbs/160gsm (higher is fine). You can use them on other surfaces like canvas/wood/glass but keep it simple with paper for now. Important highlight is oil pastels are a fun medium to use but do have their drawbacks, the biggest is unlike other mediums they never dry/cure fully after being laid down so they'll always smudge. You can protect your works with sheets of glassine or tracing paper taped down on your paper, or baking paper works in a pinch. You can also use fixatives (do this outside and with a respirator mask on) but the best method is framing, though I'd save this for your favourite pieces. Finer details can also be harder to do with oil pastels, but you can use tools to help you along, anything with a point on it, a tortillon/paper stump or a palette knife will help a lot, but you might also opt to work on a larger surface like A3 paper for more working space. You can certainly look up tutorials online and get some practice in with oil pastels that way, but I'd recommend two books that helped me a lot with learning what oil pastels can do, both free to read online on Archive.org Oil Pastels: Materials and Techniques for Today's Artist Oil Pastel for the Serious Beginner To give a little personal insight, oil pastels are the medium I've turned to when I've had volatile emotions of my own to get out of my system, it's a very cathartic medium for scribbling wildly to get things off your mind and onto paper, so I think in that respect you'll like them a lot. I do hope this helps and you have fun whatever way you decide to break into the medium ✌️

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/