SAKURA XLP50 50-Piece Cray-Pas Expressionist Oil Pastel Set, Assorted Color

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 ✌️