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In addition, only two brands, Holbein and Sennelier, include toxic mineral pigments such as Cadmiums and Cobalt.
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Oil pastel prices are comparable to artist-grade colored pencils or soft pastels without quite reaching the price of high-end soft pastels. Depending on your application, they may be good enough to include in the list above.
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Van Gogh Extra Fine Artist Oil Pastels are usually billed as good student-grade oil pastels, but share many qualities with these artist-grade brands. The softest are Sennelier Oil Pastels which are now available in 120 colors. Sakura still produces Cray-Pas oil pastels, but in several grades-children’s Cray-Pas Junior Artist student-grade round wrapped Expressionists, which many artists use for sketching to save money and the last and best are artist-grade Cray-Pas Specialists, which are square wrapped sticks.Ĭray-Pas Specialist pastels are the hardest oil pastel sticks you can find, followed in order of hardness by Cretacolor Aqua Stic, Erengi Art Aspirer, Caran d’Ache Neopastel and Holbein.
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There are only a few good artist-grade brands, each of which has its own proprietary formula.
PASTEL ART PROFESSIONAL
Unlike soft pastels or colored pencils, professional oil pastels are not available from dozens of manufacturers. Naturally, he continued to make them, and Senneliers became the first artist grade oil pastel available. He produced 40 sticks of each color, and Picasso bought 3/4ths of those, so Sennelier put the remaining 10 of each in his shop where they sold out fast. Sennelier ended up making a range of 48 colors that were heavy on the subtle grays and earth tones that Picasso requested. Picasso on the other hand just wanted to leave his brush behind and draw or paint directly on the canvas. Goetz wanted something he could use to start an oil painting: a sketch medium that would blend right in with painted layers. Talens of Holland also created some Panda oil pastels in 1930, but the medium really took off when Picasso and painter Henri Goetz spoke to Henri Sennelier about creating something with traditional artist pigments. The very first oil pastels were made in 1925 by Sakura and named Cray-Pas because they were a cross between the clean dustless ease of crayons and the brilliant saturated colors of traditional soft pastels. I had no idea that professional-grade oil pastels had existed since 1949 when Henri Sennelier created a soft creamy oil pastel stick for Pablo Picasso. I priced them appropriately between $5 and $10 and used the proceeds to buy tube oils and stretched canvases, soon leaving oil pastels behind. I wasn’t a very good painter but the resulting thin-wash paintings were, as promoted, genuine oil paintings. Compared to artist-grade colored pencils, oil pastels were very cheap.Īfter studying a package, I discovered that I could thin them with oil mediums and decided that it would be an inexpensive way to do some oil paintings, so I picked up a set of 24, along with a bottle of turpentine and some canvas boards, and got started. Later on in New Orleans when I was first starting out as a street artist, I reconsidered the medium. I lumped it in with children’s watercolor sets and crayons, just from its price and presentation, and passed it by. Click here to learn more and get a simple art website of your own! Quick announcement - EmptyEasel has created a quicker, easier way for artists to have their own art website. The colors looked bright, the oil sticks were short, round and wrapped, and the box cheerily announced that everything inside was non toxic and safe for children. It cost a dollar and change for a set of 24, two dollars and change for a larger set of 36. The first time I saw a set of oil pastels was at a drugstore in a very small display of art supplies. Click the images to visit the artists’ websites and learn more. By Robert Sloan in Research > Art ProductsĪll images in this article have been used with permission and are copyright their respective artists.