Oil Pastel Art: The Complete Guide to Techniques, Projects & Materials
Oil pastel art is painting and drawing with sticks of pigment bound in a non-drying oil and wax mixture — they blend like oil paint but are applied dry like a crayon. To start you need three things: an artist-grade 24-color oil pastel set, a heavyweight paper with real tooth (300 gsm cotton or textured drawing paper), and either a paper blending stump or your clean finger. Budget $30–$70 for a setup that will last a year. Learn the six core techniques in order (stippling, scumbling, layering, sgraffito, blending, wet blending) before attempting finished projects, and never buy the $6 "school crayon" sets sold as oil pastels — the binder is different and the colors will crack and flake within weeks.
Oil pastels are the most underestimated fine-art medium on the market. A single stick delivers the buttery mark of oil paint, the portability of a crayon, and the immediacy of charcoal — no water, no solvent, no drying time. You can finish a piece in forty minutes or layer it for six hours, and it looks like oil paint when you are done. Yet almost every beginner starts with the wrong product (waxy school "oil pastels" that never blend), gets confused when the stick behaves like a crayon, and quits before discovering what the medium can actually do.
This guide fixes that. It is the same progression we walk new students through in the Paul Rubens Shop studio — starting with what oil pastels are, moving through the kit, the techniques, and the first real projects you can finish this weekend. If you already have a set of sticks sitting in a drawer, skip to the techniques section. If you are starting from zero, read from the top; each section assumes the one above it.
- Oil pastels are not crayons. Real oil pastels are pigment + non-drying oil + wax. Crayons and most school "oil pastels" are wax-dominant and will not blend or layer properly.
- Start with three things. A 24-color artist-grade set, a 300 gsm paper with tooth, and your clean fingertip. Everything else is optional for the first thirty days.
- Learn six techniques in order: stippling, scumbling, layering, sgraffito, finger blending, solvent (baby oil) blending. Each one builds on the last.
- The medium is forgiving. Unlike watercolor, you can paint over every mistake. Unlike oil paint, you never have to wait for anything to dry.
- Pick a finishable first project. A sunset sky, a single fruit, or an abstract color field — all finishable in one sitting with two sticks of pastel.
- Upgrade the paper before the pastels. A $4 newsprint pad will ruin a $60 pastel set. A $12 cotton block will make a $25 pastel set look professional.
What Is Oil Pastel Art?
Oil pastel art is any finished drawing or painting made primarily with oil pastel sticks. The medium itself was invented in 1925 by the Japanese art-supply company Sakura as a classroom tool for children, and re-engineered for professional use by Henri Sennelier in 1949 at the request of Pablo Picasso, who wanted a direct, vibrant drawing stick that could be used on any surface without preparation. Modern artist-grade oil pastels contain the same three ingredients as Sennelier's originals: raw pigment, a non-drying mineral or vegetable oil, and a small amount of wax to give the stick structural integrity.
Because the binder never dries, oil pastels remain workable forever. You can return to a piece after six months and push pigment around as if you made the mark yesterday. The trade-off is that finished work must be framed under glass or sealed with a dedicated fixative — a fact that confuses beginners who expect oil pastels to behave like acrylic. They do not. Oil pastels behave like oil paint in stick form, which is why experienced artists treat them as a serious medium and not a "crayon upgrade."
Oil pastel art is drawing and painting executed with pigmented sticks bound in non-drying oil and wax, applied directly to a primed or textured surface and blended with finger, stump, solvent, or palette knife. The finished work never fully dries and must be protected by glass, matte board, or a purpose-made fixative.
Oil Pastel vs Soft Pastel
Soft pastels are pure pigment held together with a gum binder — they are effectively chalk. Oil pastels are pigment held together with oil and wax. The practical difference: soft pastels produce a dusty, matte, blendable-with-a-fingertip line that looks like a photograph of smoke; oil pastels produce a glossy, buttery mark that looks like an oil painting and cannot be blown away or smudged accidentally. Soft pastels need fixative between layers; oil pastels layer on their own. If you have dust allergies or asthma, oil pastels are the safer choice. For a full head-to-head, see our oil pastel vs soft pastel comparison.
Oil Pastel vs Wax Crayon
The most common beginner mistake is buying a "24-color oil pastel set" from a supermarket and getting something that is effectively a crayon. The binder tells the story: wax crayons are 90% paraffin wax; artist-grade oil pastels are pigment-heavy with just enough wax to hold the stick together. On paper, the crayon lays down a thin, slippery film that refuses to blend with itself and goes completely opaque at two layers. A real oil pastel lays down dense color, picks up a second layer cleanly, and allows a third and fourth layer to push the color around. If a set costs under $6 for 24 colors, it is almost certainly wax crayon sold under the oil pastel name.
Oil Pastel vs Oil Paint
Oil pastels and oil paints share the pigment-in-oil formulation, but the delivery system is completely different. Oil paint requires solvents, mediums, brushes, palette, drying days between layers, and some knowledge of fat-over-lean. Oil pastels require a stick and a surface — that is it. Many professional artists use oil pastels as a fast-sketch or underpainting medium before finishing in oil paint, because the two media layer and interact cleanly. For a beginner, oil pastels give you 80% of the visual language of oil painting with 10% of the setup.
The Oil Pastel Kit: Three Things You Actually Need
Every oil pastel kit sold as "complete" on Amazon bundles together 50+ items and costs under $20. The stuff inside is there to justify the price, not to help you paint — plastic stumps, a pine-wood easel that warps in a month, an erasable "oil pastel pencil" that is really an oil-free colored pencil, and so on. Save the money. The following three items will carry you through your first year of oil pastel art and will cost about the same as one of those over-built starter bundles.
Item 1 — A 24-Color Artist-Grade Oil Pastel Set
Why 24 and not 12 or 48: twelve colors leave you short on earth tones, so every skin tone and landscape piece comes out garish; forty-eight invites analysis paralysis and doubles your cost, and the extra colors are mostly variations of the same hue you can already mix. Twenty-four is the standard teaching quantity — warm primaries, cool primaries, two or three earths, a green family, a violet, black and white. The Rubens 24-color soft oil pastel set below is the one we use in our studio teaching notebook.
Rubens Soft Oil Pastels Set — 24 Colors
- 24 creamy artist-grade sticks, paper-wrapped for clean fingers
- Balanced palette: 4 warms, 4 cools, 3 earths, 2 greens, violets, B&W
- Layers cleanly — we tested four layers before any film-lift
- Ships from the US fulfillment center for 2–5 day delivery
Item 2 — Paper with Real Tooth
Oil pastel only looks good on paper that grips the pigment. Smooth paper (printer paper, sketchbook paper under 200 gsm) lets the stick skate across the surface, refuses the second layer, and produces flat, waxy marks. You need paper with tooth — a slightly textured surface that catches the pigment on the way past. The two reliable options are dedicated pastel paper (Canson Mi-Teintes, UArt, etc.) and heavyweight cotton watercolor paper at 300 gsm cold press, which has just enough tooth and takes both oil pastel and wet blending with solvent without buckling.
Paul Rubens Travel Watercolor Paper Block — 80 Sheets, 100% Cotton, 300 gsm
- 80 sheets of 100% cotton 300 gsm — a year of daily practice
- Hot pressed surface has just enough tooth for oil pastel layering
- Pre-glued block stays flat under solvent blending (no taping needed)
- 3.81 × 5.31 in travel size — fits in any bag; perfect for projects #1–#4
Item 3 — A Blending Tool (Your Finger Is Fine)
The art-supply industry sells paper stumps, tortillons, silicone shapers, color shapers, and electric blending tools. You do not need any of them for your first six months. Your clean fingertip is the best blender ever invented — it is warm (which slightly softens the pastel), it has texture, and it communicates pressure in real time. A cheap cotton handkerchief and a few cotton buds cover the rest. Once you know what you are doing, a pack of paper blending stumps costs $3 and is useful for tight corners, but buying blending tools before you can blend is like buying racing tires before you can drive.
If you want to explore the larger, more ambitious end of the palette once you have the basics, the pastel-lover's dream set is below.
Rubens Soft Oil Pastels Set — 48 Macaron Colors
- 48 pastel-range sticks — mostly mid-tones and soft hues
- Creamy texture, ideal for the dreamy/aesthetic oil-pastel style
- Excellent for skyscapes, florals and abstract color-field projects
- Great gift set — arrives in a presentable tin
Read our in-depth best oil pastels for beginners buying guide — full head-to-head reviews of six artist-grade sets including Sennelier, Mungyo and Rubens.
The Six Core Techniques (in the Order We Teach Them)
Every oil pastel painting is built from six elementary moves. Learning them in sequence is the difference between feeling stuck after your first drawing and feeling confident after your fifth. Each technique adds one variable (pressure, layer, subtraction, blend medium) and the next technique assumes you have the previous one down. Do not skip ahead. For deeper treatments of each, our how to use oil pastels guide walks through the drills stroke-by-stroke.
Technique 1 — Stippling
Stippling is making marks with the tip or corner of the stick rather than dragging it. Hold the pastel like a pencil and tap repeatedly on the paper. The marks deposit pigment without building up a waxy film, which lets you place a second layer on top cleanly. Stippling is the first technique to practice because it teaches your hand how much pressure the pastel actually needs (much less than a crayon).
Technique 2 — Scumbling
Scumbling is a broken, semi-transparent layer laid over a fully opaque layer. Hold the stick on its side, use very light pressure, and scrub a different color over the base. The top layer catches only the peaks of the paper's tooth, leaving the base color visible in the valleys. Scumbling is how you create texture (grass, fur, rough stone) and how you shift a color's temperature without completely replacing it.
Technique 3 — Layering
Layering is full-pressure application of one color directly over another. The top layer will partly push the bottom layer aside and partly mix with it on the paper. Oil pastel accepts 3–4 clean layers before the waxy buildup starts to resist further pigment; past that point you need to scrape back (technique 4) or blend (techniques 5 and 6) before continuing. Good layering is the engine of every oil pastel landscape.
Technique 4 — Sgraffito
Sgraffito (Italian, "to scratch") is the act of scratching through a top layer to expose the color beneath. Lay down a black or dark-color layer, cover it completely with a lighter color, then scratch with a palette knife, toothpick or an empty ballpoint pen. The result is a drawing in reverse — bright dark lines on a light field. Sgraffito is the single most satisfying oil pastel technique and the one children learn first in school.
Technique 5 — Finger Blending
Finger blending is pushing adjacent colors into each other with the clean pad of a fingertip. It produces the soft, glowing transitions associated with sunsets, skin and clouds. Work in small circles from the lighter color into the darker one, clean your finger on a cloth every few passes, and stop before the color goes muddy. Finger blending is where most beginners over-work the piece — three or four strokes is usually enough.
Technique 6 — Wet Blending (Baby Oil or Odorless Solvent)
Wet blending is finger blending with a liquid carrier. Dip a cotton bud or soft brush in a tiny amount of baby oil (or an artist-grade odorless solvent) and drag it across a built-up passage of oil pastel. The liquid dissolves the binder just enough to turn the pastel into a paint, producing a flat painterly surface that looks almost indistinguishable from oil paint. Wet blending is dramatic and beginners love it — but use it sparingly: once a passage is wet-blended, you cannot easily re-layer dry pastel on top.
How to Blend Oil Pastels (Short Version)
Blending is technique 5 and 6 combined, applied with judgment. The short rule: blend light-to-dark, always. Starting in the dark tone and dragging lighter color into it picks up the dark pigment on your blending tool and drags it across the light area, creating mud. Starting in the light tone and pushing gently into the dark does not — the light pigment carries into the dark with less visible contamination. This one habit fixes 80% of muddy-oil-pastel problems. For color mixing strategies (complementary pairs, temperature blending, glazing) see our oil pastel colours blending and mixing deep dive.
7 Oil Pastel Art Projects for Beginners
At some point, drills become tedious and you need a finishable piece. The seven projects below are in teaching order — project one assumes you have done the six technique drills, project seven assumes you have done projects one through six. Each project is designed to be finishable in a single sitting (30 minutes to 3 hours) using only the 24-color kit and the cotton block from the materials section. None of them require drawing skill.
Project 1 — Two-Color Sunset Sky (30 min)
The classic first piece. Tape off a horizontal rectangle on the cotton block. Load the top third with pure ultramarine or prussian blue using firm, horizontal strokes. Load the bottom third with cadmium yellow or cadmium orange. In the middle third, overlap the two colors with less pressure. Now use your clean fingertip to blend from the light (bottom) into the dark (top) in small circular motions, stopping the moment the transition goes smooth.
The piece is done in thirty minutes and it looks like a real sunset. What you are learning: how much pressure the pastels need, how far a layer spreads when blended, and how quickly over-blending produces mud. Every beginner who finishes this project continues to project two. Every beginner who tries to draw a portrait first quits within a week.
Project 2 — Single Apple on a Plain Ground (60 min)
A real apple on a plain table, good lighting from one side. Sketch the oval shape lightly with a dark red pastel. Lay in mid-red (cadmium red) for the main body. Add the shadow side with alizarin crimson or red-violet, and the highlight with yellow or white. Scumble a tiny amount of yellow-green near the top where real apples transition to green.
This project teaches you that shading is done with color temperature, not black. Do not use black to darken; it kills the piece. Use a cooler red (alizarin) for the shadow and a warmer red (cadmium) for the lit side. You will finish with a believable three-dimensional apple and a new respect for how much color information the eye reads from "red" on a table.
Project 3 — Abstract Color Field (45 min)
No subject — just color and mark. Choose four related colors (e.g. ultramarine, violet, magenta, yellow-ochre) and fill the page in irregular patches using all six techniques. Stipple one patch, scumble the next, layer the third, scratch sgraffito into the fourth, finger-blend the fifth, wet-blend the sixth. The point is not to make anything representational — the point is to spend 45 uninterrupted minutes moving between the techniques and feeling what each one can do.
Abstract color fields are what the Mark Rothko school of painting is built on. They train the eye to judge a piece purely by color and value relationships, skills that transfer directly to every representational project afterwards. Frame the result. You will be surprised how often this is the piece guests comment on.
Project 4 — Moonlit Landscape (90 min)
Cover the full page in ultramarine-and-black mixed dark blue. Lay in a horizontal strip of lighter blue where the horizon will be. Add a disc of white or pale yellow for the moon and finger-blend a soft halo around it. Sgraffito-scratch thin lines for branches across the foreground — the underlying paper white reads as moonlight through the trees.
This project teaches you that "dark" paintings are easier than "light" paintings for oil pastel, because the medium is additive and dark-then-light is how it naturally wants to work. You will also discover why sgraffito is so popular — scratching a line through to the paper produces a brightness that no white pastel can match.
Project 5 — Dreamy Cloudscape in Macaron Palette (75 min)
This project is where the 48-color macaron set pays for itself. Lay in a cloud shape using three or four pale colors (pale pink, mint, lavender, buttercream). Overlap them heavily. Now take a cotton bud with a small drop of baby oil and drag it through the layered clouds. The liquid carrier melts the pastel into a soft painterly cream that looks like oil paint. Let it sit for twenty minutes before continuing — the oil spreads slightly on cotton paper.
The finished piece is the Instagram oil-pastel aesthetic in one 75-minute sitting. It is also the first project where you will understand why artist-grade paper matters: baby-oil blending on printer paper turns the sheet into rag. On 300 gsm cotton, it just pushes the pigment around.
Project 6 — Still-Life Fruit Bowl (2–3 hours)
Set up three or four real pieces of fruit in a bowl. Sketch very lightly with the darkest pastel in the set. Block in each fruit at mid-tone (apple red, lemon yellow, orange). Add shadows using cooler versions of the same color (not black). Add highlights using warmer versions, or white. Blend transitions with your finger. Finish with sgraffito for stems and seeds.
Two to three hours of focused work produces a kitchen piece that looks genuinely accomplished. This is also the project where beginners discover that "looking at the subject" is 80% of painting — you will find yourself drawing the shadow of a banana peel because you noticed it, not because you know how to draw one.
Project 7 — Portrait Study from a Photo (3 hours)
The final beginner project — a face from a photograph. Do not attempt this before projects one through six. Choose a photo with strong single-source lighting (a window, a lamp). Sketch the major shapes very loosely. Block in the shadow side of the face using a cool mid-tone (violet-brown or blue-grey), the lit side with a warm mid-tone (yellow-ochre or pale orange). Use finger blending everywhere except the eyes and mouth — those stay crisp. The hair is scumbled; the background is one flat color.
Finishing a portrait as your seventh oil pastel piece is a genuinely encouraging moment. It is also where oil pastel reveals its secret strength: unlike watercolor, you can fix every wrong move by laying more pastel on top. Oil pastel portraits are forgiving in a way that no other medium is. For more structured drawing exercises, see our oil pastel drawing guide.
Oil Pastel vs Other Media — Quick Comparison
When should you reach for oil pastels instead of another medium? The table below captures the practical answer.
| Medium | Setup | Dry time | Blendability | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oil pastel | Stick + paper | Never fully dries | ★★★★☆ | Direct drawing, portable work, color studies |
| Soft pastel | Stick + paper + fixative | Instant (but dusty) | ★★★★★ | Smoky realism, traditional pastel portraits |
| Wax crayon | Stick + paper | Instant | ★☆☆☆☆ | Children's drawing; not a fine-art medium |
| Oil paint | Brushes, palette, solvent, canvas | 1–14 days per layer | ★★★★★ | Museum-grade finish, long-form oil painting |
| Watercolor | Paint, brush, water, cotton paper | Minutes to an hour | ★★★☆☆ | Transparency, light, outdoor sketching |
| Acrylic | Paint, brush, water or medium | 20–60 min | ★★☆☆☆ | Fast-drying layered painting, mixed media |
The practical verdict: oil pastel is the best medium for beginners who want painterly results without the setup cost or the waiting that oil paint demands, and who find watercolor's transparency frustrating. It is the medium that beats "I can't paint" most often in studio classes.
Six Beginner Mistakes (and the Fix for Each)
Frequently Asked Questions
Do oil pastels ever dry?
No. Artist-grade oil pastels use a non-drying oil as the binder, so the finished surface remains workable indefinitely. You must protect finished pieces with glass, matte board or a dedicated fixative.
What paper is best for oil pastel?
300 gsm paper with tooth. Dedicated pastel paper (Canson Mi-Teintes, UArt) is purpose-built, but 300 gsm cold-press cotton watercolor paper is an excellent all-purpose alternative and takes baby-oil wet blending without buckling.
Can you use oil pastels on canvas?
Yes, but prime it first. Raw canvas absorbs the oil binder and makes the stick skip. A gesso-primed canvas, or canvas with a clear acrylic ground, takes oil pastel beautifully and produces a more painterly surface than paper.
How do I stop my oil pastel drawing from smudging?
Fix it with fixative or glassine. A purpose-made oil pastel fixative seals the top layer; glassine (a glossy transparent interleaving paper) protects a stored piece without touching the surface. Regular hairspray is not a substitute.
Are oil pastels the same as crayons?
No. Crayons are wax-dominant and will not blend or layer like oil pastels. Artist-grade oil pastels are pigment-heavy with an oil and wax binder, which is why they behave like oil paint in stick form.
What is the best way to blend oil pastels for beginners?
Use your clean fingertip. It is warm, textured and communicates pressure in real time. Blend in short strokes from the lighter color into the darker, and clean your finger every few passes. See our blending and color-mixing deep dive for the full method.
How many colors do I need to start?
Twenty-four. Twelve leaves you short of earth tones and forces excessive mixing; forty-eight invites decision fatigue and duplicates colors you can mix. A balanced 24-color set (like the Rubens soft oil pastel 24 set) covers warm primaries, cool primaries, earths, a green family, violets, and black and white.
Can oil pastels be used with watercolor?
Yes, as a resist. Draw first with oil pastel, then paint over it with watercolor — the wax-and-oil binder repels the water, preserving the pastel strokes. This is the classic "crayon resist" technique taught to children but taken seriously in mixed-media work.
Further Reading — The Complete Oil Pastel Library
Every section in this pillar has a longer deep-dive companion. Read them in the order below once you have finished your first few projects.
- How to Use Oil Pastels — stroke-by-stroke drills on all six techniques.
- Oil Pastel vs Soft Pastel — which medium is right for which project.
- Oil Pastel Colours, Blending & Mixing — the complete color-mixing method.
- Oil Pastel Drawing — sketching and drawing with the stick, not just painting.
- Mungyo Oil Pastels — honest review of the Korean competitor.
- Paul Rubens Oil Pastels Review — the in-house review of our own range.
- Best Oil Pastels for Beginners — head-to-head buying guide.
- Best Oil Pastels for Artists — for when you are past the beginner stage.
The kit we teach with: Rubens 24-color set + Paul Rubens cotton paper block. Total under $70, ships from the US in 2–5 days.
Questions about any technique in this guide? Email us at paulrubensshop@gmail.com — we answer every studio question within two business days.