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Chalk pastels

Chalk pastels are very vibrant and have a soft, matt quality. They are quick and easy to use. Colours can be blended by working over the top of each other. Like charcoal, chalk pastels smudge easily so a fixative is needed to keep them in place.

Soft chalk pastels are good for filling large areas and building up colours. Hard pastels and pastel pencils are better for finer, more definite lines and for detail. It can be very effective to use soft and hard pastels together to create images with a mix of subtle blended colours and detailed lines and texture effects.

Oil pastels

Oil pastels are made from pigments, waxes and fats. They are good for strongly-coloured drawings.

Colours don't blend as easily as with chalk pastels but blending can be done by working colours on top of each other. Creating detail is also more difficult, so oil pastels are often better for larger works or for working with blocks of colour.

Oil pastels can be scraped away in sections and combined with other materials such as inks or watercolours to give a wax resist effect, or white spirit to create a more painterly effect.

Wax crayons

Wax crayons are harder and more brittle than oil pastels. They are cheaper but tend to be less vibrant.

Like oil pastels they are quick and easy to use and crayon drawings do not need a fixative to protect them. They can be layered and scratched, and used to create a wax resist effect.

It can be difficult to create detail with crayons and it is difficult to blend colours.