Pastels sit in a strange, productive middle ground between drawing and painting. You hold them like a drawing tool, work on paper like a draughtsman, but build up color and light the way a painter does. The result is a medium that rewards both linear precision and broad gestural marks, that can be as delicate as a watercolor wash or as rich and impasto as an oil. Edgar Degas, who spent much of his later career working almost exclusively in pastel, called the medium "a gentle powder that creates color miracles." That is not hyperbole. When you understand how pastel works, it produces effects that no other medium quite matches.
The problem for most beginners is that pastel comes in several distinct forms, each with different properties and different techniques, and the confusion between them causes frustration. Soft pastels, oil pastels, hard pastels, and pastel pencils all behave differently and suit different kinds of work. Treating them as interchangeable is the first mistake most people make.
In this guide, you will learn the key differences between pastel types, how the medium fits into art history, the core techniques for both soft and oil pastels, and practical advice for starting your own pastel practice.
Understanding the Four Types of Pastel
All pastels share a basic formula: pigment bound with a small amount of a binder, typically chalk or gum. The differences in binder amount and type create the different pastel forms.
Soft Pastels
Soft pastels have the least binder of any type, which makes them chalky, crumbly, and intensely pigmented. They go onto the surface with almost no pressure, layer easily, and blend beautifully with a finger, a tortillon, or a soft cloth. The drawback is that they are fragile, both to work with and after completion. Soft pastel work requires fixative to prevent smearing, and even then, finished pieces must be stored carefully. Brands like Schmincke, Unison, and Sennelier are the professional standard; student grades like Rembrandt are very good for learning.
Oil Pastels
Oil pastels bind pigment with oil and wax rather than chalk, which gives them a completely different character. They are more robust and harder to blend with a finger, but they respond to solvents (mineral spirits or artist-grade turpentine applied on a brush or cloth) which allows for smooth blending and even wash effects. Oil pastels do not dust off the surface the way soft pastels do, and they do not require fixative since the oil content makes them inherently more stable. They have a waxy, impasto quality that suits bolder, more graphic work. Sennelier produces the most respected professional oil pastels; Crayola and cheaper student brands are appropriate for experimentation but have lower pigment loads.
Hard Pastels
With more binder than soft pastels, hard pastels are denser and break less easily. They are less intensely pigmented but draw finer, more controlled lines, which makes them particularly useful for initial sketching and for adding crisp detail over a soft pastel base. Many pastel artists use hard pastels or Conte crayons to establish the composition before switching to soft pastels for the main color work.
Pastel Pencils
Pastel pencils are essentially hard pastels in pencil form, sharpened to a point for detailed work. They are ideal for botanical illustration, portraiture, and any work requiring precise line. Used alone they can feel limiting because the color range per pencil is narrow, but combined with soft pastels for larger areas, they offer exceptional control for fine detail.
Pastels in Art History: From Venetian Portraits to Degas
Pastel's history as a fine art medium stretches back to the 16th century, but it reached its cultural peak in 18th-century France and then experienced a second flowering in the Impressionist era.
The Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) was among the first to establish pastel as a medium for serious portraiture rather than preliminary sketching. Her luminous portraits of Venetian aristocracy demonstrated that pastel could achieve the subtlety and richness previously associated only with oil painting. Carriera worked in France during the 1720s, where she influenced a generation of French pastellists and helped establish the medium as fashionable among the aristocracy.
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau and Maurice Quentin de La Tour took Carriera's lead and produced pastel portraits of extraordinary technical refinement in the mid-18th century. La Tour's massive "Self-Portrait" at the Louvre, measuring over 60 centimeters tall, shows the medium at a scale and degree of finish that rivals oil painting in ambition.
Edgar Degas, "The Star" (1878), pastel on paper, 60 x 44 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Degas's signature cropped angles and dramatic artificial light make this one of the most technically assured pastel works in existence. The layering of color in the tutu and the warm backstage glow demonstrate his mastery of broken color in pastel. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) transformed pastel's possibilities in the second half of the 19th century. After a serious eye condition made detailed oil painting increasingly difficult, Degas turned almost entirely to pastel, creating some of his greatest work in the medium. His approach was technically sophisticated: he layered colors, applied fixative between layers to add tooth for further application, worked over pastel with diluted pastel dissolved in a spirit known as peinture a l'essence, and sometimes steam-treated the surface to blend areas. The result was pastel work of extraordinary density and richness that looks nothing like the delicate atmospheric quality most people associate with the medium.
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), who was closely associated with the Impressionist circle, also produced powerful pastel work, particularly in her scenes of mothers and children. Her pastel technique tended toward lighter, airier effects than Degas, using the medium's natural chalky luminosity rather than building up layers. Both approaches remain valid models for contemporary practice.
How to Work With Soft Pastels
Soft pastel technique is built around one fundamental property: the pigment does not dissolve. It sits on the surface of the paper, held by the paper's tooth (texture). This means that layering has limits; after three or four layers, the paper is too full of pigment to hold more, and subsequent applications just push the existing color around. Working within this constraint is the central skill of soft pastel work.
Choosing the Right Paper
Standard printer paper or watercolor paper does not have enough tooth for pastel. You need sanded paper (like Uart or Pastelmat), velour paper, or traditional pastel paper like Canson Mi-Teintes. Sanded paper offers the most tooth and can hold the most layers. Colored paper is almost always preferable to white because the paper tone shows through and contributes to the overall color harmony of the piece.
Layering and Building Color
Work from dark to light. Lay in the darkest values first, then mid-tones, then highlights. Because soft pastel has no transparency, you cannot glaze darks over lights the way you can in oil or acrylic. Blend as you go using a light touch, and save your brightest, most saturated color for the final applications where you want the highest impact. Sharp edges come from applying pastel with the end of the stick rather than the side.
Fixing Between Layers
Applying workable fixative between layers acts like giving the surface a fresh coat of tooth, allowing you to add more pastel over what is already there. However, fixative does darken colors slightly and can eliminate the luminosity of the top layers if overused. Degas used fixative in this way to build up the remarkable density of his pastel surfaces; it is a professional technique worth learning.
How to Work With Oil Pastels
Oil pastels require a different mental approach. Because the oil and wax binder makes them more tenacious, the blending techniques differ significantly from soft pastel work.
Solvent Blending
Dip a brush or cloth in mineral spirits and work it into oil pastel marks on the surface. The solvent dissolves the wax partially, creating smooth transitions and even flat areas of color similar to a painted wash. This technique allows you to create backgrounds and large tonal areas quickly, then return with fresh pastel on top once the solvent has evaporated.
Sgrafitto and Scraping
Build up two or more layers of oil pastel, then scrape back through the top layer with a palette knife, skewer, or fingernail to reveal the color beneath. This sgrafitto technique creates textural interest and reveals surprising color combinations. It works particularly well for landscape work where you want to suggest complex surfaces like rough stone or bark.
For related techniques involving layering and surface texture in other media, see our guide to texture in art. Many of the principles transfer directly to oil pastel practice.
Setting Up a Pastel Practice
Beyond paper and pastels, you need very little to get started. A drawing board, clips to secure the paper, good light, and a shallow tray to catch falling pastel dust are all that is strictly necessary.
Organize your pastels by color family rather than keeping them in the original packaging. Working with a shallow tray organized by hue (all blues together, all reds, etc.) lets you find colors quickly and see the relationships between them as you work. Many pastel artists keep their pastels in trays of ground rice, which absorbs the dust from neighboring sticks and prevents cross-contamination of colors.
Health note: soft pastel dust contains fine pigment particles, some of which include cadmium and other potentially harmful materials. Working in a well-ventilated space, washing hands after each session, and avoiding touching your face while working are sensible precautions. Some artists wear a dust mask when working for extended periods.
Final Thoughts
Pastel's combination of drawing immediacy and painting richness makes it one of the most expressive media in the artist's toolkit. It rewards direct observation and quick decision-making in a way that more forgiving media sometimes discourage. The fact that corrections are limited, particularly with soft pastels, forces you to look carefully before you mark.
Degas's example is instructive: he used pastel not because it was easy, but because it let him work fast, layer color with unusual freedom, and capture the electric quality of artificial stage light in ways that oil could not match. With practice, pastel can do the same for your work. Ready to explore how color behaves across different media? Our guide to color theory will give you a stronger foundation for mixing and placing colors in your pastel work. And if you want to see how printmakers use paper and surface similarly to pastel artists, visit our overview of printmaking fundamentals.
