Oil pastels are available in Artist Grade and student grade. There are only a few Artist Grade brands, but these have higher pigment load (less binder and more pigment), finer ground pigments (the particles are smaller and so more can pack into the same stick), are lightfast to level 6, 7 or 8 on the Blue Wool scale or clearly labeled as such per color, have the pigment composition listed and are suitable for archival purposes. When you do a serious painting that's for sale or commission, you should use the best artist grade supplies you can afford so the buyer is not disappointed by lack of durability. However, when you're selling sketches at a lower price, buyers don't expect artist grade quality. They might get it. If you do pay attention to conservation issues then you can at least try to stick to lightfast or fadeproof supplies. Even for street sketching, at the very least use actual art supplies for your work such as dimestore sketchpads and try to choose the student brands that say "fadeproof" or "lightfast" even if they're not documented.
The artist grade oil pastels brands I know of are as follows: Sennelier, Holbein, Caran d'Ache Neopastel, Erengi Art Aspirer, Cray-Pas Specialist (the square sticks), and possibly Van Gogh Extra Fine Artist or Maimeri Classico. Since I am doing independent testing for my oil pastels website, I'll be able to recategorize any cheaper brands that do have artist grade lightfastness and list specific colors that do in brands that don't have that information available. The prices on these artist grade oil pastels are comparable to inexpensive through mid-range soft pastels prices. Neopastel and Holbein are the most expensive.
For your sketchbook, lightfastness may not be as much of an issue. For learning how to draw and paint, student grade supplies can be good enough. When creating art that is intended for printing, studies for serious paintings, preliminary sketching, art to be digitized and other situations where the durability of the original doesn't matter, that's where student grade oil pastels can save you a bundle and give you plenty of versatility.
They are quite soft and pigment rich compared to cheap colored pencils. They can do service as oil paints in a pinch, especially for turpentine thinned washes or oil thinned washes -- just scribble the colors you want on a temporary palette or a plate and swirl a wet brush into the scribble. I sold some Real Oil Paintings on the street in New Orleans done with oil pastels, turpentine and a paper plate palette all on cheap canvas boards. So if you want practice paint, oil pastels can serve the purpose.
The happy news is the price on the cheap ones drops so low it's comparable to children's crayons or less. You can get 60 colors of Loew-Cornell oil pastels for about $7 or $8 in stores (less if there's a sale or coupon) or $5 and change online. 50 colors of Pentel online are $5 and change. Twelve colors is a dollare and a little bit of change -- something to tuck in on the side of another online art supply order, so cheap that you need to be ordering other things to make shipping worthwhile.
Pentel is my current favorite among the cheap brands. That's personal taste, the firm sticks seem to have more opacity and less crumbling than Loew Cornell and many others. Pentel is also my favorite brand for detailed shading and blending with techniques resembling colored pencil. I say firm, because that's in relation to other oil pastels. The hardest oil pastels are still softer than colored pencils.
Portfolio Watersoluble oil pastels, made by the same company that produces Crayola products, are only available in 24 colors. However, they have exactly the soft slippery lipstick-smooth texture of the more expensive artist grade Senneliers and the bigger set is under $10 online. So for practice, you may want to pick those up to get used to the Sennelier feel.
How to use oil pastels is a wonderful, varied experience. They were designed to go on any surface. If you're not worried about archival storage (and plan to scan the art and store it digitally), you could draw on paper grocery bags, corrugated cardboard, wood, glass, anything that comes to hand. Oil pastel has the interesting ability to be both a drawing medium and a painting medium just like soft pastels.
A drawing is loose and lets more of the background show. A painting done wet or dry in oil pastels has many layers, visible "painterly" strokes, a painted look and covers the surface completely. Either can be fine art, but knowing which to call your resulting work can help for organizing and marketing.
Studies are small preliminary paintings or drawings to help plan a serious artwork. Cheap oil pastels or even the artist grade ones are very good for this purpose, as you can emulate oil painting but they're clean and dustless. Some artists just call them Dustless Pastels.
A real benefit for anyone on a tight budget is that these are so cheap you can sketch daily, sketch several times daily, experiment with color theory and do any number of different effects all with the same medium. You can kit up for less than the cost of a fast food lunch and be prepared to journey into color with something clean, easy to handle and opaque.
Having been homeless for years while sick and unable to earn any ncome, I know what it's like to be so down and out that spending $5 on something is a big deal. The ability to do good art kept me sane during that time. Before I was that sick, it kept me living well -- eating high on the hog and living in a great little French Quarter apartment. Even in the worst circumstances I could usually manage to sell a sketch to someone.
One sketch is all it'd take to get set up with a pad of drawing paper and set of oil pastels from the nearest drugstore, probably also with a cheap bristle brush and little bottle of turpentine as well. Knowing this gave me some real confidence when I was down and out. It's a sense of practical security to realize that if you can draw recognizable subjects, you will never be completely broke.
Canvas boards are very cheap too, the small ones are pocket change and even packs of large ones are only a dollar or two. One New York artist (no doubt using artist grade oil pastels) sells street paintings of high end shops and New York's high life for hundreds or even thousands depending on size and complexity -- and oil pastels are perfect for that because they are so small, portable and clean. He has a nice setup with a good pastels box and so on.
If you can draw what you see, a basic setup to just move a few sketches to buy artist grade supplies is in reach from what you can get panhandling. Or get your first customer buying your supplies as part of the price -- I did that more times than I could count too. Libraries have plenty of good art instruction books and numerous sources have free instruction online.
One of the best is http://www.wetcanvas.com -- a huge art community owned by F&W Publications, there's free high level art instruction in all mediums including oil pastels. So if you are broke, trying to make ends meet and need to find something fun to do that'll eventually pay for itself or become a second income, join WetCanvas.com and pick up some cheap supplies -- oil pastels, sketchbook or drawing pad with lots of pages and maybe some canvas boards, turpentine and a brush for wet effects. Then look for the "101" classes in the Drawing and Sketching forum and use those supplies along with a regular pencil to build accurate drawing skills.
That's the slow way to build up to that kind of financial security. You may go through several sets of cheap oil pastels if you're a total beginner who thinks you have no talent. But drawing well is a skill, a set of skills with as long a learning curve as anything else people do. Talent really means a passionate interest in doing it.
The best way to motivate yourself to learn is to date your first drawings and study. You'll improve a lot by good classes and it will start to make sense that eventually you can produce good drawings people will pay real money for. At that point, start investing in a few artist grade oil pastels -- once you used the cheap ones to find out which colors you use most and use up fastest.
This is a much more productive way to spend your free time than just watching television or hanging out somewhere. If you go shopping a lot, then spending more time at home drawing or going out to draw in person either in parks or city scenes, you'll spend less overall. Art supplies might become a favorite thing to splurge on, but the happy result of that is that good art supplies do always pay for themselves at even an intermediate level of drawing.
Youtube has some good instruction videos in pastels and oil pastels, demos of skilled artists doing paintings.
Another great source of instruction and encouragement is the Oil Pastel Society. http://www.oilpastelsociety.com is the website. It costs $20 a year for an Associate membership, for which you get a great newsletter and contact with numerous oil pastelists including many brilliant professionals and the amazing Signature Members whose works sell for thousands of dollars each. Fine art societies can help a lot both for improving your skills and learning the ropes of art marketing. They usually welcome beginners, who don't stay beginners very long.
So if you're tightening your budget and looking for a hobby that'll take very little to invest in but come to pay for itself in a year or so -- consider oil pastels. I base that on how long it took people I taught to draw to reach the point where their sketches and drawings sold for real money to average people. I did monthly workshops and most of the students were beginners who swore up and down they couldn't manage a stick figure. The fact is that learning to draw is just a complex skill, one that you can learn in many different ways.
WetCanvas is full of interested experts who love showing the ropes to beginners, so there's no problem finding a mentor as long as you read the posts and pay attention. If you have better funding and want in-person instruction, some of the major professionals and Signature members of the OPS also do workshops. But for those deeply in debt or struggling to keep their heads out of water, learning to draw and paint can give you an affordable pleasure that holds the possibility of economic survival and eventual prosperity and freedom.
When you can draw well enough that people buy it, the only thing that can keep you from working is your health. That is literally the only thing that kept me down. There's no job security in jobs working for other people -- but anyone who has spending money will respond to the magic of seeing someone draw something well in person, especially if it's someone they love or a place they love. Start with portraits, your favorite animal or the special historic and beautiful places where you live. That's what local people want to buy -- if you do a good realistic painting of the front of a restaurant, the owner may purchase it to hang within the restaurant!
My site, http://www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com, has much more depth information about oil pastels. This article is just an overview and a suggestion for something you can do when you're bored, broke and frustrated. Clean, colorful, cheap oil pastels are a good solution to all three!
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Contributor's Note
Other than the Oil Pastel Society, I could not find a website specifically dedicated to oil pastels other than artists' personal websites when they specialize in OP. Thus my website is an important resource. I welcome comments, critique and article requests at http://www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com because I know I'm forging into unknown territory here and promoting an often-neglected yet wonderful art medium. If I leave out something important to you, then it may be pretty hard to find online. So when you visit it, please do let me know what you want to see next on my site besides product reviews, basic drawing instruction, oil pastels techniques and history and the creativity articles I've included.
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