Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth Square Soft Pastel

Acid-free paper sheets for sketching with charcoal, pastel and graphite.

Gioconda Soft Pastel Pencils offer the smooth finish of conventional pastels without the mess. They are highly pigmented, with a buttery smooth feel, and have excellent blending and toning characteristics on dark or light surfaces. All colors are lightfast and fade resistant. Gioconda Pastel Pencils also feature California cedar wood casings for crisp and accurate sharpening with minimal waste. They are available in a full range of 53 colors. Pencils are pre-sharpened.

Renesans oil pastels are oil-based. Renesans pastels are soft and easy to use and the individual colours are easy to apply and mix. The intensive colours provide artistic effects and adhere well to the surface. Oil pastels are good for both primed canvas and paper with use of a brush (e.g. bristle or sponge) doused in turpentine. The oil pastel technique offers additional options, like applying thick impasto or scratching. The product range is available in 55 colours individually or in sets.

Working with Schmincke’s finest extra soft pastels will give you a completely unique drawing experience. They have an incredibly high concentration of top quality pigment powder held together by the absolute minimum amount of binding agent - just enough to ensure that they remain a stable compound. Unlike many pastels on the market they also do not contain chalk or additives which helps keep their colouration pure and consistent throughout each pastel. This stripped back recipe results in such soft pastels that Schmincke had to design a costly and time consuming manufacturing process to stop them breaking. Each lump of pre-kneaded pastel dough is rolled into rounded skeins which are sectioned by hand and laid onto a sheet. The skeins are then cut by hand with a wire-strung frame and transferred onto wooden palettes where they are left to dry for around 2 weeks. By this time they are so soft that they need to be wrapped by hand and gently placed in their foam packaging.