Daler-Rowney offers soft pastels, hard pastels and oil pastels within our art pastels collection. Which drawing material you choose depends on the level of blendability or line strength that you want to achieve. Depending on the type of art pastels you choose, you’ll be able to create both fast sketches as well as slow and detailed masterpieces. Soft pastels blend easier than hard pastels, however hard pastels create harder, bolder marks. Hard pastels can also be run along the page to create broad areas of colour as well as detailed line work.

All of our pastel pens produce a velvet smooth mark and are creamy in consistency. Our soft pastels are available in two ranges. The Simply soft pastels are affordable yet high-quality sets with hard edges for greater control and are easy to blend.

The Artists’ soft pastels are the perfect blend of chalk, pigment and clay for exquisite richness and nuanced hues and are available in almost 200 different colour tints. The oil pastels resemble both an oil and a pastel meaning they’re easy to use and don’t require any fixture making them ideal to combine with other media such as acrylics, gouaches and pencils.

Mixed with turpentine, they become a liquid, oil-based medium that can be used dry onto an oil-based surface.