Helpful Hint #1 - when deciding where to set up your easel, pay attention to the floor. If in a carpetted room, you MUST have a very large dropcloth or catch-pan; the little catcher on some easels will not be sufficient. You may even want to put old tatty towels on the floor to wipe your feet on when leaving the drop-cloth-covered area, so you don't track brightly colored dust onto your wall-to-wall. Linoleum or ceramic tile floors make much better studio-spaces.

Helpful Hint #2 - painting in pastels will suck all the moisture out of your hands, particularly in wintertime. One of the best emollients I've discovered for dry skin is emu oil. Just put a few drops on the backs of your hands and rub it in - it will sink into your skin quite quickly, but a very little goes a long way. Make sure you're done painting for the day before oiling your hands; if you go back to the sticks, your fingertips will pick up an incredible amount of pigment. Since emu oil is very skin-penetrating, it's probably not terribly good for you. Most modern pastels are non-toxic, but you wouldn't eat them, so you probably shouldn't go for transdermal applications either.

Helpful Hint #3 - When putting a new paper on your easel, cut a small piece of scrap from the same color and tape it beside your working art. This will come in handy to try out your sticks on and see how they look on this shade of paper. Sometimes it's hard to tell what color a stick is until you actually apply it - I have one stick that looks like a nice dark blue that is a rather vibrant dark teal instead. Rather shocking sometimes when I meant to put in a few strokes of Prussian Blue and instead got a wild peacock blue.