Without meaning to, I have amassed a considerable collection of oil pastels. I didn't intend to purchase any of them, they just came along with other pastels I purchased on eBay.

Tip: if you search in eBay's crafts>painting&drawing section, you can pick up great deals on pastels. There are a number of dealers selling new sets for below retail, but the most fun is when someone acquires a lot of art supplies at an estate sale or something and offers them up as a lot. It's like a treasure hunt; who knows what you'll get?

Bidding and winning a number of these auctions for the soft pastels in the group lots, I also wound up with large numbers of oil pastels, which were thrown in because the dealer thought, eh, it's all the same thing.

One day I gathered them all together and organized them into a silverware tray and counted them - I had over 150 sticks! So I figured I'd better try them and see if I like them.

Well... results are mixed. At first I thought they were just 'fancy crayons', but they have properties crayons do not have - you can layer them and blend them, either by physically mushing two layers of color together with your fingers or with a solvent like mineral spirits.

Oil pastels use oil as a pigment binder, where soft pastels use gum resins. Some brands feel waxier than others - these definitely fall into the 'adult crayon' category. Some brands feel very creamy, almost like a old-fashioned non-glossy lipstick.

The first oil pastel brand was CrayPas by Sakura, which came out in the 1920s - these were definitely targeting the adults-who-want-their-own-crayolas market. In the 'forties, Sennelier, one of the premier manufacturers of soft pastels, developed a line of oil pastels specifically at the request of Pablo Picasso, who was looking for a more versatile medium. Other lines followed suit, so there is a wide array of oil pastels on the market, with varying degrees of waxiness/oiliness.

Alas, while the 'lesser' brands oils pastels are significantly cheaper than soft pastels, at the high end, cost is comparable.

They're definitely no longer 'crayons' and they have some advantages over soft pastels - no dust and they don't smudge except with a lot of pressure. They also remain 'soft' and plyable indefinitely - that is, they don't 'dry' like oil paints do, so in theory you could continue to work on an oil pastel for quite some time.

But they're definitely not 'real pastels', by which I mean 'soft pastels'. There are a lot of common techniques - feathering and cross-hatching and so on. Yet the 'feel' is so different that I suggest calling them 'pastels' is a misnomer. I would suggest 'oil sticks' only there's already another kind of pigment stick that is already using that cognomen, so we're stuck with 'oil pastels'. .