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There is a wide variety of quality, price, and performance when it comes to pastels, but there are basically two types: oil, and chalk.

The latter are a lot like the kind of chalk you’ll be familiar with from your schooldays, but they have a couple of crucial differences - they are much more strongly pigmented, and the quality is better so that they hold together well and produce a firmer line. As for oil pastels, to me they feel like a hybrid between chalk and wax crayon. Perhaps those who use oil paints would see a parallel there - or with their close neighbour, the oil stick.

Both types of pastel may be part of the same family, but the results you’ll produce with them differ quite significantly.

Chalk pastels can be easily blended on the page, while with oil pastels, it is more a matter of drawing one colour on top of another, as you might with crayons.

Oils produce stronger colours on the page; errors can be tricky to get rid of. Chalks, on the other hand, can easily be mixed, or drawn right over the top of, so mistakes can almost always be rectified, right up to the point where you find you’ve piled too much pigment on one spot and no more will take hold. Even then, a quick brush with a dry cloth, or a tap of your paper on the table top, and you can dislodge the loose powder.
Drawing with chalk pastels will produce a fine dust (on everything - your fingers not least), and if you are not careful, your image will smudge: after drawing, you may wish to apply hairspray or fixative to keep everything in place. Oil pastels, on the other hand, seem to stay forever smudgy no matter what you do.

Both types of pastel perform best on paper with a bit of a ‘tooth’, ie something slightly rough like sugar (’construction’) paper. That way, the pigment has something to cling to, and the nap of the paper showing through the colour also gives a pastel picture its distinctive look. You can see what I mean in the picture above: the style of a drawing like this is as much in the speckles of white as in the pigment of the blue.

As you can probably guess, I’m not a great fan of oil pastels. I am sure they have their advocates, but I prefer the forgiving smudginess of chalk pastels. Chalks, in particular, lend themselves well to subjects which benefit from blending: portraits or life drawings, with the variety of skin tones; hazy landscapes; fluffy animals. Mind you, it’d be tricky to produce a very accurate technical illustration with them, though I admit it’d be fun to try.

My preferred type of chalk pastel comes as a rectangular stick. The shape gives you the option of drawing with one corner to produce a sharp line (eg the whiskers, above), or flipping onto a flat side to cover ground quickly. These two modes give you everything you need for life drawing, for example. If possible, give up the idea of controlled ‘colouring in’, and submit to what the pastel wants you to do: big swoops across a large piece of paper. One darker colour and one pale colour will allow you to do marvellous things with light and shade. Or have a pure white stick to hand: unlike many media, pastels allow you to apply white over a darker colour, and the effect can be interesting.

Chalk pastels are very cheap and, with their wide variety of colours, appealing too. A great medium for beginners, in fact. Of course, if oils appeal, you should give them a go, too - after all, I only speak from my own personal tastes. Tell me what you know!