Hi Nirdesha! Sure – it has everything to do with the amount of pigment + wax + oil blend. Every manufacturer does it differently. To confuse things further, brand names like Mungyo have dirt-cheap student-grade OPs, which are hard as a brick and crumbly, but also have the Mungyo Gallery Artist Extra Soft grade, which are almost as creamy as Neopastels from Caran d’Ache.

Starting out with OPs can be frustrating and annoying as you learn what OP/paper combinations you like the best. Some papers are highly textured, with many grooves/nooks & crannies that seem impossible to fill in without grinding in a harder OP. Yet, a smooth paper can be just as challenging as some OPs will smear over a hard smooth surface and not blend well.

So, there are lots of things to consider when you first pick up this medium. I find it valuable to have some harder OPs around for a baseline sketch or first layer. Softer OPs will glide over harder ones, so it’s easy to build up layers – and you eventually get to that “sweet spot” where you have a beautiful thickness of OP that can be easily spread around, blended, or otherwise manipulated.

Does any of this help? Oil pastels are wonderful, but not without their challenges.

^^ Agreed. Arches Oil paper is great for oil pastels, and you can easily add a medium like the Senns colorless blending stick to help with flow.

I don’t find that Specialists crumble :thumbsup: