5 Best Soft Pastels of 2026 — Artist Grade, Ranked

Rembrandt is the pastel that behaves. The kaolin-based binder makes a firmer stick than most artist ranges, and firmness is what makes layered pastel painting possible at all — every soft mark you put down fills the paper's tooth, and once the tooth is full the surface stops accepting pigment.

Half sticks are the right buy at this count. You get roughly twice the colours per dollar, and almost nobody wears a full stick down — most pastels break long before they're used up, which makes stick length largely theoretical.

Sennelier extra-soft are what happens when you take binder almost entirely out of the equation. The sticks are close to compressed pigment, which is exactly why the colour is so intense — there's very little in the way of the pigment reaching the paper.

The fragility is not a defect and is not worth fighting. Sticks break in the box, in your hand, and against the paper. Working pastelists keep broken pieces in foam-lined trays and use the fragments, because a half-inch nub applied on its side is often more useful than an intact stick anyway.

Pastel punishes small sets harder than any other medium, and it's worth understanding why before you buy one. With paint you mix the value you need. With pastel you cannot — every tint, shade, and mid-value has to exist as a physical stick, because blending on the paper muddies rather than mixes.

Side-stroking is the technique full sticks exist for. Laid flat and dragged, a full stick covers a band of paper several inches wide in one pass — the fastest way to establish large areas of value and the standard approach to blocking in a big pastel painting.

Colour count matters more in pastel than in any other medium, and this set is the endpoint of that logic. Because you cannot mix a value on a palette, every value you might need has to physically exist — and the gap between "close enough" and "exactly right" is the difference between a painting that reads and one that doesn't.