I am a sucker for pastel shades. When Paul Rubens came out with a set of 36 oil pastels in macaron colours, I knew I have to have it. Read on for my Paul Rubens Macaron Oil Pastels Review!
Paul Rubens released a few sets of oil pastels. There is a 24 set of macaron colours also, a set of 48 regular colours, a set of metallics, a set of 3 whites and a set of white, red and blue. I bought this 36 set because of the macaron colours, and upon receipt, they really wowed me.
There is no smell, and the colours are so pretty! This set contains 36 shades plus 2 metallics (one gold, one silver) and1 white (“extender”).
Unlike the other sets (regular and metallics), this set does not have pigment information or lightfast ratings. To be fair, pastel shades are usually not very lightfast, with very few exceptions.
The box was factory sealed, so the contents are not used. There are a few pastels with other shades stuck on them like this when I first opened the box:
The consistency of these pastels are a smidge firmer than a lipstick. It goes on the paper like butter, and is very creamy. It is a bit sticky but doesn’t gum up, thankfully. I have used my fingers, a rag, silicone-tipped blenders and they all work wonderfully with these pastels.
Stand-Alone Set?
To review Paul Rubens oil pastels, I did what every pastel expert says not to do–throwing every shade in a painting. I was ambitious and wanted to use as many colours as possible. Believe it or not, in this cotton candy seascape, I used 29 shades out of 39!
By the way, I used Canson Mi-Teintes paper for this painting.
Use as a Complementary Set
As beautiful as these shades are, they are all very light (true to macaron shades), very few mid tones and no dark tones, so I struggled to use only this set to complete the painting. In the end, I had to use a dark blue from another set as the horizon, and black on the bottom right corner, as well as a little bit of dark blue in the waves.
It’s best to use this set of Paul Rubens Oil Pastels as a complement to your regular shades.
First, I used Stabilo CarbOthello and Conte a Paris pastel pencils to paint everything but the hair and clothes.
I followed that with Paul Rubens oil pastels, painting the hair and dress, before I moved on to the second figure, Yuu.
As a finishing touch, I used Prismacolor Premier coloured pencils to add in details. It did scrape a bit of the oil off, though. If you do fat over lean, this set is the fat, so anything hard on top will scrape the paint right off.
I liked how this turned out, though. By the way, I purposely didn’t blend some of the strokes to give the painting texture. I wanted the focus to be on Creamy Mami (left) so I gave her a bit more texture. Sorry, Yuu! 😛
UPDATE on March 27, 2023
I did an aurora borealis painting following Dearannart on Youtube with these pastels. Except for the dark blue and black (from the 48 set), the rest were from the Macaron set.
The pictures didn’t do the colours justice. The macaron colours are really beautiful.
Final Thoughts
I really liked how my artwork turned out. However, I wish I had bought the 24 set of macaron colours and the 48 set of regular oil pastels together instead, because this set has quite a lot of very similar colours.
The texture of Paul Rubens oil pastels is creamy but also slightly sticky. A popular pastel artist I really like has mentioned this as well. I did use a fixative and it worked well. It’s a very pretty set nonetheless.
