Sennelier Oil Pastel come in a range of 120 lightfast colours. Parisian painter Henri Goetz approached Henri Sennelier the famous artist materials manufacturer, about creating a wax colour stick for his friend Pablo Picasso. Picasso, a long-time Sennelier customer and a frequent visitor to their store across the street from the Louvre museum, was looking for a medium that could be used freely on a variety of surfaces without fading or cracking. The Sennelier Oil Pastel is a product that makes use of the components used in all Sennelier colours: top quality pigments, an extremely pure synthetic binding medium and mineral wax. The pigments are ground with an inert, non-siccative binding medium that does not oxidise and that has no effect upon either film stability or surface. This base is then mixed with wax (neutral pH). The balance of this mix provides Sennelier Oil Pastels with a unique unctuousness and a creamy texture that allows for a great deal of freedom in pictorial expression. The Sennelier Oil Pastels possess an extraordinarily high pigment content, thus providing them with a high colouring and covering potential, excellent brightness and a high degree of light stability (with the exception of metallic and fluorescent shades).