Pastel & Charcoal Pencil Sharpener, Manual Handheld Sharpener, Professional Quality, 0700234

Great sharpener. Hard to find a sharpener for pastel and conte pencils, this sharpens 100% conte pencils and about 60% of Derwent pastel pencils. Worked on Carbothello as well.

Great sharpener for charcoal and wider pencils, like Derwent Drawing. Gives a bit shorter point than standard sharpeners.

Good quality, will be even better if I can change blades

This does a great job of sharpening pastel pencils without breaking them. Dont think it's just the same as a normal pencil sharpener, it isn't. Normal sharpeners will repeatedly break the soft and fragile core of a pastel pencil because the core gets jammed in the narrow end of the tapered hole and breaks. This has a cut-out in the bottom of the narrow end so the core isn't under so much torsional pressure. This means you can get a very sharp point without having to use a Stanley knife or scalpel, it's a lot quicker too. Just remember that some pastel shavings come out of the bottom cut-out of this sharpener so don't sharpen over your work unless you want random bursts of colour everywhere! It might seem a little bit pricy compared to normal plastic bodied pencil sharpeners but it's well worth the money as it does the job it's made for and does it well. I'm going to get a spare one the next time I order something from Amazon.

I thought these were big enough for oil pastel sticks as advertised but only suitable for pencil size graphite or colour crayons!

Not sure why but this sharpener works so much better than any other I've tried.

I had terrible trouble sharpening charcoal pencils. Ordinary sharpeners do not work, I could not manage with a knife - the charcoal just kept breaking and breaking. This sharpener worked brilliantly. Tip I picked up from another amazon customer: turn the sharpener rather than the pencil. That can help too.

Works well on pastel crayons. The picture is deceiving on size !