I recently bought myself a set of powder pastels to experiment with. To start with I thought I'd copy another picture rather than doing a new composition (basically to try out the technique) and this is the result. It is a copy of the picture of Ember in the 1998 calendar.
I find the result these pastels give quite nice, and though I need to find a way to prevent the smudging as seen on the right side, I will definitely be using these things more often.