Or Is It?
Last week we discussed some of the various paper options available. Now on to pencils!
There are so many different types of colored pencils out in the marketplace; brands, wax or oil based, concentration of pigment, and the list goes on and on. I haven’t even scratched the surface of all the pencils that are out there to experiment with, and I am hoping we can do that together!
As I said in my initial post The Beginning of a Colorful Journey, my very first pencil set was SpectrumNoir, which I purchased from a home shopping network channel. This was many years ago when the adult coloring craze first started, and I didn’t know there were that many kinds of pencils to choose from; or maybe at that time there wasn’t.
SpectrumNoir offers five different sets of 24 colors, and since I wanted the most colors I could get, I purchased four. They work fine, not horrible where I want to throw them across the room, but they just didn’t give me the satisfaction of great color on a page. Plus, I later learned that they were a wax-based colored pencil; I didn’t even know there was a difference when I bought them. However, they don’t seem to lay down on smoother sheets of paper as effectively as I expected, especially coloring book paper. I also noticed that when it is hot outside, the pencil color seems to melt and makes it that much harder to lay down and blend colors together. It seems to run like caked up make-up on a hot Georgia day.
The other problem for SpectrumNoir is that if you use a lot of one color, you must buy the whole set again, even though you only need one specific color. That seems like a big waste of money to me.
Once I knew there were two types of pencils, wax vs. oil, I wanted to see how the oil-based pencils performed. But I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of money on a really expensive set. What if I didn’t really like doing colored pencil art? I would have spent all that money, just to have that pencil set sit around and collect dust. That’s when I found MagicFly.
They were a medium-priced set and seemed to have received quite a few good reviews on Amazon, so I figured I would give them a try. I loved them the first time I used them. The color lays down smoothly and the pigment just pops off the page. There is no streaking, no running, no waxy finish.
Can you guess which side is the MagicFly pencils and which side is the SpectrumNoir pencils? I wanted to compare the two pencils sets against each other and found that I like the MagicFly pencils better. The only drawback for the MagicFly pencil set is the same as the SpectrumNoir sets; if you use a lot of one color, you must buy the whole set again, even though you only need one specific color.
I found this coloring book while surfing on YouTube. If you would like to watch that, you can see it here: 3 SUPER EASY Coloring Book Hacks That Make You Look Pro from The Happy Ever Crafter.
I have decided to use this one coloring book that I own, to test out all the pencil sets I currently have and those that I may get in the future. This small book is something I can take with me in public and not get too many stares. It is chock full of beautiful flower pictures that all interest me and the elements on the page are not too complicated or extremely small.
The next pencil set I purchased, Derwent Procolor, actually came as part of a Grizaye kit that I purchased from the Colored Pencil magazine website. They are a waxed based pencil and seem o.k. to me so far.
I did swatch those out:
And tried them on a Weekly Planner from Sara Renae Clark. However, on this To-Do page, it appeared to me that there was a lot of white of the paper showing through. This was one of my first coloring pages, so maybe I just didn’t lay down enough of the color. I would like to do a page in my coloring book and a color-along page before I make any final determinations.
Finally, there are the Prismacolor pencils I have gathered from all over. I will be exploring those pencils more in-depth next week.
Since I don’t own very many sets yet, if you want to see a comparison of several different pencil sets, I highly recommend Sarah Renae Clark’s video Testing ALL the BEST COLORED PENCILS for adult coloring: 26 Brands! Faber-Castell Prismacolor + more.
Lessons Learned
The first thing I discovered from watching YouTube videos is to always sharpen your pencils before you even use them. There is a coating on the pencils from the manufacturer that you need to remove before you start coloring, or the pencils will not work correctly.
Another thing is to swatch each pencil on a piece of paper that you plan to be using for most of your colored pencil art. Following that advice, when I first started out, I made my own. It is just a grid I drew on the type of paper I was most likely to use and started swatching out the colors for both pencil sets I owned at the time. On one side of each color, I burnished with a blending pencil and the other side I used a liquid medium call Gamsol (a type of mineral spirit) to blend the colors together.
That totally bored me to tears! It took such a long, long time. Time I would rather have been coloring a picture or learning some new technique. However, I understood that I had to get the colors on paper to see what the pencil colors actually looked like. You can’t rely on the color presented at the end of the pencil or what it looks like from the core of the pencil; the color may lay down on paper totally different than either of those options. Next, I tried a pre-printed page, and once again, too tedious!
Going forward, I utilize this swatch sheet for charting the colors I use on a coloring page; like I did for our first color-along, Apples in a Basket.
If you would like to see how I create these color charts, in real-time, I have provided that as a Bonus video for my Patreon community, under the “I want to relax…” tier or above.
After watching a lot of videos and reading blog posts, I think I have finally found the type of swatch sheet I like to do. It is fairly simple, and I can get that done a lot quicker than previous versions. I found this swatch sheet while watching a video from the Colouring Kid.
Plus, I can cut it down and include it in my pencil case, right next to the pencil set.
Next week though, I am going to need some help! I have a ton of Prismacolor pencils just laying around. Since we just finished up the Apples in a Basket color along, I want to gather them all up to organize, get them swatched and put neatly away in my binder.
Finally, another recommendation is to practice, practice, practice color blending. Once again, that is something that bored me to tears. I just want to create and color. I will do test blends prior to coloring on a scratch piece of paper to make sure I have selected the right combination of colors. Sometimes though, I will jump right in and blend on the page, as long as I am sure the colors go well together.
Pamela from Pamela’s Passion for Pencils does a lot of color blending and has a great Color Combinations playlist that covers that. She has even created pre-made swatch and blending pages, if that is something you would like to do. Those are available in her Etsy store PencilPassionDesigns.
For now, head on over to my YouTube Channel where I will be reviewing the pencil sets I currently own, my thoughts on each, and how I organize and swatch each set.
Well, that’s as far as my journey takes us for now. Going forward, I plan to share my colored pencil art journey together with you. Keep an eye on my YouTube Channel (so don’t forget to hit the Subscribe button) for videos every Wednesday with some type of tip, trick, technique, or anything else I found interesting or fun. Also, on the first Wednesday of each month, starting in November, I will post here on my website a recap of what we did the previous month; color-alongs we completed, things we learned, and various tidbits I may have discovered along the way and would like to share with you. We will also be taking a sneak peek at what is coming up for the new month.
I promise to include you in my journey, every step of the way. I would be happy and honored to have you along!!
Yipee! We are going to the tropics Friday for our next color-along.
I will be at the beach and thought it would be fun to do a beautiful blue and yellow parrot. One thing I am nervous about is that this coloring page definitely needs a background. So far though, backgrounds have either bored me or intimated me. Check out what products and methods we will be trying to make our background look like a hazy tropical jungle!
See you in a few days and until then hang in there! ~Kaye
(Any products I mention on this website or in my videos can be found on my Goodies page. Head on over at take a look at all of the cool products I use and recommend!)