Swatching my Colored Pencils and Reviewing 3 new Sets.

It's been a while since I made an adult coloring post, and since I've recently picked up a few more colored pencil sets, I thought I'd share some thoughts about those colored pencils and talk a bit about swatching.

After watching some colored pencil enthusiasts on YouTube, I discovered that they all swatch their colored pencils. I didn't think too much of it until I bought a set of the Star-Joy Gold Colored Pencils. They came with a swatch booklet. I thoroughly enjoyed testing out the pencils and discovering the colors. I was beginning to see why people swatched their pencils.

Then, I tried a coloring page (shown below) using those colored pencils and it became really obvious why having swatches was helpful. I'd be looking for a certain color and instead of rolling the dice on the paint on the outside of the pencil (which is often only sort of a close match), I could look at the actual color the pencil made and then find it by name or number.

Of course, this made me instantly want to swatch all the things. After looking online, I did not find free and easy-to-download swatch sheets for all of the brands I had, so I made my own using a table in Word. I'm still tweaking the file to make it work well, but it did the job. What did I learn? That Crayola has the best color names (and a great selection of skin tone pencils), that I had forgotten about some of my pencil sets, that some of the pencil sets had to be reorganized (some sets with great numbering were all mixed up and others had numbering based on several different set sizes--so they made no sense at all) in order for the swatches to make any color sense, and that I probably have too many colored pencils. :)

So, now that I've sung the praises of the swatch, a bit more about my new pencils. I purchased three sets this year: Star-Joy Golds, Staedtler ErgoSofts, and Faber-Castel Polychromos.

The Star-Joy Golds are a huge set of colored pencils and are really inexpensive. They fall very firmly in with the other good middle-quality sets I was familiar with (like Sargent Art Supreme, Castle Arts Premium), but for even cheaper. They are smooth but not quite as vivid/saturated as I like. They blended ok, but often felt a bit pastel in nature (photos of coloring page and set above).

Next up were the Staedtler Ergosofts. I had heard really good things about these colored pencils. Reviews often placed them in their top five. This is Steadtler's (a German art supply company) "premium" colored pencil set. They only come up to a set of 36, but I got the set of 24 because they came in this great easel container.

These are good firm pencils. They reminded me a bit of Prismacolor Verithins, but smoother. They are triangular-shaped pencils (so they don't roll when you set them down), the outside of the pencil matches the color very well, and the case is great. However, they don't blend well and you really have to push hard to get vibrant colors.

If you like to color designs with very small patterns, this set might be a good one to add to your collection (especially if you can pick them up for less than $1 per pencil), but since these are imported, they're still more expensive than the Verithins, my favorite hard pencil. 

Next up was the one I was most excited for, and they didn't disappoint--the Faber-Castel Polychromos.

These pencils are also made by a German company and often grace people's best pencil lists. I have a set of their Classic pencils, which are fine (probably in line with the other "middle quality" sets). The Polychromos are their soft artist grade set, but they are more expensive than Prismacolor Premiers (my current favorite soft pencil), so I needed to see if the Polychromos were worth the cost.

I could tell pretty quickly that they were good-quality pencils while I was doing the color swatches. The 36-count set didn't have the best breakdown of colors (there are many more colors available if you're willing to shell out the cash), but they were smooth as silk while filling the little boxes on the swatches.

After trying the Polychromos out on a coloring page (sorry for the shadow), I found them to be lovely. They have a finer grain (I'm not sure the technical term--they're less grainy) than Prismacolor Premiers. Though they aren't as vibrant on initial passes, they layer and blend quite nicely. These are worth the more expensive price tag (as long as you're getting them when they aren't on Amazon's peak pricing (they seem to average about $1.33-$1.50 per pencil here in the U.S.). I look forward to using these more to get used to how they work.

So the big question--have any of these pencils unseated my favorites, the Prismacolor Premiers--nope. They are the most vibrant, soft, blendable pencils for the money here in the U.S. I haven't found anything close.....yet.