Prismacolor Premierãâ® Colored Art Pencil Set 150 Pieces

Robert A. Sloan is a San Francisco-based science fiction writer, art author, art instructor, creative person, artisan, and Renaissance man.

Some colored pencils sets

Are Large Sets of Cheap Pencils Better Than Small Sets of Adept Ones?

No. Always buy high-quality art supplies, even every bit a beginner. Inexpensive pencils don't give the same results. It'due south too discouraging when something easy with Prismacolors won't work with children's pencils—information technology seems like information technology's your lack of talent when it's actually how the materials are formulated.

Artist-class brands of colored pencils are lightfast and often label specific colors as lightfast. Your work won't exist as likely to fade in merely a few years. They are easier to use considering, with a higher pigment ratio to binder, you don't need as many strokes to get total saturation. It took me decades to get skilled enough to get total saturation with a children'south fix, and it's yet style likewise much work for the results if I accept anything else handy.

Where Tin I Detect Affordable Colored Pencils?

If yous can simply afford a small set, then search for bargains in other ways like ownership your colored pencils online. The price difference between online fine art supply companies similar Dick Blick and physical stores is huge—considering the stores have more overhead.

Rent, employee salaries, electricity, and store fixtures cost and then much that stores always sell at retail price, Online companies pay much less and laissez passer on their savings. Just for waiting some days to become your pencils, you can usually purchase twice as many creative person-form colored pencils online and the online company may have a meliorate selection of brands.

Coupons, either on the website or delivered to your inbox, can bring the price downwardly even farther. Sign upwards for and lookout man seasonal sale catalogs at the major companies for bargains. Compare your aircraft cost to what yous spend in gas to go to the fine art store, and information technology starts looking even more favorable.

You tin also look into ownership new or used sets on eBay. People change hobbies or don't like the medium. Older sets turn up on eBay sometimes in their old packaging when sellers buy inventory from stores that shut. Prismacolor is the most common artist-grade brand to plow up cheap on eBay. Cheque the online supply companies for a toll comparing and continue searching for auctions that end presently. Eventually, y'all may grab a bargain!

Color vs. Monochrome Drawing

Many art courses and traditional art schools advise that beginners need to stick with limited palettes. Often art teachers want students to employ just monochrome or ii-color harmonies.

Even so inside many artists I've known, including students, is the same urge I have—to become all the colors there are. It starts with a 64 color box of Crayolas, and it just doesn't quit. The spectrum array of all the special colors, the olive greens, sea greens, salmon pinks, and deep blue-violet that's a little bluer than violet-blue calls to something key in many people. It'south why so many pastel companies and colored pencil manufacturers arrange their products in spectrum assortment followed by a muted repeat in browns and grays, all the neutrals arranged in a secondary spectrum.

The obvious problem is that a raw beginner faced with dozens or hundreds of colors may not grasp what to do with any of them beyond uncomplicated clarification. Olive green for olives. That sand color for sand or for that box that it comes close to matching. That's i natural reaction to a big range of colors, hunting downwardly the best lucifer in the box rather than mixing to create it.

I disagree with the common wisdom that beginners ought to start with a short range of colors, particularly for colored pencil realism. My reasons come from experience. Playing with all the colors builds joy. Information technology's cocky-rewarding. Arranging them, again and once more, reminds a beginner of color theory. Spectrum harmony is natural, and other orders, similar calorie-free to dark values, also emerge every bit the beginner sorts the pencils.

My Feel With Colored Pencils

What I experienced in 1971 with my first set of Prismacolor colored pencils was a breakthrough that fabricated the difference between drawings I hated and drawings I took pride in. I had been struggling with sets of 12, 24, or 36 colors, constantly unable to find the exact colors I wanted. I tried landscapes and reef scenes just couldn't find enough dejection or greens. I hated colored pencils considering the lines were faint, it was difficult to get a solid color, and I could never find the colors I wanted.

And so I got a gear up of 72 Prismacolors in my junior year of high school.

I wore downwards nearly of the blues on my first colored pencil painting, a reef scene with sharks and coral. I also mixed those blues more than than I ever had any of my smaller sets because even with twice equally many blues, important new ones similar Indigo Blue, Periwinkle, and Aqua . . . I didn't have a full range of values. I found out what happened when I attenuated the Indigo Blue up from solid dark saturation to soft very calorie-free layering, then went over that hard with True Blue and faded it out merely past the palest Indigo, and then did information technology again with Non-Photo Blue and Aqua.

I needed 9 or ten blues to reach all the values I wanted and to gradually shade it greener as it went lighter. I wound upwards adding a few greens to the aqua also. I mixed colors till I had three or four layers on that first reef groundwork. Those mixtures were easier with analogous colors and similar hues with value steps coming up. I could guess more easily what I'd get in a mixture of Apple Greenish, Goldenrod, and Olive Green with a scrap of Dark Light-green in the shadows, than if I was trying to mix that hue with only Apple Light-green and Night Brown.

Curlicue to Continue

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I've been using Prismacolors e'er since. Of course, some pencils wore downward faster than others. I got warned that I'd have colors I never used. Instead, I just constitute out that some colors become used more often over large areas than others.

None of those pencils went unused. Very dark colors and pale colors habiliment down fast. Blues and greens go fast because I'm fond of landscapes and seascapes. Y'all might have a unlike pattern if your favorite subjects are different, but y'all'll find a utilize for every colour in the gear up.

Yous Can Never Have Too Many Colors

Equally presently as you offset to draw, you will demand more colors that don't exist yet.

Your olive green is too dark. You demand some other patch of olive green that'south more than xanthous, and the shadow has to be darker and more green. Merely because y'all have Olive Green, and a selection of Yellow Ochre, Goldenrod, Dark Green and Grass Light-green to modify it forth with brown, it starts to get a lot easier to lucifer that exact foliage tip that's turning yellowish, the pine needles that are in shadow and that weird color on your dog's red collar where the green bush reflects into the shadow.

Mixing becomes intuitive. Try different things. Try using the red that comes closest to the domestic dog collar and and then going over it with a blue that looks like shadows on white and a little of the light-green from the bush. Or try doing dark light-green under the red. There are always many dissimilar mixtures that create the effects yous want.

Equally yous read more on color theory and try unlike combinations, y'all will develop favorites. Eventually, information technology'll become possible to create a full range of colors for realism from a 12 colour set, but that comes easier with years of practice.

When to teach colour theory and color mixing is a matter of debate about the procedure of teaching—zippo more. Individuals learn in different means. Some people benefit most from that classical approach of didactics pure value get-go and then adding colors gradually ane at a time till each is mastered. Others will learn faster jumping in the deep stop with a large full-range set, trying new colors and combinations in each slice.

Realistic drawing and painting have a large set up of circuitous skills. They all demand to exist learned. Line, form, value, hue, proportion, balance, composition, shading, any beginner would be overwhelmed trying to exercise them all at in one case. Maybe the monochrome approach just simplifies things to the point that there's i affair you don't need to worry about.

But in starting from color first, there'south a valuable resource in most of the skillful colored pencil painting books available. Fantabulous line drawings and specific instructions are provided for numerous projects where the author, a professional artist, has developed a good composition and done an accurate line cartoon leaving the piece open as colour exercise for the educatee. These are fun.

Yous can have as much fun picking up a coloring book of tropical fish or botanicals and a large set of Prismacolors to experiment with shading, color mixing, modeling, and value. While that doesn't resemble classical art instruction in realism, it's one of the important steps on your journey. Color is held out as a corking advantage for learning to draw well in the Academe arroyo, simply it can be the first step if you're in love with color, and that's what makes you want to draw.

It doesn't matter and then much what society yous learn these skills as that you acquire them all eventually.

But there is a way to have all your colors and some monochrome artistic discipline too. First with a large set, merely practise specific exercises and drawings in monochrome using different dark pencils. Find out the subtle divergence betwixt an Indigo Blue monochrome drawing, a Sepia monochrome drawing, and a Dark Green monochrome or a Tuscan Red monochrome.

Practise an abstract with plenty of shading themed on each of the primary and secondary colors, only using that color grouping from your big ready. Close your eyes and choose four pencils at random out of a jar, so create something using merely those colors.

Setting limits on color within one drawing or painting is a fun challenge. I'll get into color theory more in later articles, and each of these ideas for exercises will be adult further into something that you tin can show off in your sketchbook or pull out and hang in your room.

Learning color is a combination of reading, watching, and doing. Studying other artists' color mixtures can give new ideas for how to handle pencils you lot're long familiar with. Reading color theory can give new ideas for ways to approach familiar subjects. Near of all, drawing and coloring those drawings is the all-time way to teach yourself colour at every level. If a big set makes you desire to do that more often, become for it!

The richest, nigh complex colored pencil paintings I've ever washed e'er begin with a light pencil sketch then a monochrome or well-nigh-monochrome drawing in one or more night colors. From there I build on them, mix combinations and work toward the light, leaving the brightest whites untouched. I might go over pure white areas in white pencil at the start to give them texture without colour. It all comes together. Every colour exercise can make all your afterward work richer and more complex.

Another trait of well-nigh artists I've e'er known is that no matter how skilled they become, at that place's always something cool they've never tried. Some of the joy of art is constant discovery. Artists never stop learning. If nosotros go through everything that we could study, we'll remember of things no i's tried because they're there. Add just one more than pigment and everyone's inventing again.

If that's the urge that strikes whenever you encounter a large spectrum array of colors similar the bright lacquered barrels of a big ready of colored pencils, then don't lose that joy. Indulge information technology as often equally you can. Even setting it aside for a monochrome experiment is nevertheless more than play, you can try a different color for the adjacent one.

Art that'south passionate gains something beyond technical expertise. Your passion reaches everyone that sees your colored pencil fine art and remains tangible long after y'all've finished. You take this inside you for being human, with eyes to see and hands that weep out for tools. Enjoy your colored pencils, and anybody who sees your work will feel your joy.

MatthewIceArt on September 06, 2020:

Hello Im wondering if i should purchase the 120 prepare of Arteza pencils or the 150 set up of prismacolors because i already accept a set up of 72 arteza pencils just prismacolors seem to expensive

AmyLynn on January 05, 2019:

I sort of looked down my nose at coloured pencils when I was given an Developed colouring book because as a kid, I hated crayons, and thought pencils would have the same problem - impossible to make something opaque, skipping all over a page, grrr :0) I uncertainty I knew what opaque meant at historic period 4, simply I knew they were a bummer, somehow assumed the same for coloured pencils. So I bought gel pens after talking to a bunch of the happiest book colouring campers always, who kindly suggested a make of gel pens.

I bought them for my Mom. She'southward not someone who would usually sit and color... then suddenly my 68 twelvemonth old constantly decorated Mom was dx'd with early on onset Alzheimer's. Then I'thousand hoping to keep her be artistic. She likes to color with me, and so I'm always looking for new stuff, info... she lost her fave book (information technology was gorgeous. she has a souvenir, true cat mandalas were like the stained glass she did decades agone and more) so I'm hanging on to everything, trying to figure out *how* people produce such beautiful art with pencils, and happily ended up here. That was mode longer than intended, deplorable! And thanks and so much. I enjoyed this very much.

Levy Tate from California, Usa on Nov 03, 2013:

A big fan of coloured pencils hither! Thank you for writing this hub -- it's likewise awesome! Voted upward ;-)

Marie Injure from New Orleans, LA on February xviii, 2013:

You make me want to become out and buy all the colors I tin detect. I think kids have the correct instincts. They ever go for the biggest box of crayons because they know what volition piece of work.

Liz Elias from Oakley, CA on February 18, 2013:

I'm no class-A artist--I'm really just learning, simply I've been using Prismacolors for fun...even for coloring book use in those computer-drawn fancy design books...for quite a few years, now...I love them...they draw then smoothy; flossy, almost.

Equally for 'limited palettes,' bah--I want the full range of colors...I love color; lots of it.

This was a very interesting article. Voted so,upwardly and shared.

Pamela Dapples from Arizona. on February 18, 2013:

I'm not sure if my annotate vanished or went through when I flipped to your profile to see if you are nonetheless active on Hubpages. This is a great commodity. I really enjoyed it. Voted upward, useful, interesting and sharing. I similar to endeavor different mediums, but I always come back to Prismacolor and chalk pastels.

robertsloan2 (writer) from San Francisco, CA on Oct 15, 2009:

Thanks, Dant! I do too. Certain specific colors similar Derwent's Water Light-green are inspirational, they tin suggest subjects to me or interesting treatments of subjects. The bigger the range, the easier it is for me to discover or mix exactly what I want.

Dant on October xv, 2009:

I too love the names of the colors that each pencil comes in. Having and then many variations of color make y'all feel like there are no limits apart from your imagination.

robertsloan2 (author) from San Francisco, CA on May 20, 2009:

Cam, thank y'all for your comment! I'grand so glad it helped. Crayolas may exist high quality for children's pencils simply they merely can't do what the artist grade pencils can. If you want something soft with a good large range, effort Derwent Coloursoft with the 72 color set, or of course expect for Prismacolors on sale! Any of the super-soft brands have enormous advantages over those with difficult leads and embrace much easier when you don't want the strokes to prove.

I mention Coloursoft because for some mysterious reason, the prices on the big sets seem very inexpensive compared to other comparable brands. I bought the large gear up and the quality is stunning, they really are a 18-carat deal. But a set of 120 or 132 is then much more adaptable to whatsoever subject y'all want that information technology may exist better to look for a coupon and endeavor to get the giant set.

Try eBay also, sometimes yous can find big sets of Prismacolors at a discount toll. I would suggest looking everywhere for the best price on a big set rather than only paying retail on it, I have gotten well-nigh of mine at about half retail.

Cam Anju from Stoughton, Wisconsin on May 20, 2009:

This was amazing to read! I love color simply am so frustrated with my crayola pencils.. the 24 of them I have are hard to work with.. merely I do my best! I tin't expect to go and to try Prisma colors!

Great Hub, looking frontward to reading more! :)

robertsloan2 (author) from San Francisco, CA on Dec 15, 2008:

Oh wow! Of class it'southward all correct to mention brands. You just mentioned one I'm drooling at getting someday, my biggest set of watercolor pencils is 72 Aqua Monoliths. That sounds like a cute combination, Prussian Blue and Naples Ochre. Information technology'd be deep and rich, varying betwixt greenish and bluish, a little muted simply non in a bad way.

You're tempting me... there are always some perfect combinations in every set. Over the years I've been working on purchasing full range sets of all the major artist brands. I don't have full range Caran d'Ache because of price, and oasis't gotten the Blueprint Bruynzeel ones yet or a few of the smaller ranges but I am dreaming of doing it in a few months.

Not before long but eventually... right now I need to build upwards my oil pastels range showtime because of a website I'm doing: http://world wide web.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.c... -- I am testing brands and exploring all the major artist brands, though I may not get for full range in all of them since I'm non sure if I like the texture of the one that has the largest range or whether to accumulate information technology gradually a few at a time.

Unlike colored pencils, oil pastels are sometimes cheaper in open up stock than in sets. It's odd but true. Happily, sets of CP are a real deal!

Eliza on December 15, 2008:

I've been enjoying this article a lot because I'thousand another 'colour nut', equally y'all telephone call it. I got a 120 color watercolor pencil gear up (the Albrecht Dürer range by Faber-Castell, if I'm immune to mention brands here) only recently, and I dear them And then much, it's hard to stop playing with them at all. And of course it'due south amazing to run into what these colors do upon adding h2o! I'm a huge fan of seascapes and landscapes also, and currently my favourite mixture for a really expert sea light-green is preussian blue and nighttime naples ochre - two colors I've never had in whatever set earlier, and now they're on the best way towards becoming two of my favourites. Yay for more colors! And yay for watercolor pencils, they're probably my all-time favourite art cloth.

A colorful salute from another fan!

robertsloan2 (author) from San Francisco, CA on June 21, 2008:

You lot're right. Some people don't really become color mixing easily with a large set. I did, and information technology's a thing of differences betwixt people. Some modest sets are very well chosen for mixability, more than other small sets.

Derwent Colourfast or Inktense come up in good vi-color ranges arranged for the best mixability. I was happy to detect that the Prismacolor Premier 12 colour set up has good mixability and some colors that aren't normally part of spectrum-brights 12 color sets, like Foam and Indigo, that are the ones I apply constantly.

Watercolors stone for learning basic color theory. I establish tons of practiced online articles on color mixing for them, and that does use to colored pencils besides.

Prismacolor'southward landscape set is a great one for getting used to the Weird But Useful colors. Thanks for mentioning that! Some of them looked at showtime similar I'd never utilise them in a million years fifty-fifty when I got my first set, but wound up being colors I wear down to stubs very fast, like Cream for burnishing. Some of color mixing in colored pencils is counter intuitive and goes beyond the pure hues of the colour wheel and creating neutrals past mixing complements. On my nearly contempo colored pencil painting, I wound upward needing to utilise Peach and Jasmine together to get a low-cal off-white exactly right on a reflection on argent.

I will exercise another Hub on color mixing with large sets of colored pencils, since this is a compact topic I have put decades of practice into. It's fun and can be easier than trying to mix exact hues with only a small number of spectrum brights, but there are some tricks to information technology that I recall I picked up without instruction over the years -- plus of course all the new information from Masterful Color.

Loni L Ice from Lawrence, KS on June 21, 2008:

Funny, I didn't actually learn to practise colour mixing until I started getting into half dozen-color watercolor sets. NOW I tin can see what you hateful when you're talking about color mixing, but that didn't used to be the case.

From my point of view, if you're not understanding color mixing with a small-scale set, go to a larger fix, or even a different make. Cheap Crayola colored pencils don't work for everyone to learn on. Yet, if the large set seems overwhelming, become with a smaller ready. The fix of colored pencils I learned to color alloy on was Prismacolor'due south landscaping prepare. I didn't understand why it had some colors in it, but that made me curious, then I found out what those weird colors did when mixed with all the greens and browns.

The upshot, I suppose, is that sometimes people (like yours truly) tin can observe a big set up then intimidating to work with that nosotros tin can't see the underlying principle for the trees. However, alongside that statement, it would be nice if the art world let everyone learn in the way that best suited them, and had more of an air of experimentation overall.

robertsloan2 (author) from San Francisco, CA on June 19, 2008:

Way absurd! I'm going to be posting more hubs on Colored Pencil Realism topics, this is just the beginning. Then you're another color nut! Very happy to run across you! 132-pencil salute and all that!

SweetiePie from Southern California, Us on June 19, 2008:

I agree, I agree, I agree! Color is wonderful and I never saw why people were agape to use it.

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