Thursday, July 22, 2010

more pencil info

A few more observations and answers to your questions on pencils and such....

1). The links in my last post are all to dickblick.com - I have typically ordered from them because of their great prices and service and huge inventory. Also! If you link to them through Ebates you can get a 4% cash rebate on your order (used to be 7%... but still... every little bit counts!) Not to say there aren't other sources out there! I have been looking at ASW and their prices are the lowest around (same as Blick's bulk prices but without the minimums) with flat-rate shipping in the U.S. If you're ordering from outside the U.S. and are interested in Prismacolors, check out Marker Supply - their prices are a bit higher than Blick's but they will ship overseas at actual cost, and their customer service is excellent.

2). On the Graphitint pencils - I forgot about them being water-soluble, so thought I'd show that property - actually I've never tried blending them with water before! So those can be used with regular or watercolor pencils.

3). The smudges below each color block below are intentional - sometimes I like to blend color with my finger, so I wanted to see how these pencils did.

4). Several of you asked which pencils I felt to be most comparable to the Prismacolors - from what I have here, I would say the Blick pencils are comparable and the best value per pencil, at .79 per pencil or .71 if you buy 12 or more. They're not quite as waxy as the Prismacolors, but they blend about as well. I would, though, like to try out the Derwent Coloursoft pencils and the Faber-Castell Polychromos - maybe I'll poke around on ebay and see if I can find a good deal out there.

5). Found a great resource for colored pencil info, if you have a few hours to read and click links: Colored Pencil Resource for Artists - TONS of info there, comparisons, polls, links, etc.

All for today!

Thanks so much for stopping by!

4 comments:

  1. I did play around with them and Derwent Coloursofts are more crayon-y and I think it's because they were bigger? The color selection is limited. There's a link on my blog, but I don't have the cool pictures you have. I wasn't sorry I compared, it was actually fun, but it brought me right back to the Prismacolor pencils...

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  2. Thanks Dina for this (and thanks for your other post about pencils too). So helpful to have the comparisons of the different pencils. Being in Australia, the price of artist's pencils is phenomenal which makes "trying" different brands rather unaffordable - thanks for doing the hard work for me - much appreciated!!

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  3. scribbletalk.com is a site I stumbled across. WOW U see the artist work on this site w/ no solvents used.
    All kind of pencil work is here. I really like it.
    I need to go back there. I did my 1st still life. I need to study more shading & blending from them.
    I color w/my Prism in front of my a/c unit in my bdrm during the heat of the day.
    I bought a set of Verithin for outlining my edges & doing fine line images. sure makes my stamped images look better,

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  4. Thanks for this info. I am new at this and some people say to use gamsol (OMS) and stumps to blend and others use the prisma blending pencil. I am not sure which to use.....

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