150 color paper box-set Holbein colored pencil (japan import)

Product Information

Holbein offers about 18 browns and beiges which run from warm red browns to cool chocolate umbers. A nice selection. Like the Faber-Castell GRIP, these do not have color names on the barrel, but the entire barrel matches the core color. The barrels themselves have a rubbery, grippy coating that is pleasant to use (and that I’d love to see on some artist-grade pencils!) There is no lightfastness rating as these are not intended as artist pencils. Normally pencil companies try to impress you with a ton of blues. Holbein keeps their blue family smaller than usual (they gave that space to the greens!) but I don’t see any missing blues. The blues they offer are all unique tones and values. A nice selection of periwinkles too! I use two different pencil sharpeners on location. The Derwent Pastel & Charcoal Sharpener and the M + R Sharpener as they manage a wide variety of media. For both sharpeners, they worked well. I like a long point so the M + R Sharpener works best for this. The Derwent Pastel Sharpener works best for the pastel pencils I take with me but does a pretty decent job too, although produces a shorter lead point. In the studio I have a Jakar Electric Sharpener for speed and that works really well on the Holbein Artists’ Coloured Pencils producing a clean and crisp long point in seconds. The color selection is vast as the sets are quite large so most people should find the colors that they need. They are very expensive, however, so they may be out of some people’s colored pencil budgets. They come with a round barrel, have a 3.8 mm core, and are available in sets of 100 and 150. Visual Appeal – 4/5

And fat? Fat is oil. Fat tends to mean an animal by-product but folks, so is petrolium. Crude oil is really, really, really old fat. These pencils are easy to layer, have a good color palette, and really just give you everything you need in a colored pencil. I could see how these could become my go-to studio pencils, but I would want to do my own lightfastness tests to determine which colors were best for final drawings. It would be great to see Faber-Castell embrace the latest Lightfastness standards (now about 15 years old) and provide testing results on their pencils such as the info provided by Derwent, Caran D’Ache, and Prismacolor. My studio floor is laminate wood and the pencils bounce several times when dropped but I’ve never experienced a core shattering inside the pencil casing in multiple spots. This is quite common with Prismacolors.The names make sense, something that can’t be said about all colored pencils. They use paint names when appropriate but also name colors after food, flowers, or recognizable objects. I’ve not noticed any weirdly wrong names. IMPORTANT: If you’re someone who can’t stand to sharpen pencils because you hate wasting pencil lead— DO NOT BUY HOLBEIN PENCILS! I have never blown through this much pencil length with any other brand. These pencils disappear fast! Current safety standards err on the side of caution to the point of stupidity. We don’t eat art supplies but the law assumes we might. Holbein Artists' Pencils are a range of soft and vivid artists' coloured pencils from leading art material manufacturer Holbein.

I use a lot of coloured pencils in my work. For me, the characteristics of a high quality pencil have a soft and buttery feel with a vibrant and even placement of colour. Holbein uses high grade pigments which exhibit little fading or discolouration by light.Holbein pigment tends to sit high on the surface of the paper and it doesn’t seem to settle and sink into the tooth the way Prismacolor, Lightfast, and Luminance do. Because of this, it’s essential that you seal your Holbein work with good quality fixative when you’re finished. So to say “wax, fats, and oils” is like saying “here’s my bike, bicycle, and my thingamabob with two wheels which I pedal around town.” In addition, there are plans to sell iPad and MacBook case handmade from material representative of the Nishijin-ori used to make Japanese kimonos. The yellows to orange are the fewest in number and the least impressive with a few colors that are pretty darned close to each other.

Holbeins are a soft-core pencil and the exposed core will break off if you drop the pencil onto a hard floor. These are extremely expensive pencils. There isn’t any other way to put it. However, the high price comes in part due to the unique and exotic cores that you really can’t find with many other pencil brands. Also, other premium brands that cost quite a bit offer smaller sets for those who want to try them out without paying a huge asking price but Holbein doesn’t offer this. I highly recommend Holbein for floral artists. Their greens and pinks are by far the most complete and the natural yellow greens are very organic looking.

Another consideration with Prismacolors (and all wax-based pencils) is that they are not as good at layering and mixing colors as the harder and more matte oil-based pencils. And these colors will definitely get shiny and waxy with a heavy buildup. Given the core ingredients previously mentioned, the consistency of the Holbein core is simply gorgeous. Smooth and creamy, but with the addition of oils and wax combined, the core is strong enough to maintain a decent point after sharpening. The pencil will not maintain a point quite as long as an oil only pencil, never the less, I was impressed with the longevity of the core throughout various tests. Anyway, it sounds like Holbein was forced to reformulate one or more pencil cores before they could export to the United States…