It’s no secret that I love colored pencils. I also know how hard it can be when you’re standing in the craft store trying to decide which pencils to buy. You want them to be great quality, but you wonder if the fancy ones are really worth the price. Well I’ve tested out about 10 different kinds of colored pencils, and I’m going to share everything I know about 6 of them with you today. So whether you’re coloring in your favorite adult coloring book, or doodling in your sketchbook, you’ll have the best colored pencils for you. (This post does contain affiliate links when fitting.)
- Artist’s Loft Fundamentals – these colored pencils are available for $5 for a set of 36 at Michael’s. Artist’s Loft is Michael’s brand of art supplies and I usually LOVE them. These colored pencils however have pros and cons. They are a great price for a variety of colors and I really love the colors included in the set. There are actually quite a few shades of yellow which is rare. If you love soft pastel colors and you’re not a huge fan of blending, this might be the set for you. They color very smoothly, but it’s really hard to get a vibrant pigmentation. They don’t blend or shade very well, but they are great at covering areas with soft even colors.
Price: Inexpensive, about $5 at Michael’s
Best for: Pastel colors, even coloring, pretty yellows
Not great for: Blending, shading, vibrant colors
2. Prismacolor Premier Soft Core Colored Pencils – These colored pencils really are the best of the best! The colors are so rich and vibrant, and they are great for blending. I have this set of 48 and it really is a great collection of colors. I would definitely wait for a coupon before buying at the craft store, or I would buy on Amazon where the price is by far the lowest. And if you really want all the colors of the very best pencils, I’d go ahead and get this set of 72 or even this insanely awesome set of 128. I would also DEFINITELY recommend this Prismacolor colorless blending pencil. I only recently discovered it, and it works so well at smoothing out areas.
Now, as much as I love these colored pencils, they really might not be the best ones for you. They are very soft, which makes them great for blending two colors together and for shading from light to dark. They’re also great for laying down color over a large area. You barely have to press on the paper at all. However, because they are so soft, they are more difficult to sharpen into a fine point, and they’re not the best for coloring small detailed areas in coloring books. Also, because you don’t use as much pressure when coloring with them, they tend to show the texture of the paper more than other pencils. The colorless blender pencil helps a lot with that though.
Overview: Prismacolor Premier
Price: Expensive, about $40 for 48 pencils on Amazon
Best for: Blending, shading, beautiful colors, skin tones
Not great for: Fine details, coloring pages with small areas
3. Prismacolor Verithin Colored Pencils – These fun hexagon shaped colored pencils are very hard and sharp. They don’t break very easily, and they are great for creating fine lines and details and for coloring inside tiny little areas (like in this beautiful coloring book I LOVE pictured below!). If you try to use them to cover a large area they are very scratchy. They also don’t really blend together at all, nor are they meant to. I wouldn’t recommend them as the only set of colored pencils you use, but if you’re having trouble coloring in tiny details, or adding small marks to your drawings, these are perfect!
Overview: Prismacolor Verithin Colored Pencils
Price: Medium, about $15 for a set of 24 on Amazon
Best for: Coloring in fine details, making thin strong lines
Not great for: Covering large areas, blending, shading
4. Crayola Colored Pencils – These Crayola colored pencils are amazing! Honestly, I’ve tried quite a few other brands of cheap/kids colored pencils and these are by far the best. I think sometimes people think of them as less good because people associate Crayola with kids, but they are awesome! They are definitely not as great for blending together as the Prismacolor Premier pencils, but they actually blend and shade quite well. They are also hard enough that they do generally well in small areas. Last year before I got a set of Prismacolor colored pencils, I used Crayola colored pencils to draw Disney characters for my daughter. They turned out really well, and in some ways they were easier to use than the Prismacolor Premier pencils. You can get a set of 50 colored pencils on Amazon for less than $10 (or find them at Target for about the same price.)
Overview: Crayola Colored Pencils
Price: Inexpensive, about $5 for 24 or $15 for 50 on Amazon
Best for: Rich colors, great for shading, best value
Not so great for: Blending
5. Reeves Watercolor Pencils – Watercolor pencils are a lot of fun! I’ve actually only ever tried Reeves and Crayola watercolor pencils and they both are awesome. I wouldn’t recommend them as your only colored pencils, but they are a lot of fun to use, and you can use them to easily create pretty watercolor effects all over your coloring pages. Just color in areas with the pencils as usual, then use a wet paint brush to spread the color. I would recommend only using a little water to keep the paper from curling. The Reeves watercolor pencils cost about $16 for 36 on Amazon, and the Crayola watercolor pencils cost about $7 for 24.
6. Woodless Colored Pencils – These are a lot of fun and they look so pretty. You can color with the whole pencil, which is really cool. If you sharpen them, you can create fine lines and use the sides or edges to cover more area. In general I don’t feel like the quality of the pencil itself is nearly as good as some others, but they’re still pretty good. Plus they are shaped like hexagons, and come in a nice little portable tube, which is awesome.
Pencil Sharpeners
I would definitely recommend getting a quality pencil sharpener to use with your colored pencils. There is nothing more frustrating than when your pencils break while you’re sharpening them, and a good sharpener definitely helps with that. Also, after a while the blade may get dull and it may be time to get a new one, or replace the blade. Here are a few I recommend:
Here are a couple more Disney princess drawings I did where you can really see the difference between Crayolas and Prismacolors. With Rapunzel (Prismacolor), I was able to create a lot more shadows and blending in her face and clothes, but you can also see the texture of the paper a little bit. With Jasmine (Crayola), I did a little less shading, but I was able to cover all of the areas in a thick and smooth color.
So in conclusion, if you are willing to spend a little more money to get the very best possible sets of colored pencils out there, I would recommend you get the Prismacolor Premiers (to cover large areas and blend), the Prismacolor colorless blender, and the Prismacolor Verithins (for fine details and small areas). However, if you want quality pencils and beautiful colors all in one more affordable set, I would recommend the set of 50 Crayola colored pencils.
P.S. While I was working on this post, I came across this really helpful post by Amy over at DIY Candy. She’s a huge fan of adult coloring books and has a bunch of resources. And she has reviewed a few brands of colored pencils I’ve never tried before (those tri-tone ones look amazing!), so if you are looking for even more recommendations, check it out!
You should try Jolly. I love my set.
Thanks for the article. There are many other pencils that you didn’t mention. Faber-Castell are wonderful, Caran D’atche Luminance (very expensive) and Pablos (my favorites) are for serious coloring. There are more than even those but the ones I mentioned are exceptional albeit pricey,
Thanks for sharing Sheila! I love Faber-Castell too, but I’ve never tried the others. Now I really want to!
You said that the 50 Crayola pencils cost $15 on amazon and that was the cheapest, but you can get them at Target for about $7.
Thanks for the info! You can also now get a box of 100 different colors of Crayola at Walmart. I cannot remember the price, but it wasn’t too expensive.
You didn’t mention Prismacolor scholar ……… pkg. of 60 are $30 in Canada. For the price they are quite nice. The core is a little harder than the Prisma Premier. I have them both along with quite a few other brands including a couple of different types of watercolour pencils. Colouring is such a relaxing pass time.
Thanks for sharing – that’s good to know! I’ve thought about trying them… sometimes the premier pencils are too soft – they’re great for blending and shading but don’t do details as well. And I agree coloring is so relaxing.
I have used Prismacolor Premier, Scholar, Crayola, Stradetler(sp?), Artist Loft, etc. Prismacolor is by far the best for vibrant colors, however, the pencils crumble so easy and I have to keep sharpening to get a fine point. Crumbling and breaking are very upsetting when you are doing your projects. Any suggestions? Thank you.
I’ve had the same issues. I think that the problem is the prismacolor pencils are soft so that the colors are vibrant and blend well, but that also makes them not as great for small precise areas. What I do is use prismacolor pencils for overall shading and then use another type for details. The Verithin pencils (I mention them above) are very hard and sharpen to a fine point. They don’t blend as well but they are great for detail.
I have been coloring since the 60’s. Coloring books first. We used to have coloring contests on my porch and my best friends. We’d sit on the steps and color. We all got an A or 100. Hey, you can’t say your friends are lousy at coloring, right? LOL Then I got to be 12 I think. Adult coloring books hadn’t been invented yet and at that time, I was to old to color anymore. I was very sad. Fortunately for me, there were paint by numbers and color by numbers kits which they still make by the way. I didn’t think that they did. Anyway, in 1981 when I worked in a retail store named Caldor’s which went out of business in 1999, I bought my first adult coloring book. How do I know the year? I still have 4 of those coloring books. Cats, abstract art, butterflies and snowflakes. The books were small and this was before computers. I bought 2 and with one, I colored the snowflakes, got some lucite plastic frames, cut them out and gave them as Christmas gifts. The other one was just for me to have fun with. So adult coloring books have been around for a while but took off way after I bought my first one. Now I could color and not have to color ABC’s although I have an ABC coloring book with fancy letters. I use markers, colored pencils, crayons (my box has 96 and I have some fancy ones that you can’t find anymore), water colors, chalk pencils and gel pens.
Here are my fave colored pencils, some you might not have heard of before. Color By Number & Venus Paradise pencils. I had some left over or that I didn’t loose over the years and the pencils are soft. I love them! My favorite is color called Lawn Green and it’s small. I don’t know where I will get another one that color and I use it a lot. I have Berol Prismacolor and they are great too. I bought them from a place in my town that sold art supplies and sold bunches of one color in a box. I bought them one at a time for about $1 each. I also bought some and love Caran D’ Ache Suprocolor 2 Soft. These you might not have heard of. I bought them in a toy store. They are thick for child sized hands which I have. I had never seen them before and the colors are amazing. The company is eeboo and they have multi colored pencils like different shades of red and pink. They have 6 of those. The metallic ones are called Venus, Mars, Pluto, Neptune, Mercury & Uranus. The florescent ones are Beetle, Hello Yellow, Sunset, Electric Melon, Blue Morpheus & Shocking Pink. Don’t you love the names? Because they are so big they come with their own sharpeners. They are a lot of fun to color with. Then I have 12 Staedtler colored pencils. My sister bought these for my dad along with coloring books but he didn’t want to color so I got them. He passed away March 20th of last year and never wanted to color. My dad was an artist who did leather work and colored it too and was good at drawing but at 92, he didn’t want to do it anymore and he died at 93. There not bad but I wouldn’t have bought them for me. A friend gave me 2 boxes of General’s Pastel Chalk Pencil’s, one of Cool Colors and one of Netural Colors which I had always wanted because it had skin colors and a white one. I love them but I don’t love how they come off the paper. My sister gave me for Christmas a box of white chalk pencils and some expensive or what I think are expensive Stabilo CarbOthello 12 Chalk pastel colored pencils. I love them! I have some twistables that my other sister gave me because my nephew doesn’t use them anymore. I like them a lot. I also have a box of 64 Crayola pencils because I got a coupon from Crayola and 64 colors is what I love. The problem is some of the colors seem to be the same, they aren’t 64 different ones. Can you tell I love to color? I showed a guy who does real life chalk drawings of people at a fair and a man who hand marbles paper my coloring book. They both called me an artist because they said I know where to put my colors to go with the other colors and I know how to use my colored pencils and other coloring implements. Wow! Sorry this is so long. I hope you found something new to experiment with and you found what I said interesting. One more thing before I go. I am writing a song a-la Weird Al called Give Coloring a Chance sung to the tune of Give Peace a Chance. When I get it done, I’ll send it to you so you can post it. After all, it’s all about coloring, right?