Product Review: Prismacolor Premier Colored Pencils

Since I’ve shared a few tips and tricks revolving around colored pencil drawing with you I figured I should tell you a little bit about the colored pencils that I use. My very first set of colored pencils that were exclusively mine was a small set of Prismacolor pencils that my dad gave me in 6^th grade. As you can imagine that has been my brand ever since.

While I took some time off from drawing between 6^th grade and the middle of my senior year, I automatically gravitated back towards them when I decided to start some colored pencil drawing again. At first I bought the 60 pack of the Prismacolor Scholar pencils to make sure I still liked the feel and style of the Prismacolor pencils. That is one thing I will recommend to anyone in the market for a change of materials. Try out a sampling of those materials first before you go and invest a lot of money into them. It would be a shame to spend a lot of money on a set of pencils you end up hating.

After I bought the Scholars I decided that I wanted to upgrade to a more advanced set of pencils. For a long time I debated which set of Prismacolor Premier colored pencils I wanted. In the end I decided that I knew I was going to use them, so I might as well get the biggest bang for my buck. Fortunately I discovered that you could buy the 150 set of Prismacolor Premier pencils for half off on Amazon.

        The Product

             

When you go with the 150 set of the Prismacolor Premier colored pencils you will quickly discover that the possibilities are endless when it comes to the things you can draw. You will receive one of every color that Prismacolor currently has in their colored pencil line. Also most craft stores will sell open stock of the more popular colors so it is relatively easy to replace pencils if you seem to be running out of one common color more quickly than others.

I love to organize my art supplies so I typed up a chart of all the colors and filled in a space next to them with a sampling of that color. I think that this is an important thing to do for these pencils simply because there are so many and you want to make sure that you choose exactly the right ones for whatever project you are working on. Also the colors that you get from the pencils will sometimes be very different from what you would expect based off the outside of the pencil.

One thing you have to be very careful about with these pencils is making sure you don’t drop them very much or handle them roughly in general. These pencils have a soft core which means that the lead is more likely to break while they are being transported or if they are dropped. However the soft core led also provides a variety of benefits to the pencils.

The variation of tones you can get from each pencil is quite remarkable. Each color is extremely rich and the pencils lay down color very smoothly and evenly. It is also very easy to blend with these pencils because the led is so smooth. There is also very little smearing of colors when working on a project, even when you are continuously pressing hard to get a deep rich value.

I will keep using Prismacolor Premier colored pencils for the foreseeable future. So far the only issues I have had with these pencils has been some minor lead breakage and one delirious day when I put a handful of pencils in a cup of paint brush water and left them there over night (But that was my own fault).  And, might I add, after they dried out and I sharpened them down a little bit they were fine! These are great pencils and I hope this review has helped given you some insight into the Prismacolor Premier brand.