Colouring with Pencils: Faber-Castell

Hello my Lovelies, 🙂

it’s Sunday and it’s Valentine’s Day, too. Do you celebrate it or do you think it is just an overrated day? Well, my husband and I don’t celebrate because there are 365 days in a year which should be celebrated. I love him every day and I am very grateful that he is in my life. Why should I show him my love just one day in a year? It doesn’t make any sense for me. 😀 We even forget our wedding anniversary, well I forget it 😀 Just one day in the year is important for us and this is the day when we were officially a couple. We have now been together for 12 years and 6 months and we have been married for nearly 4 years. For us, every day is special.

Ok, enough of Valentine’s Day and being a couple. 😀 Let’s dive into our topic for today. 😉 I promissed you that I will open up my cupboards and we will talk about journals, pens and all the other stationery goodies I have.
Today I would like to introduce you to our new series. Colour pencils! Some of you may think: Boring! Some of you may think: Wait, I used them as a child. Both can be true but then you haven’t found the right ones for you. 😉

Why Are Coloured Pencils Awesome?

Well, easy question because you can use them on every paper. It doesn’t matter how thin or thick the paper is, you can create amazing art with them. With the right pencils, you can even doodle on a black surface.

You can find a huge variety of colours and they don’t have to be expensive to be great.

I have different brands with different numbers of colour in the set:

• Faber-Castell Classic Colour (24 pencils)
• Faber-Castell Colour Grip (16 pencils)
• Faber-Castell Erasable (12 pencils)
• Prismacolor Premier (36 pencils)
• Castle Art Supplies Colored Pencils (72 pencils)
• Caran d’Ache Pablo (18 pencils)
• Holbein Artists‘ Colored Pencil (36 pencils)
• Irojiten Vol. 1 – 9 (each volume has 10 pencils)

As you can see, the seizes of my sets are different and the price of them differs a lot too. So let’s start with Faber-Castell. I would like to introduce to you all three sets at once because the difference between them isn’t really huge.

Faber-Castell – Pencils From Germany

A quick fact check on the company will surprise you. The company was founded over 260 years ago by Kaspar Faber. The foundation stone was set near Nuremberg (Nürnberg) and the family has kept the company for eight generations.

The products are for example:

• pencils
• coloured pencils
• erasers
• rulers
• artist pens
• brushes
• watercolours
• fountain pens
• ball point pens
• sharpeners
• crayons

The whole list of products is very long and impressive. The interesting point is that there is something available for every budget.

Their vision is to release creativity so that ideas can become reality. For Faber-Castell it is important to be grateful for the tradition and be brave to walk new ways. Their standards are high so they want to acheive high quality in every product and it should be enviromentally friendly as well. Therefore, they use only wood from sustainable forests.

They produce 2,3 billions of wooden pencils. Quite impressive, I would say. 😉

My Coloured Pencil Sets

Let’s start with the first set: Faber-Castell Classic Colour

Unfortunately, I don’t have the package anymore. It was made of cardboard and on the website I found my set in a lovely tin box now for which you pay 14 Euros.

The pencils are shaped hexagonally and they don’t break easily. So don’t be afraid to give them to children. You can get up to 60 different colours.

It is a lovely colour variety and you can create a little master piece with them. The opacity is quite high for a coloured pencil.
You can mix the colours up to a certain point and after that, however, you can see the layering.

Faber-Castell Colour Grip

I bought them a long time ago as a carboard package of 12. The package doesn’t exist anymore. 😦 But I found them online in a lovely tin box as well. The price is 9,50 Euros. I bought my other 4 grip pencils separately and the price was something like 1,10 Euro per pencil.

The coloured pencils have a triangular shape and have a zone for secure grip. The pencils are water-soluble which is quite amazing and they don’t break easily as well. I personally like the shape because it is really comfortable for me as a lefty to use the pencils but I don’t like the grip zone. The little dots are quite firm and when I hold them too hard in my hand I have marks from the dots on my fingers.

The colour variety is nice but if you want the colour to be really bright, you will need to use a certain amount of pressure. Mixing the colours isn’t quite good; maybe you have to work with water but I haven’t tried that yet.

Faber-Castell Erasable

Back in my days as a student at university, I used to colour up my notes with coloured pencils. All my friends used highlighters but I didn’t. I found the erasable ones in a little shop and wanted to give them a try. Actually, I rebought them because I used up the frist ones completely. 😀

In one cardboard package you get 12 pencils. The shape is hexagonal, like the Classic Colour, and each pencil has an eraser on top of it. They are break resistent as well and the colours are available in a nice range too. There even is some space on the pencil where you can write your name in it. 😀 The price was 4,73 Euros for the set when I bought it.

Unfortunately, there is the same problem as with the Colour Grip Pencils: I don’t really like the difficulty with mixing the colours. It is really hard to blend them, but if you just use the colours one by one then they are very lovely.

Personal Thoughts

If I had to score them from 1 to 10 (1 means „Oh my God don’t buy them“ and 10 means „Great, you really have to buy them“), I would give each pencil set a different score.

My least favourite ones are the Colour Grip with a score of 5. They are good pencils but the dots on the pencils aren’t my thing. I like the shape and the colour variety though.

The second place goes to the Erasable ones. I give them a 6.5 out of 10. The colours are the same like the Colour Grip but a huge plus,in comparison to the Colour Grip, is that you can erase them.

The best ones, in my opinion, are the Classic Colours. The opacity is the best of the three packages and the colour variety is great. So I give them an 8. I really enjoyed colouring with them and I think if your budget isn’t really high, you will get great quality for your money.

Wisdom of the Day: Coloured pencils release your creativity as much as markers.

Love to you all and stay healthy,
Chrissi
The Evil Journalista