Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Ladies and gentlemen, the main event today, world championship colored pencil match.

In the Ultramarine corner, all the way from Yonkers, New York...weighing in at .17 ounces is Prismacolor pencils. 

In the crimson corner, all the way from Cleveland, Ohio...weighing in at .22 ounces is Polychromo pencils.

Lets have a good clean fight!

Prismacolor pencils (P1)








Polychromo pencils (P2) (drawing in progress)























With only about 3 hours into my fox drawing with Poychromos pencils I can already tell the huge difference between the two pencils.

These are my observations~

1) I am able to get the fine details that I normally get with my Tombow graphite pencils using P 2. plus I can use my Tombow pencils right along side the colored pencils...all the whiskers are with graphite.

2) My biggest pet peeve was all the tiny wax pieces everywhere with P1, no matter how careful I was! I was scraping off pieces with a razor blade on my swan...you can see slight residue on the actual piece.

3) I would have a beautiful sharpened point on P1 but as soon as I started drawing, it would break...my second biggest pet peeve with P1!! I know I am heavy handed with my pencils but come on! I did not have that issue with P2.

4) My local art store carries both pencils and I noticed that P2 had a lot less colors...altho the whole point of cp is to layer to get a beautiful vibrancy, so I'm not seeing this as an issue...but I am still a newbie at this!

5) Price- A LOT more for P2 than P1, BUT, because of the breaking points, I had to sharpen way more and so I went through 2 black and 2 white pencils on my tiger...I probably would not have with P2

6) I was able to erase the Polychromo pencils!! Because P1 is wax based erasing is impossible.

7) I have about the same amount of layers on both drawings, altho I pretty sure I can go with more on my fox (P2)

8) P2 pencils are wider so they barely fit in my pencil sharpener...I have to tug them out.

9) I had heard that the white P2 pencil did not work well, so instead I just bought a Caran d'Aches Blanc pencil to use and it worked perfectly along side P2

So, despite a few glitches such as price and width, the clear champion for me is the Polychromo pencils!



3 comments:

E.M. Corsa said...

Thank you for doing the comparison, much appreciated. I have only worked with Prismacolor and like you, the points break as soon as I start using them, leaving all those bits and pieces. I will try the others.

And you work actually glows with the color; love the fox!!!

The Creative Beast said...

This was a great and informative post on color pencils! I didn't even know about Polychromo pencils so I will have to be on the lookout for them to try out a few colors for the texture. Thanks for the great info!

Jennifer Richardson said...

oh!
that orange beak!
this is just so much rich sweet
goodness going on over here!!!
love it....love it to the moon and back:)
-Jennifer

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