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I bought these pencils as a gift for a friend who is returning to art through a life drawing experience. She is still very carefully drawing the figure and I wanted to give her some means of expression. Voila! These pencils with their ability to give great color with the smallest effort have opened up windows and doors for my friend. Thank you!

Okay, I confess, I'm falling in love with these pencils. I've tried to be a prismacolor junkie, as they are so easy to come by, they have so many different ways to attain them with great sets like the potrait set and the landscape and 12packs of every color.... such versatility. The problem is, rich rich rich color is to be found somewhere else. These pencils, these cretacolor watercolor pencils, are rich in color, and blend well. Let's go back to richness for a second. That's the difference between good ale and normal beer. It's also the difference between great hot chocolate and store brand hot chocolate. Or gouda cheese and cheddar. It's a huge difference. One not to be overlooked. As far as individual properties, I'll try to go over those. The first is the difference in overlaying a color. In many colors, over laying results in later plumage(that color coming back up to haunt you later), but in these the color starts breaking into pieces like brushing dry watercolor. It's pretty cool actually. You might notice the ochre laying a dark brown line right before it starts into the small pieces of color breaking off. In blending, I still hold to koh-i-noors being the best that I've used in that area, but still, these are about as smooth in dry blending as dry prismacolors are. In color selection, a 36 pencil package really has a nice selection of colors to draw easily most things. A decent selection blues, greens, lots of reds, light yellows, bright yellows, browns, an ivory black, a permanent white, and a real orange that's called orange... who would of thought.. They do not feel the smoothest to draw with, but after a little bit of practice with them, they feel fine. They do work well on different drawing papers, but these ask for some fairly rough paper, not as rough as charcoal, but definitely much rougher than smooth drawing paper. In fact... these might do well on a smooth canvas, come to think about it. The richness of color is overwhelming if you've been using prismacolors. Brightness is not the forte of Cretacolors individual pencils. The yellow is very bright. So if you want brighter colors, you have to mix your colors, which always dulls the color at each mix. You win some, you lose some. I haven't tried a 72pack which Cretacolor makes, but I usually like mixing rather than working with that many colors as a base. Each mix, the dulling of color is tolerable, though. Still, the rule is two colors mix for a dull color and three colors mix for an even duller color or for a rug. For example, Ticonderogas by Prang make three colors into a rug affect. Yet, two colors mix great minus a standard loss of brightness.(Cretacolors and Prismas won't make the rug at the 3rd color mixed in, more on the 4th or 5th) I suppose the only major issue I have with these pencils is the difficulty in buying individual color 12 packs. It seems like no store sells any 12 pack besides prismacolors, and that is a real shame. I've only found one store online in English that sells the individual colors for cretacolor. If I liked a bigger base I wouldn't like that its hard to find the 72pks in online stores, but I'm not really that person. The only thing I would say is the Portrait pack by Prismacolor still can't be beat for portraits.

These are very nice water color pencils. Other than a thin wrapper they are 100% pigment. They can be used wet or dry, or put on dry and then moistened. They also are useful for adding details to conventional water color paintings.