Prismacolor Pencils

When it comes to the coloring of stamped images, crafters have their choice of watercolors, markers, crayons, chalks, inks and dyes and I guarantee that if you were to ask any of them what their favorite medium of choice was, they’d all have an answer. For me personally, it’s colored pencils, which I find to be quite funny considering I avoided them completely for the longest time, convinced that watercolors and Copic markers were the best way to go.

It took months and months of listening to my fellow crafters rave about their “Prismas” before I even decided to test them out, and at that point, my decision came out of pure determination to disprove the theory that Prismacolor pencils were any better than any other brand. I couldn’t imagine that you would need to spend more than $10 for a box of 24 to get any better results than a box of Crayola could give you and assumed that maybe everyone was just feeding into the hype of one particular brand. I mean really, a colored pencil is a colored pencil, right?

I went out and bought a box of 24 Artist’s Loft pencils for $5.99 at my local craft retailer store, grabbed a few colorless blenders and went home to see if they could do just as good a job. I knew right away that I liked the idea of coloring my images with pencils. The technique itself gave me much more control than I was previously used to, and allowed me to not only outline images, but achieve a level of detail I hadn’t been able to with any other medium I had used. However... I wasn’t impressed with the finished result. It wasn’t horrible, but I would have preferred the colors to blend much more evenly. So I decided that since I liked the technique, I would make the investment, and buy a box of 24 premier Prismacolor pencils. (A box of 24 Prismas will cost approximately $40/retail.)

I immediately saw the difference. The Prismas blended so much more evenly and smoothly that when used with the colorless blender, I couldn’t even tell the difference between markers or pencils. Whereas with watercolors, shading is dependent on the amount of water you use, and layering with markers causes bleeding through of color, colored pencil tones and shades are all dependent on the amount of pressure you apply, or number of layers you add. And because you are able to erase, the possibilities for blends and shades are endless, without ever having to start over because you “messed up.”

Prismacolor sells their premier pencils individually, or in sets of 12, 24, 36, 48, 120 and 132. They also have a “Verithin” line of pencils that are, as their name states, very thin for outlining and detail work. It should be stated that very soon after I bought my first box of 24, I ended up going out and buying individual pencils and am now proud to announce I own all 132. I urge anyone who is on the fence to go out and try these pencils. You will not be disappointed!

Here are a few of the cards that I created with my Prismas.

 Copyright © 2010 StarryNightsDiva. All rights reserved.