What I have noticed with cheap pencils isn't that the end result will look much different, but that it will be harder and more irritating to get there and it won't last. I'll take creamy, lightfast, pigment based pencils over fugitive, hard and scritchy cheap ones any day. The paper is sooooo important, like you say. I say the same thing to people who are just getting into watercolor. Buy some cheap watercolors for practice and just get one or two tubes of the good stuff over time, but don't skimp on the paper! You will be frustrated and think you are not any good at the medium just because crap paper produces crap results.

I have tons of great brands from caran d'ache, faber castel, prisma color etc and I actually did a piece entirely with Amazon brand colored pencils. They were creamy, buttery and have held their color for several years, which was surprising. 😂

Started out with Crayola, then moved to Prisma and Polychromos. Those are my two favorite sets. That said, I will still use my Crayola pencils. You do need to layer A LOT, but that isn’t an issue for me, as I do the same with both the Prismas as well as the Polychromos anyway and YES! paper is the biggest issue. I have used them on several different types of paper and believe it or not, if you use the right paper for them, the colors pop of the page. If not, then yes, it will be a bit more muted. The other thing that I found out through use, is that sometimes, when you think you can no longer add more layers, that isn’t the case at all. Sometimes you just need to let the pigment on the paper rest and cool down. (I worked on a page where I wanted a dark blue night sky. Literally thought I was done, that it wasn’t going to take more layers, even though I wanted to smooth it out more. It was getting late at night, so put away. Came back to it the following evening and looked at it thought, “I wasn’t able to get more layers on there last night, but why not just try and see and lo and behold, I was able to get several more layers and got it to look pretty much the way I wanted!) So, simply letting the wax cool, when working with waxed based pencils and you can sometimes add several more layers. Which makes sense…because wax does heat up with friction. (I realize that some may wonder what paper I used that the colors popped for Crayola, so will just add right now that it was the Strathmore 300 series multimedia for Youth, obviously cut down to size to fit my printer.)

Nice presentation Gemma! What I enjoy more in videos like these is the skill of the artist. I enjoy watching the artist overcoming the limitations of budget materials and showing that beautiful art can be accomplished even with modest materials. Thank you for taking the time to make this video!

This was a great way to show the comparison, thank you!

What is the paper? for scheting? for final work?

nice

For the price - Crayola are well pigmented. Thank you for reviewing the Crayola. They are so cost effective, readily available that they give availability and access to a lot of people for the joy of creating. I use them on standard card stock with light pressure and layer. On that surface I get a smooth even layer down without any streaking.

😊

Thank you for making such a detailed example for your demo! I'm curious what the time difference was between the two sides? I've done similar comparisons like this for my own curiosity (high quality vs. crappy pencils), and while I agree that it's possible to make decent art with bad pencils, it took me much, much longer (mostly due to lower pigment, and layering required more effort, as you point out). Colored pencil is already such a time-intensive medium, I think that factor alone would be an important reason to use high-quality materials.