Supplies
The best colored pencils for coloring
One property separates a school pencil from an artist one, and it is not the number of colours in the box. It is how much wax is holding the pigment together.
Colored pencils are the only medium that works on paper you already own. Nothing goes through the sheet, nothing has to dry, and a wrong colour can be softened instead of thrown away. That makes them the default for coloring pages printed at home, and it makes the choice between sets narrower than the shelf suggests.
Wax is the whole difference
Every colored pencil is pigment held in a binder. More wax or oil means a softer core, which lays down a thick, opaque layer, and thick layers are what let a second colour mix into the first on the page rather than sitting next to it. That is blending, and it is the single thing people are paying for when they buy up.
The cost is real. Soft cores wear down faster, need sharpening more often, and snap if they are dropped point-first. Hard cores do the opposite: they keep a point through a whole page, give clean edges in small enclosed areas, and refuse to blend. For a detailed page with hundreds of tiny shapes, hard is the right answer.
The middle of the range, which is where most people should stay
Between the school box and the artist tin sits the set that costs roughly a pound a pencil: wax-based, soft enough to blend, seventy or so colours in a tin. It is the honest answer for an adult who colours in the evening and does not want to think about brands.
Arteza, 48 coloursPencils
The sensible first tin. Forty-eight is the point where you stop mixing to reach ordinary skin, foliage and shadow, and everything above it is refinement rather than necessity.
Arteza Pro Series, 72 coloursPencils
Wax cores soft enough that a second colour mixes into the first instead of sitting beside it, which is the whole difference with a school pencil. Seventy-two of them, in three trays.
Arteza, 120 coloursPencils
Four trays and a colour chart. Past seventy-two the additions are neighbours you will not tell apart on paper, so this is the set to buy when the range itself is the pleasure.
The three differ only in how many pencils are in the tin, and the answer to that is smaller than the shelf suggests. Forty-eight is where mixing stops: below it you are blending to reach ordinary skin, foliage and shadow. Seventy-two is comfortable. A hundred and twenty is for the pleasure of the range, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as nobody pretends the page needs it.
When a mistake should not be permanent
Erasable pencils are the most underrated box on the shelf, and not only for children. They lift a wrong colour off a light first pass, and they soften an edge that went too dark. They do not erase like a graphite pencil, and anyone selling them that way is overstating it, but forgiving is not nothing.
Crayola erasable, 50 coloursPencils
The only colour on this page that comes back off. Not completely, and never on the first pass, but enough that a wrong colour stops being permanent.
Watercolour pencils, which are two things at once
They behave exactly like coloured pencils until a wet brush touches them, at which point the strokes dissolve into a wash. That makes them the only way to fill a large area smoothly without reaching for a marker, and it means one tin covers both the detail and the sky behind it.
The catch is the paper. Water buckles anything under 200 gsm, so a page coloured wet edge to edge will dry with a ripple in it. Used dry, they work on ordinary printer paper like any other pencil.
Arteza watercolour pencils, 72Pencils
Coloured pencils until a wet brush touches them, then a wash. Two mediums in one tin, and the only way to fill a large area smoothly without a marker.
For children, buy the cheap box on purpose
This is not a compromise. A child filling large areas with a flat colour gets nothing from a soft artist core except a lead that breaks on the first press. Fifty colours in a box that survives a tiled floor is the correct purchase, and the money saved buys paper.
Crayola coloured pencils, 50 coloursPencils
Fifty colours is past the point where a child asks for one that is not in the box, and the leads survive being dropped on a tiled floor.
The tier above: oil-based rather than wax
Faber-Castell Polychromos and Prismacolor Premier are the two names that come up whenever artists discuss pencils, and they split on their binder. Prismacolor are wax-heavy: softer, creamier, faster to blend, and prone to wax bloom, the faint haze that rises on a heavily worked area weeks later. Polychromos are oil-based: harder, so the point survives a whole page, no bloom, and layers that stay clean.
For coloring specifically, oil wins more often than the forums suggest. Coloring pages are full of small enclosed shapes, and a core that keeps its point is worth more there than one that blends in two strokes.
Faber-Castell Polychromos, tin of 24Pencils
The cheapest honest way to find out whether oil-based cores suit your hand. Twenty-four is thin for a finished page, but it answers the question before you spend on a hundred and twenty.
Faber-Castell Polychromos, tin of 36Pencils
Oil-based rather than wax, so the core keeps a point through a whole page and the colour does not bloom into a haze later. The tier above the mid-range, and worth it only if you layer.
The tin of twenty-four is the cheap way to answer the question. It is thin for a finished page, but it tells you within an evening whether a harder oil core suits your hand before you commit to a large set.
Buy either when you are layering four or five colours into one area and the result matters. Do not buy them to fill a page with one flat tone, because on that job they are indistinguishable from a set costing a quarter as much.
The budget brands worth knowing by name
Between the school box and the artist tin sits a shelf of brands sold almost entirely online, and two of them come up constantly in coloring groups. Castle Art Supplies and Kalour both make soft wax-based sets of seventy-two in a zip case, at roughly a third of the mid-range price. Staedtler sits slightly above them with harder cores that suit detailed pages.
The honest summary is that they are all the same proposition: a lot of colours, decent pigment, cores that break more often than the tin brands. If you are colouring daily they will frustrate you within a year. If you colour on a Sunday, they will not.
How to make pencils look finished
Two tones of the same colour do almost all the work. Put the lighter one across the whole shape, then the darker one only where the shape meets another, along the underside, and in the corners. That reads as shadow without any blending skill at all.
Press lightly first. Colour built in two or three light passes is even and can still be adjusted. One heavy pass is as far as that area will ever go, and the paper grain shows through it.
Then print something to try it on. The catalogue is free, and the supplies page covers the paper, printers and books that go around all this.
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Colored pencil questions
What makes one colored pencil better than another?
The amount of wax or oil holding the pigment. A soft, wax-heavy core lays down thickly enough that a second colour mixes into the first instead of sitting beside it, which is what people mean by blending. A hard core keeps a point and gives clean detail, but colours stay separate. Neither is better in the abstract; they do different jobs.
Do erasable colored pencils really erase?
Partly, and never completely. They lift enough to fix a wrong colour or soften an edge, especially on a light first pass, but pigment that has been pressed into the paper stays. Treat them as forgiving rather than reversible, which is still the difference between finishing a page and starting again.
How many colours do I need?
Between 36 and 72. Under 36 you spend the evening mixing to reach skin, foliage and shadow. Over 72 the additions are neighbours you will not tell apart on paper. The very large sets are bought for the object, which is a fair reason, but not a technical one.
Are artist pencils worth it for coloring books?
Only if you blend. The premium sets cost several times the mid-range because of pigment load and core softness, and both only pay off when two colours are being pushed into each other. If you fill areas with a single flat colour, the expensive box does exactly what the cheap one does.
Pencils or markers for a printed coloring page?
Pencils, unless you have bought heavier paper. They work on the 80 gsm already in your printer, they never reach the table underneath, and a mistake can be softened. Markers give a flatter, more finished look, and they need 120 gsm. The markers page covers that side.