 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I bring you today a watercolor pencil comparison. Watercolor pencils is one of those things that I can actually afford to buy at least a couple colors in a lot of different brands and I was curious whether spending more on a pencil means you get better quality and what does better quality mean in a watercolor pencil. I'm not super experienced with them but I just wanted to do an out-and-out test and see how this works. So I've taken a sheet of Arches rough watercolor paper and drawn all the hexagons on there filled in the left half with each of the pencils and did a yellow, red and blue. Don't compare the the color actually of these because I don't have all the colors so I couldn't match an exact yellow, exact red, and exact blue on all of them so some of them will be a little odd but I wanted to see how they wet out. How well does the color break down and melt into water when you apply water? Sometimes you'll want it to melt entirely into it. Other times you want it to retain that line so you may decide at some point you want to have some colors that you would do your drawing with and then other colors you would make do more watercolor but you want to retain a little of that line and you know you can always have a mix of pencils because like I said they're they're inexpensive in general for just like onesie twosies of different brands. This chart goes from least expensive at the top the premiums are the least expensive at least at the time of this making this video all the way down to the bottom which is more expensive so it's a little over a buck to about four bucks is the range that I've got here and the left half of these are solid pencil or roughly solid pencil the right half is going to be kind of just the outside line I just want to see how well both of these melt out and turn into watercolor and how much of that pencil line and the texture from the rough watercolor paper is retained so you may want that for some effects and you may not want it for other effects and then as we talk through talk through these and watercolor through these I'll talk about the sets the Prima first they have a bunch of different sets little packages and if you buy them all then you end up with unfortunately like 18 duplicates I was so bummed about that so I have a lot of whites and a lot of blacks now because I did buy all the sets so that's something if you like white and you like black then you'll want to totally go full set syndrome on those the charts for all these the color charts for what I have are on my blog by the way so if you want to compare the color ranges in each one of these brands the Prisma color I only have 12 I only bought a set of 12 and I was kind of glad I did because they didn't break down as well as I had hoped and then the bronze eel this was a weird thing they're an overseas company and when they sent me my pack of aquarelles I got that red one in there I thought it was a watercolor but it's it says just color on the on it so that's why it didn't break down they sent me a regular water a regular pencil in my set of watercolor pencils so that was a disappointment to find out but they didn't work all that great so I was okay with it all right next set of three this is the art grip which is the favorite castell student line then derwent watercolor as opposed to derwent ink tents they do have both and I've talked to some people who accidentally bought the wrong one they were going for the intense and they ended up with the watercolor so I wanted to compare them and see what is the difference between them and this is the ink tents and again I picked the more of an orangey yellow instead of a regular gold so sorry about that and we'll finish watering these out and then start talking about the sets the art grip I bought a bunch of them and they work just fine they're a thinner pencil so that there's less color and that's one of the things I think that makes them more affordable there's 60 colors in that set and they come in little packs little groupings of colors the derwent watercolor pencils didn't water out as much as I had hoped I thought maybe they would do a little bit better and on all of this I was trying not to scrub at them to see you know can I make it water out so probably if you have any of these you can just work at it with your brush a little bit more but the ink tents also didn't water out as much as I had hoped I was really bummed because I love the intensity of color of the pencils but I do know that you can scrub on that particular brand because I've done it before to try to smooth it out it's just going to be a little more difficult with some pencils than others now these three are the most expensive the albrecht durer has 120 colors and I love them because they do water out nicely and I have the full set so I have a lot of color options when I use those these credit color aqua monoliths I was not pleased with they are a woodless pencil which means there's a lot of pigment you could use the shavings from these to make some watercolor with just use one of those little hand things the little hand sharpener jobbies and save your shavings to paint with but the colors are not very intense and they didn't water out really well but they are expensive they're almost three bucks I think and these museum aquarels from from Karen Dash at the bottom are the most expensive so again the albrecht dures work really great I do love the set and if you're looking for a good watercolor pencil that is on the higher end side that's a great option to have the aqua monoliths the lines didn't break down very much at all that was a shame to see because they're like I said expensive but these are highly pigmented the Karen Dash and they break down beautifully I mean I hardly had to do anything to them to get the watercolor to break down beautifully and they're really strong colors and I know a lot of people like really strong colors so what I decided to do was test this image on the left I have all of the Karen Dash museum aquarels and I tried to roughly match colors they won't be exact but the ink tents are on the right because the ink tents has been my go-to for bright intense color and now that I have a bunch of these Karen Dash ones I wanted to see what the difference is and again you can go to my blog to get color charts to just see them you can scroll down the page and see as a grouping which brand catches your eye the most for the kind of look that you want some people may want a really soft watercolor look other people might want a more intense look and it's entirely up to what you're looking for in the products you're purchasing so with these I found that for the most part they are equal in terms of intensity of color and that's what I was looking for here I did do a little scrubbing to try to make some of them water down a little bit because I was working fast and my technique wasn't great but I was looking for the color test and the intensity test not as much the breakdown so on the left is the museum aquarelle on the right the ink tents and yeah I like both I'm going to continue to be using both and here are a couple videos with the ink tents and then in the center is an art grip video with the art grip aquarelles so you can watch any of those to see those pencils in action and go to my blog to get all the color charts and see what you might be most interested in be sure to subscribe for more videos and I will see you next time have an awesome day and go out and make something beautiful bye