The choice that matters most is not the brand. It is whether the pencil is wax-based, oil-based or water-soluble. Those three behave differently under your hand, and picking the wrong one is the usual reason a set feels disappointing.
Everything else — the number of colors, the tin, the price — follows from that first decision. Here is how the three types differ, which established ranges belong to each, and what to check before you spend real money on a set.
What is actually inside a colored pencil
The core is pigment held together by a binder and pressed into a wooden casing. The binder is the whole story. A soft, waxy binder lays color down quickly and blends like butter. A firmer, oil-based binder holds a sharp point and gives you finer control. A gum binder dissolves in water and turns the pencil into a watercolor.
Artist-grade pencils are not a modern idea. Faber-Castell introduced the Polychromos range in 1908, and the name comes from the Greek for many colors. What has changed since is the pigment quality and the lightfastness testing behind it.
Wax-based pencils
Wax-based cores are soft and creamy. They cover paper fast, blend into each other with very little effort, and are forgiving if you are still learning how much pressure to use. Most of the sets sold in general stores are wax-based, and so is the range most colored pencil artists start on.
colored drawing pens sit alongside those, and the choice between them comes down to how much control you want over pressure.
Prismacolor Premier Soft Core is the reference point here: 150 colors, a 3.8mm soft wax core, widely stocked and sold as open stock so you can replace a single color. It blends beautifully. The cost is that it does not hold a point, so you will sharpen constantly, and a dropped pencil can crack its core along the length of the barrel without showing any damage outside.
The other thing to know about wax is wax bloom. Over days or weeks, wax can migrate to the surface of heavily layered work and leave a faint pale haze over the color. It is not damage. A soft cloth lifts it, and a spray fixative prevents it coming back. It shows up most on dark colors built in thick layers.
Oil-based pencils
Oil-based cores are firmer. They lay color down more slowly, but they keep a sharp point far longer, which is what you want for fine detail, and they do not bloom.
Faber-Castell Polychromos is the best known: 120 colors, a vegetable-oil binder, and a lightfastness rating printed on every barrel as a star mark, which is a genuinely useful thing to have in front of you. Faber-Castell rates 102 of the 120 at its highest lightfastness grade.
Caran d'Ache Luminance 6901 sits at the top of the market. Caran d'Ache describes it as mainly oil-based with a small proportion of wax, so it behaves more softly than a strict oil pencil while still resisting bloom, and its lightfastness is among the best available. It is also among the most expensive pencils you can buy, which makes it a poor first set and an excellent eventual one.
Blick Studio Artists' Colored Pencils are worth knowing about as the middle ground. Blick developed them with feedback from the Colored Pencil Society of America, there are 91 colors in the line, and they cost considerably less than the European artist ranges.
Water-soluble pencils
Water-soluble pencils, usually called watercolor pencils, use a gum binder that dissolves when a wet brush touches it. Used dry they behave much like an ordinary colored pencil. Add water and the strokes soften into a wash.
Caran d'Ache Supracolor Soft Aquarelle is the established artist range: 120 colors, a 3.8mm core, hexagonal barrels that do not roll off a table. Caran d'Ache Museum Aquarelle is the more lightfast and more expensive water-soluble line.
They are harder to control than they look. Water spreads pigment past the line you drew, and paper that is too thin will buckle. If you want to try them, work on paper made for watercolor rather than sketch paper, and add water sparingly. Our note on watercolor on printer paper covers why the paper matters as much as the pigment.
Pastel pencils
Pastel pencils are a different medium wearing the same shape. The core is compressed pastel, slightly hardened so it does not crumble, wrapped in wood so you can sharpen it. They are opaque where colored pencils are semi-transparent, and they are dusty. Artists use them alongside pastel sticks for detail work rather than as a substitute for colored pencils, and how the rest of that family behaves is in our guide to working with pastels.
Student grade or artist grade
The difference is pigment load. Artist-grade pencils carry more pigment and less filler, which is why the color looks saturated rather than chalky, and why it holds up to layering instead of going waxy after two passes. They are also usually rated and sold for lightfastness, and sold individually so you can replace the colors you actually wear out.
Student sets are not a mistake. If you are finding out whether you enjoy this, a good student set answers that question for a fraction of the price. Crayola, Arteza, Tombow and Staedtler all make competent ones. Just do not judge the medium by them.
What to check before you buy
- Is the core centered in the wood? Look at the unsharpened end. An off-center core sharpens unevenly and breaks more often.
- Is the barrel straight and undamaged? Roll it on a flat surface. Cracks or chips in the casing usually mean the core inside is broken too.
- Is lightfastness published? Any serious range prints or publishes a rating. If nobody will tell you, assume the color will fade in a sunny room.
- Is it sold as open stock? You will use three or four colors far faster than the rest. Being able to buy them singly matters more than the size of the original tin.
- How many colors do you actually need? A well-chosen 36 or 48 covers most work. Very large sets are mostly convenience, not capability.
Getting more out of the set you have
Colored pencils are layered, not mixed. You cannot blend two colors in a pan before they touch the paper the way you can with paint. Instead you lay one lightly over another and let the eye combine them, which is why a light touch and several passes beat one heavy pass almost every time. Knowing which pairs combine cleanly and which turn gray is worth ten minutes with the color wheel.
Paper matters more than most people expect. On a smooth surface the pigment sits flat and looks solid. On textured paper it catches on the raised grain and leaves the valleys showing, which is what gives colored pencil work its characteristic glow.
Make a color chart the day the set arrives. Swatch each pencil and write its number beside it, because the color on the barrel and the color on the paper are rarely the same, and the printed name will not help you at all.
A short answer
If you want one recommendation rather than a list: start with a wax-based artist set for the blending, add an oil-based range later for the detail, and buy the two or three colors you exhaust as singles. That is the path most colored pencil artists end up on anyway.
And if what appeals to you about coloring is the structure — knowing what goes where, and being able to switch your mind off while your hands work — that is exactly what a paint by numbers kit gives you, with the drawing already done. Our beginner's guide covers what a first canvas is like.
