Hi there, I'm Sandy Onock, artist and papercrafter 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. It's a not super experience 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 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 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 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 inexpensive in general for just like 1-2 z's 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, two 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. 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 sets in Dream 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 Prism color only have 12 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 Brunzeal, this was a weird thing. They're an overseas company and when they sent me my pack of aquarels, I got that red one in there. I thought it was a watercolor, but it says just color on it on it. So that's why it didn't break down. They sent me a regular 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 Durwent watercolor as opposed to Durwent ink tents. They do have both and I've talked to some people who accidentally bought the wrong one. They were going for the ink tents 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 Durwent 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. They all brick doer 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 Cretacolor 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 that 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 Aqua reels from Kansen from Karen Dash at the bottom are the most expensive. So again, the obrachtors work really great. I do love the sets 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 Aqua reels 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 four bright intense color. And now that I have the 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 watercolory 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 that break down. So on the left is the museum Aquarell 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 this center is an art grip video with the art grip Aquarell. 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 bye.