Christmas Gift Art Challenge 1 - Faber-Castell Polychromos 36 Coloured Pencils

For Christmas 2020, I received the best ever gifts from my wonderful family. I was really like a kid given an armful of candy, only better as these won't rot your teeth 😁 Plus the note from my son made my day (the "6-pack boy" sign-off is an inside joke - he's currently serving his National Service so this is a goal he's yet to reach).

To do the gifts justice, I thought I would give myself the challenge of creating an artwork using each of the art supplies. First up, the Faber-Castell Polychromos coloured pencils. These are not new to me, I already have a few Polychromos that I bought singly, but this is my first set. It's a 36-pencil set and to me, there are few things as gorgeous as a brand new set of perfectly sharpened coloured pencils.

I have a 36-coloured pencil set of Derwent Lightfast and quite to my delight, I found that this Polychromos set is an ideal complement to that one. The Lightfast set is much more muted - rich in browns and earth tones but there are big gaps - the yellow/orange/red range is severely lacking (there isn't a single orange!) and all the greens are dark. The Polychromos set, in contrast, is bright and doesn't have any dark green, only light and mid-tone greens, plus a reasonable number of yellow and oranges. Perfect!

I picked a photo reference with lots of bright colours, so I could use as many Polychromos pencils as possible, and decided on a parrot.

I drew this on Clairefontaine Paint On Naturel paper. This is a mixed media paper that's supposed to be able to take wet media as well.

It feels a lot like Strathmore Mixed Media paper - both are thick cards (Paint On is 250gsm while Strathmore is 300gsm) that come with lovely shades and have a smooth surface. If I had to choose, I would pick Paint On as I seem to be able to layer coloured pencils slightly better. The Strathmore becomes slick pretty quickly. Paint On is also cheaper in Singapore - for around the same price, I get 30 sheets with Paint On vs only 15 sheets for Strathmore.

When drawing the parrot, I used a layer of PanPastels underneath as I wanted to see how coloured pencils would work over it. I regretted doing this because I struggled to get the Polychromos light colours to draw over it. I'm not sure if it's because of the paper or it's just because Polychromos is very translucent in nature, but the light yellows and greens simply could not go on top of the PanPastels. The Polychromos white is especially useless. In future, I wouldn't use a PanPastel underpainting for coloured pencils, unless I'm using a sanded paper like Pastelmat.

This is the final drawing. Considering how the lights wouldn't go on well, the Polychromos hues came out extremely pigmented, which I'm very pleased with. The Polychromos is good for those who like piling on many light layers of coloured pencil (which unfortunately isn't me as I have a rather heavy hand) but I absolutely love the details I can get with the sharp points and it's a wonderful complement to my Derwent Lightfast and other loose coloured pencils. It's a harder pencil than other high end oil-based pencils, but still manages to feel creamy to the touch, not scratchy (I wrote a comparison among Polychromos, Derwent Lightfast and Caran d'Ache Luminance). Truly a quality product.

Check out part 2 of my Christmas gift creation using the Faber-Castell Pitt Pastel Pencils!