The yellows to orange are the fewest in number and the least impressive with a few colors that are pretty darned close to each other. They make a complete range of pinks and magentas plus a beautiful selection of reds with no overlaps or missing values. Normally pencil companies try to impress you with a ton of blues. Holbein keeps their blue family smaller than usual (they gave that space to the greens!) but I don’t see any missing blues. The blues they offer are all unique tones and values. A nice selection of periwinkles too!

This is a set of 100 Holbein Artists’ Coloured Pencils which come contained in a durable cardboard box with lift-out trays. The sets are quite large so you will have a lot of colors to choose from. This is particularly true in brighter colors such as yellows and purples. There is also an abundant supply of specialty colors such as Easter greens and pinks. While we don’t find a need for many of these colors in a typical art piece, they may be perfect for you. Anyway, it sounds like Holbein was forced to reformulate one or more pencil cores before they could export to the United States… Holbein, like every other pencil in the world has some wax in it and some oil in it. They’re soft which means they’ve got more wax than oil. Holbein have quite an extensive range in this collection which is always beneficial to the colored pencil artist. The largest set available is 150, however, there are also three sets of 12, each set offering a different color palette. Next is the 24 set, 36 set, 50 set, 100 set and of course the 150 set. With the 100 set, there are two versions available, the original cardboard and then a wooden gift box set, this is also the case for the largest of the sets, the 150. Holbein PerformanceHolbein pigment tends to sit high on the surface of the paper and it doesn’t seem to settle and sink into the tooth the way Prismacolor, Lightfast, and Luminance do. Because of this, it’s essential that you seal your Holbein work with good quality fixative when you’re finished. Holbein offers 2 whites, one “White” and one “Soft White”. Soft white does not mean beige. The Soft White core is physically softer and soapier in feel, similar to Derwent’s Chinese White Drawing Pencil. Holbein white is dense with a hint of translucency like Prismacolor White. I strongly recommend all four white pencils mentioned in this paragraph. It is the colored pencil that the lead kneaded with pigment, wax, fats and oils, etc. is dried and put in the thin central canal of an axial pencil frame of wood. Holbein offers about 18 browns and beiges which run from warm red browns to cool chocolate umbers. A nice selection. Holbein Artists' Pencils are a range of soft and vivid artists' coloured pencils from leading art material manufacturer Holbein.

And fat? Fat is oil. Fat tends to mean an animal by-product but folks, so is petrolium. Crude oil is really, really, really old fat. In terms of Lightfastness, 11 out of 36 are Lightfast I, 7 are Lightfast II, and the remaining 22 are rated below museum grade at Lightfast III through V. I highly recommend Holbein for portrait artists. With the large range of browns, pinks, pale blue-violets, and celadon greens, they give you everything you need for realistic skin and skin underpainting for any ethnicity. These are extremely expensive pencils. There isn’t any other way to put it. However, the high price comes in part due to the unique and exotic cores that you really can’t find with many other pencil brands. Also, other premium brands that cost quite a bit offer smaller sets for those who want to try them out without paying a huge asking price but Holbein doesn’t offer this.

So while Holbein twiddled their thumbs and ignored the US market, I kept quiet about my secret love. I’ve honestly never found the ideal substrate (paper) to use with Holbeins. I use light pressure and prefer to layer, I don’t burnish. With Holbein, I often end up filling in specific toothy spots that have been missed. This is something that rarely happens to me with other brands. The Dagwood project here was colored on Vellum Bristol (Strathmore 500 series) and it’s toothier than I envisioned. Holbein tend to shed core debris as you use them. Use glassine paper below your hand and dust the paper frequently to keep the margins clean. Also, as mentioned above, they don’t do a very good job of blending, and more than a couple of layers on top of each other result in a bit of a mess. While this is an obvious tradeoff that you have to have when it comes to softer leads, there are better options out there for those who enjoy blending.