PANDAFLYProfessional Colored Charcoal Pencils Drawing Set, Skin Tone Colored Pencil, Pastel Chalk Pencils for Sketching, Shading, Coloring, Layering & Blending, 12 Colors

I had no idea they had charcoal in anything but black, white & brown. These were cheap but packaged well. Very professional looking. My 75 yr. old hubby just took up drawing a couple of years ago & he absolutely loves these.

I was leery about purchasing these because so many people complained about them breaking during sharpening. Yes, they are a hard fragile lead, but if you are careful sharpening they work just fine. I love the colors and brightness. I've used them on multiple shades of paper from white to toned, to black and they put down nice pigment. For this price, they are definitely worth the occasional broken lead. They do put off dust, they are erasable with a good eraser and they blend well. For me they are great for practice or just to get a quick sketch down. Note, if you use fixative, the charcoal fixative works better than pastel fixatives and the colors still hold up well. I'll definitely be buying these again.

Great quality and I have enjoyed using them as a beginner

Please be warned: DON'T sharpen these with an electric sharpener. In fact, don't sharpen any charcoal or soft pastel pencils with an electric. It can kill your sharpener. Yep, speaking from experience.The pencils themselves perform decently. As you can see in the first pic, they have good color payoff for the price. They are also water soluble, which I only recently learned that charcoal is water soluble, which was part of what sparked my interest in buying charcoal pencils. I also like that they smudge fairly well.The most difficult thing about these pencils is how hard they are to sharpen. I think getting a fine point will be impossible (maybe this is true for most charcoal/soft pastel pencils due to their crumbly nature). You'll see in the pics I got crummy points on even the "best" sharpened pencil, the red one. The worst was, obviously, the green one.A tip on sharpening: I tried four different sharpeners on these, the electric first, then three handheld ones. Oddly, a Revlon makeup pencil sharpener with two different sized holes worked the best. I think these makeup sharpeners are easy to find on Amazon or a drugstore for around $2. I'm researching sharpeners dedicated to charcoal given my new interest in this medium.I did try a standard double hole metal sharpener that proved useless with these pencils. The small hole was too small and the large too large.I do appreciate that the pencil names were printed at the very end of the pencil so they'll remain visible until the pencils are used up. However, I would've preferred the names be spelled out. Names like "WH" and "BK" are easy enough to figure out, but "BN" and "PUS" are too tricky for me.So, the jury's out on this one. Will post an update if I find they're not for me or if they're surprisingly good in action.Explanation of photos:1. swatch/blend/water solubility test on cold press watercolor paper2. blending test with two colors each - cold press watercolor paper3. poor sharpening test on green pencil4. sharpening test on red pencil (best I could achieve with sharpeners I own)5. swatch/smudge on Strathmore black mixed media paper6. swatch/smudge on Strathmore toned mixed media paper

I like making pictures with pastels. It is quicker, more expressionistic, more artsy, perhaps. But I hate using pastels, too. The clunkyiness of the shape, the brittleness of the piece, the extreme messiness, the maddening smearing that defaces my efforts. Yuck.I love these pencils. The colors are intense and beautiful. The pencil itself is more manageable and you can get a sharp point if you need it . It feels like you can make the art that you imagine more easily. They are still frustratingly smeary but such is the medium. I'm going to try putting the fixative on the completed sections before moving on to a new section. Regardless, they are far more user friendly.

For the price (and discounting things like lightfastness, as who knows?), these are great, and great fun. I've been eying a Carbothello set (a lot more expensive), and I picked these up to play with to see if I even want to use the medium. These feel and handle similar to the carbothello and to the Conte sanguine pencil (from one of their sets) that I have. They are not like the Derwent version, which is tinted charcoal and much more subtle in color until washed out.Be sure to look closely at the colors on offer. Some of the browns/reds are nearly identical, there's a lot of them, and the yellows are all ochre/earthy except for one lemon yellow that's so pale it's nearly white. At this price point, not that big of a deal, but it reduces the value (the 12 color Carbothello set is under $20). There's only one green and I did not have much luck with mixing more. Would have preferred some of the redundant earth browns and reds be swapped out for another gray or two, another green, and a brighter yellow that isn't so chalky.First, paper matters, a lot, less price so much as purpose. I was using Stonehenge White (the square wire pad), with a bit of texture but definitely not watercolor paper. These lay down like pastel or charcoal sticks but cleaner, and they smudge acceptably, but not like charcoal, not to a smooth blur (again, on this paper). On a scrap of cheap watercolor paper I was able to wash out with a brush into a smooth wash, while on the Stonehenge line marks remained, though I didn't scrub. I had no problem erasing (Tombow mono sand eraser) dry, smudged, or washed, though it erases like charcoal, it's not going to be perfectly white after.

The colours are great and the cores seem thick which means lots of pigment.The pencils do not arrive pre-sharpened. As I was sharpening the new pencils, the leads were breaking off into the sharpener in chunks. They were already broken inside the new pencil.This happened with several of the colours and wasted a lot of the product.

I start to sharpen them with a pencil sharpener, continue with a craft knife, it is easy to sharpen them this way. It is very pleasant to work with the pencils, easy to blend them.

When my package arrived I was so happy to finally have my charcoal leads ,problem was when they get sharpened they crack which makes them equivalent too dollar store material ! Very disappointing

These charcoal pencils come in a big range of 24 colours, are easy to sharpen and don't break off like the cheaper ones. Very happy with them

Produit selon mes attentes, intéressant pour tous les âges :-)

Lovely colours, great price, suitable to mix with other pastel pencils, They sharpen ok with a knife.