Review of Cezanne Colored pencils

Hi friends, today we are going to take a look at the new 120 set of Cezanne colored pencils available from Creative Mark. These pencils are also available in a set of 72.

Overview: These are touted as a lightfast brand of artist quality blendable wax-based set if pencils that can hold up to other more expensive brands. Today we will put these pencils to the test on a variety of surfaces from watercolor paper, to sanded paper to a coloring book page and standard drawing paper.

Pros:

• Price (around 50 cents a pencil)

• Blendable

• Performs well on all surfaces tested but better on more textured surfaces as it allows for more pigment saturation.

• Sharpens well to a strong point. (I only had one issue with breakage with a handheld sharpener and it is in the video, that pencil sharpened well in an electric tho) It also sharpens well with a blade.

• Nice selection of colors although many pencils in the 120 set are “samey”

• Colors layer well

• The tin is nice and the trays are sturdier than most.

• Very little glare or wax bloom even when burnishing.

Cons:

• Not available open stock

• Several leads not centered making it wasteful when sharpening with a pencil sharpener so a knife was needed to sharpen those.

• The white is weak, better as a blender than a white

Paper I tested these pencils on:

• Strawberry: 140# CP watercolor paper

• Drawing paper (poppy stamped images, see photo above)

• Goldfinch: Toned watercolor paper

• Coloring book

• Sanded pastel paper (Blue jay)

• *on the sanded paper I used Colored pencil powder blender, Texture fixative, touch up texture and titanium white from Brush & Pencil.

I will have upcoming videos for the bird artworks.

Bottom line, the more I used the Cezanne pencils the more I like them. I think they are a good value for your money but not as pigmented as Polychromos or Prismacolor. I recommend adding a Prismacolor white to this set for maximum versatility. These pencils felt more like an oil-based pencil (more like Polychromos than Prismacolor) than wax and they worked very well on sanded paper with the powder blender technique. I plan to use that a lot with these pencils as they are much cheaper than Polychromos for practice. I got much nicer results with rougher paper and had a bit of difficulty getting the color saturation I wanted on the smooth coloring book page but the smooth drawing paper with just a bit more tooth worked well. I recommend these for non-permanent work because even though the tin say these pencils have good lightfastness there are no ratings on the pencils.

I hope you found this review useful and til next time happy crafting!