Thursday, June 16, 2016

Koh-i-Nor Tri-Tone Colored Pencils





I'd promised that I'd try the Koh-i-Nor tri-tone colored pencils on various supports and this is the latest.  It's small but I get bored with working with colored pencil easily.  Because of that, I wanted to use my time to the best advantage to fully cover and burnish the painting.  I really dislike the speckles that you get with certain papers like this one.  It's Tizano Drawing Paper and has a definite texture. 

I worked diligently on this to use enough cp to cover the speckles and tried hard to get the smooth, almost oily, finish that artist quality colored pencils give.

All but the background was done in the Tri-Tones.  I worked on the flower and leaves/stem for several days and could not get some areas dark enough even with optically mixing several dark colors.  I also couldn't get the coverage I desired.  It was fortunate that I'd used a yellow paper otherwise, I don't think the petals would look as covered as they do.

The background was done with a cp I already had.  I think it was a Lyra but am not sure as it was sharpened below the name.  Even though I spent way less time on the background, I think the results are much better compared to the flower.  Sure, I got bored and left some speckles, but overall, coverage was much better with the artist quality pencil.

Would I recommend the Koh-i-Nor's?  Probably not.  I didn't see any really advantage to the tri-toned lead and it seemed to be more of a gimmick than a positive enhancement.  I think the pencils must be student quality also as they lacked the coverage of my artist quality pencils.

I have to say that I only bought the tin of 12 pencils and that may not be enough to really judge. All in all, if you have some extra cash laying around, you might want to play with these but they feel like a waste of money for this art supply junkie.

1 comment:

Sue Clinker said...

Interesting to see your review/comments on these pencils Jan. I've not tried them myself but often find that a pencil brand I don't particularly like, works well when used on different supports - At the moment I'm hooked on Faber Castell Polychromos but as I have hundreds of pencils from 6 or 7 manufacturers I try to incorporate them all into my work.