Cherries with Koh-i-Nor Tri-Tone Colored Pencils

Life has started spinning even faster lately and I totally forgot to post the cherries I did with the Koh-i-Nor Tri-Tone colored pencils!

So, without further ado, here it is:

These cherries were painted on DuraLar Matte, a translucent synthetic film which has a matte surface on both sides.  I like to use the DuraLar for colored pencils as you can use both sides of the support which makes for a sort of 3-D effect or, at the very least, gives you more surface to layer colors.

However, I just used one side for these cherries because I couldn't seem to get any color strength and got tired of trying.  This painting does show the different tones/colors you can get with these pencils better than the other supports I've tried.

I think I would really like these if they were a bit heavier on the pigment content.

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.