Tips for Colouring with Faber-Castell Polychromos Pencils (2024)

FAQs

How to color with Faber Castell Polychromos? ›

Drawing many lines alongside each other will create an area of colour, which can be intensified by repeatedly overlaying lines at different angles. Light colours are transparent, while dark colours provide coverage. Superimposing layers of colour increases the brilliance and vividness of the colours.

For detailed artist drawings, we recommend using a smooth paper, such as Bristol board, Strathmore toned pads, Hot Press Watercolour Paper or textured Pastelmat. Polychromos Pencils adhere to many rough surfaces too, such as wood, stone, leather and metal.

These colored pencil techniques cover the 5 main ways that you make marks with colored pencils: stippling, hatching, cross-hatching, back and forth stroke, and scumbling. You can see examples of these 5 techniques on the left!

The basic thing is to draw first, then use a brush and a little water (or a lot of water, depends on what you want). You can also wet the paper first, then draw on it.

Top-quality materials, combined with our long experience, ensure that Polychromos artists' colour pencils have extremely break-resistant leads, maximum light-fastness, the most vivid colours and optimal paintability, along with many other advantages valued by professional artists.

The pencils smudge. This smudging allows you to move the colour around a little bit but it also smudges my hand. This forces me to put a sheet of paper on the drawing on which I place my hand. Otherwise my hand smudges the paper.

Faber-Castell makes a professional brand of colored pencil called Faber-Castell Polychromos Pencils, which contain high-quality pigments and have a good lightfastness rating. It would be okay to use these with your Prismacolors, since they are both top quality colored pencils.

The Prismacolor drawing is a lot more vibrant, but is still significantly grainier than the Polychromos drawing. Another plus for Polychromos colored pencils is that they are oil-based. Prismacolors are wax-based, and sometimes a Prismacolor drawing will develop a thin, waxy film on the surface called wax bloom.

Sharpener #185710 is an excellent choice for Polychromos and Albrecht-Durer watercolor pencils - it is the correct angle and sharpness for our barrels.

Certain pencils are better for each preferred application, however, the Faber Castell Polychromos lends itself incredibly well to both methods, in fact, some would say that the Polychromos pigment performs better in layers but in my testing of the pencils I found they performed excellent in both.

What is the difference between Faber Castell Classic and Polychromos? ›

The Polychromos have less wax and more pigment. Classic color pencils or map colors are a base level pencil usually used in educational projects or something minor. The Polychromos are pretty much the highest end color pencils you can get. They are aimed toward artists and designers.

The Color Wheel Method

My favorite way to sort colored pencils is by arranging them in a color wheel. Here's how you can do it: Start with your reds and move through the spectrum in this order: oranges, yellows, greens, blues, and finally, purples. Within each color group, arrange the shades from lightest to darkest.

Solvent blending

Polychromos pencils can be used with paraffin oil (baby oil) or solvents such as mineral spirits or rubbing alcohol and used for painting.

Polychromos have very saturated colors, and have a harder “lead” which means they will last longer than let's say water soluble color pencils which are soft.