Drawing with Prismacolor Premier

I'm going to do a brief review of the 72 set of Prismacolor Premier colored pencils. I must say before hand that I am no expert and that I don't consider myself an artist. However, I do want to share my experience and sensations using these pencils.

This is not the first time I use Prismacolor pencils, but it is the first time that I have used them intensively.

As you can see in the above picture, there are already some pencils shorter than the others. For the most part, this is due to use, although in the case of the cream and white colors I have had trouble sharpening them, as they broke several times. I bought this set in Aliexpress, since the price it has in this site is lower than in other places, and I didn't had the chance to buy them in person. Some of the pencils had the whole barrel cracked when I got them, but I had read that this breaks on the barrel were common, so I didn't consider returning them.

This is the swatch I made of this 72 set. The paper used here, and in the drawing, is the Strathmore Toned Gray 4oo series. As you can see, the colors have no problem looking bright and even the grey tones differentiate themselves from the tone of the paper.

However, I have made another swatch on white paper to see how they look. The texture of the paper I used wasn't the ideal for this medium, but it's the only one I had available at the time of this review. Besides, the main point of this second swatch was to see the colors above white, rather than to see how they behave on it.

I made the mistake of not reorganizing my pencils based on color tones before starting this swatch, which I intended it to be organized based on tones (In the picture of the pencils they have already been reorganized).

As you can see, the tones differ slightly from one paper to another, being more bright on the toned gray paper than in the white one. Also, they felt way more smoother than on the white paper and allowed more coverage. However, none of these aspects has to do with the tone of the paper, rather than its texture and weight, which, as I said before, were not adequate for color pencils, and that's on me.

Regarding the drawing: I started coloring the skin (in the picture it already has two layers). The issue is that I tend to press too hard on the paper, so I had to be constantly checking myself to not ruining the grain, so I could keep adding more layers.

At some point, no matter how many layers I applied in different directions, or howe much I sharpened my pencils, I didn't manage to cover the tiny spaces from the grain of the paper, so I decided to use a blender pencil I bought some time ago, from Caran d'Ache.

I managed to blend "better" the upper lips, but overall I didn't enjoy this technique, or perhaps I didn't do it right, but in my opinion this pencil flattens the texture of the paper, so for me it was very difficult to actually blend the colors and add more layers after applying this blender.

Again, I guess I may have done it wrong, I'm not saying that this blending pencil is not good. I'm sure there are artist that can make good use of it with good results, but that just wasn't my case. I will keep using it for now in order to improve my use of it, but I'm open to look for and try other blending tools or methods.

The last part of the drawing consisted on adding highlights on the lips and on the lime. I am more or less content with the ones in the lips, although the ones on the lime didn't end out well. I didn't add the marks on the lips neither, since I didn't want to spoil the drawing even more, since at this point the drawing didn't accept more color and was starting to be a mess.

I must say that some Prismacolor pencils felt more creamy when applying them other form this same set, but again, I don't know if it's me or the pencils (I guess it's mee and that I'm overlooking something).

Overall, I'm pleased with the end result, since I wasn't able to do something like this a while ago, but I hope to keep learning and improving over time.