Review on Caran Museum Aquarelle Colours 3510 312 by Angela Rodriguez

These pencils are not made from "bad" materials. They dissolve completely in water and the colors are bright. I love watercolors and am a huge pigment snob so I liked them. I only gave them three stars for two specific reasons. (1) Performance: After doing color swatches and a few sketches, I didn't find the Caran d'Ache to be brighter or perform noticeably different than its competitor. I already have a good set of Faber Castell Albrecht Dürer watercolor pencils. Since Faber is half the price, I expected more intensity, better blending, smoother sharpening, or smoother styling. Some. That's good, but they're no different than Faber's Polychromos Luminance range. Don't get me wrong if you currently use student watercolor pencils or even some professional brands like Cretacolor Monolith and they and Fabers are amazingly better than what you're used to (brighter, blend better, lines completely disappear with water). ). (2) Durability: While they haven't behaved any differently, I still appreciate their great archival quality and would be willing to pay more if every pencil in this tiny set was truly premium. Speed of Light. Considered the most lightfast watercolor pencils in the industry, they are rated on the same scale as traditional mediums (oil, watercolor, etc.) rather than the less stringent lightfastness system of colored pencils. The pencil body has a lightfastness rating. Both properties are great! However, in the $53 twelve-color set, Caran d'Ache chose to include their blue color with a lightfastness rating of 3 out of 5 (deep ultramarine). Every second Blue in their line has the highest rating! Whilst this is normal for any brand across a wide range of colours, including inferior archival colors in this small, expensive first set of a product that bills itself as a 'museum', the quality was extremely disappointing. Otherwise, the color palette isn't bad - warm and cool primary colors, two shades of green, two neutral shades, one gray color and black. It's pretty easy to mix secondary colors with watercolor pencils, so I can leave out the orange and purple so I can use neutrals and dark colors to more easily mute chroma and darken values. I appreciate their working qualities and light resistance of the fishing line, but the price is prohibitive. I'll continue to work with them and update if I change my mind, but I'll probably stick with my fabers and watercolors. I am currently spraying the originals with a UV blocking fixer and placing them under UV glass as a warning to the buyer not to expose them to direct sunlight like all artwork. All I need for my prints is a high-quality photo. A solid product but not as exemplary in quality as their Luminance line to justify their cost.