Derwent has recently released much-awaited additional colours for its Drawing Drawing pencil range. If you haven’t already tried these pencils, they’re beautifully soft and wide-core coloured pencils that are an absolute joy to use. Although the original 24 set of colours is beautiful, it did lack in some colours, so I was delighted to be able to select from the additional 48 colours now on offer – yes, they’ve extended the range to 72! I’ve used the palettes I previously created from Port e Vullen to help me work out which colours I need and found a very convenient way to order them from the Derwent website. Read on to find out more.
The original 24 colour set of Derwent Drawing Pencils is unusual in that it contains a very natural and muted colour range – quite different from the colours that are usually found in coloured pencil sets. I’ve had this set for a while and although I love the colours, I find there are some frustrating gaps in the selection.
Here are swatches of the original set of 24:
As you can see, they’re a very natural and muted set of colours, quite unlike the range of colours in most pencil sets.
Every artist on YouTube seems to love these pencils and I can see why. The Chinese White is legendary as one of the best white pencils on the market. I carry it around in my Caran d’Ache Luminance pencil set as its even better than the Luminance one in my opinion for layering ability and opacity.
The Derwent Drawing pencils have a very wide core (the coloured bit) and so lay down broad strokes that are great for quick coverage and bold sketches. The pencils are well pigmented and quite soft but with enough grip to feel fantastic as you use them.
The only issue with them is the lack of colours.
The greens are beautiful, but very similar, the greys are all warm (even the Cool Grey is too warm for me) and although you could use the Solway Blue as a cool grey, it’s a little too blue. The blues are all green leaning too and there’s no proper yellow.
It’s therefore no surprise that people are ecstatic that Derwent have not only added some colours, but they’ve actually tripled the range! We now have an extra 48 colours to choose from and with a birthday coming up soon(ish) I thought I’d order some for my husband to give me.
As I was planning on making some sketches of my Port e Vullen pictures (from the last blog post) anyway, I thought they would be the perfect test to see which colours I really missed when trying to use the set of 24.
For each of the colours taken from the photos of Port e Vullen, I tried to get the best matches from the Derwent Drawing set of 24. I also had a go at sketching the first two photos to see how more of the colours worked together in a sketch.
You can see in the sketches how I really missed the contrast colours that would have provided a focal point to the sketch. In the one on the left, I could not achieve the yellow of the lichen and on the right, the green lichen just would not stand out and got completely lost in the greys.
The trials showed how fantastically natural the colours in the range are, but the desperate need for a wider range of greys and blues. I actually grimaced every time I used the Cool Grey as it was such a warm tone. The warm grey is a soft brown colour and not what I would normally call a grey. With so many slate tones to match in these pictures they just weren’t up to the job.
I also realised that although Mars Violet is included, there are no purples or lilac colours and I would sometimes need a brighter green than those included in the set.
From the chart below, you can see the new range of Derwent Drawing Pencil colours really gives me a great choice of colours to solve these problems.
Some of the colours are already familiar to me as they’re shared with the Derwent Lightfast range. Speaking of which, you can see that the lightfast rating of these pencils ranges from 5 – 8 on the Blue Wool Scale (5 & 6 being good lightfastness and 7 & 8 being very good and excellent, respectively).
If you’d like to see a really useful swatching video of the whole range, Natasha Newton has one on her Youtube channel and she’s made scans of the swatch sheets available in the free tier of her Patreon subscriptions. She also mentions in the video that the Derwent online shop allows you to ‘build your own tin’ of pencils of your choosing from any across their ranges. They also give you a bigger discount on the pencils, the more you buy, as the tins are available in 6, 12 or 24 pencil sizes.
This is great fun and the perfect way for me to buy my additional pencils, so I set about choosing 24 of the ones I’d most need from the 48 I don’t already own. Here are my choices:
Sunflower, Autumn Leaf, Autumn Red, Bistre, Burnt Rose, Grape, Heather, Violet Dusk, Delft Blue, Royal Blue, Polar Ice, Deep Atlantic, Spruce Green, Distant Green, Fresh Green, Light Moss, Sage Leaf, Dark Brown, Forest, Mist, Platinum, Carbon Grey, Granite, Taupe.
A couple of my first choices were sold out but there was always a close alternative available and I know that these colours will make life so much easier when sketching with these pencils. As I’m getting them as a birthday present in early December, I won’t be trying them out for a little while, but it looks like delivery will be quick as I ordered them late last night and they were dispatched early this afternoon.
I also ordered a couple more colours from the Lightfast range in a tin of 6 to push my order over the £50 free delivery threshold and I got a 20% discount by using a code from The Art Gear Guide, which can be applied to orders up to the end of December on anything from the Derwent shop.
I really enjoyed sketching with these pencils and the broad core helps me to be more expressive and free when mark-making, which is something I’m really working on at the moment. I can’t wait for my birthday and to test out the new colours!
Until next time,
Emma
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