Well, I thought that I’d talk about trying out some old Caran D’Ache Prismalo watercolour pencils today. My parents found these whilst clearing out some old stuff and I have literally no clue when they were made but, if I had to guess, I’d probably say that they were from the 1970s-90s.
Not a clue when these were made, but – from the style of the tin – I’d guess the 1970s-90s. But, are they any good? And, no, I’m not sure why the word “English” has been scratched into the case.
If you don’t know what watercolour (or “Aquarelle”) pencils are, they’re like ordinary colouring pencils but with a cool twist. If you go over them with a wet paintbrush, they turn into watercolour paint Yes, you have to use watercolour paper with these pencils and – if you want to add line art before paint – waterproof ink rollerball or fine-liner pens, but they’re really cool and I’ve been using them since late 2013.
Anyway, early on New Year’s Eve last year, I had a vaguely “dark academia”-style daydream about a cool gothic college/university. About a different parallel version of me who got to go there instead of the college/university I actually went to during the 2000s.
This daydream was amazing but, although I wanted to make some personal art about it in my art diary/ fan art sketchbook, I didn’t have the time that morning. So, I quickly wrote down a description instead.
Later, I realised that I should probably make some original “public” art and write a blog article before making some personal art based on the daydream. To save time, I decided to stick with the theme of the daydream but do something different with it.
I went with a more stylised “librarian” character, added some stone architecture and more atmospheric lighting. And, if I tried out the old watercolour pencils, I could also get a blog article out of it too. Here’s a cropped – but otherwise un-edited – scan of the original painting (since the colours usually change during digital editing). The finished version should hopefully be posted here in late April next year:
Here’s a full-size un-edited (aside from cropping) preview of the painting that I made using these old pencils. The finished version should appear here on the 26th April 2025.
One of the first things I will say about the pencils is that the colour range in the tin was slightly more limited than I expected. I mean, you’ve got the main colours but I quickly ran into some issues – such as the lack of a pale brown pencil or a peach/pink pencil for pale skin tones. Luckily, I was able to get around the latter by using the red pencil very lightly in order to create a pink skin tone. The tin also contains a white pencil, which can probably be used to adjust the other colours – although when I tried this after messing up some of the red lighting in the background, I found that it was easier to just use an eraser.
Because of these limitations, I decided to lean into it and use a limited palette – mostly consisting of red, light/dark blue, grey, white, black and brown. I didn’t get to try out all of the pencils but I still managed to do a lot within the limitations. Interestingly, whilst the grey pencil was a relatively pale shade of grey, the black pencil thankfully wasn’t too intense. This allowed me to use it lightly to add shading in a similar way to a water-soluble graphite pencil.
As for the colours, they were reasonably decent. Possibly a bit “lighter” than I expected, since I had to use a bit more pressure to get bolder colours but – as I mentioned about the black pencil earlier – this isn’t an entirely bad thing, since it gives you more control over the colour values. These vintage Prismalo pencils aren’t the very best watercolour pencils I’ve ever tried, but they are also far from the worst too. Still, it’s cool that watercolour pencils are one of those art mediums that can easily stand up to decades of disuse and still work perfectly afterwards
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got fun daydream art to make….
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting