As you can see from the images below, when I am testing the core of all colored pencils, I apply one light layer, followed by approximately five light layers building up to one over all beautiful coverage and then finally I apply one heavy application. The vibrancy of the colors was certainly not to the same high standard that we all know and love the Premier pencils to be, never the less, when medium to heavy pressure was applied, a decent coverage was produced. Incidentally the Col-Erase are a wax based pencil, but not as soft and creamy as the Premier. When laying down the color it was really difficult to tell if they were wax or oil based, the Col-Erase were neither soft and creamy or hard, but at the same time you could tell that they were not your average dollar store colored pencils. I will say this however, the Col-Erase faired much better than the Premier pencils, although the wood casing seemed to be the main problem in the Col-Erase, none of the cores shattered completely or fell out of the barrel like they did with my Prismacolor Premiers. You can see from the images I took, that the sharpening of the pencils was not a smooth process. When I finally had the pencils sharpened, the snagging of the wood barrel and splitting of the wood was evident in the cores with little nicks of the cores chipped off.

I tried a few of my sharpeners to make sure it was not just a blunt blade, but to no avail. There is a chance, that I may have just picked up a faulty batch, never the less, there was resistance and splitting of the wood in every pencil. When sharpening the pencils, I could immediately tell that the wood casing was of a lower grade than most pencils in the student or artists category. The first thing I noticed when opening the Col-Erase packet was that none of the pencils had been sharpened, which I actually feel is a good thing as I personally feel this is a safer and more protective mode for the pencils to be in during transit, protecting the core from knocks and bangs. don't get me wrong, I have mentioned this on many occasions I absolutely love the Prismacolor Premier pencils, their creamy core is to die for, however, the quality control issues are just too prominent and frustrating. The performance of the Col-Erase was a big deal for me, purely based on the terrible experience I had with the Prismacolor Premier pencils. The color palette is very basic, which is what you would expect from a set containing only 24 colors, so the next big question would be how they perform? Perhaps their performance can help one over look the small palette, allowing for a reasonable blending experience, bearing in mind however that we are dealing with colored pencils here and not watercolor, there is only so much you can do with regards to blending.

Col erase pencils