Best brand color pencils and markers?

For me I use Crayola, Laureintin, or Prang brand names for pnecil crayons, crayons, markers, and water colour pencils.

December Fairy said:

Are there brands that are better than others?
I want something that will be bright looking rather than dull.

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i go to an art college and everyone makes a big deal about prismacolors and everything, but honestly i think its just because theyre not childrens markers, i think its just because theyre "artist's" markers.

personally, id take crayola markers over prismacolors any day. they come in just as many colors. generally you can get the fat markers in 10 colors but you can get a 100 pack of the skinny markers and its a wide variety of colors. the only thing is you cant buy just one marker like you can with prismacolors.

although prismacolor colored pencils ARE better than crayola, they have more pigment and less filler wax, so the colors are generally more vivid.

mythos said:

I haven't heard of most of these pencils. mythos counts her non-existent pennies. My next deck will be pencil. I'm a Derwent's girl. It's a childhood thing. To have a full set of Derwent's, when I was a kid (in 1950's Melbourne Australia) was to have made it. And, in the 1990's, I discovered Derwent pastel pencils, which you can use wet or dry. They are a right 'expletive' to sharpen without the pastel breaking, but they are lovely.

mythos

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I'm an artist, Australian. I'm not a fan of derwents AT ALL because the colours are just too chalky. I asked them about it and they said their customers liked them because they were blendable. I think they have some new products with better colours. I use Faber-Castell Albrecht Durer watercolour pencils a lot - really excellent pigments - I think they are far, far better than Derwents (not the red box in the newsagent - its a dark green tin) and have a small set of Prismacolors. Prismacolors are available at any half-decent art shop and you can buy them in sets or individually if you want to test them out. Good rich colors, I like them. The trick is to use decent toothy paper, such as Stonehenge, which will allow you to layer the colour thickly. You keep the pencil sharp, not blunt, so that the pigment gets right into the paper. Regular sketch paper has longish, coarse fibers that give a rough texture but not much 'tooth' - the fine fibers that stick up and hang onto the pigment - so you get coarse shading but can't really layer. The fibers in a rag paper like Stonehenge are stronger and take more abuse. Hot-pressed lightly-sized watercolor paper (such as Arches Aquarelle) also works well.

Also get a 'colourless blender' pencil - its basically a waxy pencil - that you can use to put on the paper first if you need to minimise colour adhesion, so that you can do a really light shade, or over the top to blend two colours together.

Re brand snobbishness - while I can't really comment about markers, with pencils you get what you pay for.

Edited to add: you can also layer coloured pencils over a watercolour wash to really pump up the colour, though you'll need to use watercolour paper if you want to do that. At any rate, see if you can get a good artist's paper to use to print your deck onto, a standard photo paper will be too smooth. A nice Velour paper might be worth a try (haven't tested one myself yet, not sure how robust the surface is)

Prismacolor girl here!

I've been using them for years and my artwork has slowly gotten as good as the pencils are They have such a rich, buttery laydown and the color range is vast and vibrant. I especially like the three different grays (warm, cool, and French gray) with a number of precise percentages for all of them. It's probably a little perverse of me to work in grayscale when I'm using colored pencils, but it is a nifty little corner of the craft. It frees me up when I'm overwhelmed by all the colors and infinite layering and blending possibilities.