Cretacolor Karmina

Cretacolor Karmina

The pencil

The pencil has a hexagon shape. The color of the pencil is marked on the end of the pencil. I appreciate how easy it is to read the text on the pencil; and it is not written in gold or silver, but in matte black, which makes it even easier to read.

Characteristic

As most colored pencils, this is wax-based pencil. They are very transparent; so this is not the best choice of pencil for colored papers, even though there are exceptions (ultramarine is quite opaque, something ultramarine is not know for).

                       As all harder pencils Karmina last longer and can be sharpen to a fine point. The hardness is most obvious the first layers, but will feel softer after a couple of layers. Some colors (especially noticeable in magenta) feels scratchy and are therefore difficult to use.  

All the same hue

They only offers 36 colors, which could be enough since you can layer them and create new colors, but it is always convenient to have a little more to choose between. However, it not all about many colors, it is more important what colors you have. In this limited range I find it strange how many colors seems unnecessary. They have only three earth colors: chestnut, umber and ochre dark (and maybe you can count ochre light as a earth color, even though I think it looks a bit to yellow). The Cadmium citron and Naples yellow are very close in hue, saturation and value and the Emerald and Moss green dark are very close too. 

Lightfastness

They claim to be lightfast (approved by ASTM) but according to CPSA they have a lot of colors that are really bad. 24 colors have a high lightfastness but 12 are inferior. Not so impressive in such a small set.

Cretacolor Karmina color chart