I have had the great opportunity to test out Arteza’s Expert Watercolor Pencils, and Arteza’s Premium Watercolor Pad. On first inspection the tin of 72 pencils has a very wide range of bright colours and natural colours and the Arteza Premium Watercolor Pad is thick and heaverly textured. It has a thickness of 300gsm but can still be used with a lightbox to trace out your image which is very useful. The Arteza Expert Watercolor Pencils are of normal diameter and therefore can fit into any sharpener. They sharpen well in my Jakar electric sharpener and have a strong sharp point that doesn’t break very easily when drawing.

Layer 1

After tracing out the image of a cat eye I started adding my base colours with the Arteza Expert Watercolor Pencils. On starting my test image I noticed that Expert Watercolor Pencils are very bright like the Expert Colour Pencils I have tested before. They have a bit of a crayon texture to them so it will be interesting how well they do with detail.

They are also very pigmented so not a lot is needed on the Arteza Premium Watercolor Pad in order to blend with water. The more you blend an area the more the more the color is removed so it is important not the touch the area too much where you want the color to be bold. These areas would be the pupil and around the eye where I want it to be as black as possible. Since only a little water is added the paint dries very quickly.

Layer 2

After my first layer had dried I started adding the darker tones. I really like the selection of colours in the Arteza Expert Watercolor Pencils tin but it might be more useful to have more pastel tones for very light areas. The Arteza Expert Watercolor Pencils layer really well over the top of each other and I’m not worried about filling in between the Arteza Premium Watercolor paper textures since the water will blend this out. I am also not trying to create any detail at this point since it will all be blended out by the water.

After adding the water again I can see my shadows and textures starting to build. With these pencils I have noticed it is really easy to add quite a few layers because the Arteza Premium Watercolor Pad is so think and the pencils are so pigmented. Like normal water colour paint you can dap paint off using a tissue when the area is wet, which is very useful when trying to create highlights and curvature of an eye.

Final Touches

I think the final stage to any good picture is to intensify the contrast, making the image more realistic. The Arteza Expert Watercolor Pencils are really good at drawing over one another and so I was able to add more darkness around the pupil and I lifted the paint in areas to create a lighter reflection. It’s really nice that I can keep going back to areas to add or take color. Also because these are pencils I can draw in little details and not blend them to create textures. In the second picture you can see the colours i used, before and after adding water.

Overall I really enjoyed using these Arteza Expert Watercolor Pencils because they were so bright and blended really well. I loved overlapping the Arteza Expert Watercolor Pencils and I thought the Arteza Premium Watercolor Pad was really good quality. You get a lot of paper for your money and I love the fact I can still use my lightbox to trace with it. I thought there was a good range of colours in the Arteza Expert Watercolor Pencils tin but I it did feel like I was missing lighter, pastel colors. You can make what you need by adding more water but it would be nice to also have them to hand. I also found that the white pencil layers well over the black but this is a last minute detail since once you add water you no longer see the white pencil.

Thank you for reading my blog on Arteza Expert Watercolor Pencils and Arteza Premium Watercolor Pad. The links below will take you to Amazon where you can purchase them and test them for yourself. Let me know in the comments below what you thought and if you have any experience using them. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Welcome

Hello, I’m Sema Martin and I have created this series of blog posts to help other artists on their journey to becoming great! I specialise in colour pencil as a medium and have created many pet portraits for customers all over the world. You can read more about my journey by clicking the button below.