10 Best Artist Grade Colored Pencils 2025 in the United States

The KALOUR 72 Count Colored Pencils set is a vibrant collection suitable for adult coloring books, drawing, and sketching. With 72 different colors, users have a broad palette to choose from, which is ideal for enriching any artwork. Each pencil has a soft core that ensures smooth and vivid color application. The soft core is highly pigmented and break-resistant, making it great for blending and layering multiple colors. This is particularly useful for artists looking to create smooth gradients and detailed artwork.

The pencils are made of high-quality basswood, making them easy to sharpen, and each pencil is numbered and named for easy identification. While this set is great for beginners and casual artists due to its affordability and ease of use, professional artists might find the lack of lightfastness information a drawback. Additionally, being marketed as suitable for both adults and kids, it offers versatility and is a great gift option.

This set of colored pencils provides excellent value for beginners and hobbyists looking for a comprehensive and easy-to-use set, but may not meet the durability needs of professional artists.

Prismacolor Premier Colored Pencils offer a rich, vibrant experience for artists. With 150 pencils in the set, the color range is impressive, providing a wide variety of hues to work with.

The soft, thick cores are ideal for shading and creating smooth gradients, while the pigments are richly saturated and lightfast, ensuring your artwork remains vibrant over time. The ultra-smooth laydown makes blending colors effortless, which is a significant advantage for detailed and professional work.

Additionally, the thick, robust leads are designed to resist cracking and chipping, which enhances durability and makes them suitable for extensive use, including adult coloring books. However, the soft cores may require frequent sharpening, and the set's premium quality comes with a higher price tag, which might be a consideration for budget-conscious buyers. Nonetheless, they are a solid choice for anyone seeking professional-grade colored pencils.

Prismacolor Premier Soft Core Colored Pencils are a popular choice for artists looking for vibrant and richly pigmented colors. Their thick, soft cores make shading and blending smooth and easy, which is great if you want to create subtle gradients or layered colors. The pigments are designed to be lightfast, meaning your artwork is less likely to fade over time when exposed to light. The set offers a wide range of 72 colors, giving you plenty of options to work with.

The softness that helps with blending also means the pencil cores can be more prone to breaking if you're not careful, so handling them gently is important. The pencils are well-constructed with robust wooden casings, which helps protect the leads. While the core hardness is softer compared to more rigid pencils, this softness is typical and preferred for smooth color laydown in artist-grade sets.

These pencils are ideal for hobbyists and serious artists who want vibrant colors and smooth blending in their drawings, though they might require some care to avoid lead breakage.