So it finally arrived, my box of the 72-count Marco Raffiné coloured pencils! I had seen the colouring community swoon and rave over these pencils for the past 6 months so I just had to see what all the fuss is about. I took the plunge when I saw the pencils being sold on Amazon for a similar price as Ebay. Earlier Amazon had some sellers but the price was so much higher than Ebay or Aliexpress that I couldn't justify getting them. Reports of ridiculously long delivery times from Ebay and Aliexpress deterred me from getting them from these sites, also I love Amazon's customer service whose generosity and solution focused approach has saved me on several occasions.
The first thing that struck me was the weight of the box. I don't know what I had thought but just seeing photos of the box never made me think it would weigh so much! It felt nice in my hand. However I discarded the box straight away, I hate flimsy cardboard boxes. Some people also complained about a strong chemical smell but I attributed this to the box. The pencils themselves smell good like wooden colouring pencils should. (I always sniff on everything new!)
The pencils never struck me as particularly handsome and real life confirmed this. The silvery finish is more plasticky than silvery and is unevenly applied on some pencils. The hexagonal shape and colour indicator on top are OK features. The wood is of varied quality: some pencils are flawless while others shave away quite a bit. However I was pleasantly surprised by the lead quality as I sharpened the whole 72 set and only got one minor tip breakage which was fixed with just a little bit more sharpening. All pencils arrived seemingly undamaged so I'm hoping that no leads are broken further inside the pencils!
The pencils have no colour names but fortunately they are numbered in a straightforward fashion, from 501 to 572, making swatching a breeze. I made a handdrawn colour chart as I currently don't possess an operating printer. Or, there is a printer but it's ink and I'm afraid to use it in colouring because the lines might smudge from blenders and such so we haven't really plugged it in.
Upon swatching I soon discovered that the individual pencils vary in quality within the
set: some glide nicely along the paper giving off even and rich
pigmentation, while others feel waxy and smeary and leave a patchy
result. I therefore took a leaf out of Faber Castell's book and marked the individual pencils with dots from 1-3 depending on
how smooth or smeary they feel. I fear the smeary ones will be very difficult to layer and blend, in addition to the feeling that you're pushing candle wax around the paper. (I know they're oil based but this is the best description to the feeling I can come up with.) Here's my quality scale and the number of pencils in each category:
3 dots (19 pencils): Superior quality, rich pigmentation, glides smoothly on the paper and leaves an even coat of colour
2 dots (38 pencils): Good quality, enough pigmentation, possible to layer and blend, no hesitation in using them.
1 dot (15 pencils): Smeary and uneven result, and/or poor pigmentation. Use with caution in case it's a unique shade I don't have in other sets.
Palette wise I have mixed emotions. The purples and greens are great especially as I'm fussy with my greens and for example I'm not impressed with the greens in my 60 count Polychromos as I find there are to many cold greens in that set. The Raffinés contain many warm green shades that you're more likely to find in nature. The purples are also warm and rich and the yellows are surprisingly pigmented. However I find there could have been a couple more blues in stead of having so many greys. Six shades of grey are entirely too much in a set of 72. The browns and maroons are very nice, however to my disappointment, two of the dark neutrals I most looked forward to using turned out to be one-dotters. Otherwise the one-dotters seem to be mainly lighter pastelly colours which sort of makes sense, if the manufacturer achieved the pale shade by adding more binding material in stead of using a different pigment combination.
How these pencils perform on different kinds of paper and in different situations such as layering, burnishing and using with blending tools, remains to be seen. In any case I'm really looking forward to taking them for a test drive today!
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