Why Professional Colored Pencils Cost 14 Times More Than Crayola | So Expensive | Business Insider

Key Takeaways

[Music] every colored pencil starts off like this bright powdery pigment but it's the secret recipe for transforming these pigments into colorful cores that sets professional pencils apart from student grade ones every ingredient from pigments to waxes and oils and even the wood is carefully chosen to make these pencils perform better on paper and artists are often willing to Shell out hundreds of dollars for this level of performance a set of 120 Faber Castell polych chromos pencils costs $350 14 times as much as a similar box of Crayola colored pencils and some Brands price their sets at over $550 but professionals say that compared to cheaper alternatives like Crayola the different in quality is glaring looks quite chalky and waxy in comparison to this which has taken so many more layers making highquality colored pencils involves more science than art so how did chemists and Engineers perfect them and why are they so expensive at faor castel's factory in Stein Germany workers churn out a whopping 2.3 billion pencils a year making them takes a surprising amount of precision starting with these the pigments just like people the particles of each pigment have their own distinct personality and behavior some are rough and edgy and scratch across the paper While others are smooth and silky but size also matters down to the micrometer Fabo Castell say ideally 90% of the pigment particles should have a diameter of less than 40 microm it says this is perfect for creating a core with a consistent texture and vibrant color that applies smoothly lay down this balancing the pigments behavior requires adjusting the other ingredients unlike cheaper alternatives professional colored pencils have a lot more pigment than filler so it's important that the balance of ingredients is just right the ingredients are top secret but g lugat a chemist at Faber Castell told Business Insider it's a specific combination of oils waxes and fillers that binds the pigments the result is this mixture dough likee clumps of color but each color has a bespoke formula because not all pigments are created equal after the mysterious blend of wax's oils and fillers is mixed with the pigment it's pushed through this High press machine the result identical pencil length cylindrical cores workers bake the cores in batches to harden them then they dip the dry cores in a melted mixture of waxes and fatty acid derivatives Farber castel's colored pencil cores are 3.8 mm in diameter making them less likely to break compared to Crayola 3.3 mm [Music] cores the company randomly tests cores from each batch to make sure they won't break Under Pressure quality testers apply pressure to the cuse at a 60° angle they shouldn't break until the force is at least 3.3 kg the cor's performance is also scrutinized with smear tests like the this one pencil cores made by different brands each have their own characteristics the wax base of gon Dash's luminance pencils is soft so the color melts into the paper that makes them great for creating gradients fabra castel's colored pencils on the other hand have a harder core so they're best for fine lines and realistic details even the wood encasing the cause of professional grade pencils is carefully considered a pencil's wood determines how long the pencil will last and how well it will sharpen at the factory the seedar is cut into planks which are stored for months until they're dry Groves are milled into the wood and the Coes are slotted into the planks another identical plank is glued on top and they're pressed together before the next machine Cuts them into perfect [Music] pencils but the pencils shouldn't just perform well they must also look and feel expensive workers mix dyes to the exact color of the cores to create a water-based varnish for the outside of the pencils another machine coats each pencil with this varnish the pencils are then stamped with the company's branding and the end caps are dipped again rounding out the top of the pencil every step of the way the pencils are checked for visual defects like chips and varnish irregularities and the faulty ones are [Music] removed my collection of pencils now is probably worth I would say about 6 700 that's Bethany V and she knows a thing or two about colored pencils she has about 400 high-end ones which she uses to make realistic animal portraits that can sell for up to $6,500 and each brand and each um type of pencil works and they complement each other so well so I tend to use the the carage illuminance um because they're wax based so it creates A really lovely smooth buttery feel to the surface and then over the top I can go in with poly chromos you can sharpen them to a fine point they're super great for detail Bethany has big expectations for these pricey Brands when it comes to blendability blendability in the world of colored pencils means that the artist can layer colors over one another directly ly on the paper creating gradients without sharp lines the colors should transition smoothly while some colored pencil artists might use blending tools and solvents Bethany prefers to create a blending effect through layering so layering and creating like the subtle changes especially with a equestrian portrait we think about the Contours of a of a horse's face there's no harsh lines so the only way we can do that is by cre reling a lot of pigment on the paper we do that through layering she says she can't accomplish the same look with cheaper colored pencils these are Crayola colored pencils which I think we used to have at school and obviously I think you can pick these up from most supermarkets or sort of local stationary stores she's demonstrating the difference with swatches first up Crayola the one thing I'm really really aware of is they're very kind of chalky I'm quickly realizing whilst doing this is that I'm having to use a lot of pressure and a lot of layers to really make this a little bit more blendable too many layers can create what's called a wax Bloom which Bethany doesn't want eventually when you press quite hard you're not really going to be able to layer that much more pencil over the top and already it's becoming it feels a little bit slippery under hand cuz I'm adding quite a lot of layers slippery waxy layers limit how much gradation Bethany can achieve with expensive pencils she doesn't have that problem and then even despite the fact that I'm doing this I can still go over with more layers and if I was to take a little bit of black whereas on here we can you can see how scratchy that is if I use the same light pressure it just Blends so beautifully into whatever we've put down underneath Bethany's work on animal portraits often requires her to blend several shades of the same Hue like varying Browns in horse hair or dog fur compared to cheaper Brands manufacturers of professional grade colored pencils offer a much wider variety of shades when we've got such color like such vast color choices it does make it easier to really flip between colors and you get a lot of sort of subtle like different Hues whereas a lot of the cheaper pencils you when you get your your very bog standard colors you might get a couple of different shades of red but they're all very vibrant you don't get the neutral colors that you do with these these pencils but for artists and their clients all this effort from pencil producers is pointless if their work doesn't stand the test of time I need especially when we're looking at selling our work and selling it to the public um actually charging for the work we need to be ensuring that that work is going to last for years to come and it's not going to discolor it's not going to fade um it's going to stay as vibrant as the day when we drew it or the day we completed that portrait you see it's super colorful and I really really aimed like I wanted to show you this piece because of all the blending that went into it but you can still see about 5 years on how vibrant the colors are um so obviously using the professional gray pencils that even if this was in direct sunlight all the time it wouldn't it wouldn't fade at all like your your portrait the longevity of a color is known as its light fastness FAO Castell uses a star rating where three stars means the color will be preserved with little or no fading for 100 years in museum like conditions almost all of the colored pencils the company offers in its professional lines a three stars each color receives a rating through a specialized light fastness test Faber Castel says perfecting texture durability and light f for its poly chromos line costs five times more than producing its student grade pencils all this R&D translates to a higher price tag but according to Fabo Castell the extra effort is worth it Bethy appreciates this attention to detail because it allows her to create the realistic portraits she's built a business on that's why she'll never go back to cheaper alternatives like if you were to just do what I did and bought a couple of pencils at the start then obviously I think that will can keep the cost down however as my collection has grown and as I've got more confident with the medium obviously that's naturally LED for me to expand the collection which is now as I said worth a fair few hundred um and to me and the work I create now I couldn't be without the entirety of my collection [Music]