Oil or Wax? What 72 Colored Pencils Actually Change About Your Drawing

I have drawn with the same twelve colored pencils since school, and for years that felt like enough. Then I spent an afternoon with a seventy-two pencil tin spread across a table, and the problem changed shape. It stopped being "which color is closest?" and became "which of the four greens that already live in this shadow do I want?" That is a different, and much better, question to be asking.

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The tin in question is an oil-based set, which is the detail that actually explains the difference in how it behaves — far more than the count does.

The binder is the whole story

A colored pencil is pigment held in a binder, pressed into a wooden barrel. The binder is either wax or oil, and it decides almost everything you will notice in the first ten minutes.

Wax-based pencils are soft, buttery, and generously pigmented. They blend by smudging, which feels wonderful, and they bloom — a milky haze that creeps over a finished drawing within weeks and is nearly impossible to remove. They also go blunt fast, because the core collapses under normal pressure.

Oil-based pencils are harder. The core holds a point, so fine work stays fine instead of turning into a soft blur two minutes in. Pigment load is higher, colors layer without the lower layer smearing upward, and the finished surface stays satin rather than waxy. The trade-off is real: they do not smudge, so you cannot cheat a gradient with a fingertip. You build it in thin layers instead, which is slower, and better.

What seventy-two buys you that twenty-four does not

Not seventy-two colors. Most people use twenty of anything. What the larger set buys is range inside a single hue: four greens that sit next to each other, three or four reds spanning warm to cool, and the two-step value gaps you need to shade a face without reaching for black, which is the single most common mistake beginners make.

A well-sorted large set gives you fewer compromises rather than more novelty. The 72 here leans practical: the earths, ochres, and muted greens that landscape and botanical work actually need, plus a full run of values that lets you make a dark that reads as purple-brown rather than dead grey.

Where these actually come from

The colored pencil is one of the last mass-market drawing tools still assembled largely by hand, and the overwhelming share of the world's supply comes out of China. The process is more industrial than the tin suggests: pigment is milled with binder into a paste, extruded into cores and kiln-dried, and then sandwiched into grooved wooden slats that are glued, pressed, and cut into individual pencils. Each one is then lacquered and sanded in several passes, because the barrel finish is what stops the wood from swelling when your hands get warm.

What has changed is not the craft but the pigment supply. Chinese producers now buy pigment and binder at a scale small European workshops cannot match, which is why a 72-color oil-based tin costs roughly what a 24-color set cost in the 1990s.

Who should buy oil-based, and who should not

Buy them if you keep a sketchbook, draw plants or buildings, or work in layers and want the drawing to survive being looked at under a lamp six months later. Buy them for a child over about nine who presses hard — the hard core is far more forgiving of heavy hands than wax.

Do not expect watercolor effects; oil-based cores are not water-soluble. And for a four-year-old, buy the fat wax crayons and keep these in a drawer until the grip settles.

Two things to do in the first week

Lay a wash of the lightest color down first and let it stay light. Then build three passes of increasing pressure in the same direction, and never scrub back and forth — oil cores reward directional layering and punish agitation. Second, burnish the finish with a hard white or a colorless blender rather than a solvent, because the harder core takes a burnish where a soft wax core would just smear.

A steel-bladed sharpener matters more than any single pencil in the tin; hard cores eat cheap blades.

The honest verdict

Seventy-two pencils will not make anyone a better draughtsman. What they will do is remove the excuse that stopped me for twenty years: the sense that the drawing in your head needed colors you did not own. It did, and now I do, and the drawings are still not very good — but they are the ones I meant to make.

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