Derwent Pastel Pencils

​" Derwent Pastel pencils have a unique highly pigmented fine chalk texture which creates a beautiful laydown of soft colour and are easy to blend; ideal for creating detailed drawings and sketches. 
These pencils can be used dry or with water to create light washes, if portraiture and life studies are more your thing. "

Taken from the Derwent website 

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Wooden box with all 72 colours

​Colours Available: 72
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Sets Available:
Open stock (Individually)
​Blister pack of 6, Tin of 12, Tin of 12 skintones, 24, 36 & 72 
Wooden Box of 48 & 72

Costs: RRP £2.00 Each (Ave)

Features

• Rounded palette of 72 full strength colours and natural tints
• The vast range of colours available allow artists to layer colours on top of each other in order to create new tints and hues.
• Can be easily mixed and blended.
• Suitable for all types of pastel work.
• Ideal for creating crisp, fine lines and detailed pastel studies.

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ADVANTAGES
* Highly pigmented
* Layers and blends well with minimal dusting
* Naturally water soluble - can be used with water to create light washes
* Erasable
* 87% Lightfast - colours remain the same for 100 years under museum conditions
​* Vegan friendly

DISADVANTAGES
* Lightfast ratings are quite poor for some of the colours

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Products available

The Colour Chart

Ratings of 6 and upwards are considered to be lightfast.

Protecting your pastel work

These pencils are coded using the 'Blue Wool' lightfast rating. The lightfast ratings vary with the pink and purples being the worst rated. The highest ratings are the earthy colours. Using the lower rated pencils, means you should protect your artwork by placing in a frame with UV or museum quality glass. If you are making prints from your work, lightfastness is not important. Cover your work with a sheet of glassine paper and store inside a wallet designed to protect art. 

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Other related articles that may be of interest
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Pastelmat is an ideal paper for Pastellists, find out why!

View all our other pastel articles including our step by step pastel tutorials

Unison pastels - probably THE best soft pastel available

New to pastels? Need some help deciding where to start? This article offers lots of help.

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Derwent Pastels in art

Click the image to view the progress of this Cocker Spaniel pastel portrait at John Graham Art

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Although I no longer practice pastels, my partner John Graham, used them in his own artwork along side other brands such as CarbOthello and PITT. Each range varies in pigment vibrancy with the older Derwent pencils offering a more muted selection of colours that were not available in any of the other pastel pencil ranges. John still has a large collection of the old colours although he no longer has time to create art. John used pastel blocks like Unison to create the base layers before using Derwent's pastel pencils to create the very fine details. He would use a Stanley knife to shape his pencils and get an extremely fine, straight edge - particularly useful for very short haired subjects such as the Bull Terrier below. Click the image to visit the progress page and see the insane detail he created, particularly around the nose.

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Miniature Bull Terrier in pastels - click to view the progress page

Miniature Yorkshire Terrier - Click the image to view the progress

The history of the Derwent pastel pencil

Derwent introduced pastel pencils to their range back in 1994. There were originally 90 colours and each colour was numbered, followed by an F, B or D. 

​The Rexel Derwent pencil seen below was the original design. American company ACCO, purchased Derwent (aka The Cumberland Pencil Company) back in 1980. In 1992, ACCO and the British company Rexel, merged. Rexel then became a brand of their product range. The middle pencil was the later design which had a pink band around the top of the pencil.

In 2010, the pencils were completely rebranded both with a new colour palette and product numbers. The coloured band was changed from pink to silver. Their appearance now very similar to the Coloursoft coloured pencil range, to avoid confusion, a 'P' was placed before each number code. The Coloursoft pencils have a darker barrel and are coded with a 'C' followed by the number.

Apparently the new pastel pencils are a bit smoother in application than the old range. From personal experience, the earlier pencils were quite scratchy in application, I also found that the pigments were quite neutral in comparison to the vibrancy of the PITT pastel or Stabilo CarbOthello pastel pencils.

Old colour chart

Tonal grades

As you can see from the old colour chart above, each colour had two complimentary tonal grades. The colour name was followed by an initial, F, D or B, however I have been unable to find out what these initials stood for but believe D was the pure colour, F was a lighter tone of this colour and B the darker tone. 

Some of those colour 'sets' can be seen below.

SAFETY WITH PASTELS

Pastels create dust which can be dangerous to health over a period of time. For protection, ensure you are in a well ventilated area when using Pastels. You may prefer to wear a face mask to avoid breathing in the dust and/or purchase an air purifier. If you have any breathing problems such as asthma, pastels may not be the medium for you, or you could opt to work with Pastel pencils which creates far less dust.

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