Hello Reinhard. Nice to see you back. I haven’t tried pastels except for one CarbOthelli which I found a bit rough, sort of scratchy. It is a white one. At one time I did a drawing that needed a lot of white and I bought every kind of white pencil I could find. Good luck with your new endeavour. It is always interesting and exciting to try a different medium.
Vens

I use Carb-Othello alot (amongst others).

I have the 60 piece Carb-Othello set and i just cant get the feel for them. Alot of people like them tbough. I do like how you can layer light over dark with pastels which you cant do with cp’s.

Rick

Thanks for the information on Cretacolor, Tiago.

I have the 60 color Carb Othello set and love them. They were my favorites for a good long time though I also had the Cretacolor set. They’re excellent. From samples I’ve tried, the amount of variation between brands on pastel pencils isn’t as great as between other types of colored pencils, so it couldn’t hurt to expand to more than one set.

The colors tend not to match across brands except for things like black, white and lemon yellow. So you’ll wind up with a better assortment of greens and browns and blues if you get multiple sets over the long run.

Even the General’s set is pretty good. Enjoy them.

One tip for Carb Othello but it affects all pastel pencils – internal breakage that you don’t see until you try to sharpen it. Use sharpeners with a brand new blade, once there is any friction trying to sharpen, swap out for a new blade either replaceable blade or replace the hand sharpener. Or, and this is safest in the long run, electric or hand crank sharpeners. I use the Multi-Point from Jerry’s Artarama and have literally had no trouble with it – and no more points breaking off the pastel pencils.

The other way to baby them and keep them safe is to get an elastic band case for the set, either something like the Global canvas or leather pencil cases or the roll-ups like the Derwent or Niji canvas rolls for pencils. I have my Carb Othellos in two Niji canvas rolls that I got from Blick for about $5 each and they have stayed perfectly safe and organized in them.

Letting them stay in their native tins, if the tin drops or even tilts on its side, pencils bang together and the core can crack – resulting in the point dropping off when it gets close to the crack. This happens to soft colored pencils like Prismacolor Premier too. So get a good case for your pastel pencils and store them in that, until then make sure the tin is safe, flat on a sturdy surface and not banged around by children or cats. Try not to drop the pencils on the floor while using them.

I liked the hand crank sharpener better than electric in part because of power outages and later to reduce the amount of cords coming onto my desk.

It depends on what you prefer. If lightfastness is an issue for you then forget about the Carbothellos, they have very poor ratings. The Faber Castell Pitt Pastel 60 pencils set has about 20 or so pencils with only 1 or 2 stars. The rest have 3 stars, meaning they are of the highest lightfastness (ASTM I or II). The Carbothellos go by a 5 star system and very few of them have 4 or 5 stars, most have 3 or less which is not acceptable in my book. I did buy 2 or 3 of the 5 star pencils, but they feel very much like the Pitt Pastels, maybe a bit more scratchy. I would most definitely opt for the Pitt Pastels and maybe get a few Caran d’Ache pastel pencils to even out the poor green range in the Pitt Pastels (their greens have louzy lightfasness ratings, louzy….). Caran d’Ache pastel pencils are quite expensive, but very soft and incredibly pigmented. They also go by a 5 star system, so I got myself a couple of 5 star pencils.

A wonderful pastel pencil are the pencils from Conte à Paris. They are bigger than regular pencils, but they have nice purples and greens of the highest lightfastness (a 4 star system, I think) that are missing in the Pitt Pastel set. Their only disadvantage is that you need to go dig on the internet for the lightfastness ratings as they do not note them on the pencil itself. But I love them and have bought quite some to complete my Pitt Pastel set

Is there a Gerstäcker anywhere near you? They have all the pencils I mentioned above and you could get one or two to try them out. My favourite are the Pitt Pastels, those I use most and Gerstäcker sells them for a very fair price of 1.40€ or so per pencil.

Edit: Best pastel paper by far is the Pastelmat, it is a bit expensive, but sooo worth it. Every couple months Gerstäcker has a sale where they sell the pastelmat paper pads or single sheets for 30% less than their usual price. I bought a stock last time