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| 2/16/20 Prismacolor Art Stix in Stillman & Birn Zeta sketchbook |
My friend and fellow urban sketcher Roy DeLeon showed
some sketches on Instagram that looked like they had been made with crayons. When
I inquired, it turned out he was using Prismacolor Art Stix. The next
time I saw him, he let me play with the Art Stix, and my inner five-year-old
self jumped up and down! A new toy!
Not just any new toy – one that smells like candy! As soon as
I opened the package, I got a delicious whiff of Good & Plenty or
some other kind of licorice, which is exactly how vintage Sanford-era Prismacolor pencils smell. I don’t even like licorice candy, but the scent puts
me in colored pencil heaven.
The material felt familiar because, in fact, it is identical
to the wax-based pigment core in Prismacolor Premier (or vintage Eagle/Berol/Sanford
Prismacolor) colored pencils except in a chunky stick form. The color numbers
match Prismacolor numbers, and they are available open stock. The unencased stick evokes pastels, but without the
nasty smearing or dusty residue. When applied, it feels more like a crayon than
a colored pencil, but not as waxy.
I brought my rain-spattered pansies back into the house
again. After having fun with the looser watercolor pencil approach the
other day, I thought I’d try it with the Art Stix, too. The first thing I did
was to pull out my 7½-inch square-format Stillman & Birn Zeta
sketchbook because I thought the extra real estate would be handy with the thick
sticks. Since the Art Stix are new, they still have corners, which could be
used for some detailing, but overall, they are like well-worn crayons. I
avoided the corners and let my inner five-year-old gleefully scribble away!
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| The Art Stix come in a tedious tray that makes the sticks difficult to remove. I immediately took them out and put them into a small pink box that once contained Valentine chocolates. |
This isn’t meant to be a full review since I haven’t used
them much, but I am already looking forward to taking Art Stix to life drawing
sessions eventually. They encourage broad strokes and large blocks of color. (Perhaps
my glee in using Stix is a backlash from my detailed botanical work lately.)
A few comments about the Stix themselves: I got my
Mexico-made set at Blick, but the old set Roy had was branded Berol, the US-manufacturing Prismacolor brand from the ‘80s. Poking around on eBay, I
found several new and barely used sets of Berol-branded Art Stix for about the same price as
contemporary ones, so they are relatively easy to find. Although I look askance
at contemporary (Mexico-made) Prismacolor pencils due to breakage and
other potential quality issues, these contemporary Art Stix seem fine to me. I
put quite a bit of pressure on the Stix to make this sketch, but I didn’t break
any.
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| Better than chocolates? |
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| Crayons for grownups! |
I didn't realize that Prismacolor was putting these into sets, though it makes perfect sense. In what seems like a different lifetime, we used to call these "hard pastels." You bought them individually, though I do remember small sets being available. I was grinding them into a powder and then smushing that powder into tissue paper to color it but I've still got boxes of them somewhere. I'll have to get them out and try them as a drawing tool.
ReplyDeleteI've never heard the term "hard pastels"! These Art Stix can be purchased open stock too, but you know me -- I can't resist all the colors! ;-)
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