Vintage Colored Pencils: “Triple Stripe” Caran d’Ache Supracolor II

A grail from an unexpected place!

 

If you’re surprised to see a new post from me about vintage colored pencils, believe me, I’m equally surprised – not to mention thrilled!

My St. Bernard tin of Prismalo II

Since you’re geeky enough to care (and if you’re not, you’re following the wrong blog 😉), this would be a good time to review the Caran d’Ache watercolor pencil history post that I began in 2019 and last updated in 2023. Toward the end of that post, you’ll see a small tin of Prismalo II Soft pencils with an image of a St. Bernard. I purchased that tin on eBay containing a mishmash of well-used pencils. The ones imprinted with “Prismalo II Soft” notably include three gold stripes near the white end cap. Since the inexpensive “set” was such an incomplete mess, I didn’t think it was reliable in terms of determining without doubt what kind of pencils came in the St. Bernard tin. However, other specimen images I had examined on eBay led me to believe that the “triple stripe” pencils did belong to the St. Bernard era.

As my historical post surmises, the softer form of Caran d’Ache’s water-soluble colored pencils during this era was called Prismalo II Soft, and that name would morph into the current product name, Supracolor II Soft (and eventually just Supracolor II). I’d seen other Prismalo II sets on eBay with variations of the St. Bernard image, and I’d also seen Supracolor II tins with a mostly solid red lid. All of these sets seemed to contain pencils with the triple stripes. Based purely on eBay sightings, I surmised that the triple-stripe era had been somewhat shorter (and therefore rarer) than other designs.

The stripe pattern changed a bit also: The Prismalo’s stripe pattern was thin/thick/thin. In its Supracolor II form, the pattern had changed to three stripes of equal width. It seemed to be of historical significance (if only in my brain) that the triple-stripe design marked the transition between the Prismalo II name and the Supracolor II name. (If, by this point, your eyes are glazing over, don’t say I didn’t warn you! 🤓)

Triple-striped pattern of Prismalo II

I got a bee in my collector’s bonnet to hunt down a complete set of triple-striped Supracolor II pencils, preferably with the St. Bernard image on the tin (the latter just because it’s adorable). It was still on my “hunting” list early last year when I made the commitment to downsize and, therefore, to stop collecting. Although I had not added any new vintage specimens to my collection since then, it’s hard to delete the list from my mind.

That’s why you could have pushed me down with a feather at last week’s Gab & Grab when I spotted this tin: A complete set of Supracolor II with a whole family of St. Bernards! And – gasp! – three gold stripes on the barrel! The Urban Sketchers G & G is just not the kind of place I would expect to find a grail, and yet there it was – and the owner was my good sketching buddy, Roy! Neither he nor I had known that my grail had been in his studio all that time!

Slightly different triple-stripe pattern on the Supracolor II set I recently acquired.

Price sticker on the tin

He had purchased the set at a store called Amsterdam Art (for $16.56 on sale!) in the Bay Area where he had been living from 1977 to 1982. Now I have a definitive date marker for this set’s design and the era when Caran d’Ache made the name transition from Prismalo II to Supracolor II.

What a score! The only item I took home from the Gab & Grab, the St. Bernard family will now have a happy home in my new studio. Thanks, Roy!

Incidentally, I have plans to display my vintage collection properly once my furniture is in place. Back in 2018 when I first began collecting, my entire collection fit beautifully on a few bookshelves. That era certainly didn’t last long! I want to get back to that type of collection display – small enough to see and appreciate everything, not just stacks and stacks that I have to move around just to find what I’m looking for. It may take a while to get there, but I will certainly photograph the results when I arrive.

(While digging through my blog for that post, I also came across this one in early 2018 about my resolution to de-stash! I’m happy that I had documented that event – it makes me realize how much re-stashing had occurred in seven years!)