Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils Review
Contè á Paris Pastel Pencils Review
I personally love watching pastel artists, I love to see the amazing work they create and every time I watch them, all I want to do is get out my own pastel sets and create the same standard of realism or flawless detail. I have always loved the idea of create this amazing realistic image with essentially powder, pigmented chalk.
There are a lot of artists who simply refuse to use pastels simply due to the feel of the medium in their hands, for artists who feel this way, rubbing the pastel pigment between their fingers is like someone running their nails along a school chalkboard. So for those artists plagued with this feeling, pastel pencils are perhaps the best way to go should you really desire to use the medium.
However, for colored pencil artists, using pastels in pencil form will be a very quick transition with only a few minor differences, such as, applying highlights on dark areas is achievable, something all colored pencil artists find difficult to achieve.
Conté à Paris Pastel Pencil Characteristics
Conté is a huge name in the art world and in particular pastels, they provide both pastel pencils and pastel sticks, which a just rectangular sticks of pure pastel pigment. I will be conducting a pastel pencil comparison at some point as there is quite a variety pastel pencils and pastels in general, so a comparison video would be an excellent way to highlight the differences.
The Conté Pastel Pencils are really quite chunky pencils, with an 8mm barrel and approximately a gorgeous 5mm core. Not all, but a lot of pastel pencils sport quite chunky cores and this is more to do with the brittle nature of the pastel pencil core and breakages mainly during the sharpening process. The pencils themselves feel light at first, but, there is a really nice balance to the Conté pastel pencils.
The barrel of each Conté Pastel Pencil is lacquered in the same color as the core pigment, making pigment identification and visual selection easy. Along one side of the barrel is printed the company name, “Conté à Paris”. Further along the barrel is the pigment identifying number “Pastel 014”, followed by the companies country of origin “France” and finally finished of with the number “1355” on every pencil which helps to indicate that the pencil you are holding is a pastel pencil.
Unfortunately there is no lightfast information or pigment name which I know a lot of artist would prefer for the companies to add to their pencils, however there is lightfast information and pigment names which I will discuss further into the review.
Conté à Paris Pastel Pencil Performance
I was really torn with the Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils that I have reviewed, now I am not sure what the reasons were behind my struggle, so perhaps we can work this out together. So I completed a pastel pencil piece of art, which you can watch the speed drawing of here or take a look at the still images of here.
As far as the quality of the pencils are concerned, the actual core of the Conté Pastel pencil, the quality and strength of pigment was excellent. I absolutely loved using the pencils, however, I wish I had of purchased a larger set to complete the art work, but that is on me and nothing to do with the actual pencils and of 24 pencils, I was unable to use five of the pencils.
When trying to sharpen pastel pencils of any brand, it is a really tricky exercise. You can use pencil sharpeners but it is advised if you decide to go this route, use the manual hand crank sharpeners or the preferred method is using a craft knife and sharpen the core. So with the Conté Pastel Pencils I used both my manual hand crank sharpeners and I use the term sharpeners because I used four of them and of course I used the craft knife, but with the five pencils I couldn’t use, no matter what I done, the cores just crumbled and fell apart.
I actually videoed the sharpening process with a craft knife and in the video you can see that once I gently shave the pencil wood back to display the core, as soon as I touch the core, it just breaks off and I am being really gentle. So I am not sure what the problem was with those five pencils, I am not sure if this is a common thing with Conté Pastel Pencils or if I just got a few bad pencils in my set, this is where you guys can help me out; if you have used the Conté Pastel Pencils, have you experienced the same problem with the pencils.
Breakage aside and minimising a 24 set of pastel pencils to 19, the actual quality of the Conté pastel core was a delight to work with. The art work I completed was done on Clairefontain Pastelmat, blending and mixing color with the pencils on the paper worked really well. Layering was effortless also, which I understand has as much to do with the paper as the medium.
Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils Sets
As with so many really excellent art mediums, there is not enough of them, or is that me just being greedy? greedy for art. The Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils come in sets of 12, 24 and 48, you can also purchase blister packs of 6 and these packs are broken down into genres such as landscape, pastel shades etc. The Conté Pastel Pencils can also be purchased in open stock which is always an excellent option for the artists as the last thing in the world any artists wants to happen is they run out of a particular pigment during a project and they are forced to buy a full set just to obtain that one pigment.
From what I can gather, the Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils can be found in many different countries and because of their popularity in the art world, they are relatively easy to source, most if not all major art stores stock them and the same goes for Amazon or eBay.
Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils Set Prices
As always I will try to provide prices of the various sets available from the UK, US and Europe. As soon as Amazon Australia provide prices for art supplies I will add those also. I use Amazon simply because it is the most generic story in terms of a global sense and as people from all over the world watch the reviews from The Art Gear Guide, I try my best to provide a range of prices.
Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils Pricing For The UK
Here in the UK the prices for the Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils are as follows. For the Conté Pastel Pencils 12 set you can expect to pay £12, for the Conté Pastel Pencils 24 set you can expect to pay £23 and for the largest 48 set you can expect to pay £48.50
The Blister Packs are obviously considerably cheaper and if you are unsure about pastel pencils in general, I would suggest starting out by either purchasing a few open stock pencils or perhaps one of the six pack Blister Packs. For the Conté Pastel Pencils Landscape Six Pack you will pay £7.75, for the Conté Pastel Pencils Assorted Six Pack you will pay £7.75 or if you fancy some pastel shade the Conté Pastel Pencil Pastel Shades six pack will cost approximately £6.98. You can also purchase two White Conté Pastel Pencils in a blister pack and two Black Conté Pastel Pencils, both sets costing £2.50
Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils Pricing For The US
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find Conté Pastel Pencils on Amazon.com, there was lots of Conté Pastel blocks etc but no pencils. I can tell you however that across America, Dick Blicks and Jerrys Artarama both stock the Conté Pastel Pencils in sets and open stock. I will continue to check Amazon and if they become available I will of course update this post accordingly.
However it is important to note that in the US you still have easy access to this particular brand of pastel pencils via the two main art chains I’ve mentioned above.
Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils Pricing For The EU
For those of you in Europe wanting to try your hand with the Conté Pastel Pencils, this is the pricing structure that you can expect to pay. For the Conté Pastel Pencils 12 set you can expect to pay €23 for the Conté Pastel Pencils 24 set you can expect to pay €34 and for the largest 48 set of Conté Pastel Pencils you can expect to pay €44.
For the smaller 6 pack blister packs you can expect to pay the following. For the Conté Pastel Pencil Landscape 6 pack you can expect to pay €13 for the Conté Pastel Pencils 6 pack Portrait set you will pay €12.75 and for the Conté Pastel Pencils 6 pack of pastel tones you will pay €13.39.
Conté à Paris Pastel Pencils Lightfast Information
The Conté Pastel Pencils do in fact have a lightfast rating, however this information is not displayed on the actual pencils or the pencils packaging, you can however locate this information on Conté’s web site along with a color chart naming the actual pigments in their range.
The Lightfast rating that Conté has used is as follows, * * * * Stars equals Excellent Lightfast. * * * Stars equals Good Lightfast. * * Stars equals Moderate Lightfast and * Star is the lowest with Limited Lightfast.
So of the 48 pigments in the Conté Pastel Pencil range 26 pigments are rated 4 Stars, 4 pigments and rated 3 stars, 14 Pigments are rated 2 Stars and 4 pigments with 1 Star rating. This is a reasonably good ratio with at least 30 of the 48 pigments being good enough for artists to use on gallery pieces or commissions.
Conté à Paris Pastel Pencil Conclusion
I actually really enjoyed using these Conté Pastel Pencils, I only wish that I either purchased the 48 set so I had more colors at my disposal or at least had the full accompaniment of 24 pencils. I also wish I knew what the issue was with the five pencil that simply would not sharpen, to be honest I am going to just put it down to one of those things and that I ended up with a few bad pencils in the set, which in all fairness to Conté, this can happen with any set of pencils. However, if this is something that has happened to you with regards to Conté Pastel Pencils before, please let me know in the comment section and it will help to build up a bigger picture.
To get a much better understanding of the Conté Pastel Pencils, you can take a look at my video review by following the link, you can also check out my speed painting using the pencils as this demonstration will help show you the layering, coverage and pigment strength. If you would prefer, you can also take a look at the still images of the painting I have added, some people prefer to read about prcoducts, others happy to sit back and relaxing watching a video and some just want to scan the art work to determine the products quality. I try to provide as many different review formats of the same product so that I please as many people as possible, enabling as many people as possible to see the review in the way they most prefer.
