#2 Focus on 🔎
Faber Castell Albrecht Durer
Welcome all,
This is the second in a new series thats is not emailed to everyone. I
I want to write more and not have writers or artists block.
Albrecht Durer by Faber-Castell
Currently as of writing this they retail at £66.50, £33.99 and £2.60 for a 24 tin, 12 tin and open individual pencil price respectively. 1Faber Castell website . They also do many variations of numbers and packs in tins and wooden cases etc. There are watercolour markers within the same Albrecht Durer series. I don’t have these. The Faber Castell brand has a long german history synonymous with a quality global reach.
These are a water soluble pencil [watercolour pencil] with a 3.8mm lead, with a useful hexagonal body so they don’t roll off your surface.
I have the 24 tin that I found at a reasonable price less than the retail prices above. I can’t actually remember what I paid but did add 9 individual colours recently [Dec 2024 @ £1.70 each] from 2Jacksons, now £2.20 each!! Definitely look around you to pick up some bargains. I got these to increase my range of blues and greens mainly.
The greys, yellows and orange shades tend to get the heaviest use as they are the shortest!
The tin oozes quality as expected and comes with a hinged lid and booklet with some company history and tips for using them.
Again I’ve moved mine to a Derwent roll as they go on trips more than other pencils.
Samples
Here’s a plein air piece started in the ‘mizzle’ and finished adding colour at home. [Fabriano sketchbook 160gsm from Jacksons Art]
I initially decided on a simple colour palette and as I like the ‘Cobalt turquoise’ that was my starting colour. Using Colour wheel apps I looked through the variations of complementary, split complementary, triadic, square etc etc and get to something I like [often including ‘burnt siena’ or shades of orange]. A little trial of the colours and off I go
With the pencils I started lightly with the turquoise on the paper and flicked between the nylon board and taking straight of the pointy end!
The ‘magenta’ and ‘alizarin crimson’ didn’t get a look in, only to make a bit of grey with the ‘burnt siena’ and ‘cobalt turquoise.’ I drop a tiny bit of the orangy colours into the wall too.
I can’t really compare these to the other brands as I haven’t used others like the caran d’ache museum aquarelle. I like the Albrecht Durer and can’t justify having another set££. They are decent quality for what I do, so that’s good enough for me [as much as I would love to have a set of caran d’ache!]
As with all these Focus on series, if I feel there is a good update I will add to this information. I will probably be using them more in the future as i want to do more mixed media larger creative pieces.
https://www.faber-castell.co.uk/products/art-and-graphic/albrecht-duerer
https://www.jacksonsart.com/faber-castell-albrecht-durer-watercolour-pencil-cobalt-turquoise