With 24 beautiful shades which can be blended they are a hugely innovative and multi faceted product. The extendable front plate has a self feeding mechanism which stops when the pencil has reached a superb point. With a proud heritage dating back to 1832; we have been creating pencils in the Lake District, UK, ever since. Cass Art, Cass Art London and the Cass Art logo are trade marks and trade names of Art-Line Limited. For the most part, the colours in this set are similar to their counterparts in the Derwent Graphitint pencil range once they’ve been activated with water, though not all are an exact match and some (especially a few of the blues) are quite different).

Derwent as a company are producing some of the most versatile products on the market at the minute, the Drawing and Graphitint ranges may not have a large number of colours in their sets, but the colours they do have will be difficult to find in other sets, making them a unique brand of pencils. With only 24 colours in the range, it is difficult to find the right one especially for this stunning Red-legged Honeycreeper as there is only the Ocean blue colour in the set that comes close to the blues on this bird and that was quite a muted tone.Here’s the painting I did with the Derwent Graphitint pan set, along with some Graphitint pencils and a Caran d’Ache Supracolor pencil. I found that all of the colours had significant granulation when applied to watercolour paper, which makes for interesting effects, but can be challenging if you wanted some completely smooth areas of colour.

In terms of the set itself, it comes in exactly the same kind of box as the Inktense pan sets, including a sponge, a waterbrush and five mixing areas inside the lid. A combination of graphite and colour, the Derwent Graphitint pencil is a unique combination of watercolour pencil pigments and graphite making it perfect for mixed media work. Finally the end cap is painted with a flash of colour, which corresponds to the pigment in the core.When the Graphitint pans are used up, you can either replace them (individual pans are not yet available but I imagine they will be eventually) or fill the empty half pans with watercolours or gouache of your choice.