The Best Colored Pencils of 2025
Top pick
These perform as effectively as artist-grade pencils twice the price. They lay down vibrant color, blend nicely, and are easy to sharpen.
If you’re willing to pay a little more, this set provides three times as many colors and the same great quality.
Prismacolor’s Premier Colored Pencils set is our top pick for adults and serious kid artists taking up colored-pencil drawing. The range and vibrancy of colors in this set were among the best in our test group, and the pencils were some of our favorites with which to draw.
They were among the most durable in our tests, and they were as pleasant to use as pencils from more expensive sets. You can get them in a 24-pack, which should be enough for most beginners, or a 72-pack that greatly expands your color palette.
The colors are vivid, vibrant, and clear. When we compared the color samples on the page, the Prismacolor Premier set stood out as one of the top contenders from our initial pool of 13.
They have the best color selection. The Prismacolor Premier pencils come in a better range of colors in all hues, and no category lacks in choices. Some competitors have a weaker selection of purples or very few pinks; one has a wide range of reds at the expense of the blues. Judging from customer reviews we read, we think shoppers looking for a larger set will find a nice range in the larger Prismacolor Premier sets, as well.
They lived up to their promise of a “soft core.” The Prismacolor Premier pencils’ wax-based lead was creamy and easy to lay down on the variety of papers we tested with. The softer lead also allowed us to easily blend two colors. By contrast, some of our lowest-scoring sets were hard and did not blend well.
Despite the soft lead, the Prismacolor Premier pencils did not make a mess of lead residue on the page, as one of their competitors did. (Note that many of the one-star reviews of this set on Amazon complain about the soft lead. If you know you prefer a hard lead — say, for very detailed, technical drawings — these pencils may not be for you.)
The pencils arrived intact and appeared straight and well made. The Prismacolor Premier pencils stood out for their high quality, unlike one competitor whose lead arrived broken. When we sharpened them, the pencils did not feel overly brittle, and they came to a clean, sharp point. Other pencils we tested broke during sharpening, but the Prismacolor Premier set held strong.
They’re a great value. The Prismacolor Premier sets ($1.04 per pencil for both the 24-pack and the 72-pack at this writing) are a little more expensive than our budget pick, the Prismacolor Scholar Colored Pencils (62 cents per pencil at this writing). But we think spending a little more is worth it for a higher-quality drawing experience.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The packaging leaves a lot to be desired. While the Prismacolor Premier pencils were our favorite writing utensils, their packaging was not tops on our list. The most common packaging design for premium-grade pencils is a metal box containing a plastic tray with a groove for each pencil within.
The Prismacolor Premier 24-pencil set breaks from the norm by offering a deeper box with two stacked smaller trays. This design makes it impossible to see and reach all of your pencils at one time unless you remove a tray, and the trays themselves are made from a flimsy plastic, so they do not lift in and out of the box easily.
How the Prismacolor Premier Colored Pencils have held up
We continue to stand by the Premier Colored Pencils as our pick for most people. A Wirecutter staffer who is a longtime user of Prismacolor pencils and who bought a fresh pack of them over a year ago says they are still her go-to pencils. “They’re amazing for blending, they’re very easy to use and feel soft on the page as you’re drawing,” she said. “And you can get really bright, intense color out of them.” Wirecutter editor Harry Sawyers added, “My oldest kid likes them so much he only sparingly uses them.”
