Royal Talens Van Gogh pencils - wax and watercolour

By Carol Leather

Along with Bruynzeel, Royal Talens is part of the Japanese Sakura Group. The company is perhaps better known for its Royal Talens Rembrandt soft pastels.

The pencil lines have been made since 1948. They used to be produced in Holland, though that may no longer be the case: it is possible production has moved elsewhere within the Sakura Group. Stock has been intermittent in the UK over the past few years, which would suggest the pencils may now be imported from manufacture in the Far East, by way of Holland. The company uses sustainable wood for the casings.

The wax Van Gogh pencils

The non-soluble version is a good-quality, wax-based pencil of medium softness. Its real advantage is lightfastness: every colour in the range is lightfast to the American ASTM D6901 standard, which is unusual and genuinely useful if you sell or display your work.

The Van Gogh watercolour pencils

The watercolour Van Gogh pencils are sold in similar sets, so you can choose between the dry wax pencil and the water-soluble version depending on how you like to work.

Colour range and UK availability

The full sets come in 60 colours. For a long time singles were not available, but single-pencil import to the UK has resumed, so both sets and singles can now be bought.

Sets of 60, in both the wax and watercolour types, are listed on Amazon, supplied by Trinity Arts and other importers.

The Amazon link above is an affiliate link. If you buy through it you help support this site at no extra cost to you.

These are a good-quality pencil. The maximum of 60 colours, probably a result of how hard it is to keep every colour lightfast, does make the palette more limited than brands that offer up to 120. Even so, the lightfastness benefit makes them well worth considering.

How they handle: a layering test

To see how they perform, I tried a simple layering exercise on toned tan mixed media paper, overlapping a red (Scarlet) and a blue (Phthalo Blue Green) to see how the pigment built up.

These are a soft pencil, and the colour transferred to the paper straight away. Not soft in the way a Prismacolor or a Coloursoft is, but smooth and, for want of a better word, "juicy". I got about four layers down before I ran into trouble, and this time it was the paper that beat me rather than the pencils: the toned tan surface started to get slippy and would not take much more.