Castle Arts Gold Colored Pencils 120 Wallet Set Review

Introduction

Castle Arts has been expanding quickly, and the Gold line is its newest colored pencil range. The 120 wallet set reviewed here sits at the top of the lineup, alongside a 120 tin, a 72 wallet and a 72 tin. Castle Arts is a UK company, and reports about its customer service have been consistently positive, which counts for something in this price bracket.

The pencils are sold as oil-based, and the set impressed enough to earn a full workout across five different papers, from mixed media sheets to premium archival stock.

Who This Product Is For

This set suits anyone building a serious colored pencil collection without jumping straight to premium European brands. Beginners get a genuinely excellent educational booklet, while experienced artists get a large, well-chosen palette with strong layering behavior. If you mainly work in botanical subjects, the green selection alone is worth a close look.

What Is in the Box

Alongside the 120 pencils, the wallet set includes two booklets. The main booklet is, frankly, the best included guide seen across any pencil set to date. It covers pencil care, sharpening with sandpaper, grip techniques, stroke types like hatching, stippling and burnishing, color theory in real depth, how twelve base colors mix into 144 combinations, blending with solvents and powders, and even surfaces you can work on beyond paper, such as wood and sanded surfaces. It is genuinely useful for beginners and still informative for long-time pencil artists.

A full color chart is also included, which helps when organizing the set. Note that the pencils arrive in a fixed order, so expect to rearrange them to match the chart.

Build and Design

The cores measure roughly 3.8 to 3.9mm, a comfortably thick diameter, inside barrels of about 7.8mm. The barrels are a rich ultramarine blue with the Castle Arts name in gold leaf print, a gold ring separating the barrel from the pigment identifier, and the pigment name and number printed on the end section. Every pencil is end-capped, so the core is protected and you cannot see the pigment from the tip end, a small but welcome detail.

Color Palette

The 120-color selection is well balanced. Highlights include a strong range of yellows and creamy tones, useful flesh tones, deep purples, aquas and blues, and a gorgeous selection of greens. The browns are excellent too, from reddish and orangey browns through dark Van Dyke shades, and the set closes with a strong gray section including warm grays, a blue-gray and a reddish-tinted gray.

The one gap worth noting is tan shades, which feel underrepresented. Otherwise the palette reads as very complete.

Performance on Paper

Layering is excellent. In a standard five-layer build-up test, pigment accumulated cleanly and color blends behaved predictably: yellow over blue produced a clear green, red over yellow a clean orange, and red over blue a strong, slightly reddish purple, which is usually the hardest blend to land.

The pencils also responded well to odorless mineral spirits, breaking down into a painterly finish after a five-layer build with no issues, and the surface accepted further layers afterward.

On the botanical test piece, drawn on premium textured lightfast paper without any solvents, the pencils blended easily by themselves and the texture of the core sat beautifully in the paper grain. Higher-quality paper clearly brings out the best in this set, though they performed well on every sheet tested, including black and toned papers.

Things to Consider Before Buying

On black paper the cores read as notably translucent rather than opaque, which is typical of oil-dominant pencils. If you prefer the thick, opaque coverage of waxy pencils, this is a different working style. The white and blue were the most opaque of those tested, but all showed some of the dark paper through the layer.

There were also a few quality-control niggles: around three or four pencils had cores that broke during sharpening, and one or two felt slightly gritty during swatching. Core breakage is common even among far more expensive sets, and previous Castle Arts sets showed none of it, so this may be a batch issue, possibly related to wallet storage during shipping.

Buying Advice

Choose the wallet set if you want the full 120-color palette and do not mind cardboard storage; pick the tin if you want more rigid protection. The 72-set options cover smaller palettes. Expect typical oil-pencil translucency, plan your layering accordingly, and budget for the possibility of a pencil or two with core issues. On performance alone, the layering, blending and palette strength make this one of the more appealing mid-range sets currently available.

Conclusion

The Castle Arts Gold 120 wallet set delivers beautiful layering, strong blending and a genuinely rich palette, supported by the best instructional booklet shipped with any pencil set so far. A handful of broken cores and a couple of gritty pencils are the only real complaints, and both are forgivable in this medium. With Castle Arts also expanding into pastel-tinted and metallic pencil ranges, this is a company worth watching, and this set is easy to recommend.