Derwent Shade and Tone Mixed Media Set Review: Dry Media Turned Watercolor

Introduction

Derwent has been making art supplies in Britain for over a hundred years, and the Shade and Tone Mixed Media Set is a good example of why the company still experiments. The idea is simple but clever: take what are normally dry media and make them available as wet media. The result is a set of watercolor-like pans that let you turn familiar drawing materials into washes, sketches, and watercolor-style work.

What Is the Derwent Shade and Tone Mixed Media Set?

The centerpiece is a clamshell palette with a clip that opens to reveal a color guide and a curated set of natural paint colors, paired with black, terra cotta, and graphite pencils. The pans are sealed in place with a protective film, which is a thoughtful touch because it keeps everything together in transit and keeps one color from muddying the next. Alongside the palette you get three Derwent pencils and a small water brush with a screw-on reservoir that you fill with water before use.

Derwent pencils need little introduction. The company generally builds them with a thick core and a nice cedar casing, and they have a long track record of reliability in that department. The set is positioned around experimenting with shade, tone, and form, and the palette is clearly designed with that in mind.

How the Colors Perform

The palette covers a deliberately earthy range: Mars Orange, Sanguine, Venetian Red, Sepia, Autumn Brown, Burnt Embers, Burnt Earth, Sepia Ink, Graphite Grey, Storm Grey, White, and Black. These come from several of Derwent’s lines, including tinted charcoal, Inktense, graphite, and Pastel Shades. The colors are intense and swatch out very nicely.

Because there is not really a cool color in the set, the palette forces certain choices. Where you might normally reach for a touch of blue or a Payne’s grey, you end up using the charcoal grey or black to get that cooler counterpoint. That sounds like a limitation, but in practice it works the other way around: it narrows your options and opens new doors at the same time, pushing you to experiment in ways you would not with fifty colors available.

One practical note: the Inktense colors are not rated as strongly for lightfastness, though in a sketchbook they perform very well. If you are working purely for the joy of it, as this set invites you to, that is unlikely to be a concern.

Sketching With a Limited Palette

The earthy tones give work done with this set a throwback quality, something reminiscent of a 17th, 18th, or 19th century sketchbook. That old-world character is part of the appeal, and it holds you within a boundary that encourages deliberate choices rather than endless color hunting.

Landscape sketching is a particularly good fit. Even a small hint of red in a sky, drawn with the sanguine tones, reads beautifully. The set works equally well for figure and anatomy practice, and the included pencils hold up on their own merits regardless of how you use the palette.

Buying Advice

The set is not expensive; it can generally be found for under $25 to $30. Considering that the three pencils alone are worth the price of admission, the palette and water brush make this an easy recommendation to try. The water brush tip is a little stiff out of the box, so it is worth wetting it first and shaping it before you start squeezing water through.

It is also genuinely portable. The clamshell closes securely, so this is the kind of set you can throw in a bag and take out for landscape or figural sketching on location.

Conclusion

The Derwent Shade and Tone Mixed Media Set rewards the kind of artist who enjoys working within constraints. The curated earthy palette, solid Derwent pencils, and compact travel-friendly format make it a fun, low-risk way to try something different, and the modest price makes it easy to justify picking one up.