Woomer Color Pencils 72-Set Review: Balanced Palette, Excellent Blending

Introduction

Colored pencil sets live or die on their palette balance, core quality and how forgiving they are to use. The Woomer Color Pencils 72-set makes a strong case on almost all of these fronts, offering a soft-core artist set with richly saturated pigments at a budget-friendly price point. It is one of those sets that punches well above what the tin suggests.

The set arrives in a cardboard sleeve over a plain orange tin, which stands out nicely on a desk. The packaging advertises lightfast, artist-quality pencils with saturated colors, a 3.8 mm soft core, break-resistant leads, easy blending and a wide range of colors. This review covers the 72-set specifically; the full range is 133 pencils across the 72 and 90 sets, with some duplicates between them.

Who This Product Is For

This set is well suited to students, hobbyists and anyone getting into colored pencil work who does not want to spend a fortune. It is also a genuinely good option for developing artists because the core behaves in a way that rewards good technique rather than fighting it.

If you sell original artwork and rely on verified lightfastness ratings, you will want to read the caveats below carefully. For everyone else, the set has a lot to offer.

Palette and Color Selection

The palette is very well balanced, with few near-duplicate colors. It opens with light yellows and cadmium tones, then moves through pinks and pale flesh tones such as seashell pink, light salmon and cinnamon, into oranges, crimson and darker reds like red purple and lizard crimson.

Blues run from pale Caribbean Sea and cornflower blue through phthalo and ultramarine into darker Prussian and ocean blues, with a lovely bluish turquoise along the way. Violets, pinks, a full green range from cadmium lemon yellow through light green, leaf green, turquoise and olive into hooker and deep cobalt greens follow, then a warm band of earth tones: yellow ochre, burnt ochre, burnt umber, Vandyke brown and a muted but gorgeous walnut brown.

Grays get real attention here, with cold, cool and warm grays plus a cadet blue that reads as a cool gray, ending on black and white. The palette supports botanical work comfortably, and the pale tone selection is broad enough for both lighter and darker skin portraiture.

Layering and Blending Performance

The core measured around 3.9 mm on a 7.7 mm round barrel, slightly larger than the stated 3.8 mm. In use it is a soft, well-saturated core that builds color smoothly. Five light layers applied with the pencil’s own weight show a satisfying gradual build, and a single heavy application demonstrates genuinely strong raw saturation, useful for the blockier style of fan art.

Blending is where this set shines. Yellow and red blend into a clean orange, blue and yellow produce a convincing green, and the difficult blue-plus-red purple test, which defeats many sets, works exceptionally well here. The soft core blends across light and dark greens seamlessly without damaging the paper’s tooth.

The pencils also perform well on smooth paper, Bristol vellum and hot press paper with no issues.

Opacity and Black Paper Test

Tested on black paper, the set shows a healthy mix of translucency and opacity rather than a uniform behavior. Lemon yellow leans translucent, while light ultramarine, pale vermillion and leaf green sit on the opaque side, and white offers decent opacity.

That variety matters because artists tend to prefer one behavior or the other, and a set offering both gives you more flexibility within a single palette. A quick fan-art style sketch confirmed the saturation levels seen on the swatch, with rich color at heavier applications.

Sharpening and Lead Durability

The break-resistant lead claim held up in practice. Sharpening was excellent, with no breakages at all, and pencils were sharpened nearly halfway down the barrel without a single snap. Whether that is core formulation or luck, it is the kind of reliability beginners especially will appreciate.

The barrel is fully lacquered in the matching pigment color, so you can identify shades at a glance. Markings include the color name, a pigment code, a plus-style lightfast rating and “made in China” toward the core. The gold-leaf style lettering is attractive but can be hard to read against certain barrel colors.

Lightfastness: Read This Before Buying

The lightfast rating system is the set’s weak point. Woomer uses a scale of zero to five pluses, but the printing is inconsistent: some pencils show five pluses with only four shaded in, which could mean a four or a five. Of the 72 pencils, five are rated three, two are rated three or four, 44 are rated four, and 21 are rated four or five.

That ambiguity is worth taking seriously. Lightfastness is not an exact science in any brand, but a rating system that should be straightforward becomes confusing here. If you plan to sell originals and promise clients highly lightfast materials, this set will not back that claim up. For practice work, sketching and learning, it simply is not a dealbreaker.

Buying Advice

For the price, these pencils are excellent value. The palette balance is close to perfect, the core is great for both blending and layering, and saturation is strong throughout. The single real issue is the lightfast rating system, which is more complicated than it needs to be.

If you are a student or new to colored pencils, this is an easy recommendation: reliable sharpening, a well-thought-out 72-color palette and a core that rewards proper layering technique. Skilled artists on a budget will also find plenty to like, as long as they are not depending on the lightfast ratings for client work.

Conclusion

The Woomer Color Pencils 72-set delivers balanced color selection, excellent soft-core blending and layering, strong saturation and dependable sharpening at a modest price. The inconsistent lightfast markings are the one genuine flaw, but for learners, hobbyists and budget-conscious artists who are not selling lightfast-critical originals, this set earns a firm recommendation.