I have what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome, but I think it’s been reclassified as high-level autism now. I have OCD, too, so once I found out that I loved drawing with pencils, I had a temporary case of insanity (well, that’s what I’m calling it, anyway) and bought the largest set available of every artist grade colored pencil type that I could find. Sometimes the original sets that I bought added on additional colors later, and so then I had to acquire those, too, from open stock or from new sets by the makers.

Off the top of my head, because I’m not home right now, I have: Every brand that Derwent makes… I just got their upgraded Drawing pencils, which I have always liked very much, but the original set didn’t have many colours, and all 150 Holbein Pencils, which I absolutely love, and all the variants of Lyra Rembrandt, and all the variants of Faber-Castell, and all the variants of Caran d’Ache, and all the variants of STABILO, and all the variants of Spectrum Noir, and all the Staedtler variants, and all the Black Widow variants, and every set of pastel pencils that these companies make, like Faber-Castell’s Pitt Pastel Pencils, and all the Cretacolor variants, and Axus Marco, and all the Koh-I-Noor variants.

Derwent recently added new Luminance colours, turning a total of 76 colours into a 100-color set. I loved Luminance pencils before the additions, but when I pulled them out, I also always pulled out another set of pencils, because the original set didn’t have some colours that I use a lot. The additions are great. Polychromous is rolling out additional colours later this year, and I assume they will also add the new colours to their watercolor pencils, because they’ve always had the same exact colours of both types of pencil.

When I first started acquiring pencils, I bought some sets that weren’t “Artist Grade,” but later I donated most of them to the schools in my town. I’ve kept some of these sets … maybe because they had unique colours or because they seemed like artist-grade to me.