Best 11 Colored Pencils for Adult Coloring Books

The Prismacolor Scholar line is what I’d recommend to anyone walking into adult coloring without wanting to spend Premier money. The cores are soft enough to blend without heavy pressure, the 60-tin covers most palette gaps you’ll hit on a typical mandala or floral page, and the discount this week is the deepest in the category. Scholar isn’t Premier, but it still plays nicely with most coloring book paper and won’t tear the page on layered work.

Goldfaber sits one rung below Polychromos in the Faber-Castell hierarchy, so it’s a sensible jump for anyone who’s outgrown student-grade pencils but isn’t ready to spend on the top line. The cores are oil-based, which means they hold a point longer and resist the wax bloom that soft Prismacolors can develop in storage. The 48-color tin is enough to handle adult coloring books without buying open stock, and the bestseller rank tells me people keep coming back to this one.

Winsor & Newton is better known for paint, so the colored pencil line still flies under the radar a bit. The Studio Collection 50-piece set has soft wax cores that lay down saturated pigment, with a color range that leans toward muted naturals more than the candy-bright Prismacolor palette. The discount on this one is the lightest in the post, but Studio Collection rarely shows any markdown at all, so if you’ve been waiting, here it is.

Polychromos is the high end of colored pencils, full stop. The 12-tin is too small for a serious coloring kit on its own, but it’s the right way to test whether you actually like the oil-based feel before committing to a 60 or 120 set. If you’re shopping for a Mother’s Day gift and the recipient already owns a basic set, this is a thoughtful step up.

This is a 12-pack of Prismacolor Premier in cool tones, which is a niche but useful set. If you already own a basic Prismacolor tin and keep running out of blues and grays on landscape pages, this fills the gap without paying for duplicates of red and yellow. As a starter set on its own it’s a bit lopsided, so think of it as a supplement to a larger tin.

Shuttle Art is a marketplace brand, but this 138-pencil set keeps showing up on bestseller lists for a reason. You get an enormous color range plus a coloring book, sketch pad, sharpeners, and pencil extenders for what most premium 60-tins cost on their own. Color consistency isn’t quite at the Prismacolor or Faber-Castell level, but for a beginner who doesn’t yet know which brand they prefer, this is a low-risk way to find out.

Col-Erase pencils are an old-school art supply that’s quietly useful for adult coloring. The cores are firmer than Premier and they erase cleanly, which means you can sketch a color plan onto a page before committing with your real pencils. The 12-pack covers the basics for layout work and the Prismacolor pedigree shows up in how consistent the color application is.

Most colored pencil tins ship with a single black, and that black gets used up fast on outlines and shadow work. A 12-pack of Premier black 935s is a practical buy if you color heavily and don’t want to babysit one stub for an entire book. The soft Premier core lays down a true black, not the gray-black you sometimes get from cheaper pencils.

This is a small 6-pack with thicker 4.0mm cores aimed at younger users, but the neon range fills a real gap in standard Prismacolor sets, which lean naturalistic. If your coloring books are more pop-art or geometric and you’ve wanted a hot pink or electric green that doesn’t fade into the page, this covers it cheaply. The junior format also makes them easy to grip if you’re sharing with a kid at the table.

Metallics and fluorescents almost never come in a standard tin, so picking up a dedicated 24-pack makes sense if your coloring books include foil-look pages or you want some shimmer in your work. KINGART isn’t on the level of the trusted brands for lightfastness, meaning these may fade faster in direct sunlight, but for a closed coloring book on a shelf that doesn’t really matter. The discount is fine, not exciting.

The Prismacolor Premier sharpener has two hole sizes and a generous shavings bin. The body doesn’t rattle apart in your hand the way cheaper plastic sharpeners do, which matters when you’re sharpening through a 60-tin. Pair it with any of the Premier or Scholar sets above and you’ll stop losing pencil to bad sharpening.