The Kasimir set have an interesting place in my collection. While many pencil sets have very soft graphite pencils have a more grainy feel, Kasimir are distinctly more precise and create much cleaner lines. That said, they emulate the style of inking much more. They are distinctly for penciling- a process comic arts use where they pencil out what they plan to ink, ink over the graphite, and then erase the graphite that is left behind. While most pencil sets come with a much large range and blend more easily, these care only about the more extremes in the ranges and blend less easily. Blending promotes smudging, so its often not held up in penciling projects as a good quality. When you get this set of pencils, you will find only H and B pencils- giving you either very life or very strong graphite markings.
These sharpen very well, and don’t need sharpening often. I found the cardboard they come in has a method of flattening tips if you walk around with them in the container. This probably indicates you are better off with a higher skill level for these out the gate. They get to be incredibly specialized, targeting mostly people who want to pencil before inking, and who likely already have containers for them outside of what they come in. Its hard to recommend these as a gift. That said, they are an amazing budget option over Tombow Mono 100 Pencils or similar options, costing half as much. As they are drawing pencils they do still lack some fundamental options you might get from other sets. If you want to use these pencils to complete a piece, they lake the graphite range of more general sets for sketching. If you want to under draw and canvas, these don’t have dissolving properties and are best with fine points with out shading, sometimes forcing a more hard edge feel that you aren’t generally looking for when attempting illustrations.
I’ve been using them for almost all my projects this month to really see where they shine and where they do not. It is clear to me that they probably won’t be liked as much as other pencils by beginners and are fundamentally not great as gifts for that reason. People who are just learning probably want a larger range of use cases and won’t mind the grainy effects those tend to offer- while people who have gotten good by doodling in classrooms probably want mechanical pencils for higher levels of control. They are probably best for people who are looking to upgrade their existing illustrating skills and are beginning to get more specialized with their skills. At the same time, there are more expensive pencils that are slightly more my taste, they are very slightly better. They might not be worth twice as much better, if we were being honest, but I’m not in a place where I worry about paying twice as much for these types of supplies. That said, I would probably give these to a friend who is getting back into illustration as they probably won’t know the difference and won’t care about it being slightly worse than other options. They will just be glad to have pencils they can ink with again.
I have worked on a handful of illustrations using these pencils, which I then inked, or used to help fill after inking. An example of this was the skull above, as the pencil guide for the Blial Cabals workflow review and my MTG ink proxies. I also did an illustration of Nicole- this was done on mixed media paper. You can view these pencil examples below as well.
