Wax Crayon / Color Pens / Color Pencils

Most wax crayons, color pens and color pencils are stocked in-store and available at our retail outlet.

A crayon (or wax pastel) is a stick of colored wax, charcoal, chalk or other material. A crayon made of oiled chalk is called an oil pastel; when made of pigment with a dry binder, it is simply a pastel. A grease pencil or china marker (UK chinagraph pencil) is made of colored hardened grease. There are also watercolor crayons, sometimes called watersoluble crayons.

Crayons, which are available at a range of price points, are easy to work with, often less messy than paints and markers, blunt (removing the risk of sharp points present when using a pencil or pen), usually non-toxic, and are available in a wide variety of colors. These characteristics make them particularly good instruments for teaching small children to draw in addition to being used widely by student and professional artists.

A colored pencil, coloured pencil or pencil crayon is an art medium constructed of a narrow, pigmented core encased in a wooden cylindrical case. Unlike graphite and charcoal pencils, colored pencils’ cores are wax-based and contain varying proportions of pigments, additives, and binding agents.

Colored pencils can vary greatly in terms of quality and usability; concentration of pigments in the wax core, lightfastness of the pigments, durability of the colored pencil, softness of the lead, and range of colors are indicators of a brand’s quality and, consequently, its market price. Typically, water-soluble and oil-based colored pencils are considered to be a higher quality than their wax-based counterparts, but for many artists, these differences are a matter of preference.