Last week I wrote about my blue and brown watercolour pencils. I did review of the ones I use and don’t use (now that I have the complete FaberCastell set).
This week is green . Thanks Tina for the prompt. I hope that these are interesting and of use to someone.
Below is a drawing I did in 2012 ! of the green watercolour pencils I had at the time. I had been given a lot. I have added to them since then.

Below is the full range of all the green Faber Castell Albrecht Durer watercolour pencils colours.


My daily sketch kit still contains the greens that I was using in 2012 and a replacement colour that is included since then. These are personal choices that I use for my sketching in Melbourne.
- Earth Green
- Grass Green
- Chromium Green Oxide
- Pine Green. I was using Mineral Green in the Derwent brand, but wanted to get the nearest equivalent Faber Castell colour. This was purely personal preference, as I feel the Derwent’s are a little softer on the page and don’t sharpen to a finer point for detail.
There are a few things to note, which I mentioned last week.
- knowing the colours that you own enables you to be aware of the large range of colour choice that you potentially have.
- a colour can often change quite dramatically on the page when water is added.
- there is a huge range of colours available and many of them are very close
- you don’t have to use all the colours!
TIna ( who asked me about greens) is in the US and so the colours she uses will be very different. I describe a lot of these colours as “European”. I am not sure if this is correct, but there are a lot of blue/green colours.
It is good to be aware of the range that I have available to me. I will still only keep the four in my daily sketch kit, but I would be using strange unusual colours for commissions and my “You Can’t Draw in Books” project. I don’t do many commissions and they are usually buildings, sometimes with a few trees, grass for context. My “You Can’t Draw in Books” project involves drawing on a page of a book that was about to be discarded. The pages of different books vary in quality and age, most of them do not like to much work on them or too much water added to the pencil marks on the pages. in both cases, I would choose a single pencil colour if I had it instead of combining colours.
which greens do you use?
Let me know if you have any questions.