[grawprog]

Thanks for that info. Colours and pigments interest me but it's something i've never actually had much experience with. I always thought art was something I just wasn't good at so.I never took any art classes in high school or anything. My biggest introduction to colour mixing has been at my job mixing pigmented resins in epoxy and matching it to different colours of stone for laminating.

This job actually started getting me into more visual arts in general I started with stone carving and i've been getting into learning to draw.

I find the two processes somewhat similar but opposite. Carving is subtractive taking something and removing material until you get your desired shape. Whereas drawing is additive. You start with nothing and use lines and values to create your shapes. The forms and the way you study them are very much the same though.

I haven't gotten into painting yet. But i've been doing some digital painting of my drawings and i've been playing with water colour pencils a bit.

One thing that seems to confuse me though. I've got a couple sets from a two different manufacturers. There's a couple of the same colours between the two sets but I notice they don't seem to match. This works well as it gives me more colour range but i'm just not sure if this would be because of different amounts of binder or different pigments used to produce the colour.

Either way the more i've learned the more I wish i'd taken the time to learn about this when I was younger.

[RealDinosaur]

Pigments are used more for paints, and I don't believe that markers and watercolor pencils base their naming on them. I've got a set of Derwent Inktense 'watercolour' pencils, and the naming is rather whimsical, and does not correspond to any pigments I know of. It's the same with markers usually.

But that is okay, the reason to stick with pigments for mixing, is it gives you maximum mixing power from as few colors as possible. When pencils come in sets of 36, 72 or sometimes 150, you will never be too far away from the shade you need anyway.

If you want pigment based watercolor pencils, I would recommend looking into the Daniel Smith Watercolor Sticks. They are named correctly, and most have single pigments. They can be used as a pencil, and are a mix between pastels and watercolor pencils. A strange hybrid but they might be right up your alley.