Complementary Coloured Pencils Sets for Adult Colouring: Castle Art, Black Widow and metallic coloured pencils

Laura Longoni
Dec 28, 2025
2 min read

Updated: Jan 5

In my previous post, there was a summary of the most used artist coloured pencils in different tutorials for adult colouring books and pages.

In this post you will find a brief summary of the complementary coloured pencil sets and metallic coloured pencils that are used in place of, or in combination with, the professional artist coloured pencils for adult colouring. These coloured pencils are cheaper than professional coloured pencils, but they have the disadvantage that they are only sold as sets and not individually.

Black Widow

Black Widow pencils are wax-based pencils made popular by their distinctive black wood casing. The range initially included three sets of 24 colors each, each named after three different animals, and the colors were inspired by the terrifying world of spiders and all things dark.

The three sets in question are Spider, Scorpion, and Cobra.

Over the years, the range, as well as the design of the pencils themselves, has been expanded and improved, introducing two sets for skin tones (Dark and Light), a set with more pastel tones (Monarch), and a set with warmer tones (Dragon).

A total of 144 colors are currently available but not as single pencils.

Castel Art

The brand Castle Art has developed in recent years and, among some artists and enthusiasts, is considered a valid, more economical alternative to colored pencils.

They are medium-pigmented, wax-based pencils that can be used either as a replacement or in combination with other sets.

Among the available sets, the most popular are certainly the specialty sets like the Pastel Set and the Harmonious Set.

Castel Art (Pastel Set)

The Pastel Set appears to be an economical alternative to the Holbein Pastel Set. It contains 48 colors that can be combined with each other or with other sets to achieve softer, pastel tones.

Castel Art (Harmonious Set)

The Harmonious set is a set composed of 72 more desaturated tones (mainly in the purple, blue, gray range) created with the aim of obtaining more delicate, harmonious gradients, even in combination with sets from other brands.

Metallic coloured pencils

Metallic coloured pencils are pencils whose lead contains metallic pigments or MICA powders to create a metallic effect when light strikes the pigment.

These pencils are often used in combination with regular colored pencils to create a metallic effect in a project, or alone on dark (black) paper.

Unfortunately, not all metallic coloured pencils offer a noticeable metallic effect. Much depends on the level of opacity of the color contained in the lead, and, as you can see from the photo below, even the brand of the pencils themselves is no guarantee that they will deliver what they promise in terms of performance. Below you can see the comparison I did between the metallic coloured pencils contained in the sets by Prismacolor, Caran d'Ache and Faber Castell (different sets).