Review: Mungyo gallery watercolor crayons (set of 24)

Watercolour crayons are not as popular as watercolour pencils, maybe because they are less controllable, more opaque and more liftable than watercolour pencils; they sure do require different techniques to work with. Watercolour pencils handle like watercolour, but the crayons handle more like... well, crayons that can be blended with water. The popular Neocolor crayons are smoother and can be laid down almost like a less messy version of oil pastel. Cheaper brands are somewhat different than that, and it is one of those cheaper brands that I am reviewing today.



This set contains the Mungyo gallery watercolor crayons. Pastellists might be familiar with the brand; the company is located in South Korea, named so after an old name for the Korean Ministry of Education. As can be expected, the brand contains mostly educational supplies for children and young art students, including the popular cheap sketching pastel set of 64. Like most Korean art supply brands, it pays more attention to handling characteristics than to being lightfast. Due to that, I expected the crayons to be good sketching tools, maybe not suitable for finished works but sufficiently versatile for sketchbook entries.



When opened, the box contains 24 crayons that are longer and fatter than Neocolors. The colour variety is probably not very versatile(the yellows are not well-balanced, and the ultramarine blue is not warm enough to be useful, and there is no good cold red), but as it is a good-sized set of 24, it is much less of a problem.



Each crayon wrapper bears the description "finest water soluble crayon pastel" and the colour name, in three languages(English, French and German). I do not really understand the choice of languages, as the packaging is for the Korean market, and some of the colour names do not make very much sense(you can glean them from the picture of the box). It is likely, however, that they re-package and re-sell these crayons to some other companies for the scholastic/student market; in that case, they may as well need the colour names in French and German. I did not want to pay an extravagant amount of money to unpack and examine all those products overseas, however.



I tried to lay down each of the colour and give them washes to see how they washed. The colours are not very smooth; they feel somewhat like dry wax, similar to Artbars but much harder. They handle almost like the Daniel Smith watercolour sticks, but these can be used for sketching unlike those sticks that only work on very rough watercolour papers. With a wet waterbrush, some colours dissolve easily and wash well but others still leave chunky residues on the paper, especially some of the lighter colours. Incidentially, those lighter colours were the ones I saw the most problem with when I attempted to lay them down.

The colour selection looked as if they were intended for brighter subjects, so I attempted to sketch a Sun Conure using them.



The crayons do not dissolve very well and also do not layer very well, which was problematic when trying to sketch out the darker parts of the bird. The greens did not blend well with browns, and after two or three layers they refused to layer or blend anymore, and instead formed uneven chunks that cannot easily be moved around with water. When layered sparingly, however, they are not unusable. They are less liftable than Artbars, which is quite useful for artists going after techniques that rely heavily upon glazing.



I magnified the tail feathers to demonstrate the difficulty with layering.


Overall, these are perfectly satisfactory for the price point(6~8 dollars depending on the retailer), but are not very useful for an artist not skilled enough to deal with all the quarks of using lower quality watercolour crayons. If you are working on a relatively rough paper, however, many of these issues are less problematic - but again, I would not use high-end rough watercolour papers with $7-a-set crayons with low lightfastness.