The 8 Best High Quality Charcoal Pencils (2023 reviews)

If you often find yourself scrambling for good pencil, mujinhua high quality charcoal pencil should be your first option for buying. Drawing with charcoal pencils create your own masterpiece or sketch out ideas with this charcoal set, great for figure, portraits or still life drawings and fantastic for the classroom or outdoor. It can be applied and manipulated quickly allowing the artist to capture visual information with speed.

It can be used alone to create bold, intense blacks and tonal values suitable for fine detail and technical drawings or soft, atmospheric blends. The "suntan" color is a bit of an orange brown shade.

These charcoal drawing pencils are safe, non-toxic, super pigmented, smooth, layered nicely, none cracked, and easy to sharpen. It is an easy pick-up technique simply because the medium is so forgiving. These are definitely good for beginners/novices. It is great for quite a few applications, but artists still like the control that they get from a charcoal pencil.

Why We Like This:

Messy but easy to draw with
Erasable with a soft vinyl or rubber eraser
One of the new comers and featured product

Best For creating Rich lines: Galart supplies High Quality Charcoal Pencil

Buy on Amazon

Whether you’re a beginner or a professional artist, this complete drawing charcoal sketch pencils set is what you need for an impressive illustration. These pre-sharpened professional charcoal pencils for artists come with 5 soft, 4 medium charcoal pencils, 2 hard pencils, and 1 soft white charcoal pencil including a pencil organizer tray.

These pencils have a high-grade lacquer finish on high-quality soften basswood for clean usage without getting your hands dirty. It provides easy sharpening of these art pencils. They work well for blending and are capable of creating very dark and light shading.

This drawing set is great for drawing in pencil. It is great for beginners, but also high enough quality for experienced artists.

Why We Like This:

Perfect for shading, blending, and filling dark charcoal color
Great for beginners or professional artists
Good brand reputation

Best Set: us Art supply High Quality Charcoal Pencil

Buy on Amazon

We know from years of feedback from readers, customers and amazon sellers, what most people want in a convenient and appropriate pencil. The us art supply high quality charcoal pencil is exactly that - it's a simple pencil that hits all the right notes. This kit offers a variety of pencils to use for drawing with a pad. It is ideal for entry-level artist. These are a good quality wax colored pencil. The colors blend well and allow for layering of the same color as well as multiple colors.

These pencils don't have very bright colors and the lead is too hard. It is a gift for someone looking to start a new hobby. It is a good set of pencils and tools for beginners. It comes in a reusable case, but its not super durable or fancy, but for the cost it is perfect for pens. The set is a good product and definitely recommends for pens.

Why We Like This:

Really nice pencils and charcoal, great starter kit
Awesome starter kit for a child wanting to learn the basics of sketching
Good brand reputation

Best For color: Derwent High Quality Charcoal Pencil

Buy on Amazon

The derwent high quality charcoal pencil is satisfactory and appropriate and fits well with your daily purpose. It's a good tinted charcoal medium. It balances out with extra black and white extras to a set of tinted charcoal. The colours are earth toned, and subtle, some colours look the same, when blending, but no reds or rust colour pencils included. These are also nowhere near as messy as Vine charcoal, or the compressed charcoal sticks which are easier to control when applying over a broader space, but not when it comes to working in on those fine details.

This set has a dented lid and 2 broken cores. It's the electric sharpener that has adjustable holes for different size pencils. These have a mixed score on the lightfast rating. These are really fun to use because they blend and it's easy to hide mistakes.

Why We Like This:

Charcoal and graphite always work well and blend nicely
Somewhat subtle but still add enough tone to enhance a monochromatic drawing
High quality and easy to use

Best For Art projects: MARKART High Quality Charcoal Pencil

Buy on Amazon

The markart high quality charcoal pencil is suitable and reliable and fits well with your daily purpose. Chalk pencils are less messy and easy to use. It is a nice charcoal set especially for beginners. It is great for figure, portraits or still life drawings and fantastic for the school classroom. The different densities of the charcoal pencils make drawing different densities easy. It is easily blended and erased allowing the artist to produce a variety of effects in an artwork.

The Chalk pencils are less messy and easy to use. It is used to blend with other colours to create midtones. It is a must have for a beginning artist. It is easy to use, forgiving if you make a mistake, great for layering shades.

Why We Like This:

Great coverage and blended nicely using a tortillion
Great pencils for artists of all levels
Much neater than vine or compressed charcoal

Best with regular wooden Pencil: Portraitart High Quality Charcoal Pencil

Buy on Amazon

Best part: portraitart high quality charcoal pencil costs comparatively low and it is available to ship in 24 hours. All charcoal pencils, the regular, soft, and super soft pencils all produce nice jet black lines. They come in a fancy metal container. To make sure that you can use these pencils on a wide variety of paper with maximum tone range, the charcoal is designed with unique binding agent ratios that ensures excellent tone saturation and smoothness. It contains about 5x the charcoal to that of traditional wooden pencil. It works well with mixed media paper, watercolor paper, and card stock.

The Extra Soft one though, can rip through delicate paper, so, not so extra soft. It offers a bit more texture while the smooth side is slightly better at blending.

Why We Like This:

Screams luxury, yet easy on the wallet
Definitely quality materials and a great feel
Solid black, no shine, great coverage

Best For Drawing class: General'S High Quality Charcoal Pencil

Buy on Amazon

General's "Original" Charcoal pencils are handcrafted with an extra smooth, rich, intense black drawing formula. Oil free and blendable, these charcoal pencils are made with the finest organic blacks to create beautiful art renderings and mix-media art. It makes charcoal drawing much neater and cleaner.

It is ideal for drawing class, painting, sketching, still life, portraits, applying patterns on canvas, or to draw directly onto fabric. These are great quality pencils.

Why We Like This:

Feature a rich warm hue, to create beautiful art renderings and mixed media art
Made with the finest organic blacks
Wood wrapped high quality charcoal that can easily be sharpened for detail work

Best For Drawing on tones paper: General Pencil High Quality Charcoal Pencil

Buy on Amazon

These bianco primo charcoal pencils by general are handmade in the usa using high quality sustained cedar and a rich organic charcoal. They're the same hardness as chalkboard chalk just in pencil form. They look really nice and work great for practicing letter writing (Kids) or doodling and seem to wipe off fine with a wet cloth.

It has this soft leather stuff on the outside. It goes on smooth and dark and sharpens to a clean point. There are many great white pencils available whether it's chalk, charcoal, wax, or oil. These pencils are pretty nice to write or sketch.

Why We Like This:

Really good white pencils for work on tan drawing paper
Made with high quality sustained cedar
Use with mixed media and quick sketches
Great for art and the highlights