Art Fun Cheap

Rainbow-writing pencils sound like a novelty item, but I’ve found the best ones to be a versatile and addictive drawing tool. They are so much fun that they brighten your day.

I like using them at work, because they look like ordinary mechanical pencils. Doodling with them makes boring business meetings bearable. Rainbow pencils actually saved the day more than once in technical meetings when I had to quickly capture elaborate color-coded diagrams from a white board before they were erased.

You see, the “lead” of these pencils is in three colors, red, blue, and yellow-green. When you looked end-on at the tip of the lead, you can see that the colors are arranged like a pie chart: one third of each color.

That means is you can either write random colors, including mixtures of adjacent colors to make purple, yellow, orange, darker green, and so on; or you can quickly learn to control the color you write or draw by rotating the pencil.

The colors are translucent, so they mix easily in layers. With just one pencil, you can do a complete, full-color drawing, including black and browns.

You will use up the lead fairly fast, because it is so much fun to write and draw with these pencils. Buying extra packages is the only way to get the extra supply of lead that comes in each package.

Rainbow pencils are great for writing, for sketching, drawing color-coded charts at work, for journaling and for making backgrounds on journal pages. You can blend the colors by layering, by rubbing with a paper towel, or both.

The queen of rainbow-writing pencils were the elusive Rainbow Stix mechanical pencils made by PenTech/Sanford and distributed in the U.S. by JAKKS Pacific, Inc. They looked like a package of four ordinary mechanical pencils in four different barrel colors, but they are pure magic for about $3 a package!

Unfortunately they are no longer on the market. Luckily another company now offers a better-quality mechanical pencil with the same fabulous rainbow lead for under $2. I will post information soon on where and how to get them. And I’ll bet you will want some.

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