Art Fun Cheap

Rainbow Stix pencils are some of my favorite cheap, wonderful art tools. As I wrote in September, though, in Pencils that Write a Rainbow, they had disappeared from the stores about three years ago.

Then last Thursday afternoon, surprise! My local dollar store had just gotten in a huge supply of them. (Naturally I bought an armload.)

Seeing Rainbow Stix at King Dollar almost certainly means that the distributor was emptying out a warehouse somewhere, but it could be good news for you! Check your local dollar stores and see if you can find them.

Rainbow Stix look like just an ordinary package of four cheap mechanical pencils in four different colors, with a small container of extra lead. The package is generally a metallic sky blue with clouds, as shown in the scan on the left. There was an older package in bright rainbow colors, but you probably won’t run across one of those.

Make sure you get the Rainbow Stix pencils that are a solid, flat color themselves (like the ones I just found, on the left). Originally the company also made some metallic-colored pencils with metallic lead. The metallic pencils do *not* write a rainbow. They generally write just a sort of dull silver grey and dull metallic teal. You may find some use for those, but I never have.

The bright-colored Rainbow Stix with red-blue-green tricolor lead, however, are absolutely fabulous for writing, sketching, color-coding, and making glorious textures and diagrams.

There is just no end to what you can do with these pencils. See my original post on them (linked above) to get some idea of the possibilities. If you find any Rainbow Stix, snap them up while you can!