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ORIGINS
The Black Widow pencils have some interesting origins, just his creator, Albert, told me. The company that they originally come from is called Medihealth 1, an Australian company dedicated to health and care products that started to commercialize its products in Amazon back in 2015, expanding towards Canada and Europe later. Realizing the impact that colouring books had on adults in the last few years and how an act such as colouring (which we often imagine as childlish) can be really beneficial for stressed people or people in pain, Albert understood that colouring was a great therapy, because it produces soothing effects in the mind of people who practice it. One year later he met a local craftsman in the Canton fair (China) who manufactured pencils, something he had in mind for a while. Thus, Medihealth 1 expanded its market including the colouring pencils, producing such beautiful tools made in black wood in 3 different sets: the cobra, the scorpion and the spider, challenging designs of unexpected colours that makes of these sets something different and attractive within the art supplies market.
ORIGINAL SETS
As mentioned before, the Black Widow pencils come in 3 different sets, each of them in different and unusual tones and with exotic names. The pencils come in tins without hinges, something that, as I always say, it is quite clever when it comes to save space on the desk. The tins are unique and nice, each one of them featuring the proposed animal on the cover, and the name of the colours and a sample on the back side. Inside, the pencils are disposed on a plastic tray, pre-sharpened. The pencils show both their names and numbers on the barrel, which is something that artists always feel grateful for ( I mean, these pencils cannot be purchased individually but, still). The top of the pencils end on a naked tip that exposes a wax-based lead. The reviews confirm that these colours can blend well, they are suitable to work on layers and they are ideal to colour illustration books. The Black Widow pencils are hexagonal and their tips needs to be sharpened less than the ones of an average pencil.
The spider was the first set to be released, and it is my favourite. It includes these colours: lady bug, banana, tarantula, zephyr blue, cyanide pink, pumpkin, cicada, foxy brown, fang green, lemonade, sting bug, casper, egg yolk, toadstool, water melon, plum pudding, amethyst, forget me not, starry night, everglade, toxic green, huntsman, spider web, black widow.
The scorpion set includes the following colours: grub green, brown bug, blood red, yellow sand, charcoal green, delicious pink, honeycomb, galaxy blue, Irish green, green grass, dark tan, pigs ear, dark chocolate, blue horizon, blue heaven, lime fruit, olive green, turquoise, deep purple, burgundy, pastel purple, pastel lemon, tanned, burnt orange.
The cobra set includes the following 24 colours: venom, cobra, mustard, light yellow, gold, nugget, bubblegum, fancy pink, sunset, fire, deep red, tulip, blood diamond, purple haze, rattlesnake, chesnut, charcoal, dim grey, space, aquarius, flat black, forest, opal green and grape.
WHERE TO BUY
These pencils are around 11 pounds in Amazon UK, which I think is a fair price for a set of 24 colours.
THE NEWEST: SKINTONES SETS
As of February 2019, we learnt the good news that Black Widow had launched 2 new sets, this time for skintones: one for light skintones and one for dark skintones, 12 pencils each. The sets come in beautiful tins without hinges, featuring an original image on the cover: the back of a human hand (as confirmed by the creator), which is a clever idea to represent the different features (no only its colours) of human skin. The pencils come pre-sharpened and disposed on plastic trays safer than the ones of the original series. These pencils also come with the name and the number of the colour on each of the hexagonal barrels. The main external difference between these series and the original ones is that the original ones didn’t have any lacquer, so the beautiful black wood was exposed. However, these series have a black layer on each barrel and end on a closed tip that is painted in a colour that matches the lead, so they can be easily recognizable. The leads are 4 mm and are also wax-based. They can be sharpened easily with any regular sharpener, and the leads stay strong, without breakages. These colours are blendable, non-toxic, and the wood used for the pencils comes from responsible forests.
The light skintone set include the following 12 colours: pretty pink, brown fog, fairy floss, saffron, carrot, sherbet, murk, blush, rust, snow, egg shell, sunburst.
The dark skintone set includes these colours: greythorn, olive gold, choctone, washed purple, olive brown, light mocha, mud, negra, leather, suede, cinnamon, midnight.
WHERE TO BUY
These pencils cost around 12 pounds in Amazon UK.
Light skintone set | Dark skintone set
CONTROVERSE
There is a topic I would like to discuss, because I cannot simply ignore it, as I find it outrageous. There has been certain voices in both Youtube and Amazon accusing these skintone sets to use racist names for the pencil names, something that I consider ridiculous. Since I took the pain to write the name of every single pencil in all the series of this brand here, anyone can observe that they are related to the topic of each set, for example “black widow” or “rattlesnake”. Therefore, the colours in the skintone sets are related to words that describe dark or light colours, such as “mocha” or “cinnamon”. I don’t believe that words like “mud” or “negra” are picked to offend anyone by comparing certain skintones with, as someone states, “ugly things”. To begin with, mud, for example, isn’t something beautiful nor ugly, it just depends on the person who decides to feel offended by it saying that the word has negative connotations. Second, the word “negro”, besides having been historically used to offend black people, in Spanish is perfectly used to name the black colour and has nothing to do with racist ideas. I fail to understand why people has to dig where there is nothing. If something I like about art supplies and specifically about pencils is that they are aside from any political or social debate, and to find that some people complains about the names of some pencils with the creator of them seems sad to me; you would think they want to find secret mean intentions where there is none, because if the person designing these pencils was a racist, he wouldn’t have used black wood in the first place, and much less launched a skintones set. But turns out that, not only he has launched one skintones set but two, so to include all the skintones, for everyone’s taste and pleasure. Therefore, let us please put an end to wrong judgments that can harm a great and affordable brand like the Black Widow is, which primary purpose is to serve as therapy.
MORE INFORMATION
Learning to draw 