Lyra Colorstripe Colored Pencils and Sharpener Review

Intrigued by their sleek looks and the manufacturer's website, I included a set of 16 Lyra Colorstripe pencils in my last Blick's order. According to the box labeling, they won the 2009 Best of the Best Red Dot Design Award. Given how poorly they performed during this review, I can only guess that they must have judged them on their trend-setting looks alone without sharpening them much.
The colored stripe running the full length of the pencil barrel is particularly striking with the brighter colors. The pencil barrels feature an ergonomic triangular profile that is quite comfortable to hold and that children might find helpful for a secure grip.
The Colorstripe canister sharpener worked well while keeping shavings contained. The sliding colored plastic cover closed tightly preventing any debris from falling off and matched the unique design of the pencils. It has a fairly small capacity, so one must take care to empty it frequently to prevent jams.
If there were replacement blades available, the canister sharpener would be at a disadvantage since its cutting blade is located in a fixed position where it can't be easily removed.
So long as the blade was brand new, the pencils sharpened reasonably well without problem. As the blade inevitably got duller, it revealed the hidden flaws on a couple of pencils (pink and metallic silver) that started breaking apart instead of sharpening evenly.
The molded plastic tray holds the pencils securely while nicely displaying their signature color stripe. Though it is not a very functional design since the pencils are held so tightly that they are hard to remove and place back in their tray slots while working with them.
The white colored pencil had poor covering power and featured a rather brittle lead.



Several of the pencils crumbled and produced an excessive amount of debris while drawing these reference color swatches.
Color chart drawn on Hand Book Artist Journal.
Color chart and test doodle drawn on white card stock. The leads are reasonably smooth and the color swatches are fairly bright like good kids' colored pencils, but I just do not get the sense that these pencils are artist grade materials. Actually one of the yellow pencils and the neon pink pencil seem more suitable for highlighting text.
Used the long side of the exposed color lead to lay down some quick shading on this second test doodle. That feature works fairly well so long as the pencil is held at a shallow angle to the paper.
I have little tolerance for brand new pencil products that contain faulty pencils in their release sets and suffer from brittle leads or do not sharpen well. I ordered this set with reservations after reading about the problem with the gold colored pencil lead separating from its wooden casing in Pencil Talk.
In this set, the weak wooden case of the silver colored pencil shattered badly after just a couple of sharpenings. Tried sharpening the opposite side, but the wood casing continue to fall apart as well. Thus it would seem that one pencil in every set of 16 might turn out to be a dud. The cardboard packaging does afford very little protection against the rigors of shipping, so that might partially explain why Lyra's quality control at the factory failed to screen out faulty pencils. It is a shame that a sturdier tin box was not used to better protect them during transit and storage.
The Lyra Colorstripe colored pencils get points for original design, but poor marks for their performance. Crumbling leads and poor quality control as seen with the weak wooden casing are not conducive for a pleasant experience. Collectors might still want to add them to their collections for the novelty factor, but I would not recommend them for serious colored pencil users.
UPDATE: After the initial disappointment, I continued to further test these colored pencils on other papers and resharpened each pencil a few times to determine the limits of their performance.This color chart drawn on a Creative Mark "Reflexions" sketchbook showed that the Colorstripe leads have a fairly smooth laydown on this soft paper with a fine vellum surface.Drawing this color chart on Lami Li sketchbook paper required a heavier hand pressure to lay down these paler swatches. The smooth Lama Li paper did not readily accept their waxy pigments loads.Re-sharpening all the Colorstripe pencils reduced the amount of colored lead debris left behind by some of them. It also revealed the structural flaw of this new pencil design: the thinner side of the wooden casing next to the rectangular lead is weaker than a conventional pencil and is rather prone to cracking and breaking off. As the sharpener blade gets duller, the wooden casings are more likely to shatter under the stress and break apart lengthwise. The picture above shows how the pink pencil's barrel has also begun to crack after a couple of sharpenings. The silver pencil already lost a big chunk of its wooden casing. While sharpening them with a utility knife might seem like a practical solution, it felt rather cumbersome and the colored lead offered much resistance against the cutting edge.Final word: Unless you plan to keep them unused and in pristine condition, the Colorstripe Pencils are probably not worth the hassle given that some of their wood casings are prone to breakage during the regular sharpening process. Considering their current retail price and lackluster performance, most users would probably be better off getting a set of 18 Caran D'ache Pablo pencils or 24 Faber Castell Polychromos pencils instead.