Crafted By Colette

Last week I showed you what I’d bought for my Wish vs AliExpress challenge. This week, I show you the swatching that I did.

I didn’t get any paper so I did all the swatching and the final art piece on paper from my Faber-Castell Mixed Media Pad. I split the page in half, and labelled the sides so I’d remember to put everything in the correct place. Like the haul pictures, the Wish stuff is on the left and the AliExpress is on the right.

Item 1: pencils

The Wish pencils (on the left) felt lovely and smooth. The AliExpress ones were a little scratchy. For some reason I can’t find the picture of the AliExpress swatches, so the image on the right is where I compared the sizes from Ali with the same sizes from the Wish set.

Item 2: erasers

The erasers were identical. Absolutely. I couldn’t spot any difference.

But I swatched anyway. They erased. They’re erasers.

Item 3: Sharpeners

I scribbled like a mad person on some scrap paper, as hard as I could, so as to blunt the pencils. The Ali pencil just snapped every time I tried that.

The Wish pencil sharpened well in the Wish sharpener. The Ali pencil just kept snapping in the Ali sharpener. I tested the pencil in the Wish sharpener and it kept snapping in that one too. To be fair, I tested the Wish pencil in the Ali sharpener and it worked fine. The sharpeners are great.

Item 4: pens

These were good from both places. They were juicy, and drew smoothly. I’d say the AliExpress pens felt nicer, but only marginally.

Item 5: colouring pencils

Two of the pencils from Wish came blunt, but they sharpened nicely. One of the Ali pencils was blunt. Like the sketching pencil, it did not sharpen.

For the swatching I did a patch that had many layers so it was darker, and a patch that one or two layers and was lighter. Wish is on the left, Ali is on the right.

Neither brand snapped while colouring – even when I pressed harder for the darker patches. The Wish pencils felt rough and grainy though. The Ali pencils were smoother and more pigmented.

Bonus swatching:

For this project I’ll be using the colouring pencils but if the pens are nice I’ll use them in future, and for that I’ll need to know if they’re alcohol-ink and waterbased-ink proof. So I grabbed a marker of each type. I like to do this type of test on a yellow so I can really see if the ink smudges.

The Ali pens did better with this, but it’s more than likely I didn’t let the Wish pens dry enough before I went over them with the markers. I do that a lot.

Next week, the art!