About Maya Collins

My Story

I still have that first set somewhere. A 12-color Crayola watercolor pencil tin I bought for about four dollars at a drugstore when I was in college studying fine arts. They were terrible: waxy, barely soluble, and the pigment would go chalky the moment a brush touched them. I loved them anyway.

That cheap tin sent me down a rabbit hole I never climbed out of. Within a year I had picked up a student-grade set from Staedtler, which was a genuine improvement. Then I found a secondhand Derwent Watercolour set at a garage sale and spent a weekend just laying down swatches and dissolving them with water to see what each color could do. I was hooked on the process: the dry mark, the wet bloom, the way pigment lifts and settles depending on paper texture.

These days my go-to sets are Faber-Castell Albrecht Durer and Caran d'Ache Supracolor. Both are professional-grade tools that reward patience, and both have taught me things about color that I couldn't have learned any other way. But getting here took years of buying, testing, and occasionally wasting money on sets that didn't deliver what they promised.

That's the honest reason this site exists. When I was starting out and trying to figure out which pencils to buy next, I couldn't find reviews that felt trustworthy. Most of what I found online was either a quick unboxing with no real testing, or a listicle that was clearly pulling from a press release. Nobody was talking about how colors behave on hot press versus cold press paper, or whether lightfastness ratings actually held up over time, or how a student-grade pencil compares to a professional one for someone who can only afford one set right now.

I started writing down my own notes, first in a sketchbook, then in a Google Doc. Eventually a friend who is a web developer convinced me to publish them properly. That was about four years ago. The site has grown since then into a body of reviews built on hands-on testing, written by someone who works with these tools every day.

My professional background is in botanical illustration. I work primarily on commission, creating detailed plant studies for publishers, researchers, and private clients. Botanical work demands precision in both line and color. A misrepresented leaf vein or an inaccurate pigment can undermine the scientific value of an illustration. So when I pick up a watercolor pencil, I'm thinking about consistency, color accuracy, fine-line performance, and how gracefully it handles on a variety of papers. Those aren't abstract concerns for me. They're the difference between work I can deliver to a client and work I have to redo.

I buy every product I review with my own money. I test on cold press, hot press, and student-grade paper because the same pencil can behave very differently depending on tooth and sizing. I run swatch tests on every color in a set before I put any of it into actual artwork. And I do real lightfastness testing: swatches go in a window for several months before I make any claims about permanence.

None of that is unusual for a professional reviewer. The difference is that I approach these as an artist who relies on these tools, not as someone evaluating products from the outside. When I tell you a pencil lays down a smooth wash on Arches cold press but drags on cheaper student paper, I've done it myself, multiple times, with notes and photographs.

If you have a question about a product I've reviewed, or you want to suggest something I should test, you can reach me through contact@bestwatercolorpencil.com. I read every message, though I can't always reply quickly during busy commission periods.