9 Interesting Colored Pencil Facts You Probably Didn’t Know!

Updated by Brandon F. on December 22, 2022

Let’s test your knowledge of one of your favorite art mediums.  And no, we aren’t referring to your knowledge of the array of greens available in a Prismacolor set or the history of Crayola.  Here are some interesting facts we have come across about colored pencils.

-A single tree can produce the wood necessary for up to 300,000 colored pencil barrels.  That equates to over 8,000 average-sized sets.

-The first usage of colored wax mediums goes back as far as the Greek Golden Age.

-The largest colored pencil drawing ever documented was 500 yards long.  It was completed by Jainthan Francis of New Jersey in 2009.

Jainthan Francis in front of his record-setting colored pencil drawing

-The first usage of colored pencils was not for artistic endeavors, but rather for checking and marking documents.

-Do you think a set of Faber-Castell colored pencils are pricey?  The most expensive pencil in the world was also made by them.  It contains 18-carat white gold and is wrapped in 240-year-old olive wood.  Each pencil retails for nearly $13,000.

The most expensive pencil in the world, the Graf von Faber-Castell Perfect Pencil

-Crayola far and beyond makes the most colored pencils of any company in existence, amassing 600 million colored pencils last year.

-Speaking of 600 million, if you laid all of those colored pencils tip-to-tip it would wrap around the earth 2.5 times!

-Colored pencils are generally considered to have the longest shelf-life of nearly all artist mediums.  There are reports of colored pencils being found that are nearly a hundred years old and still work perfectly fine.

-The largest colored pencil set in the world is sold by a Japanese company called Felissimo.  Their largest set has 500 pencils that are all unique colors!