Color & Creativity: 500 Pencils from Social Designer

Social Designer, a progressive arts organization, is offering an unusual subscription called 500 Pencils — over the course of 20 months, participants will be sent 25 colored pencils every four weeks.

The purpose of this excruciatingly long collection process is to force recipients to experiment with and ultimately appreciate each pencil, including colors that may not normally seem appealing. Participating in this project is also excruciatingly pricey — each monthly set costs $33. The "crafted to order" pencils are produced in Japan and are not available on any other schedule. Social Designer also sells unique storage devices that allow the colors to become part of a room’s decor, thereby surpassing their original purpose as means to an end.

You can purchase monthly the pencil collections directly from Social Designer.

Even if you can't subscribe, there are questions here to be pondered. Can the ways we select, receive, and house our instruments of creativity actually serve as inspiration for the art they make?

Comments (11)

what a fantastic, simple, and beautiful idea.

posted by twelveindustries on August 25th 2009 at 7:04pm
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love it!

posted by LoriSF on August 25th 2009 at 7:07pm
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Well--are the pencils good quality? How good?

posted by sphinxie on August 25th 2009 at 7:24pm
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Visit the Colored Pencil Society of America...I'm pretty sure these amazing artists manage quite well w/o upscale pencils, and develop their knowledge of color theory in the process.

. http://www.cpsa.org/

posted by muirwoods08 on August 25th 2009 at 8:58pm
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I love the beauty of the way the pencils look. Until now I never thought I'd see anything more expensive than the Caran d'arche luminance pencils. Do they understand that there is a recession on?

@muirwoods08.

Love that you linked their site, have you hit scribbletalk.com as well?

posted by grumbler101 on August 25th 2009 at 9:13pm
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My honey is considering signing up, but the price--yikes! He loves all things pencil and I love all things colorful, but with the thingies to put them on the wall, the total would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $800.

posted by STH on August 25th 2009 at 11:03pm
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OMG! I want these. They are so dreamy...

posted by mjkitty7nyc on August 26th 2009 at 1:53am
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if this didn't cost SO MUCH i'd totally sign up.

posted by pseudodesigns on August 26th 2009 at 2:38am
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i first thought it was a great idea..saw their store window in midtown manhattan a couple of weeks back..but come on they are COLORED PENCILS! it's daylight robbery!

posted by Drops of Jupiter on August 26th 2009 at 12:57pm
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@grumbler101: Thanks! I will check it out.

posted by muirwoods08 on August 27th 2009 at 10:41pm
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I am in Australia and the price of these pencils per month is about AUS $36 - thats $1.44 per pencil - half the price of Faber Castell polychromos and probably much cheaper than Caran d'Arche and whatnot...so, are they really THAT expensive?? I havent been able to really find out anything about the quality of the pencils...but, really, i do love them!

posted by 7havax on November 5th 2009 at 11:17pm
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